AT ANCHOR

I AM going a journey, brother. Or would it be better to say,
 I am just ending up a long voyage, and dropping my kedge in the bay.
Coming home; and in debt to the purser, with never a dollar to pay.

Six decades. ’Twas a wearisome, voyage, made over a mystical sea,
In a poorly rigged, plebeian lugger, that always was drifting a-lee;
And where are the lofty square-riggers that started the voyage with me?

They passed me far up to the windward, with stunsails aloft and alow,
Some heading for tropical islands, some bound for the islands of snow,
And where are the weatherly clippers the merchants delighted to know?

Some drowsily swing to their anchors, as the meandering tides go by;
Some battle in frozen oceans, where the northerly gales are high;
Some drift in the seething tropics, with keels upturned to the sky.

Oh, grand is the lofty clipper, as she dashes the yeasty brine
From the crest of the midnight billow, where the waters flash and shine.
But I love the plebeian lugger—the little lugger is mine.

And lofty clipper or lugger, it comes to the same at last,
Or whether we count as wreckage, or hold to our moorings fast,
When we swing to a final anchor, and the voyage of life is past