IV

    Out from the docks we shot
    Into the screaming night;
    We steered by lightning’s light;
    The paddles beat a mad tattoo;
    The gridded walking-beam
    Pumped up, pumped down,
    Against the misty gleam;
    Faster and faster jets the stand-pipes’ steam. 
    And the white water whirls
    Astern in phosphorescent whorls—­
    It swirls
    And then leads backward green with light
    Of streaming foam across the velvet night.

    By the last lightning flare,
    That must be Sumter, bare
    Against a torn cloud like a rag;
    But now the wind begins to flag,
    And as it fails the engines lag;
    Then comes a low hail from the mast
    “Avast”—­
    Again the engines slow—­
    Then stop—­
    And we were drifting like a log
    As silent as a drowned corpse
    In the sea-set tide,
    Muffled in dripping fog.

    No word from all the ship—­
    She seemed asleep—­
    Only the cluck of water and the feel
    Of grim Atlantic rollers at the keel,
    Nuzzling two fathoms deep;
    They made her heel. 
    The porpoise played about our copper lip. 
    It seemed as if they were
    The only living things in all that blur,
    And we—­
    The only ship upon an ancient sea.

    When suddenly a laugh broke through the spell;
    It was so near
    Our pulses lapsed a heart-beat,
    Struck with fear. 
    The curtains of the fog were blown apart;
    Stark in the sallow moonlight’s metal day,
    The white decks of a Yankee frigate lay. 
    I saw the glint of moonlight on her bell;
    She was not twenty fathoms length away. 
    A man’s face leaped out in the cherry glow
    Of match flame in the hands he cupped
    About the pipe whose curling wreaths he supped. 
    “Clang!” like a fireman’s gong
    Our engine signals rang;
    The paddles thrashed into a frothy song;
    Five ship’s lengths we had forged along
    Before their bugles sang.

    We had ten long lengths on them
    Before their ship began to swerve. 
    The rabid screw was frothing at her stern;
    But I could feel the verve
    Of our blithe timbers tremble; every nerve
    Of our good race-horse ship
    For open water seemed to yearn.

    That was a Titan’s race;
    The answering rockets snaked it down the coast,
    Dying like scarlet worms
    Among the fog-wreaths; but we gained,
    And when her flaming cannon stabbed the mist
    They thundered at our ghost.

    So we were gone,
    With cotton in our furnace,
    Once the aft-stacks flared,
    And then we plied pitch-pine
    Dampened with turpentine,
    Until the black sea glared—­
    But we had gone—­
    Over the world’s round shoulder
    Thrust the dawn,
    Their ugly, black masts dipping it hull down. 
    Three days the paddles beat while we drove on!