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Never more popular than today, George V went home to a London in which the House of Commons was ringing with ironic cries of "Remember the Maine!" Aboard the hospital ship Maine, which was used last week by Government bigwigs & friends as a floating grandstand, the food was so abominable and the service so slow that First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell next day addressed a letter of apology to each distinguished guest. In swank Mayfair a rich young Argentine made herself obnoxious to English friends by screaming at cocktail parties, "My dears, in the crush I had a perfect piece of meat on my plate when a clutching hand came over my shoulder and seized it! Wolves—those people on the Maine were simply wolves!"
*THE KING AND THE SEA (In which the Sea describes the King's early training in the Royal Navy before the death of his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, put him in line for the Throne.)
I After his realms and states were moved To bare their hearts to the King they loved, Tendering themselves in homage and devotion, The tide wave up the Channel spoke To all those eager, exultant folk: ''Hear now what man was given you by the ocean!
II
"There was no thought of orb or crown When the single, wooden chest went down To the steering-flat, and the careless gunroom hailed him To learn by ancient and bitter use, How neither favour nor excuse, Nor aught save his sheer self henceforth availed
him.
III
"There was no talk of birth or rank By the slung hammock or scrubbed plank In the steel-grated prisons where I cast him; For But rest — niggard and hours the and a naked light narrow on his space face — While the ship's traffic flowed, unceasing, past him. IV "Thus I speak at the schooled him word to — at go a and sign be come — dumb; To stand to his task, not seeking others to aid him; To share in honour what praise might fall For the task accomplished and — over all — To swallow rebuke in silence. Thus I made him.
V "I loosened every mood of the deep On him, a child and sick for sleep, Through the long watches that no time can measure, When I drove him, deafened and choked and blind, At the wavetops cut and spun by the wind; Lashing him, face and eyes, with my displeasure. " VI I opened him all the guile of the seas — Their sullen, swift-sprung treacheries. To be fought, or forestalled, or dared, or dismissed with laughter. I showed him worth by folly concealed, And the flaw in the soul that a chance revealed— (Lessons remembered—to bear fruit thereafter.) VII "I dealt him power beneath his hand, For trial and proof, with his first command— Himself alone, and no man to gainsay him. On him the end, the means, and the word. And the harsher judgment if he erred, And—outboard—ocean waiting to betray him. VIII "Wherefore, when he came to be crowned, Strength in duty held him bound, So that not power misled nor ease ensnared him Who had spared himself no more than his seas had spared him!" IX After his lieges, in all his lands, Had laid their hands between his hands And his ships thundered service and devotion, The tide wave, ranging the planet, spoke On all our foreshores as it broke: "Know now what man I gave you—I, the ocean!"