ON OLD CAPE COD
_By Ferdinand C. Lane_
_Drawings by Rena V. Rockwell_
SECOND EDITION
To Emma - my Wife
Copyright 1961 by Ferdinand C. Lane
[Illustration]
ON OLD CAPE COD
How rich is life on old Cape Cod
Where autumn smiles in golden rod,
And marshes flame, though not with fire -
A region blest of heart’s desire.
In vain we’d roam the Seven Seas
There are no quainter shores than these.
Here nature in indulgent mood
Enfolds us with her solitude;
And here her cleansing winds combine
The tonic of the salt and pine,
The while old ocean’s muffled swells
Are chiming like cathedral bells.
The days drift by without a care
As sweet fern odors scent the air,
And watching wheeling gulls at play
The world of strife seems far away.
It must have been a kindly God
Who shaped the sands of old Cape Cod.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
On Monomoy 5
The Song of the Sea Shell 6
Winds of the Cape 7
The Enchanted Marsh 8
The Fragrance of the Cape 9
Sea Lavender 10
The Final Rose 10
Fairy Rings 11
Beach Plums 12
On Truro Hills 13
My Drift Wood Fire 15
The Sand Piper 16
The Whistling Buoy off Nauset 17
Peaked Hill Bars 18
The Rime of the Three Captains 19
Storm Signals 20
Neptune’s Coursers 21
To a Spider Web wet with Dew 22
The Dunes 23
The Flight of the Wild Geese 25
Sweet Fern 26
White Sail 26
The Humming Bird 27
O Road that Winds Among the Hills 28
The Beach Grass Threnody 28
To a Rose Jar 29
Blue Berries 30
The Watcher 31
The Sea Shell Boat 32
Flotsam 33
The Ancient Log Book 34
The Dance of the Moon Beams 35
Marshes of Sandwich 37
The Smile of the Sea 37
Our Cape Cod Home 38
Thunder Storm Off Race Point 40
To a Scrimshawed Whale’s Tooth 41
Creeping Fog 42
Wooden Sailor 43
The Dreamer 44
The Chant of the Night Wind 45
Midnight 46
The Golden Rod 47
Wild Roses 48
The Coast Guard Station 49
Keeper of the Light 50
On Chatham Bars 51
The Old Timer’s Lament 52
Revery 53
The Old Hulk 54
The Modernists 55
When the Locusts are In Bloom 57
The Harvest of the Sea 58
Beach Grass 59
The Swamp Heron 61
The Throes of Creation 62
Hog’s Back Church 63
Beyond the Point 66
The Winds of Time 67
To an Aged Willow 68
The Old Woods Road 69
The Poverty Weed 70
The Sweep of the Tides 71
Lost Billingsgate 73
Transformed 74
Haunting Echoes 74
Lost at Sea 75
The Aspen 76
The Song of the Sea Gulls 77
Broken Fragments 78
Workers of Magic 79
My Golden Fleece 80
The Lone Lilac 81
Friendly Lights 82
To My Cherry Blossom 83
Grains of Sand 84
The Funeral Wreath 84
Memory 85
The Stoker 89
Imagination 91
In Wellfleet by the Sea 95
ON MONOMOY
Gigantic finger, joint by joint,
Thrust out in warning from the land
To lurking shoals, along your point
We tread a skeleton of sand,
Till at the end we seem to be
Where all the world dissolves in sea
On Monomoy.
O’er Stone Horse shoal and Pollock Rip
The sullen tides sweep on apace
Where many a gallant sailing ship
Has found her final resting place;
But of the dead - no man may say
Till redly dawns the judgment day
On Monomoy.
For fishermen tell ghastly tales
Of wrecks and shuddering moons that mark
Red murder done, and spectral hails
Of Yo-Hoes keening from the dark!
So in the night when breakers moan
Fear trails his steps who walks alone
On Monomoy.
Waif of the seas and old Cape Cod
Where Gosnold voyaged long ago,
Where bold Champlain in armor trod,
What tales the muttering undertow
Could Whisper - or the sea birds scream
To brooding dune and marsh adream
On Monomoy.
THE SONG OF THE SEA SHELL
Come press your coral lip against my ear
Frail vagrant of the sea,
And sing to me the songs I love to hear
From ocean’s symphony.
Of tides that set in far off palmy isles
Where ukuleles strum,
And star eyed maidens wreathed in flowers and smiles
Dance to your rhythmic hum.
No plaintive bird, full throated with the spring,
Warbles a sweeter note
Than those enchanting melodies that ring
Within your pearly throat.
Sonorous chords that sound a minor key,
Sea chanties hoarse and low,
The echoes of the mermaid’s minstrelsy,
And songs the sirens know.
But now a bit of flotsam on the beach
Imprisoned in my hand,
I listen to the mysteries you teach
And strive to understand.
Your music leaves me in a brooding vein
Sweet chantress of the deep,
For in those elfin strains you wake again
From death’s engulfing sleep
And when, like you, upon life’s farthest shore
Time bears my empty shell,
O may such songs as your immortal store
Be mine as well!
WINDS OF THE CAPE
Winds of the Cape, go tearing by
Down the wild canyons of the sky!
When winter’s cold has stripped the trees,
And fields are bare and waters freeze,
We hear them in the dead of night
Careering on their headlong flight -
The formless horsemen of the blast
In gales of darkness rushing past!
Winds of the Cape in gladness ring
With all the lilting songs of spring!
When fresh and clean the world awakes,
And petals fall in snowy flakes
From beach plum bush and apple tree
There comes the haunting melody
From sky land’s caravans once more -
Wild geese in flight for Labrador!
Winds of the Cape in Summer days
When shore and dune dissolve in haze,
Come drifting down the heavenly leas
From cloudland’s floating Hebrides,
Caressing with your langorous calm,
And coolness like a healing balm;
And whispering tales of Araby
Palm fringing some enchanted sea.
Winds of the Cape, what sadness blends
In those wild gusts that Autumn sends
Down empty hallways of the sky,
To echo ever mournfully
The footsteps of the dying year;
To grieve o’er woods and meadows sere
For things we loved so much - but lost
Like blossoms withered by the frost.
