The Fighting Téméraire - Bone Prisoner Model

No tusk from trackless jungle brought, No bone of slaughtered whale Her wreathed and Tritoned sternports wrought And bulwarks eggshell frail. No warm dog-watch her building whiled Away in tropic seas, For no shore-anchored salt beguiled His unaccustomed ease. Mellow as ancient ivory And fine as carven jade, From beef-bones of captivity The shapely hull was made, Whose making helped upon their way Such limping hours and slow As measure out the leaden day That none but prisoners know. Old wars, old woes, old wasted years, Old causes lost and won, Old bitterness of captives' tears As dreams-as dreams are done. As dreams the stubborn hulls, the pride Of masts that raked the sky, Sea-shattering bows and oaken side Of fighting fleets gone by. Yet still, though thrones and systems shake And pass and are no more, The spars a casual touch might break Unharmed by Time endure. Still, though the world in change be whelmed, From these small mimic bows The antique warrior, mailed and helmed, Looks out with frowning brows, Like those beneath whose sightless stare The sullen smoke-drift rolled Round her, well-named the Téméraire , In famous fights of old. What of her builder? Did he sail Home to his France at last, To tell in happier times the tale Of wars and prisons past? Or is, upon some gravestone hoar, The legend plain to see: 'He was a Prisoner of War, But Death has set him free'?