We Have Fed Our Sea (6)

We Have Fed Our Sea
[words Rudyard Kipling, music Peter Bellamy]

We Have Fed Our Sea is the last part of Rudyard Kipling's poem The Song of the Dead from his book The Seven Seas (Appleton and Company, 1900).

Peter Bellamy sang We Have Fed Our Sea on his privately issued cassette of 1982, The Maritime England Suite, accompanied by Dorothy Collins on piano and Ursula Pank on cello. He recorded it again in 1989 for his album Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs, The first recording was also included on his Free Reed anthology Wake the Vaulted Echoes. A live recording from Paul Adams' collection of miscellaneous Peter Bellamy tapes was included in 2018 on the Fellside anthology Destination. Peter Bellamy tersely noted in the original album's notes:

"These verses are but a small part of Kipling's longest sustained poems, A Song of the English."

Lyrics
We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

There's never a flood goes shoreward now
But lifts a keel we manned;
There's never an ebb goes seaward now
But drops our dead on the sand—
But slinks our dead on the sands forlore,
From the Ducies to the Swin.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid it in!

We must feed our sea for a thousand years,
For that is our doom and pride,
As it was when they sailed with the ~Golden Hind~,
Or the wreck that struck last tide—
Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef
Where the ghastly blue-lights flare.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' bought it fair!