TURNER'S OLD TÉMÉRAIRE UNDER Α FIGURE SYMBOLIZING THE CHURCH THOU wast the fairest of all man-made things; Thy thunders now but birthdays greet, Thou a mere hospital, where human wrecks, The breath of heaven bore up thy cloudy Like winter-flies, crawl those renowned wings, And, patient in their triple rank, The thunders crouched about thy flank, Their black lips silent with the doom of kings. Now a black demon, belching fire and steam, Drags thee away, a pale, dismantled dream, And all thy desecrated hulk Must landlocked lie, a helpless bulk, Woe 's me, from Ocean's sky-horizoned air Than here be safe in dangerless despair. 30 Thy drooping symbol to the flagstaff clings, Thy rudder soothes the tide to lazy rings, decks, Ne'er trodden save by captive foes, And wonted sternly to impose God's will and thine on bowed imperial necks ! 40 GRANTE PULLED The SUB STRONG, simple, silent are the [steadfast] laws That sway this universe, of none withstood, Unconscious of man's outcries or applause, Or what man deems his evil or his good; 1 This poem is the last, so far as is known, written by Mr. Lowell. He laid it aside for revision, leaving two of the verses incomplete. In a pencilled fragment of the poem the first verse appears as follows: Strong, simple, silent, such are Nature's LawI. In the final copy, from which the poem is now printed, the verse originally stood: Strong, steadfast, silent are the laws. but 'steadfast' is crossed out, and 'simple' written above. A similar change is made in the ninth verse of the stanza, where simpleness' is substituted for 'steadfastness. The change from steadfast' to 'simple' was not made, probably through oversight, in the first verse of the second stanza. There is nothing to indicate what epithet Mr. Lowell would have chosen to complete the first verse of the third stanza. (Note by Professor C. E. Norton, in Last Poems of James Rur sell Lowell.) |