Alfred Noyes

The Fisher-Girl

Where the old grey churchyard slopes to the sea,
  On the sunny side of a mossed headstone;
Watching the wild white butterflies pass
Through the fairy forests of grass,
Two little children with brown legs bare
    Were merrily, merrily
Weaving a wonderful daisy-chain,
And chanting the rhyme that was graven there
    Over and over and over again;
While the warm wind came and played with their hair
    And laughed and was gone
Out, far out to the foam-flowered lea
Like an ocean-wandering memory.

    Eighteen hundred and forty-three,
    Dan Trevennick was lost at sea;
    And, buried here at her husband's side
    Lies the body of Joan, his bride,
    Who, a little while after she lost him, died.

This was the rhyme that was graven there,
  And the children chanted it quietly;
As the warm wind came and played with their hair,
And rustled the golden grasses against the stone,
    And laughed and was gone
To waken the wild white flowers of the sea,
And sing a song of the days that were,
A song of memory, gay and blind
As the sun on the graves that it left behind;
For this, ah this, was the song of the wind.

    I

She sat on the tarred old jetty, with a sailor's careless ease,
And the clear waves danced around her feet and kissed her tawny knees;
Her head was bare, and her thick black hair was coiled behind a throat
Chiselled as hard and bright and bold as the bow of a sailing boat.

    II

Her eyes were blue, and her jersey was blue as the lapping,
    slapping seas,
And the rose in her cheek was painted red by the brisk Atlantic breeze;
And she sat and waited her father's craft, while Dan Trevennick's eyes
Were sheepishly watching her sunlit smiles and her soft contented
    sighs.

    III

For he thought he would give up his good black pipe and his evening
    glasses of beer,
And blunder to chapel on Sundays again for a holy Christian year,
To hold that foot in his hard rough hand and kiss the least of
    its toes:
Then he swore at himself for a great damned fool; which he probably
    was, God knows.

    IV

Often in summer twilights, too, he would sit on a coil of rope,
As the stars came out in their twinkling crowds to play with wonder
    and hope,
While he watched the side of her clear-cut face as she sat on the
    jetty and fished,
And even to help her coil her line was more than he hoped or wished.

    V

But once or twice o'er the dark green tide he saw with a solemn
    delight,
Hooked and splashing after her line, a flash and a streak of white;
As hand over hand she hauled it up, a great black conger eel,
For Dan Trevennick to kill as it squirmed with its head beneath
    his heel.

    VI

And at last, with a crash and a sunset cry from the low soft evening
    star,
A shadowy schooner suddenly loomed o'er the dark green oily bar;
With fairy-like spars and misty masts in the golden dusk of gloaming,
Where the last white seamew's wide-spread wings were wistfully
    westward roaming;

    VII

Then the song of the foreign seamen rose in the magical evening air,
Faint and far away, as it seemed, but they knew it was, ah, so near;
Far away as her heart from Dan's as he sheepishly drew to her side,
And near as her heart when he kissed the lips of his newly promised
    bride.

    VIII

And when they were riding away in the train on the night of their
    honeymoon,
What a whisper tingled against her cheek as it blushed like a
    rose in June;
For she said, "I am tired and ready for bed," and Dan said, "So
    am I;"
And she murmured, "Are you tired, too, poor Dan?" and he answered
    her, "No, dear, why?"

    IX

It was never a problem-play, at least, and the end of it all is this;
They were drowned in the bliss of their ignorance and buried the rest
    in a kiss;
And they loved one another their whole life long, as lovers will
    often do;
For it never was only the fairy-tales that rang so royally true.

    X

The rose in her cheek was painted red by the brisk Atlantic breeze;
Her eyes were blue, and her jersey was blue as the lapping, slapping
    seas;
Her head was bare, and her thick black hair was coiled behind a throat
Chiselled as hard and bright and bold as the bow of a sailing boat.

    XI

    Eighteen hundred and forty-three,
    Dan Trevennick was lost at sea;
    And, buried here at her husband's side
    Lies the body of Joan, his bride,
    Who, a little while after she lost him, died.