Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
—This is my own, my native land—
With a vengeance!
It is four years since I saw, under a little winter snow, the death-grey coast of Kent go out. After four years, down, down on the horizon, with the last sunset still in the west, right down under the eyelid of the shut cold sky, the faintest spark, like a message. It is the Land’s End light. And I, who am a bit short-sighted, saw it almost first. One sees by divination. The infinitesimal sparking of the Land’s End light, so absolutely remote, as one approaches from over the sea,from the Gulf of Mexico, after sunset.
I won’t pretend my heart was dead. It exploded again in my chest. “This is my own, my native land!” My God, what lies behind that spark of light!
One goes out on deck again, two hours later, to find a vast light towering out of the dark, as if someone were swinging an immense white beam of communication in the black boughs of the tree of night. and the ship creeps invisible under the pure white branches of the light of men, down on the little lustre of the sea. We are entering plymouth Sound.
Breathes there a man with soul so dead—·
There are the small lights on the soft blackness that must be land. Far off, ahead, a tiny row of lights that must be the Hoe. And the ship slowly pulses forward, at half speed, venturing in.
England! So still! So remote-seeming! Across what mysterious belt of isolation does England lie!“It doesn’t seem like a big civilised country,” Says the Cuban behind me. “It seems as if there were no people in it. ”
“Yes!”cries the German woman. “So still! So still! As if one could never come to it. ”
And that is how it seems, as you slowly steam up the Sound in the night, and watch the little lights that must be land, on the unspeaking darkness. The darkness doesn’t speak, as the darkness of the coast of America, or of Spain for example, speaks in the night when you are passing.
Slowly the ship lapses to silence in mid-water. A tender lit up with red and white and yellow lights—the German woman calls it the Christmas-tree boat—hovers round the stern and comes up on the leeward side. It looks curiously empty, in spite of its lights. And with strange quick quietness, the English sailors make fast. Queer to hear English voices below on the tender, so curiously quiet and withheld, against the noise of Spanish and German we are used to on board.