THE ENCHANTED MARSH
O ripples in the marshland grass
Like waves on an enchanted sea,
The winds, with trailing garments pass
Invisible adown the lea
Each footprint, evanescent, pressed
In shadowed highlight, trough and crest.
No spray upon those waves is seen
To splash upon the marshy bank;
Uncanny sea so strangely green!
While lurking in those coverts dank
What things of the abyss may dwell
Only the fear hushed winds might tell.
Far off where dunes aspiring melt
Into the sky, those currents flow
In turmoil neither heard nor felt
How furtively they come and go!
Things yet undreamed of well might be
Submerged beneath so weird a sea.
No surges break but in our ear
An elfin murmuring seems to sound,
So vague it is we scarce may hear.
O can it be the far off pound
Of foamless surf on sands unseen
Beyond that shimmering waste of green?
And we who sail that eerie sea
Go drifting on a tide of dreams
To unknown isles in fantasy,
Borne on the undulating beams
Of sun, dim litten, or the moon
That cringes o’er the farthest dune.
How timelessly it ebbs and flows,
That sea of ever changing light,
And whence it bears us no one knows
To what wild chasms of the night
Where fancy, yearning to explore
Pauses, aghast, upon the shore.
THE FRAGRANCE OF THE CAPE
The sun, that sovereign alchemist, and winds
That do his bidding, gleaning from the wilds
Sweet essences and savory condiments
Have mingled them in that vast crucible
Of hill and hollow, swamp and circling sea,
And like the witch’s cauldrons, from that brew
Evoked a fragrance sweet as Araby.
The honeyed breath of Mayflowers in the spring,
The nectar lingering in the elfin cups
Of purple lilacs, fairy scents distilled
By pendant locust blossoms, essences
That lade the air when the wild roses bloom
In scarlet flames that beautify the hills;
The resinous aroma of the pines
In summer heats when crows call languidly
To droning bumble bees and gulls float past
Like wisps of snowy cloud; the musk of swamps
Where swaying cat tails shimmer in the sun
And the noon stillness echoes to the calls
Of blackbirds clarion shrill; the pungent smell
Of sage grass by the tidal pool, the spice
Of sweet fern from the hillsides redolent
With beachplum and the subtle frankincense
Of waxen bayberry, and over all
The faint, elusive permeating scent
Of sand and salt and spray from shore and sea.
The mace and cinnamon of far off isles
Are in that odor intimate and quaint
And lasting as the memories that cling
To weathered houses, gardens colorful
With hollyhocks and dahlias, rimmed with shells;
Or stranded hulls that brood in lonely coves
By crumbling piers where once proud vessels lay.
The romance and adventure of those days
When stanch descendants of the Pilgrim band
Carved out from sand and wilderness their homes
And wrung a hard subsistence from the deep,
Still linger in the memories of that time,
And in the perfume subtle, vague and strange
That charm elusive as the whispering breeze,
Sad as the setting sun athwart the dunes,
Mysterious as the ever changing sea,
The wild sweet, haunting fragrance of the Cape.
SEA LAVENDER
Upon the marsh a filmy blur
As delicate as gossamer;
A wraith of fog, a vaporous wisp
With stem and leaves and branches crisp,
Their fibre toughened by the gale,
Can plant so hardy seem so frail?
Half hidden mid its stalks of green
The flowerets are scarcely seen
As dainty specks of ocean’s blue,
Or bits of sky that filtered through,
To melt in tints of amethyst
As evanescent as the mist.
And now through many a lacey line
That fairy fingers intertwine
Upon my mantelpiece at last
You shed the fragrance of the past;
A wraith of marshland witchery -
A floral memory of the sea.
THE FINAL ROSE
From an ember
bud that glows,
In September
flames a rose.
Bursting prison
doors of bark,
Blithely risen
like a lark.
Sweetly winging
to my room,
Ever singing
in perfume.
Tardy comer,
woodsprite blest,
Dying summer’s
last and best!
[Illustration]
FAIRY RINGS
Far and near on every hand
Fairy rings bedeck the sand,
Footprints of the sportive elves
Dancing gaily with themselves;
Hand in hand and round and round
Treading circles on the ground
Nightly, by the glow worm’s ray
To the cricket’s roundelay.
Ardently each woodland gnome
Clasps a fairy from the foam,
Waltzing till the wondering moon
Sees each circle as a rune
In a maze of mystery
For the puzzled stars to see,
While the revellers at dawn
Leave a myriad circles drawn.
Or perchance the compass grass
Whirled by wandering airs that pass
Has engraved those strange designs
In its circumscribed confines.
Archimedes never drew
Circles more exact or true
Than each needle pointed blade
Razor edged and green as jade.
Can we delve the cryptic sense
From each grooved circumference?
In the grass that etched those rings
What immortal spirit springs?
Or what inspirations stir
The bewitched geometer
To such elfin tracery
On the sands beside the sea?
BEACH PLUMS
How daintily your blossoms cling
Like memories of winter snows;
The maiden promises of spring
That Nature, wakening, bestows;
White as a bridal veil of gauze
O’er branches gnarled like eagle’s claws.
How richly ripe and purple hued
You lure the eager appetite
When autumn yields in kindliest mood
Those luscious globules of delight!
The sylvan elves must brew that taste
From sea and dune and scented waste.
For only skill like theirs could blend
From woodland wild and rolling brine
Such flavors. Or perchance they lend
Their elven powers to those divine
So that the tang of earth and sky
Is mingled in their alchemy.
Or were some darker rites invoked
Some ritual of the churchman’s hell;
Malignant imps and beldams cloaked
In blackness capering neath the spell
Of gibbous moons obscure and lone -
Such witchcraft we might yet condone.
Yes, though we know not whence you came
Your sweet caresses to the tongue
Would still delight us just the same
Whether from day or darkness sprung;
Content and carefree, from the stems
To pluck such epicurean gems.
