VIII

And then, then, Mother, the ship stagger'd under a thunderous shock,

That shook us asunder, as if she had struck and crash'd on a rock;

For a huge sea smote every soul from the decks of The Falcon but one;

All of them, all but the man that was lash'd to the helm had gone;

And I fell—and the storm and the days went by, but I knew no more—

Lost myself—lay like the dead by the dead on the cabin floor,

Dead to the death beside me, and lost to the loss that was mine,

With a dim dream, now and then, of a hand giving bread and wine,

Till I woke from the trance, and the ship stood still, and the skies were blue,

But the face I had known, O Mother, was not the face that I knew.