No drum-beat nerved them to the fight;
They heard no bugle blare:
No sword or lance-point glittered bright,
No standard floated there;
Only the streaming Northern Light
Shook, high in air.
They had no hope of victory
Against their unseen foe;
They had no hope of fame to be
That they might live to know:
Nothing before them could they see
But frost and floe.
They died; in death was not foregone
The old high English pride:
They died: till many a year was done
They slumbered side by side,
To show the folk who follow on
How brave men died.
Notes
From THE FOREMOST TRAIL, by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London, UK, © 1899, p. 49.
Most likely this poem is a tribute to the ill-fated Sir John Franklin Arctic Expedition of 1845-48 in search of a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Franklin and his crew were trapped in the ice and none survived. Eleven years later from a lonely cairn of stones, the expedition's log was recovered.
Contributed by Ian "Nobby" Dye of Bristol, UK.
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