Lyrics

Only a ripple, and just a puff
Stirring the old brown sails,
Like as a breath from a sick man’s lips
Flutters a bit, then fails.
After awhile the wind was dead,
And we rolled on the oily sea,
Like a weary man in a fever fit
Moving uneasily.

No headway on the old barky now!
She might have been a log.
Ten leagues away the land lay hid
By a strip of cold, gray fog:
And three points off the starboard bow—
‘Twas a summer night in June—
Where the sky and the water joined in one,
Heaved up the red, full moon.

Bloody red, but silver soon,
With a path of glittering light
Stretched from the bark to the ocean’s edge,
Waving, and broad, and bright.
Something dark in the shining belt,
About a league away,
A shapeless bulk, like a ragged rock,
On the face of the water lay.

There was no rock or reef on the chart
Laid down as here about;
We looked through the night-glass steadily
But we couldn’t make it out.
I kept my eye on the ugly thing
As I stood on the quarter-deck,
Then ordered the crew to lower the gig—
It might be it was a wreck.

We pulled away for the shapeless hulk
Till it loomed against the moon,
And we read on the bow of a mastless brig
The name—the “Glenaloon.”
We hailed, tho’ never a man was on deck,
And never a voice replied;
We shipped our oars as we touched the wreck,
And climbed the vessel’s side.

There was a rubbish of splintered spars—
Mainmast and foremast gone—
Shattered boats on the littered deck,
But of living beings—none!
Surely that is a human form
Crouching upon the deck,
In an old sou’ wester and Guernsey frock!
“Shipmate! what of the wreck?”

Surly old chap! I raised his hat—
Remember, the moon was full—
And started back, for its white rays fell
On a ghastly, grinning skull.
Groping our way through spars and sails,
Mottled with shade and light,
Five more skeletons we found
Bleached to a deathly white.

Then walking aft—the deck was flush—
To the cabin I made my way.
Stretched on the transom at full length
The skeleton captain lay.
In his bony hand a paper was clutched
(I read what it said next day),
“Wrecked—boats stove and food all gone—
We can but wait and pray.”

As we pulled from the brig o’er the steel-black sea,
In the light of the pitiless moon,
We read again her fateful name—
The weird name—”Glenaloon.”
And faster and faster into the waves
The blades of our stout oars fell,
For the deck seemed swarming with shadowy forms
Waving a wild farewell.

In the sunny calm of the following day
We buried the fleshless crew.
Shrouded and shotted, one by one,
They sank through the water’s blue
And I never look of a summer night
On the blood-red disk of the moon,
But I think of the horror she once revealed—
The wreck of the “Glenaloon.”

Source:
Durivage, Francis Alexander. The Glenaloon and Other Poems. New York: Trow’s Print and Bookbinding, 1881.

This book can also be found on Google Books.