Page:Rudyard Kipling's verse - Inclusive Edition 1885-1918.djvu/734

 ===Poseidon's Law=== 

the robust and Brass-bound Man commissioned first for sea His fragile raft, Poseidon laughed, and "Mariner," said he, "Behold, a Law immutable I lay on thee and thine, That never shall ye act or tell a falsehood at my shrine.

"Let Zeus adjudge your landward kin whose votive meal and salt At easy-cheated altars win oblivion for the fault, But you the unhoodwinked wave shall test—the immediate gulf condemn— Except ye owe the Fates a jest, be slow to jest with them.

"Ye shall not clear by Greekly speech, nor cozen from your path The twinkling shoal, the leeward beach, or Hadria's white-lipped wrath; Nor tempt with painted cloth for wood my fraud-avenging hosts; Nor make at all, or all make good, your bulwarks and your boasts.

"Now and henceforward serve unshod, through wet and wakeful shifts, A present and oppressive God, but take, to aid, my gifts— The wide and windward-opening eye, the large and lavish hand, The soul that cannot tell a lie—except upon the land!"

In dromond and in catafract—wet, wakeful, windward-eyed— He kept Poseidon's Law intact (his ship and freight beside),