When the Spirits that are masters
Of the ever-ready storm,
And that love to hound the waters,
To destroy and to deform,
See a mortal in their power
They prepare a joyous hour,
Venting their primeval hatred
Of the thing whose blood is warm.
And they lay on ocean’s surface
Their innumerable hands,
And each hand creates a billow
That advances and expands;
Till, amid the petrel’s screaming,
Rope and tattered sail are streaming
High above the seething water
From the mast that still withstands.
But then hate is blind: they know not
What each human prey is worth:
Not more cruel than impartial
Is their elemental mirth:
And their fury is not keener
O’er the greater than the meaner,
Though their victim were a Shelley
And the glory of the earth.
Look around thee in the sunshine;
Watch this satin-surfaced deep,
Which alone some rolling dolphins
Stir out yonder in its sleep,
Till upon the sea shall settle
Sunset hues of molten metal,
Red and bright as crater gleamings,
And the noon shall cease to creep.
Here was washed ashore the greatest
Of the victims snatched away
By the Spirits that are masters
Of the wind and of the spray;
When the waves might have exulted
O’er the body they insulted
With a shriller wilder clamour
Than since Nature’s earliest day!
Cæsar braved the great Sea Spirits,
And he bade his men row on;
And he cried: “Ye carry Cæsar:
Then why tremble and turn wan?”
And the great waves roared more loudly;
But his galley sailed out proudly
From the peril of the tempest
Like an onward-hurried swan.
Yet the world would scarce have missed him--
There be Cæsars more than one:
But a poet like to Shelley,
Where be such beneath the sun?
And mankind had lost a treasure
Past all mourning and all measure,
When the beach-waves gently shelved him
With a moan for what was done.
For an English ear, the breakers
On this fatal Tuscan shore
Seemed to lisp the name of Shelley,
And to mourn it evermore;
And the name appears to mingle
With the rolling of the shingle
And with every sound of Nature
Which he lived but to adore.
Oh, I hear it in the murmur
Of the fragrant woods of pine
As the sea-breeze softly hurries
Through their long-extended line;
And I hear it faintly coming
From the never-ending humming
Of the world of busy insects
That the undergrowths confine.
’Tis the spot; and nought discordant
Mars its beauty and repose.
All along the tideless margin
Pine or bay or ilex grows,
Filled with an eternal warble;
While Carrara’s crags of marble,
Bare and lofty, print the azure,
And, to landward, all enclose.
All is peace and glorious sunshine;
Nature seems redeemed from war.
Nothing stirs from beach to offing,
Where a few feluccas are,
Waiting for the breeze that’s lazy;
While beyond, where all is hazy,
Like the ghost of dwindled power
Loometh Elba, faint and far.
But his genius knew no Elba,
And his star, without decline,
Was extinguished at its zenith
In the wild and tossing brine;
Not war’s red and lurid planet
As of incandescent granite,
But a star of whiter radiance,
Clear, effulgent and divine.
Mighty treasures lie for ever
In each slimy ocean cave;
Galleons with their gold lie buried
Where the dark depth knows no wave;
But the total of their measure
Matches not the matchless treasure
That in yonder stretch of water
Has for ever found a grave:
There the great unwritten poems
Of a mighty poet lie--
Unborn children of a lineage
Which, once born, may never die.
But the water mirrors heaven
With the smile of one forgiven,
While the breakers in the sunshine
Sing an endless lullaby.