The Child and the Mariner

In this old captain’s house I lived, and things

That house contained were in ships’ cabins once:

Sea-shells and charts and pebbles, model ships:

Green weeds, dried fishes stuffed, and coral stalks;

Old wooden trunks with handles of spliced rope,

With copper saucers full of monies strange,

That seemed the savings of dead men, not touched

To keep them warm since their real owners died;

Strings of red beads, methought were dipped in blood,

And swinging lamps, as though the house might move;

An ivory lighthouse built on ivory rocks,

The bones of fishes and three bottled ships.

And many a thing was there which sailors make

In idle hours, when on long voyages,

Of marvellous patience, to no lovely end,

And on those charts I saw the small black dots

That were called islands, and I knew they had

Turtles and palms, and pirates’ buried gold.