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We were schooner-rigged and rakish,
with a long and lissome hull,
And we flew the pretty colours of the crossbones and the skull;
We'd a big black Jolly Roger flapping grimly at the fore,
And we sailed the Spanish Water in the happy days of yore.
We'd a long brass gun amidships, like a well-conducted ship,
We had each a brace of pistols and a cutlass at the hip;
It's a point which tells against us, and a fact to be deplored,
But we chased the goodly merchant-men and laid their ships aboard.
Then the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains,
And the paint-work all was spatter dashed with other peoples brains,
She was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank.
And the pale survivors left us by the medium of the plank.
O! then it was (while standing by the taffrail on the poop)
We could hear the drowning folk lament the absent chicken coop;
Then, having washed the blood away, we'd little else to do
Than to dance a quiet hornpipe as the old salts taught us to.
O! the fiddle on the fo'c'sle, and the slapping naked soles,
And the genial "Down the middle, Jake, and curtsey when she rolls!"
With the silver seas around us and the pale moon overhead,
And the look-out not a-looking and his pipe-bowl glowing red.
Ah! the pig-tailed, quidding pirates and the pretty pranks we played,
All have since been put a stop to by the naughty Board of Trade;
The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest,
A little south the sunset in the islands of the Blest.
John Masefield
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Read poems about / on: sunset, dance, silver, work, happy, moon, red, water, ballad
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Comments about this poem (A Ballad of John Silver
by
John Masefield
) |
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comments about this poem (A Ballad of John Silver by
John Masefield
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Michael Pruchnicki
(7/20/2008 10:07:00 AM) |
Who minds a good romp and a lusty battle fought to the death on the high seas with the sun overhead and the blue seas rolling? There's no time for sentimental musing in piracy, nor for genteel regret on any good pig-tailed pirate's part, Silver suggests. The lissome-hulled schooners and merry crews are at rest now in the sacred islands of the Blest, so do not grieve for the days long gone! Masefield has written a merry ballad of a carefree life of ships and men under the big black Jolly Roger!
A man after my own heart, Masefield was a poet, dramatist, and novelist of some renown. If you get a chance to read 'Sea Fever' and 'Cargoes, ' you'll get my point!
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Archie Langford
(7/20/2007 2:19:00 AM) |
poetry true poetry a pleasure to read
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Emily Spence
(1/12/2006 12:51:00 PM) |
This poem is very funny with the lookout not looking but it is also realistic with the brains of the men spattered everywhere. I think that John Silver does not mind at all apart from the messy paintwork and having to clean it up, I'd hate to think what the pretty pranks they played were.
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