Sir Humphrey Gilbert

Southward with fleet of ice
    Sailed the corsair Death;
Wild and fast blew the blast,
    And the east-wind was his breath.

His lordly ships of ice
    Glisten in the sun;
On each side, like pennons wide,
    Flashing crystal streamlets run.

His sails of white sea-mist
    Dripped with silver rain;
But where he passed there were cast
    Leaden shadows o'er the main.

Eastward from Campobello
    Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed;
Three days or more seaward he bore,
    Then, alas! the land-wind failed.

Alas! the land-wind failed,
    And ice-cold grew the night;
And nevermore, on sea or shore,
    Should Sir Humphrey see the light.

He sat upon the deck,
    The Book was in his hand
"Do not fear!    Heaven is as near,"
    He said, "by water as by land!"

In the first watch of the night,
    Without a signal's sound,
Out of the sea, mysteriously,
    The fleet of Death rose all around.

The moon and the evening star
    Were hanging in the shrouds;
Every mast, as it passed,
    Seemed to rake the passing clouds.

They grappled with their prize,
    At midnight black and cold!
As of a rock was the shock;
    Heavily the ground-swell rolled.

Southward through day and dark,
    They drift in close embrace,
With mist and rain, o'er the open main;
    Yet there seems no change of place.

Southward, forever southward,
    They drift through dark and day;
And like a dream, in the Gulf-Stream
    Sinking, vanish all away.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator. He wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. Some of his famous works include "Paul Revere's Ride" and "The Song of Hiawatha." Longfellow was one of the most popular American poets of his time and remains a significant figure in the canon of American literature.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Theologian's Tale - The Wayside Inn - Part First

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Simple Poetry

Holidays

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Simple Poetry

Killed At The Ford.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Simple Poetry

Children

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

The Wreck Of The Hesperus

It was the schooner Hesperus,
    That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
    To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
    Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
    That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
    His pipe was in his month,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
    The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailor,
    Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
    For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
    And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
    And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Fishermen

Hurrah! the seaward breezes
Sweep down the bay amain;
Heave up, my lads, the anchor!
Run up the sail again!
Leave to the lubber landsmen
The rail-car and the steed;
The stars of heaven shall guide us,
The breath of heaven shall speed.
From the hill-top looks the steeple,
And the lighthouse from the sand;
And the scattered pines are waving
Their farewell from the land.
One glance, my lads, behind us,
For the homes we leave one sigh,
Ere we take the change and chances
Of the ocean and the sky.
Now, brothers, for the icebergs
Of frozen Labrador,
Floating spectral in the moonshine,
Along the low, black shore!
Where like snow the gannet's feathers
On Brador's rocks are shed,
And the noisy murr are flying,
Like black scuds, overhea...

John Greenleaf Whittier

The Dead Ship Of Harpswell

What flecks the outer gray beyond
The sundown's golden trail?
The white flash of a sea-bird's wing,
Or gleam of slanting sail?
Let young eyes watch from Neck and Point,
And sea-worn elders pray,
The ghost of what was once a ship
Is sailing up the bay.

From gray sea-fog, from icy drift,
From peril and from pain,
The home-bound fisher greets thy lights,
O hundred-harbored Maine!
But many a keel shall seaward turn,
And many a sail outstand,
When, tall and white, the Dead Ship looms
Against the dusk of land.

She rounds the headland's bristling pines;
She threads the isle-set bay;
No spur of breeze can speed her on,
Nor ebb of tide delay.
Old men still walk the Isle of Orr
Who tell her date and name,
Old shipwrights sit in ...

John Greenleaf Whittier

Treasure Trove

We were a crew of what you please,
Men with the lust of gold gone mad;
Dutch and Yankee and Portuguese,
With a nigger or two from Trinidad,
The scum of the Caribbees:
Outbound, outbound for a treasure ground,
A pirate isle no man had found,
A long-lost isle in the Southern Seas,
An isle of the Southern Seas.

We sailed our ship by a chart we bore,
The parchment script of a buccaneer,
Whose skeleton, found on a Carib shore,
Had kept its secret for many a year,
Locked in a buckle of belt it wore.
And the dim chart told of buried gold,
A hidden harbor and pirate hold,
On an isle that seamen touched no more,
That sailors knew no more.

We were a crew of Devil-may-care,
Who staked our lives on a bit of a scrawl;
Who diced each other fo...

Madison Julius Cawein

A Greyport Legend

They ran through the streets of the seaport town,
They peered from the decks of the ships that lay;
The cold sea-fog that came whitening down
Was never as cold or white as they.
Ho, Starbuck and Pinckney and Tenterden!
Run for your shallops, gather your men,
Scatter your boats on the lower bay.

Good cause for fear! In the thick mid-day
The hulk that lay by the rotting pier,
Filled with the children in happy play,
Parted its moorings and drifted clear,
Drifted clear beyond reach or call,
Thirteen children they were in all,
All adrift in the lower bay!

Said a hard-faced skipper, God help us all!
She will not float till the turning tide!
Said his wife, My darling will hear my call,
Whether in sea or heaven she bide;
And she lifted a qu...

Bret Harte

The Cruise Of The Galleon

This laboring vast, Tellurian Galleon,
Riding at anchor off the orient sun,
Had broken its cable, and stood out to space.

FRANCIS THOMPSON.

Galleon, ahoy, ahoy!
Old earth riding off the sun,
And straining at your cable as you ride
On the tide,
Battered laboring and vast,
In the blast
Of the hurricane that blows between the worlds,
Ahoy!

'Morning, shipmates! 'Drift and chartless?
Laded deep and rolling hard?
Never guessed, outworn and heartless,
There was land so close aboard?

Ice on every shroud and eyelet,
Rocking in the windy trough?
No more panic; Man's your pilot;
Turns the flood, and we are off!

At the story of disaster,
From the continents of sleep,
I am come to be your master
And put out i...

Bliss Carman