Tag Archives: ship

to a ship wrecked on the sea-shore

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This useless bark, dry and broken,
now so despised by water and wind,
looked with scorn on the vast movements
of the stormy sea, of the east and the south winds.

Proud towards the deep, obedient to its pilot,
and always thirsty for the rich metal,
it brought the ores which it took aboard
in the distant Indies to their Spanish destination.

Now it lies far from the dear woods
in which it might have kept its green decoration
better than it could cargoes of treasure.

So the man who follows miserly greed
sometimes perishes miserably in a foreign land,
lacking both consolation and wealth.

Juan Martínez de Jáuregui y Aguilar

a sailor on the beach

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Who art thou, O shipwrecked stranger ?
Leontichus found thee here a corpse upon the beach,
and covered thee in this tomb, with tears for his own hazardous life.
For no quiet life is his either, but restless as the gull
he roams the sea.

Callimachus

a comparasion

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When the wind strikes gently upon a sea that is blue,
this craven heart is roused within me, and my love of the land
yields to the desire of the great water. But when the deep waxes
grey and loud, and the sea begins to swell and to foam and the waves
run long and wild, then took I unto the shore and its trees and depart from
the brine, then welcome is the land to me and pleasant the shady greenwood,
where, be the wind never so high, the pine-trees sing her song. O ti’s ill
to be a fisher with a ship for his house and the sea for his labour and
the fishes for his slippery prey. Rather it is sleep beneath the leafy plane
for me, and the sound hard by of a bubbling spring such as delights
and do not disturb the rustic ear.

Moschus