In exile, hopeless of relief,
I pine, a hapless sailor,
And this is how I came to grief,
Upon an Arctic whaler.
My exile is no land of palms,
Of tropic groves and spices,
But placed amid the savage charms
Of polar snows and ices.

It was a sad funereal coast,
The billows moaned a dirge;
The coast itself was lined with bays,
The rocks were cloth’d with surge.
And here by cruel fogs and fates
Our ship was cast away—
Where Davis found himself in straits,
And Baffin turn’d to bay.

And from my chilly watch aloft
I saw the icebergs sailing,
Where I sat weeping very oft,
While all the crew were whaling.
For one and all, both great and small,
From veteran to lubber,
From captain down to cabin boy,
Were used to whale and blubber.

Our ship misled by ill advice—
Our skipper, half seas over,
Upon this continent of ice
Incontinently drove her.
While I alone to land did drive,
Among the spars and splinters,
And since have kept myself alive,
Through two long Arctic winters.

It was a land most desolate,
Where ice, and frost, and fog,
Too truly did prognosticate,
An utter want of prog.
Another would have reeved a rope,
And made himself a necklace;
My wreck bereaved me of my hope,
But did not leave me reckless.

And since, on oil and fat I’ve kept
My freezing blood in motion.
(I think the “fatness” of the land
Transcends the land of Goshen.)
In vain, gaunt hunger to beguile,
I try each strange device;
Alas! my ribs grow thin the while,
Amid the thick-ribb’d ice.

In vain I pour the midnight oil,
As eating cares increase;
And make the study of my nights
A history of Greece.
Monarch of all that I survey,
By right divine appointed;
(If lubrication in and out
Can make a Lord’s anointed).

Though lord of both the fowl and brute
My schemes to catch them work ill,
And three she-walrii constitute
My social Arctic circle;
Three, did I say? there are but two,
For she I chiefly fancied
Has been my stay the winter through,
And now is turning rancid.

The cruel frost has nipped me some;
My mournful glances linger
Upon a solitary thumb,
And half a middle finger.
In toto I have lost my toes,
Down to the latest joint:
And there is little of my nose
Above the freezing point.

Upon this floe of ice my tears
Are freezing as they flow;
I lie between two sheets of ice,
Upon a bed of snow.
I have a hybernating feel,
And with the Bear and Dormouse,
Shall take it out in sleep until
Something turns up to warm us:

Until some Gulf-Stream vagaries
Or astronomic cycles,
Shall bring to these raw latitudes
The climate of St. Michael’s.
Or else some cataclysm rude
With polar laws shall play tricks,
And Nature in a melting mood
Dissolve my icy matrix.

Maybe, a hundred centuries hence,
Pr’aps thousands (say the latter),
Amid the war of elements
And even the wreck of matter,
When in the crush of worlds, our own
Gets squeezed into a hexagon,
The natives of this frozen zone
May see me on my legs again.