 | A Summer Christmas and a Sonnet upon The S.S. "Ballaarat." |  |
Lil was in raptures, she had not
Deemed that her lover spoke or wrote
So manfully as he had told
The story of the stormed stronghold.
She saw that like the Ithacan
Whenever in his story ran
Mention of “battles or of ships
The whole man changed” and from his lips
Poured such a stream of burning words
That he who heard beheld the swords
Dinted and red with their fierce play
And white sails bending o'er the bay.
The three poor soldiers of West Kent,
Men of the Fiftieth Regiment,
Standing upon the river-sands
Awaiting but the staff commands
To enter the Urumea,
The struggle in the riverway,
With ebbing tide and weedy rock,
And then the first tremendous shock
When they had gained the hostile banks
And down on their devoted ranks,
With not a stick of shelter nigh,
Poured the fierce hail of musketry
And canister and hand grenades,
And when, above the palisades,
They saw the glowing fire barrels
And gleaming piles of mortarshells
Upon the ramparts of the town,
And then the order to lie down
While the Trafalgar sixty-eights
Breached traverses and parapets,
And then that awful pause between
With its exploding magazine,
And then the ghastly, sickening glee
Which the survivor of the three
Showed in the storming, when he ran
His bayonet right through the man
Who'd killed his mate; and then the hell
Which on the conquered city fell.
Deemed that her lover spoke or wrote
So manfully as he had told
The story of the stormed stronghold.
She saw that like the Ithacan
Whenever in his story ran
Mention of “battles or of ships
The whole man changed” and from his lips
Poured such a stream of burning words
That he who heard beheld the swords
Dinted and red with their fierce play
And white sails bending o'er the bay.
The three poor soldiers of West Kent,
Men of the Fiftieth Regiment,
157
Awaiting but the staff commands
To enter the Urumea,
The struggle in the riverway,
With ebbing tide and weedy rock,
And then the first tremendous shock
When they had gained the hostile banks
And down on their devoted ranks,
With not a stick of shelter nigh,
Poured the fierce hail of musketry
And canister and hand grenades,
And when, above the palisades,
They saw the glowing fire barrels
And gleaming piles of mortarshells
Upon the ramparts of the town,
And then the order to lie down
While the Trafalgar sixty-eights
Breached traverses and parapets,
And then that awful pause between
With its exploding magazine,
And then the ghastly, sickening glee
Which the survivor of the three
Showed in the storming, when he ran
His bayonet right through the man
Who'd killed his mate; and then the hell
Which on the conquered city fell.
| A Summer Christmas and a Sonnet upon The S.S. "Ballaarat." | |