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Title: A Watchword Of The Fleet
Author: Alfred Noyes [
More Titles by Noyes]
[For purposes of recognition at night a small squadron of Elizabethan ships, crossing the Atlantic, adopted as a watchword the sentence: Before the world--was God.]
They diced with Death. Their big sea-boots
Were greased with blood. They swept the seas
For England; and--we reap the fruits
Of their heroic deviltries!
Our creed is in the cold machine,
The inhuman devildoms of brain,
The bolt that splits the midnight main,
Loosed at a lever's touch; the lean
Torpedo; "Twenty Miles of Power";
The steel-clad Dreadnoughts' dark array!
Yet ... we that keep the conning tower
Are not so strong as they
Whose watchword we disdain.
They laughed at odds for England's sake!
We count, yet cast our strength away.
One Admiral with the soul of Drake
Would break the fleets of hell to-day!
Give us the splendid heavens of youth,
Give us the banners of deathless flame,
The ringing watchwords of their fame,
The faith, the hope, the simple truth!
Then shall the Deep indeed be swayed
Through all its boundless breadth and length,
Nor this proud England lean dismayed
On twenty miles of strength,
Or shrink from aught but shame.
Pull out by night, O leave the shore
And lighted streets of Plymouth town,
Pull out into the Deep once more!
There, in the night of their renown,
The same great waters roll their gloom
Around our midget period;
And the huge decks that Raleigh trod
Over our petty darkness loom!
Along the line the cry is passed
From all their heaven-illumined spars,
Clear as a bell, from mast to mast,
It rings against the stars:
_Before the world--was God._
[The end]
Alfred Noyes's poem: Watchword Of The Fleet
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