Jerry An' Me

NO matter how the chances are,
Nor when the winds may blow,
My Jerry there has left the sea
With all its luck an’ woe :
For who would try the sea at all,
Must try it luck or no. They told him — Lor’, men take no care
How words they speak may fall —
They told him blunt, he was too old,
Too slow with oar an’ trawl,
An’ this is how he left the sea
An’ luck an’ woe an’ all.

Take any man on sea or land
Out of his beaten way,
If he is young ’t will do, but then,
If he is old an’ gray,
A month will be a year to him,
Be all to him you may.

He sits by me, but most he walks
The door-yard for a deck,
An’ scans the boat a-goin’ out
Till she becomes a speck,
Then turns away, his face as wet
As if she were a wreck.

The men who haul the net an’ line
Are never rich ; an’ you,
My Johnny here, — a grown-up man,—
Is man an’ baby too,
An’ we have naught for rainy days,
An’ rainy days are due.

My Jerry, diffident, abroad
Is restless as a brook,
An’ when he left the boat an’ all,
Home had an empty look ;
But I will win him by an’ by
To like the window-nook.

I cannot bring him back again,
The days when we were wed.
But he shall never know — my man —
The lack o’ love or bread,
While I can cast a stitch or fill
A needleful o’ thread.

God pity me, I 'd most forgot
How many yet there be,
Whose goodmen full as old as mine
Are somewhere on the sea,
Who hear the breakin’ bar an’ think
O’ Jerry home an’ — me.