d’un matelot flottant au gré des vagues. Involontairement je me rappelai alors l’Île des Morts, ces belles strophes qu’un de nos bons poètes canadiens, James Donelley, avait imitées de Thomas Moore :[1].
See you, beneath you cloud so dark,
Fast gliding along, a gloomy bark ?
Her sails are full, though the wind is still,
And there blows not a breath her sails to fill !
Oh ! what doth that vessel of darkness bear ?
The silent calm of the grave is there,
Save now and again a death-knell rung,
And the flap of the sails with night-fog hung ?
There lieth a wreck on the dismal shore
Of cold and pitiless Labrador ;
Where, under the moon, upon mounts of frost,
Full many a mariner’s bones are tost !
You shadowy bark hath been to that wreck,
And the dim blue fire, that lights her deck,
Doth play on as pale and livid a crew
As ever yet drank the church-yard dew !
- ↑ Voici les vers de Moore. Ils sont intitulés : « Written on passing Dead-man’s island, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, late in the evening, September 1804. »
