W. Heath Robinson: Illustrations for A Song of the English by Rudyard Kipling, Part 1

Frontispiece: Follow after—we are waiting by the trails that we lost,
For the sounds of many footsteps, for the tread of a host.

Fair is our lot— goodly is our heritage!
(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!
For the Lord our God Most High
He hath made the deep as dry,
He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the Earth!







THE COASTWISE LIGHTS



THE SWINGING. SMOKING SEAS

Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.

ON THE LINELESS; LEVEL FLOORS

Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors

THE COASTWISE LIGHTS OF ENGLAND

Come up, come in from Eastward, from the guardports of the Morn!







THE SONG OF THE DEAD
CAME THE WHISPER; CAME THE VISION

 . Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need,
Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.


 . Then the wood failed- then the food failed — then the last water dried -
In the faith of little children we lay down and died.

On the sand-drift — on the veldt-side — in the fern-scrub we lay.
That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way.


Follow after — follow after — for the harvest is sown:
By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!

When Drake went down to the Horn,
And England was crowned thereby.

We have fed our sea for a thousand years,
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.

If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

There's never a flood goes shoreward now
But lifts a keel we manned;
There's never an ebb goes seaward now
But drops our dead on the sand -
But slinks our dead on the sands forlore
From the Ducies to the Swin.














The wrecks dissolve, above us; their dust drops down from afar -
Down to the dark, the utter dark, where the blind white seasnakes are.


Here in the womb of the world — here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat —
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth —
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.