The Ships That Won't Go Down
by Henry Lawson (1898)
We hear a great commotion
'Bout the ship that comes to grief,
That founders in mid-ocean,
Or is driven on a reef;
Because it's cheap and brittle
A score of sinners drown.
But we hear but mighty little
Of the ships that won't go down.
Here's honour to the builders –
The builders of the past;
Here's honour to the builders
That builded ships to last;
Here's honour to the captain,
And honour to the crew;
Here's double-column headlines
To the ships that battle through.
They make a great sensation
About famous men that fail,
That sink a world of chances
In the city morgue or gaol,
Who drink, or blow their brains out,
Because of "Fortune's frown".
But we hear far too little
Of the men who won't go down.
The world is full of trouble,
And the world is full of wrong,
But the heart of man is noble,
And the heart of man is strong!
They say the sea sings dirges,
But I would say to you
That the wild wave's song's a paean
For the men that battle through.
by Henry Lawson (1898)
We hear a great commotion
'Bout the ship that comes to grief,
That founders in mid-ocean,
Or is driven on a reef;
Because it's cheap and brittle
A score of sinners drown.
But we hear but mighty little
Of the ships that won't go down.
Here's honour to the builders –
The builders of the past;
Here's honour to the builders
That builded ships to last;
Here's honour to the captain,
And honour to the crew;
Here's double-column headlines
To the ships that battle through.
They make a great sensation
About famous men that fail,
That sink a world of chances
In the city morgue or gaol,
Who drink, or blow their brains out,
Because of "Fortune's frown".
But we hear far too little
Of the men who won't go down.
The world is full of trouble,
And the world is full of wrong,
But the heart of man is noble,
And the heart of man is strong!
They say the sea sings dirges,
But I would say to you
That the wild wave's song's a paean
For the men that battle through.
Thanks Paul.
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4 comments:
Glad you like it, Charles. It quickly became one of my favorites. A friend had posted it.
Ah, poetry is a wanderlust
that flits the world before our eyes
and makes us men who won't fit in
as elves in the gathering dusk.
Men still insist on making reliable materials and devices to secure and enrich our lives. Many of them become my customers and my laboratory provides them the materials property information they need to solve many a thorny problem. They battle on and make improvement after improvement, unnoticed by most, yet critical to their business.
Others, cast a critical scientific eye upon huge swindles such as catastrophic man-made global warming due to the CO2 emissions caused by the use of fossil fuels. Despite the massive invective assaults against those who proclaim the failure of the hypothesis, they have the courage to point out how it contradicts reality.
There are many other men who are the ships that will not go down. Without them, there is no civilization. When they are undervalued, we have a President Thompson or an Obama presidential usurper.
Last year, I had a graduate class in criminology theory on the seventh floor and we had to read this post-modernist junk about how there is no reality. I pointed out that we take the elevator every week... Here's to the ships that won't go down.
I like to think of all the computer code, billions of lines of it, from embedded binaries that control traffic lights and fuel injectors to interpretive mark-ups like this. Here's to the ships that won't go down.
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