Poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in Friendship’s Offering, 1825/The Sailor
THE SAILOR
He was their last and their only child,
But one remaining of many;
And is not the blossom the last on the bough
The most beloved of any?
They brought him up ’mid the mountain and flood,
Till the spirit of sickness was banish’d,
And the roses of health laugh’d on the cheek,
Whose hectic bloom had vanish’d.
And chiefly is was the boy’s delight
To make ships of slips of willow;
And then he would call the lake a sea,
And the rippling wave a billow.
And he loved, on the long and winter’s night,
To read each gallant story,
How the brave had raised the blood-red flag,
And died for their country’s glory;
And how some had sailed to stranger climes,
With but sea and sky before them,
Till the God, whose marvels they’d seen, saw fit
To their native land to restore them.
His mother wept, but his heart was fix’d
On a sailor’s life of danger;—
He envied the wind, for it could be
O’er the wild sea-waves a ranger!
She blest him beside his father’s grave,
And the setting sun shone o’er him.
His lighted brow seemed an augury
Of the life that lay before him.
Oh, hope is catching—she found it so,
And her mother’s grief, concealing;
While he was still by her side, she felt
The glow of her sailor’s feeling.
But when he went, and she saw him turn,
And gaze on the home he was leaving,
What bitter tears wash’d away the web
The fairy hope had been weaving.
That night she sat down to her lonely meal
And wept; there were none to chide her,
That night it was a servant’s hand
Laid the book of prayer beside her.
The boy was glad—but one fond thought
Of the mother, who smooth’d his pillow,
Fill’d his eyes with tears, when, for the first time,
His slumber was waked by the pillow.
But he slept ’mid dreams of the blood-red flag,
The ball and the grape-shot’s rattle,
The cutlass sweeping the boarded deck,
And the storm of an ocean battle.
But his ship was bound for a sultry clime,
Where an Indian sun was beaming,
And from every wind that swept the sail,
Was the breath of fever streaming;
And men who had stood, unscath’d, when the balls
Like dust on the gale were flying,
And those whom the tempest of night had spared,
Were now like spring leaves dying.
He, too, was fading; that sailor youth,
The rose of his cheek had departed,
And his thought had turn’d to his own dear home—
And the mother he left broken-hearted.
It was one evening—the signal gun
O’er the echoing wind was ringing,
And the warning waves broke round the ship
As if they a dirge were singing.
He heard the sound, his steps grew faint,
And his pale brow waxed yet paler;
Next day the sea o’er the hammock broke,
Where slept the youthful sailor.
’Tis the church yard here where his father rests,
Here his mother’s grave is making;
And his is where the wild wind sweeps,
And the ocean waves are breaking.