Mermaids
The bell is gone from the pitching buoy;
The warning voice is gone from the reef,
With its sudden clangour and shaking grief.
Stand wide! Stand clear! ’Ware rocks, Mariner.
Death lurks here!
Wakeful, it hung in its iron cage—
Clatter and clang when seas smashed wild,
Boom and bang when tides span mild. Stand wide! Run clear!
’Ware reefs, Mariner.
Death lurks near.
Night and noon and dawn and eve,
It shook, from the tumult of green and white, Its boom of warning and clatter of fright—
’Ware rocks! Stand clear!
Peril is near.
Silver mermaids found the bell.
Laughing sea-maids took it down
From the pitching buoy to their coral town,
And stilled its clangy voice to sleep,
Restful and deep.
The ships stands in; there is naught to hear—
No clang of bell, so nothing’s to fear.
All’s well. All’s clear.
But death is here!
I am strong for mermaids, though I must admit that some of them are mischievously inclined. I believe in them: but there are dusty professors, with long noses stuck into books, who argue that the whole mermaid tradition is founded on nothing more or other than seals glimpsed suddenly and unexpectedly by drunken sailors and fishermen. Seals! I have seen seals—and maybe I’ve seen mermaids. Nobody but a fool, and certainly not a sailor with three sheets in the wind, would mistake a seal for a mermaid. Some people are always trying to take such joys as mermaids and fairies out of our difficult lives. But here are some verses which prove that mermaids are not seals.
