Glee! The great storm is over!

Glee! The great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls, –
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

I love the way the last stanza undercuts the thunderous joy of the first two. The uncomfortable silence after the children ask their difficult but obvious question is palpable; the waves beating against the shore–the waves that know all too well what became of the forty–make the silence that much darker.

This photo is available as a greeting card.