| FIVE-AND-TWENTY years have gone | |
| Since old William Pollexfen | |
| Laid his strong bones down in death | |
| By his wife Elizabeth | |
| In the grey stone tomb he made. | 5 |
| And after twenty years they laid | |
| In that tomb by him and her, | |
| His son George, the astrologer; | |
| And Masons drove from miles away | |
| To scatter the Acacia spray | 10 |
| Upon a melancholy man | |
| Who had ended where his breath began. | |
| Many a son and daughter lies | |
| Far from the customary skies, | |
| The Mall and Eades’s grammar school, | 15 |
| In London or in Liverpool; | |
| But where is laid the sailor John? | |
| That so many lands had known: | |
| Quiet lands or unquiet seas | |
| Where the Indians trade or Japanese. | 20 |
| He never found his rest ashore, | |
| Moping for one voyage more. | |
| Where have they laid the sailor John? | |
| |
| And yesterday the youngest son, | |
| A humorous, unambitious man, | 25 |
| Was buried near the astrologer; | |
| And are we now in the tenth year? | |
| Since he, who had been contented long, | |
| A nobody in a great throng, | |
| Decided he would journey home, | 30 |
| Now that his fiftieth year had come, | |
| And ‘Mr. Alfred’ be again | |
| Upon the lips of common men | |
| Who carried in their memory | |
| His childhood and his family. | 35 |
| At all these death-beds women heard | |
| A visionary white sea-bird | |
| Lamenting that a man should die; | |
| And with that cry I have raised my cry. | |
