All islanders will gladly spring to arm,
For sake of curving sea-coasts, cliffs and dunes,
That their imperilled ingle take no harm,
Nor singing waves be humbled from their tunes,
Their tidal ballads and their haunting cries
Of tern or petrel, or perhaps a soul,—
Yet for no one of these the patriot dies
But for the love of the ancestral whole.

An island, though a continent entire,
In ocean prongs is like a gem of light,
Its facets shining with a beacon-fire,
A solitaire by which a race is plight
To its dear sea—be but its peril known.
Its folk will die to save their precious stone.