| |
| WHEN the robust and Brass-bound Man commissioned first for sea | |
| His fragile raft, Poseidon laughed, and “Mariner,” said he, | |
| “Behold, a Law immutable I lay on thee and thine, | |
| That never shall ye act or tell a falsehood at my shrine. | |
| |
| “Let Zeus adjudge your landward kin whose votive meal and salt | 5 |
| At easy-cheated altars win oblivion for the fault, | |
| But you the unhoodwinked wave shall test—the immediate gulf condemn— | |
| Except ye owe the Fates a jest, be slow to jest with them. | |
| |
| “Ye shall not clear by Greekly speech, nor cozen from your path | |
| The twinkling shoal, the leeward beach, or Hadria’s white-lipped wrath; | 10 |
| Nor tempt with painted cloth for wood my fraud-avenging hosts; | |
| Nor make at all, or all make good, your bulwarks and your boasts. | |
| |
| “Now and henceforward serve unshod, through wet and wakeful shifts, | |
| A present and oppressive God, but take, to aid, my gifts— | |
| The wide and windward-opening eye, the large and lavish hand, | 15 |
| The soul that cannot tell a lie—except upon the land!” | |
| |
| In dromond and in catafract—wet, wakeful, windward-eyed— | |
| He kept Poseidon’s Law intact (his ship and freight beside), | |
| But, once discharged the dromond’s hold, the bireme beached once more, | |
| Splendaciously mendacious rolled the Brass-bound Man ashore. | 20 |
| |
| The thranite now and thalamite are pressures low and high, | |
| And where three hundred blades bit white the twin-propellers ply. | |
| The God that hailed, the keel that sailed, are changed beyond recall, | |
| But the robust and Brass-bound Man he is not changed at all! | |
| |
| From Punt returned, from Phormio’s Fleet, from Javan and Gadire, | 25 |
| He strongly occupies the seat about the tavern fire, | |
| And, moist with much Falernian or smoked Massilian juice, | |
| Revenges there the Brass-bound Man his long-enforced truce! | |
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