Hope and love! everything shattered
And I myself, like a corpse
That the growling sea has cast up,
I lie on the strand,
On the barren cold strand.
Before me surges the waste of waters,
Behind me lies naught but grief and misery;
And above me, march the clouds,--
The formless, gray daughters of the air,
Who from the sea, in buckets of mist,
Draw the water,
And laboriously drag and drag it,
And spill it again in the sea--
A melancholy, tedious task,
And useless as my own life.
The waves murmur, the sea mews scream,
Old recollections possess me;
Forgotten dreams, banished visions,
Tormentingly sweet, uprise.
There lives a woman in the North,
A beautiful woman, royally beautiful.
Her slender, cypress-like form
Is swathed in a light, white raiment.
Her locks, in their dusky fullness,
Like a blessed night,
Streaming from her braid-crowned head,
Curl softly as a dream
Around the sweet, pale face;
And from the sweet pale face
Large and powerful beams an eye,
Like a black sun.
Oh thou black sun, how oft,
How rapturously oft, I drank from thee
The wild flames of inspiration!
And stood and reeled, intoxicated with fire.
Then there hovered a smile as mild as a dove,
About the arched, haughty lips.
And the arched, haughty lips
Breathed forth words as sweet as moonlight,
And delicate as the fragrance of the rose.
And my soul soared aloft,
And flew like an eagle up into the heavens.
Silence ye waves and sea mews!
All is over! joy and hope--
Hope and love! I lie on the ground
An empty, shipwrecked man,
And press my glowing face
Into the moist sand.