Page:Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918.djvu/30

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She drove in the dark to leeward,

She struck—not a reef or a rock

But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her

Dead to the Kentish Knock;

And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:

The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;

And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel

Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.

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Hope had grown grey hairs,

Hope had mourning on,

Trenched with tears, carved with cares,

Hope was twelve hours gone;

And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day

Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,

And lives at last were washing away:

To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.

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One stirred from the rigging to save

The wild woman-kind below,

With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave—

He was pitched to his death at a blow,

For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:

They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro

Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do

With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?