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Where Lies the Land to Which the Ship Would Go
by Arthur Hugh Clough

English poet. His first poem of note, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is written in classical Hexameters and tells the story of an Oxford scholar who marries a 'Scotch lassie'. Amours de Voyage (1858) is similar in its treatment of religious doubt, class conflict and romantic love. Clough's dissatisfaction with the attitudes of the Victorian age is most forcefully expressed in two poems which were not published until after his death: 'Dypsichus', which he described as dealing with the 'conflict between a tender conscience and the world'; and 'The Latest Decalogue', a biting satire on Victorian morality. His collected Poems became very popular when they were published in 1862.


Where Lies the Land to Which the Ship Would Go
by Arthur Hugh Clough

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons upon the deck's smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace!
Or, o'er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far widening as we go.

On stormy nights while wild north-westers rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast
Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.


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