ON TRURO HILLS
Upon those dome like hills of sand
A wonderous carpet has been laid,
Rich as the rugs of Samarkand
And gorgeous as some rare brocade
Wrought on the looms of far Cathay
Or by the shrines of Mandalay.
It covers well those hills of sand
That glaciers rounded long ago,
Nor can the dyes of Samarkand
Display a stranger, deeper glow
Such tints of red and gray and green
With gold and amber in between.
To rolling slopes the lichens cling
And tufts of bunch grass russet sere,
Through them the murmurous breezes sing
While clustering sweet fern, far and near
Wafts spicy smells like incense o’er
Those lonely hills from wood to shore
The wild bearberry shyly twines
Its sinuous length through grass and moss,
How glossy are its clinging vines
From green to rusty red. Across
Its sheen the sunbeams dreamily
Play like the waves upon the sea.
Blueberry clumps in curving lines
Mingle with waxen bayberry
To trace their arabesque designs
On richly wrought embroidery,
With borders in the marshy sedge
And fringing beach grass for the edge.
A treeless waste it seems, but no
The scrub oak, lichen crusted, cowers
And dwarf pines, gnarled and twisted, grow
By beach plum thickets, white with flowers
A waste that blooms with rarer dyes
Than jungles turn to tropic skies.
And there are thread bare patches too
That add more color to the heath
For where the texture is worn through
It shows the golden sands beneath,
While in the afternoon’s slant rays
All outlines blur in purple haze.
Uncanny moorland, desolate
And in the dusk how weirdly still,
A landscape one can ne’er forget.
O’er ghostly hollow wraithlike hill
What timid moonsprites nightly flee
The muttering demons of the sea!
The ebbing seasons merely change
That coverlet from day to day,
By shifting, in their varied range
From sober hues to some more gay,
While from the sea and sky and air
Fresh color splashes everywhere.
That turf rough seeded by the wind
And nurtured by the pensive sun,
Is richer than the shawls of Ind,
Or that famed carpet once begun
By Jinns and Peris, known of yore,
That through the air the Genii bore.
Perhaps on some enchanted breeze
From Kurdistan or Araby
Those Genii over unknown seas
Have borne this priceless tapestry,
This fabric wrought in Faery land
To beautify a barren strand.
’Tis woven on the loom of time
Spun from the filaments of dreams,
This magic carpet. Age nor clime
Can match its pattern, or the streams
Of color lavish Nature spills
O’er Truro’s ancient, windswept hills
MY DRIFT WOOD FIRE
Heap high the wood on my rusty grate
As I sit enthroned like a potentate
In my old arm chair, while the crackling blaze
Unbars the gates, to my dazzled gaze,
Of a flame bright world that my fancy weaves
Though the storm may batter the creaking eaves.
There is Norway pine from the Arctic’s chill
From wrecks that splintered off Peaked Hill;
There is stout oak fashioned by broad axe blows,
And stranger wood that the jungle grows;
For such is the tribute I levy, - these
Are the far flung gifts of the seven seas.
The surf that claws at the wind swept beach
Like skeleton fingers seems to reach
For my lonely shelter; but staunch it stands
Though its walls resound to the rattling sands
In volleys hurled by the howling blasts; -
Pile on those staves and that stump of mast!
Up the roaring chimney the black smoke goes
But O the glory that ebbs and flows
On the heat warped ceiling and buckled floor,
In green and purple; with ruddy ore
That glints in gold where the salt burns through
Mid flames that dance in an elfin blue!
My home may seem but a weathered shack
Where the cold creeps in through many a crack;
But my fire’s bright magic has changed all these
To a castle hall where I take my ease,
With the window flaunting in sparkling lines
My royal crest that the frost designs.
Yes, I am a king carefree and bold
And I laugh at the gale and the winter’s cold.
My grate? ’Tis a jewel vault of Ind.
That music wild? - It is not the wind
But my minstrel’s songs, for my heart’s desire
I have found at last in my drift wood fire!
THE SAND PIPER
Quaint manikin, what bids you keep
Such formal distance with your droll
Divertisements, the while I stroll
In solitude beside the deep?
Your mannerisms first suggest
A Puritan sedate and prim;
Then change you by capricious whim
Into a gnome with hooded crest,
Or bit of animated foam,
Or e’en a cloud wisp drifting by, -
What region in the sea or sky
Or lonely dune can you call home?
Your footsteps mincing gleefully
Thread in and out along the verge
Embroidering the creamy surge, -
Strange little old man of the sea!
But in your antic frolicking,
Your beak grotesque and solemn eye,
Your stilt-like legs, your piping cry,
And sudden ecstasies of wing,
There is a kinship with the spray
Wind driven, and the restless sand,
A mingling of the sea and land,
The hither and the far away.
Blithe atomy, bold Nature’s child
Within you pulses glad and free
With joyous spontaneity
The tameless spirit of the wild!
THE WHISTLING BUOY OFF NAUSET
Voice of unutterable woe
Wailing alone at sea!
Borne on the shuddering winds that blow
Out of the dark to me.
Now far - now near
To the frightened ear
Comes that monody wild and free.
Mingled of menace and grief and fear
With a maniac chuckle of glee -
O hear!
That note of demoniac glee!
Prophet of peril and storm,
Harbinger, Triton and brute,
Mariners peering to glimpse your form
Cheer at your hoarse salute -
That gurgling sound
Of a sob half drowned
That is vague as the muttering foam!
Staggering drunkenly to and fro,
You buffet the tide rips and undertow,
A fettered gnome
In the grip of the shoals below.
Hark to that ominous roar
Freezing the blood with dread!
Vampire waves on a spectral shore
Ravening over the dead.
O-oo, O-oo!
Is your wild adieu
To the souls that the winds have sped!
Breakers are howling like wolves on the trail,
Foaming and gnashing and leaping the rail,
Where a shrieking crew
Are lost in the maddened gale.
Wraith of the dangerous seas,
Haunting the skeleton sands,
Creature of iron and billow and breeze
Wrought by a mortal’s hands.
