Vale.
Round the camp-fire's glowing embers, reminiscent one remembers
Dear dead days of deep-sea travel when the routes were ruled by sail;
Running Easting down when weather left you brine-scaled altogether
As you surged along triumphant with the driving western gale.
With the fore-foot's spume far-flinging and each straining backstay singing
An Aeolian hymn of worship to Poseidon and his ways,
Sails tower in tremendous tiering, taut from clew to weather earing,
With their reef-points all a-patter as she lifts and scends and sways.
Tropic nights with starlight splendid when your dim horizons blended
With that Equatorial heaving which the calm forever mars;
When the heavens mirrored round you seemed with magic to surround you,
And you floated like a dream-ship on a spangled sea of stars.
Gone forever, days of sailing; steam the only power prevailing,
Scheduled like a penny ferry with the seamen washing paint;
Fare-ye-well, you ships of glory, clippers famed in song and story,
From your graves rise ghostly chanties, mournful echoes dim and faint.

—R. Morant.