Famous Single Poems
this church, climbed up into the steeple and perused the legend on the bell!
It is a fact, however, that, outside of Treasure Island, the chantey has never been found anywhere in print, and it has always been one of the tragedies of literature that the Captain never got any further than the first four lines. The beginning is so admirable! Though, of course, as a chantey four lines are enough; many chanteys consist of no more than that. For a chantey is made to be sung as a gang of sailors heave on a rope, or do some other work in concert, one voice carrying the lines and all of them coming in on the chorus. It is like a marching-song: the simpler and more repetitious it is the better.
Mr. E. B. Osborn, the literary editor of the London Morning Post and the author of a collection of charming essays, Literature and Life, has the audacity to assert that even these four lines would not have been tolerated aboard the Hispaniola, for Flint’s cutthroats would have preferred such jocund stuff as “Haul Away, Joe,” or “Hog’s-Eye Man,” and adds that “it is highly improbable that there ever was an authentic chantey of the Dead Man’s Chest. If there had been, it would have been found in one of the standard collections, such as Captain W. B. Whall’s or that published by Dr. R. R.
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