Your eerie moan
So weird - so lone
Is a medley of boding and rapture and groan.
Roisterer, mourner and demon I wis
Strangest of beings in ocean’s abyss
Your elfin cry
Is a note of its infinite mystery.
PEAKED HILL BARS
On the dread bars at Peaked Hill
The sullen waves are strangely still;
And o’er that eerie sand dune’s crest
The winds, beguiling, seem at rest;
As the wild flare of Highland Light
Goes surging up into the night.
What sinister serenity
Pervades that graveyard of the sea,
Where sand bars, white as bone, submerge
Down where the tides intone a dirge
For houseless and unhallowed souls -
’Tis Death who broods among the shoals!
For hark, it comes, the thunderous gale
That makes those dunes and beaches quail,
As the wild winds and waves embroil
Those shoals until they seem to boil
And lift to heaven as loud a din
As though the fiends were caged within.
No mariners of old e’er sailed
More dangerous seas. Charybdis veiled
No starker terrors than those blue
And greenish shallows hide from view,
Where, crouched like tigers on the kill,
Lurk the dread bars at Peaked Hill!
THE RIME OF THE THREE CAPTAINS
Three captains lounged before the blaze
Of drift wood burning cheerily,
And they warmed to ventures of other days
In salty tales of the sea.
Tarred were the ropes coiled under the eaves,
Tar had dripped on the warping floor,
Beach sand fluttered like withered leaves
And sifted under the door.
The salt that crusted the chimney wide
Had tinged the flames with yellows and reds;
Salt were the wavelets that lapped outside,
And white as the salt were their heads.
Visions of many a tropic clime
In the firelight seemed to come and go;
Till friends they had known in their youthful prime
Took form in the radiant glow.
As time cracked voices droned away
Through strange adventures in days gone by,
One voyaged with them to far Cathay
And spice swept Araby.
Quaint were the islands they knew so well
Zanzibar, Pitcairn, and Celebes;
Isles enchanted where reigned the spell
Of other and lonelier seas.
Seas that cringed at the typhoon’s wrath
When his thunderous roar was heard;
Silent seas in the calm of death
Where never a whisper stirred.
And the pulses quickened to hear their tales
of voices hailing from spectral sands;
Of dead men’s ships with their ghastly sails
Unfurled by skeleton hands!
Legends weird of an unplumbed deep
Where galleons foundered in days of yore;
And sightless monsters that grope and creep
In the slime of the ocean floor.
Sagas of shipwreck in days long gone,
Of pirate treasure and revelry,
Of clashing cutlass and fights hard won
In some blood stained mutiny.
On decks awash how they held their own
When faced by the knives of a cursing crew.
And they spoke of shoals and of ledges lone
Which only the sea birds knew.
Youth flushed once more on withered cheeks,
Bent shoulders squared defiantly,
At such deeds as fired the warlike Greeks
In their legended Odyssey.
And the murmuring tide ebbed once again,
And the fire burned low e’re the captains three
Recalled with a sigh they were old, old men
Who were done with their toil on the sea.
STORM SIGNALS
Red blur against the western sky
A banner flutters threateningly
The sport of every treacherous air
It flaunts its warning note - “Beware”
Each wrinkle in its protean form
A portent of impending storm.
The darkening smudge where sank the sun
In bloody embers smoulders on
With brooding wrath. But angrier red
Invests that standard with the dread
Of unseen terrors. For it holds
Death’s shadow in its writhing folds!
NEPTUNE’S COURSERS
Horses of Neptune that bound and dash
Maddened with fear at the tempest’s lash,
Pawing the sand with their thudding feet
In a crashing rhythm of thunderous beat,
Swift as the startled winds they race,
Straining ever at fleeter pace;
Forms that curve where the billows comb,
Breasting a welter of seething foam,
What unseen riders spur them on
In a fierce stampede to be up and gone?
Out of the hoary deep they come,
Surging on with a booming roar,
Pounding ever along the shore,
Till the senses whirl and the ear grows numb.
Manes that stream in the wind swept spume,
Necks that arch in the breakers’ crest,
Hoofs resounding like drums of doom,
Rearing forward with frantic zest,
Wild are the steeds of the storm scarred deep!
Trident driven, they plunge and leap,
With nostrils spread and their eyes aglow,
And fetlocks gripped by the undertow,
Boisterous, raging, uncanny steeds
Out of an ocean waste that breeds
Chargers fit for a sea god’s needs -
Neptune’s coursers, untamed and free,
Fleeing the wrath of the unknown sea!
TO A SPIDER WEB WET WITH DEW
Suspended o’er the grass there floats a web
More delicate than strands of gossamer
Wet with the morning dew, in pendant gems
That flame with reds and greens and darting blues
From the bright sun. A filmy nothingness
Made visible by jeweled drops and etched,
Like frosted silver, on a background dark
Of drooping pines. An airy talisman
As lustrous as a diamond necklace draped
About a Peri’s throat. What fleeting glimpse
Of loveliness ethereal and unreal
Inspired that rapt enchantment of design,
That harp of strings attuned to elfin songs,
That ladder for the moonsprites nightly trail
From sky to earth. What miracle of line,
What shimmering grace, what witchery of form!
So fragile that a fallen leaf may rend
Its warp of magic ne’er to know the woof
Of hard reality. A diagram
Of elfin tracery impalpable;
Each angle and its intersections squared
By that grotesque geometer who spins
Unseen, a hateful spider, ogre grim
To all the insect world. Can ugliness
So venomous create a thing so fair
Beyond the range of art? In pensive mood
We pause a moment to admire and scan
Its meaning. Can such fairy elegance
Spring from so foul a source? Yet legends tell
How crippled Vulcan, grimed with dust and smoke,
In darkness wrought the glorious shield of Mars.
The water lily, blossom honey sweet,
Draws nectar from the mire. Nor time nor bounds
May curb that hidden beauty that wells up
From secret springs in nooks obscure and dark,
Till gems of dew upon a spider’s web
Glow like the Pleiades in frosted skies.
