Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/381

 But this pure pleasure is my own,

That I have power to waft away

A hope as bright as heaven's zone.

On this her natal day.

May all her life be like the light

That softens down in spheres divine,

"As lovely as a Lapland night,"

All grace and chastened shine!

the roar of the storm, in the wild bitter voice of the tempest-whipped sea,

The cry of my darling, my child, comes ever and ever to me;

And I stand where the haggard-faced wood stares down on a sinister shore,

But all that is left is the hood of the babe I can cherish no more.

A little blue hood, with the shawl of the girl that I took for my wife

In a happy old season, is all that remains of the light of my life;

The wail of a woman in pain, and the sob of a smothering bird,

They come through the darkness again—in the wind and the rain they are heard.

Oh, women and men who have known the perils of weather and wave,

It is sad that my sweet ones are blown under sea without shelter of grave;

I sob like a child in the night, when the gale on the waters is loud—

My darlings went down in my sight, with neither a coffin nor shroud.

In the whistle of wind, and the whirl of ominous fragments of wreck

The wife, with her poor little girl, saw death on the lee of the deck;

But, sirs, she depended on me—she trusted my comforting word;

She is down in the depths of the sea—my love, with her beautiful bird.