Seafarer



'Bright plates and pannikins
To sail the seas around,
And a new donkey's breakfast
For the outward bound!'

Shanghaied in San Francisco
We brought up in Bombay
Where they put us afloat in an old Leith boat
That steered like a stack of hay.

We've sweltered in the Tropics
When the pitch boiled through the deck-
And saved our hides and little besides
In an ice-cold North Sea wreck.

We've drunk our rum in Portland
And we've thrashed through Bering Strait-
And we've toed the mark on a Yankee barque
With a hard-case Down-east mate.

We know the streets of Santos
And the loom of the lone Azores-
We've eat our grub from a salt-horse tub
Condemned from the Navy stores.

We know the quay of Glasgow
And the river at Saigon-
We've drunk our glass with a Chinese lass
In a house-boat at Canton.

We know the road to Auckland
And the light on Sydney Head-
And we've crept close-hauled when the leadsman called
The depth of the Channel bed.

They pay us off in London
And it's 'O for a spell ashore!'
But again we ship for the Southern trip
In a week or hardly more

For- it's 'Goodbye Sally and Sue'
And- 'It's time to get afloat-'
With an aching head and a straw-stuffed bed,
And a knife and an oil-skin coat.

Sing- 'Time to leave her, Johnny!'
Sing- 'Bound for the Rio Grande!'
When the tug turns back you follow her track
For a last, long look at land.

Then the purple disappears-
And only the blue is seen-
That will take our bones to Davy Jones
And our souls to Fiddler's Green.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:27 min read
122

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABXB CDED AFAF GHCH AAXA CXAI GJXJ IKXK AEJE XLXL AMAM
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,439
Words 283
Stanzas 11
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

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