By many waters and on many ways I have known golden instants and bright days; The day on which, beneath an arching sail, I saw the Cordilleras and gave hail; The summer day on which in heart’s delight I saw the Swansea Mumbles bursting white; The glittering day when all the waves wore flags, And the ship _Wanderer_ came with sails in rags; That curlew-calling time in Irish dusk, When life became more splendid than its husk, When the rent chapel on the brae at Slains Shone with a doorway opening beyond brains; The dawn when, with a brace-block’s creaking cry, Out of the mist a little barque slipped by, Spilling the mist with changing gleams of red, Then gone, with one raised hand and one turned head; The howling evening when the spindrift’s mists Broke to display the Four Evangelists, Snow-capped, divinely granite, lashed by breakers, Wind-beaten bones of long since buried acres; The night alone near water when I heard All the sea’s spirit spoken by a bird; The English dusk when I beheld once more (With eyes so changed) the ship, the citied shore, The lines of masts, the streets so cheerly trod (In happier seasons), and gave thanks to God. All had their beauty, their bright moments’ gift, Their something caught from Time, the ever-swift. All of those gleams were golden; but life’s hands Have given more constant gifts in changing lands, And when I count those gifts, I think them such As no man’s bounty could have bettered much: The gift of country life, near hills and woods, Where happy waters sing in solitudes; The gift of being near ships, of seeing each day A city of ships with great ships under weigh; The great street paved with water, filled with shipping, And all the world’s flags flying and seagulls dipping. Yet when I am dust my penman may not know Those water-trampling ships which made me glow, But think my wonder mad and fail to find Their glory, even dimly, from my mind, And yet they made me. Not alone the ships, But men hard-palmed from tallying-on to whips, The two close friends of nearly twenty years, Sea-followers both, sea-wrestlers and sea-peers, Whose feet with mine wore many a bolthead bright Treading the decks beneath the riding light. Yet death will make that warmth of friendship cold, And who’ll know what one said and what one told Our hearts’ communion and the broken spells When the loud call blew at the strike of bells? No one, I know, yet let me be believed, A soul entirely known is life achieved.