[Illustration]
THE DUNES
The dunes, the silent sentinels of the land
That range along the lea,
In revery unbroken, there they stand
And gaze far out to sea
Across their wind swept crests the breezes play
In cadence sad and sweet,
The restless sands whip ever day by day
Their surf tormented feet.
The dying sunbeams gild their crags with gold
Then purple into night,
Around their slopes the elves of twilight fold
A film of spectral light.
A landscape wild that one might see in dreams
Or on the pallid moon,
Blue shadows traced in silver by her beams
In many a cryptic rune.
Or etched against the winter sky they show
An outline weird and stark,
Their pale sands melting like the sparser snow
Into a background dark.
With scudding clouds, reflected on the dull
Gray mirror of the sea.
Cut by the wing points of a lonely gull
In poised expectancy.
The distant sand bars mark the skeletons
Of other vanished dunes,
Their crests were once upreared to other suns
And other ghostly moons.
The seething shoals once foamed beneath your feet
And maddened tide rips swirled
Whence risen proudly you can stand and greet
The older, firmer world.
Unstable element of shifting sand
Whose contours ever change,
But moulded by great nature’s groping hand
In shapes bizarre and strange.
We too, from sand have fashioned castled towers
For waves to wash away,
But her creations crumble much like ours
Though in a grander way.
Nature, like man, forever vainly strives
To conquer time and tide;
She toils long aeons, we our briefer lives
And both unsatisfied!
THE FLIGHT OF THE WILD GEESE
Out of the sky they call to me
Honking geese in the far flung V
Of an angle traced on the filmy skies
As they float along, and their plaintive cries
Are the pipes of an elfin roundelay.
Tis the call of the wild to the Far-away!
“Northward Ho!” is their haunting chant
Down the rocking winds their long lines slant,
And the old gray gander who takes command
How he marshals the files of his climbing band,
As they wing their flight with a tireless haste,
To the ice rimmed seas and the tundra waste.
To the spruce fringed lakes and the virgin sod
Where never the foot of man has trod;
To the empty lands unspoiled and clean
That never the eye of man has seen;
Where the frost wraiths flee in the melting nights
That throb to the dance of the northern lights.
On their venturous voyage no compass guides
Through the murmuring reefs and the chartless tides
Of the upper air. But their leader hoarse,
Like a pilot sage directs their course
To the sheltered fens and the coves they share
With the snow white fox and the arctic hare.
How we follow the wild geese’s homing flight
Till their chorus dies and they fade from sight,
And our pulses thrill to be up and away
Joyously buoyant, as free as they.
For their far off challenge seems to ring
“Awake, glad world, to the songs of Spring!”
SWEET FERN
Strange perfume of the wilderness,
Elusive as an elfin child
That broods above the landscape wild -
And haunting as a last caress.
From thickets broken and obscure
That spicy fragrance down the lea,
Brings to the ever murmuring sea
The sweetness of the barren moor.
Low risen thickets, scarcely seen
Among the clumps of reindeer moss;
What elfin traceries emboss
Your leafy arabesques of green!
And if no lonely passer by
Has trod your solitude to share
That incense - every wandering air
Has borne it to the bending sky.
WHITE SAIL
White sail beyond yon point of sand
Set like a gem upon the blue,
A fairy bark for elfin land
Receding gradually from view;
White sail a snow flake come to rest
Like thistledown, upon the sea;
A distant beacon on the breast
Of watery immensity.
White sail, a finger tip that seems
To beckon from the ocean’s rim,
To some enchanted isle of dreams
Beyond the skyline, vague and dim.
White sail that like a lonely tern
Fades out against the dying day,
We watch till you are gone and yearn
To voyage into the far away.
THE HUMMING BIRD
Blithe wanderer from some happier sphere
What hither darting brought you here
Swift as a flash of light,
With rainbow spatters on your throat
Aflutter like a dancing mote
Upon a sunbeam bright.
Bold atom of exultant life
With energy and action rife
And pinions all ablurr,
What glad exuberance of wing
Like harping on a fairy string
Evokes that vibrant whirr?
With humming, strumming melody
Like some supernal bumble bee
You flit about to sup
On honey dew. Your fearless beak
Probes, lancet like, those sweets to seek
Within each nectared cup.
Ah birdikin, now here, now there,
Poised elfinlike, upon the air
Aglitter like the dawn,
How ardently we would beguile
So fair a sprite to rest a while
But flash! and you are gone.
Yet the unspoken word you bring
Still lingers. Time is on the wing
And never may be stayed.
So let us sip each honeyed hour
For life itself is but a flower
That all too soon will fade.
O ROAD THAT WINDS AMONG THE HILLS
O road that winds among the hills
With sinuous curves that lure the eye
Up distant slopes to meet the sky,
And wake a wanderlust that thrills
To scenes which beckon far beyond
From steep Kashmir or Trebizon.
How like a bird, we’d love to roam
Beyond the gray Horizon’s rim
That shuts us like a prison grim
Within that narrow niche - our home
While thoughts unfettered steal away
To Istanbul and far Cathay.
O road we tread in toil and strife
That climbs to greet the bending air,
The long, long trail to none knows where -
The weary highway we call Life -
What lies beyond? Ah, who can say
But we shall see and know - some day!
THE BEACH GRASS THRENODY
Lo in the wind the beach grass sings
A medley of fantastic things
That stirs the silence of the ear
With elfin notes we scarce may hear,
From formless shapes grotesque and strange
That lurk beyond the vision’s range.
The fingers of what moon beam sprite,
Or lonely demon of the night,
Have strummed those sweetly plaintive strings
To the weird melody that wrings
A note of haunting mystery
From the chill vastness of the sea.
TO A ROSE JAR
Fair chalice in your spicy store
The roses seem to blow
And childhood’s simple faith restore
In legend’s long ago;
Such as the Arab’s jewelled prose
Where Genii from the bottle rose
The magician’s command obeyed
And at his feet whole kingdoms laid.
From odorous depths I summon thee
O spirit of the past!
