'I saw thee seek the sounding shore,
Delighted with the dashing roar;'
but few tokens of this 'delight' are to be observed in his poetry. He
has, indeed, his allusions to 'tumbling billows' and 'surging foam;'
to southern climes where 'wild-meeting oceans boil;' to 'life's rough
ocean' and 'life's stormy main;' to 'hard-blowing gales;' to the
'raging sea,' 'raging billows,' 'boundless oceans roaring wide,' and
the like; but these are the stock-metaphors of every poet, and would
be familiar to him even had he never overpassed the frontiers of
Bohemia.
One sea-picture, and one alone, is to be found in Burns, and this, it
is freely admitted, is exquisite:
'Behold the hour, the boat arrive;
Thou goest, thou darling of my heart!
Severed from thee, can I survive?
But fate has willed, and we must part.
I'll often greet this surging swell,
Yon distant isle will often hail:
E'en here I took the last farewell;
There latest marked her vanished sail.
Along the solitary shore,
While flitting sea-fowl round me cry,
Across the rolling, dashing roar,
I'll westward turn my wistful eye:
Happy thou Indian grove, I'll say,
Where now my Nancy's path may be!
While through thy sweets she loves to stray,
Oh! tell me, does she muse on me?'
This charming lyric, the pathetic tenderness of which commends it to
every feeling heart, is all that Burns has left in evidence that the
sea had to him, at least, one poetic aspect.