The Lost Ones. Poem by Samuel Bamford

Where the sun looks cold and shorn,
Where the day is long and lorn,
Ah! too long, so cold and dreary,
Long and lorn, and dim and weary,
Sailors brave must needs go sailing,
Wives forsaken, children wailing;
Sails were spread, and ships in motion,
Down the darksome northern ocean;
From that darksome northern main,
When will they return again?
When will they return again?

Over billow, into gloom,
Ploughed the stem, and swung the boom,
Till they entered on a nether
Sea, outriding wreck and weather.
Night was there all strangely gleaming,
Stars wild coursing, meteors streaming;
Omens for a timely warning,—
'Mortals, back, or no returning,'
Omens vain, for, with the day,
On they sail, nor seek to stay,
Until lost, and faraway;
Ah! too brave, too far away.

Gone and lost, but how or when,
Never may be known to men;
By what frozen lands they steered,
Gulf or berg, they disappeared;
Whether life so closed behind them
That the living ne'er can find them,—
Whether kindly, death received them,
And from utter woe relieved them,—
Or, a remnant are surviving,
Hoping still, and homeward striving;
So that lost and broken-hearted
Yet may meet, and ne'er be parted.
Ah! dear hope, with thought 'so fair,'
Whose fond whisper was a snare
Wrought from uttermost despair.

All is frozen still and fast
In that death-land, wild and vast;
Save when mountain bergs are drifting,
Or with noise, like thunder, rifting;
Or the storm goes darkly scowling,
'Mid eternal winter howling;
Over desolation endless,
And a region void and friendless,—
Drear, immeasurable gloom!
One vast shroud, without a tomb,
What a band! and what a doom!