Weave all your spells of fantasy
And may your visions last.
Bring to my ear the murmuring breeze
The drowsy, far off hum of bees,
Unfolding to my raptured gaze
Those scenes beloved, of olden days.
Once more within this scented gloom
Forgotten sunbeams rest
On hedges drooped with odorous bloom
By blushing lips caressed.
Those roses faded with the dusk -
Her lips grew cold, but fixed in musk
The fragrance lingers - and her eyes
Do they smile down from Paradise?
Prophetic incense, subtly rare,
O may I understand
The poignant messages you bear
From Memory’s holy land
For petals torn from withered stems
Have filled this treasure casque with gems
And their sweet perfume brings to me
A hint of immortality.
BLUE BERRIES
From elfland’s glades and coverts green
Peering through bars of sun and shade
Are friendly little eyes, I ween,
That glow like sapphires set in jade,
And shyly veil their azure spheres
In summer’s filmiest atmospheres.
There banqueting, we half recline
And sip the perfume redolent
With sweet fern, aromatic pine,
And bayberries’ seductive scent,
An incense rare as smoking spice
That censers raise to Paradise.
The stillness brooding like a pall
O’er thickets and entangled trees
Is stabbed by the shrill blackbird’s call,
And rippled by the wandering breeze
That trails a buzzing dragon fly
Where bumble bees hum drowsily.
Athwart the slant rays of the sun
Far off there glides a cloudland sail
To faery shores. Our task is done -
Our treasure won - a brimming pail.
And no blithe argonaut e’er bore
From legend’s quest a richer store!
THE WATCHER
A frail old lady bent and gray
She gazes out into the west.
To her it seems but yesterday
He sailed away with eager zest
“I pinned a rose upon his coat”
She falters, clutching at her throat.
A mariner he put to sea,
Twas more than fifty years ago,
The neighbors nod in sympathy,
She cannot understand they know.
What fancies throng her poor old head
“My Robert lost? He can’t be dead.”
And she is right. Her clearer eye
Sees through the storms and stress of years,
Full well she knows he did not die
The rainbow glistens through her tears
Enshrined within her heart in truth
Her Robert lives in deathless youth.
From her lone window on the shore
She nightly sets a lamp to burn
A beacon when the breakers roar
To guide him on his safe return.
No matter what the neighbors say
These two shall meet again some day!
THE SEA SHELL BOAT
How now, little maid, in your bonnet arrayed
With that quaint little shell in your hand!
Not a shell but a boat? Ah, I see, let it float
Far away from these mountains of sand.
It will sail so I’m told, down the pathway of gold
Where the sun paves the sea with its beams,
To some fortunate isle where the skies ever smile
Upon childhood’s endeavors and dreams.
But, Honey, don’t cry if it sinks bye and bye
Like a fluttering bird to its nest;
For the wild waves at play in their blundering way,
Like the oncoming years never rest.
My hopes were aglow in the long, long ago
When my own little ship left the shore;
But my hair has grown grey since it drifted away
And it never came back any more!
[Illustration]
FLOTSAM
O flotsam stranded on the beach
Half buried in the oozing sand,
A sudden step, an outstretched hand,
And you are snatched beyond the reach
Of clutching waves. What brought you here
From far off climes beyond the seas,
The sport of every furtive breeze,
A wanderer for many a year?
What gulfs of ocean’s nether world
Your paths have plumbed, I cannot know,
To what abyss the Krakens go,
Or where Leviathan was hurled.
What current dark, I wonder, links
Your lot with mine on this lone shore, -
But there is only silence more
Unbroken than the Memphian spinx.
And am I fain to speculate
Upon the burden of your past?
When I, myself, am flotsam cast
Ashore a little while to wait
For Time’s resistless tides that sweep
In endless waves of night and day
Across the shoaling milky way
From some vast, unimagined deep!
THE ANCIENT LOG BOOK
’Tis a time eaten volume with pages so blurred
That they seem to peer out through a fog,
But our fancy illumines each lustreless word
Of that battered old “wind-jammer’s” log.
Till our eyes gazing out through those angular lines
Like windows, transparent, behold
Far vistas of seas where adventure combines
With “spices” and “teak wood” and “gold.”
“Off the Horn” where the “greybeards” loomed up “mountain high”
All “our topsails were carried away”;
Then ’twas “cutlass and pike” when the “pirates drew nigh”
As “becalmed off Macassar we lay.”
“One man hurt” then a later notation, “he’s dead”
And “was buried at sea” all we know,
He “signed from Tahiti” a “good man” they said,
“The fo’castle hands called him ‘Joe’”
Lone wanderer far from his native lagoon
Was he mourned by some garlanded maid?
We ponder till jarred by a “roaring Typhoon”
And “there on our beam ends we laid”.
“With our water casks low” when our “Bread had give out”
“We fetched by some island unknown”
Though we “dragged on the coral” while “Going about”
We added “their stores” to our own.
There’s the wash and the surge of the murmurous deep
In each billowing flourish of ink.
Though the captains are silent in fathomless sleep
What they tersely inscribed is a link.
With a past, when our banner, its glory aflame
To the winds of the heavens was flung;
And their deeds are forever an epic of fame
Such as Homer of old might have sung.
THE DANCE OF THE MOON BEAMS
O the moonbeams dance down the broad expanse
Of a path o’er the heaving sea,
And they blithely trip from tip to tip
Of the billows ranging free.
Down a highway bright of silvery light
They dance to the ghostly moon,
In the sprightly set of a minuet
And the whirl of a rigadoon.
To our lonely shore like a burnished floor
Streams that river of luminous sheen;
’Tis a fairy track through the shadows black
’Tis a bridge that spans between.
The regions here and that unseen sphere
Far off in the western sky,
Where the day is done with the setting sun
And the sunsets fade and die.
Where the moon holds court and her minions sport
As over the seas they roam,
And they dance their way through the glistening spray
And laugh in the rippling foam.
“O the night is ours and its witching powers
“And there’s never an eye to mark,
“For the demons sleep in the caverned deep
“And the goblins of the dark.
