_Hear now a song--a song of broken interludes-- A song of little cunning; of a singer nothing worth. Through the naked words and mean May ye see the truth between As the singer knew and touched it in the ends of all the Earth!_ The Coastwise Lights. Our brows are wreathed with spindrift and the weed is on our knees; Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas. From reef and rock and skerry--over headland, ness and voe-- The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go! Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors; Through the yelling Channel tempest when the syren hoots and roars-- By day the dipping house-flag and by night the rocket's trail-- As the sheep that graze behind us so we know them where they hail. We bridge across the dark, and bid the helmsman have a care, The flash that wheeling inland wakes his sleeping wife to prayer; From our vexed eyries, head to gale, we bind in burning chains The lover from the sea-rim drawn--his love in English lanes. We greet the clippers wing-and-wing that race the Southern wool; We warn the crawling cargo-tanks of Bremen, Leith and Hull; To each and all our equal lamp at peril of the sea-- The white wall-sided warships or the whalers of Dundee! Come up, come in from Eastward, from the guard-ports of the Morn! Beat up, beat in from Southerly, O gipsies of the Horn! Swift shuttles of an Empire's loom that weave us main to main, The Coastwise Lights of England give you welcome back again! Go, get you gone up-Channel with the sea-crust on your plates; Go, get you into London with the burden of your freights! Haste, for they talk of Empire there, and say, if any seek, The Lights of England sent you and by silence shall ye speak. The Song of the Dead. _Hear now the Song of the Dead--in the North by the torn berg-edges-- They that look still to the Pole, asleep by their hide-stripped sledges. Song of the Dead in the South--in the sun by their skeleton horses, Where the warrigal whimpers and bays through the dust of the sere river-courses._ _Song of the Dead in the East--in the heat-rotted jungle hollows, Where the dog-ape barks in the kloof--in the brake of the buffalo-wallows. Song of the Dead in the West--in the Barrens, the snow that betrayed them, Where the wolverine tumbles their packs from the camp and the grave-mound they made them; Hear now the Song of the Dead!_ I.