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| OUR brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees; | |
| Our loins are battered ’neath us by the swinging, smoking seas. | |
| From reef and rock and skerry—over headland, ness, and voe— | |
| The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go! | |
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| Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors; | 5 |
| Through the yelling Channel tempest when the siren hoots and roars— | |
| By day the dipping house-flag and by night the rocket’s trail— | |
| As the sheep that graze behind us so we know them where they hail. | |
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| We bridge across the dark, and bid the helmsman have a care, | |
| The flash that, wheeling inland, wakes his sleeping wife to prayer. | 10 |
| From our vexed eyries, head to gale, we bind in burning chains | |
| The lover from the sea-rim drawn—his love in English lanes. | |
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| We greet the clippers wing-and-wing that race the Southern wool; | |
| We warn the crawling cargo-tanks of Bremen, Leith, and Hull; | |
| To each and all our equal lamp at peril of the sea— | 15 |
| The white wall-sided warships or the whalers of Dundee! | |
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| Come up, come in from Eastward, from the guardports of the Morn! | |
| Beat up, beat in from Southerly, O gipsies of the Horn! | |
| Swift shuttles of an Empire’s loom that weave us main to main, | |
| The Coastwise Lights of England give you welcome back again! | 20 |
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| Go, get you gone up-Channel with the sea-crust on your plates; | |
| Go, get you into London with the burden of your freights! | |
| Haste, for they talk of Empire there, and say, if any seek, | |
| The Lights of England sent you and by silence shall ye speak! | |
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