“Are far away where the shadows gray
“On the spectral sand dunes lie,
“So join in our mirth that is not of the earth
“But more of the sea and the sky!”
To the rhythmic beat of their twinkling feet
The creaming breakers fret,
As to and fro on a rollicking toe
They gracefully pirouette.
For the surges roll o’er the murmuring shoal
Through a brooding harmony
And the night wind sings of unspoken things
In an eerie melody.
“O cast your cares on the buoyant airs
“Where the star points smoulder dim”
Is their lilting song as they float along
To the skyline’s molten rim.
As their footsteps pave o’er the frosted wave
A path to the magic west,
With a carefree shout we would join the rout
And follow their homing quest.
But our feet are banned from that faery land
Though our vaulting fancy yearns
As it throbs in tune to the dying moon
Till the morning redly burns.
With our hearts in tune to the dying moon
We stand in the hush of dawn;
There are cryptic runes on the windswept dunes
But that luminous path has gone.
And the wet sands lie neath the empty sky
As drear as the lifeless sea,
But through our dreams flit the elfin beams
Of that moonsprite revelry.
MARSHES OF SANDWICH
Marshes of Sandwich where slow currents wind
Languidly seeking the outermost sea
Drifting, some ultimate haven to find,
Where far horizons stretch, boundless and free!
Out there beyond the white sea wall of dunes,
Murmurs of ocean that breathe faint and low
Looming like mountain peaks crusted with snow
Weaving blue shadows through hot afternoons.
Languorous meadows where dragon flies dream,
Level green solitudes soothing the eye,
Golden with mist from the sun’s slanting beam
Purpled by patches of cloud floating by.
Prairies beloved of the homing wild geese
Nature’s hurt children are healed by your balm;
How we have longed for the infinite peace
Born of your timeless, unchangeable calm!
THE SMILE OF THE SEA
O the sun’s molten gold seems to spatter and spill
O’er the wavelets so dazzlingly bright,
As they dance to the songs of the sandpiper’s shrill
With their numberless sparkles of light.
For the languorous winds with their deft fingers press
Those wrinkles of sapphire and flame,
And the fires they enkindle all surge to express
A shout of exultant acclaim.
How they twinkle and glitter like sparks from the steel
While the gilded foam chuckles with glee,
Till all nature, attuned to the rapture they feel
Seems aglow with the smile of the sea.
[Illustration]
OUR CAPE COD HOME
O ancient Cape Cod house whose drooping eaves
Prim as the bonnet of a Pilgrim maid
Are sere and grey as Autumn’s driven leaves,
What comfort seems to drowse beneath their shade
Comfort that fairly drips like Heaven’s own dew -
The tranquil calm that our forefathers knew.
How many gales about those eaves have roared,
How many summer heats have come and gone,
And left their imprint on each weathered board
Time seasoned and discolored, handed on
To younger generations. Quaint and queer
You seem, but O your wealth of homey cheer!
Your architects were of a sombre breed,
Their doctrines gnarled and knotty to the core,
And yet you gave them refuge, ’twas their need;
What battlemented towers had yielded more?
A treasure galleon, in your roomy hold
Were sanctuary from the storm and cold.
And beauty thralled them too, those builders dour,
Though beauty was to them, sedate and plain;
They wrought in harmony with marsh and moor
In simple lines, and time’s enduring stain
On crumbling shingles, where the lichens grow
To mingle with the greys their golden glow.
With broad axe and with adze those builders wrought
And in the wilderness foundations laid
For our great nation. Liberty they sought
With toil and thrift - sound virtues roughly made
Of homespun stuff, quite like the clothes they wore
As out of fashion as your buckled floor!
The times were hard, the men who lived them rude,
They lacked the many luxuries we know;
The life within your walls was drab and crude,
At least our demagogues have told us so;
And yet along your pathway rimmed with flowers
How shallow flows this flippant life of ours!
The new apartment in the city’s maze
Has fixtures that your age had never seen,
Machine made gadgets, till our very days
Seem spun for us, upon a vast machine;
And we ourselves an inconspicuous part
Of some grim Frankenstein without a heart.
Caught in the maelstrom of the times we strive
To please our gods of gold with feet of clay;
Exchange your solace for a noisy hive;
Clutch at the shell and throw the pearl away;
And your unbounded views of ocean’s foam
Shut out with walls that never can be home.
O quaint old Cape Cod house, precarious link
Between the past and present, Life, no doubt,
Means progress, - so at least we’re taught to think
Though often wonder what ’tis all about -
But as we smile at customs you have known
How are the angels saddened at our own!
THUNDER STORM OFF RACE POINT
Beyond the dunes what monstrous shapes are these
Like Titans rearing out of the abyss
To menace heaven? Terrible they loom
Upheaving with their shoulders till the sky
Is warped and yielding, and the trampled sea
Pales into death white foam. Impending doom
Sweeps to engulf the world, when flash on flash,
As far heat lightnings glint on burnished arms,
The wild Valkyries come! Their jet black steeds
Outpace the furious winds; and hark, the stroke
Of Thor, the Thunder God! His hammer dread
Splinters the silence, crashing downward, stuns
The firmament. That glare that blinds the eye
Is Woden’s Sword! It pierces coil on coil
Night’s writing dragon, pouring forth its flood
Of venomed gloom.
Redoubled is the din
The powers of Tartarus and Heaven locked,
In mortal strife. The adamantine base
Foundationing the everlasting hills,
And the resounding archways of the sky,
Reverberate and tremble!
Wildly burst
Like pent up tears, the rains that hurtle down
Sodden with chill; while whimpering, the surge
All tempest frayed and besomed, choked with sobs,
Fingers the whining sands.
Ages it seems,
Tumultuous aeons, e’er the torrents cease
And tides of blackness ebb. Far out to sea
The mighty conflict drifts, the thunders die
As scorpion whips of forked lightnings scourge
The cringing giants of the cloud that flee
Down to their dungeons in the vasty deep;
While o’er their tatters rides the full orbed moon
Glorious, resplendent like the shield of Mars,
Triumphant o’er the terrors of the storm.
