A Wanderer's Song

Welcome to Poetry Friday. The roundup today is hosted by Julie at The Drift Record.

My wandering this holiday weekend will be solely in my head and on the page. Tuskegee, Mississippi, and the old Seneca Village in Central Park. I've been saving these for a long weekend.

Though I may wander over to the park to admire the ducks and other water birds, but no major traveling plans. I pulled out an old poetry textbook today, Doorways to Poetry by Louis Untermeyer, (published by Harcourt, Brace, Inc in 1938) and was browsing through it when I found the poem below.  Wherever you are wandering this weekend, I hope you make lots of memories.

Frontispiece of Doorways to Poetry by Rockwell Kent

A Wanderer's Songby John Masefield

A wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels,

I am tired of brick and stone and rumbling wagon-wheels;

I hunger for the sea's edge, the limit of the land,

Where the wild old Atlantic is shouting on the sand.

Oh I'll be going, leaving the noises of the street,

To where a lifting foresail-foot is yanking at the sheet;

To a windy, tossing anchorage where yawls and ketches ride,

Oh I'l be going, going, until I meet the tide.

And first I'll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls,

The clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls,

The songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out,

And then the heart of me'll know I'm there or thereabout.

Oh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick,

For windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick;

And I'll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels,

For a wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels.