Dreams Dust | Page 6

WITH THE SUBMARINES
ABOVE, the baffled twilight fails; beneath, the
blind snakes creep;
Beside us glides the charnel shark, our pilot
through the deep;
And, lurking where low headlands shield from
cruising scout and spy,
We bide the signal through the gloom that
bids
us slay or die.
All watchful, mute, the crouching guns that guard
the strait sea lanes--
Watchful and hawklike, plumed with hate, the
desperate aeroplanes--
And still as death and swift as fate, above the

darkling coasts,
The spying Wireless sows the night with troops
of stealthy ghosts,
While hushed through all her huddled streets the
tide-walled city waits
The drumming thunders that announce brute
battle at her gates.
Southward a hundred windy leagues, through
storms that blind and bar,
Our cheated cruisers search the waves, our
captains
seek the war;
But here the port of peril is; the foeman's dreadnoughts
ride
Sullen and black against the moon, upon a sullen
tide.
And only we to launch ourselves against their
stark advance--
To guide uncertain lightnings through these
treacherous
seas of chance!
. . . . . .
And now a wheeling searchlight paints a signal on
the night;
And now the bellowing guns are loud with the
wild lust of fight.
. . . . . .
And now, her flanks of steel apulse with all the

power of hell,
Forth from the darkness leaps in pride a hateful
miracle,
The flagship of their Admiral--and now God help
and save!--
We challenge Death at Death's own game; we
sink beneath the wave!
. . . . . .
Ah, steady now--and one good blow--one straight
stab through the gloom--
Ah, good!--the thrust went home!--she
founders--
flounders to her doom!--
Full speed ahead!--those damned
quick-firing guns
--but let them bark--
What's that--the dynamos?--they've got us, men!
--Christ! in the dark!
NICHOLAS OF MONTENEGRO
(1912)
HE speaks as straight as his rifles shot,
As straight as a thrusting
blade,
Waiting the deed that shall trouble the truce
His savage guns
have made.
"You have dared the wrath of a dozen states,"
Was the challenge that
he heard;
"We can die but once!" said the grim old King
As he
gripped his mountain sword.
"For I paid in blood for the town I took,
The blood of my brave men
slain,--
And if you covet the town I took
You must buy it with
blood again!"

Stern old King of the stark, black hills,
Where the lean, fierce eagles
breed,
Your speech rings true as your good sword rings--
And you
are a king indeed!
DICKENS
"The only book that the party had was a volume of Dickens. During the
six months that they lay in the cave which they
had hacked in the ice,
waiting for spring to come, they read this volume through again and
again."--From a newspaper
report of an antarctic expedition.
HUDDLED within their savage lair
They hearkened to the prowling
wind;
They heard the loud wings of despair . . .
And madness beat
against the mind. . . .
A sunless world stretched stark outside
As if it
had cursed God and died;
Dumb plains lay prone beneath the weight

Of cold unutterably great;
Iron ice bound all the bitter seas,
The
brutal hills were bleak as hate. . . .
Here none but Death might walk at
ease!
Then Dickens spoke, and, lo! the vast
Unpeopled void stirred into
life;
The dead world quickened, the mad blast
Hushed for an hour its idiot
strife
With nothingness. . . .
And from the gloom,
Parting the flaps of frozen skin,
Old friends
and dear came trooping in,
And light and laughter filled the room. . . .

Voices and faces, shapes beloved,
Babbling lips and kindly eyes,

Not ghosts, but friends that lived and moved . . .
They brought the
sun from other skies,
They wrought the magic that dispels
The
bitterer part of loneliness . . .
And when they vanished each man
dreamed
His dream there in the wilderness. . . .
One heard the
chime of Christmas bells,
And, staring down a country lane,
Saw
bright against the window-pane
The firelight beckon warm and
red. . . .
And one turned from the waterside
Where Thames rolls

down his slothful tide
To breast the human sea that beats
Through
roaring London's battered streets
And revel in the moods of men. . . .
And one saw all the April hills

Made glad with golden daffodils,
And found and kissed his love
again. . . .
. . . . . .
By all the troubled hearts he cheers
In homely ways or by lost trails,

By all light shed through all dark years
When hope grows sick and
courage quails,
We hail him first among his peers;
Whether we
sorrow, sing, or feast,
He, too, hath known and understood--
Master
of many moods, high priest
Of mirth and lord of cleansing tears!
A POLITICIAN
LEADER no more, be judged of us!
Hailed Chief, and loved, of
yore--
Youth, and the faith of youth, cry out:
Leader and Chief
no more!
We dreamed a Prophet, flushed with faith,
Content to toil in pain
If
that his sacrifice might be,
Somehow, his people's gain.
We saw a vision, and our blood
Beat red and hot and strong:

"Lead