TO A SCRIMSHAWED WHALE’S TOOTH
Quaint relic that the mellowing years
Have tinged with Autumn’s ripened gold,
What scene of olden time veneers
Your ivory surface smooth and cold!
Hard bitten by some huge sperm whale
You often gored the giant squid,
That nightmare of the deep, amid
Unfathomed gulfs of crag and vale.
Remotest seas, their bounds unknown,
That old bull whale was wont to cross
By ways uncharted, he alone,
Shared with the wandering albatross.
Marauder savage and morose,
He spurned the waves in pride and wrath,
No killer dared dispute the path
The monarch of the ocean chose.
Then came the whaler’s crew - and this
Lone carven fragment now remains
Of all his bulk, that the abyss
Long since engulfed. Yet it explains
A graphic story. Clothed with life
Its dead white surface - line by line -
Unfolds in intricate design
A sailor’s dreams - etched by his knife.
Through many an hour of summer haze
While the long swells rocked languidly
His patient fingers graved that maze
Of intertwining tracery.
And that sweet face with hair so trim,
Love’s arrow, and two hearts that bleed,
What touching romance we may read
In “H to J” - to Her from Him.
Old Time united them we trust -
Initials linked but separate -
Though both long mingled with the dust
Their story we may still translate
From this rude sketch. Devotedly
They passed a lifetime richly blest
And safe at home, together rest
In sad, sweet graves beside the sea.
Or did perchance, Fate intervene
To bow that head in sorrow low
For lover lost - what came between
Those twain we cannot hope to know.
The sadness of a far off day
The fading of a golden dream
Dim memories, how fresh they seem
To ever youthful H and J!
Enshrined as on a magic page
A clasp knife for his only aid,
Still fondly lingers age by age
The love a sailor bore a maid.
His name, nor hers, no one can say,
No evidence besides, endures,
But silent eloquence like yours
Immortalizes H and J!
THE CREEPING FOG
Rolling in from the sea, rolling on
Ghostly floods chill as death, in the dawn
Swallow up all the world in their sweep
As the grey currents stealthily creep
Over marshland and dune, while the sun
Dripping mist, scarce proclaims day begun
To a landscape all eerie and wan
Drowned in fog, rolling in, rolling on!
Trees by oceans of droplets bedimmed
Loom like shapes that our fancy has limned;
Beacons set where the weird torrents range
Through invisible channels and change
All the loved, olden landmarks we know,
Till dissolved in that strange overflow
Earth and sky seem to blend and begin
In the fog’s swelling tide, rolling in!
WOODEN SAILOR
Wooden sailor swinging war clubs
On my lawn with furious tempo,
Like the Don of Spanish legend
He of old, who braved the windmills
Looming up like giants, charged them
Splintering his lance and bruising
His frail bones on mad illusions;
You resemble him - bold warrior,
Struggling with the summer breezes,
Lunging at the clouds above you.
But your ludicrous gyrations
In my yard, your droll gymnastics
Point a world of deeper meaning,
For we too, are often harried
By imaginary perils;
Spend the years in aimless striving
Wearying the heart and sinews
On fantastic undertakings;
Cursed by impotent endeavor
Unproductive, never-ending.
If we smile at your contortions
Toiling furiously for - nothing
It is less in mirth than sadness.
For I fear we fail to equal
Your stout heart and resolution
Wigwagging your bold defiance.
Yes, while we are battling shadows,
Wasting life in futile effort,
Can we wonder that the angels
Grieve in Heaven at our folly?
THE DREAMER
He lounges on the wharf and whittles pegs
While his pathetic gaze drifts out to sea,
Around him fishnets, anchors, empty kegs
And coils of rope are stored. His revery
Though deep, is sometimes broken by a sigh
As strange lights kindle in his faded eye.
A shapeless hat seems floating on his hair
Of wavy white. His clothes are patched and worn
His fingers palsy shaken, and an air
Of pathos and of helplessness forlorn
Enfolds him, as he lays his pipe aside
And gazes sadly at the ebbing tide.
His vision seems athirst to drink its fill
Of ocean’s mystery that he loves so well,
For he has lived adventure, lives it still,
Though age, long since, has yielded to the spell
Of brooding calm. No idle dreamer he,
His thoughts are busied on some far off sea.
Stern old Magellan and Sir Francis Drake
Heard tales from just such ancient sailor men,
Tales that inspired a zeal to undertake
Those stirring voyages beyond the ken
Of their small world. Discoverers bold, - and yet
They steered the course some unknown dreamer set!
THE CHANT OF THE NIGHT WIND
O the wind in the chimney place thrums a wild strain
A chant that no mortal has known,
And my soul deeply stirs at its eerie refrain
In my dim lighted chamber, - alone.
For strange lifting cadences mark its sweet song
With gladness and beauty and fear,
Till chords, long forgotten, in memory throng
Like a shell that I press to my ear.
O where have you wandered, melodious breeze
That sounds such a magical note,
Have you winged on your journey, o’er limitless seas
From some Ultima Thule remote?
A region no mortal may ever explore
Whose legended boundaries lie
On foam whitened beaches and sinister shore
And crags that are gnashing the sky!
Where ice fields aglow in the dark of the moon
Reflect the volcano’s red glare -
We may ponder and doubt - but our souls are in tune
To the verve of that uncanny air!
For the spirits of night strum their wild elfin lyres
And they harp on invisible strings,
While a music, unearthly, floats down from those wires
Like the tremulous flutter of wings.
For those notes so elusive, so mystically sweet,
We may sense but their vague undertone,
For they baffle our hearing, so faintly they beat
On the verge of the audible zone.
O restless and fitful, those wandering airs,
As the sad breezes sigh to the rain,
Then dying, evasively mock at our prayers,
For silent, we hear them again!
’Tis the music of elfland that rings in our ears
With its haunting notes witching and low,
Like the voices of friends that have gone with the years
Or the echoes of songs long ago.
MIDNIGHT