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SEA POEMS
BY
CALE YOUNG RICE
AUTHOR OF
"WRAITHS AND REALITIES," "TRAILS SUNWARD," "COLLECTED POEMS," ETC.
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
The Century Co.
TO
HARRISON S. MORRIS
A HATER OF SHAM AND PRETENSE,
A LOVER OF BEAUTY AND TRUTH,
A FIRM FRIEND.
FOREWORD
The poems of this volume, gathered here after many requests, are, with a
few exceptions, from my previous lyrical publications. They are also in
a real sense an intimate record. For the sea has often enough seemed to
me almost as a vast external subconsciousness in which the forces of my
being--as well as the world's--were at play.
Cale Young Rice.
Louisville, Ky., August, 1921.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Sea-Hoardings 3
The Shore's Song to the Sea 5
To a Firefly by the Sea 9
Invocation 11
I Know Your Heart, O Sea! 11
A Sea-Ghost 13
Finitude 15
The Colonel's Story 16
Cosmism 21
Off the Irish Coast 22
The Fairies of God 23
The Song of the Homesick Gael 24
Pageants of the Sea 26
A Song of the Old Venetians 29
Basking 30
Sappho's Death Song 32
The Wind's Word 33
Submarine Mountains 34
The Song of the Storm-Spirits 36
The Great Seducer 37
K'u-Kiang 38
Typhoon 39
Penang 41
Nights on the Indian Ocean 42
Sighting Arabia 44
"All's Well" 45
Somnambulism 47
Chartings 48
The Trail from the Sea 50
Haunted Seas 54
Sea Lure 54
Songs to A. H. R.
I Minglings 56
II Love and Infinity 56
III Recompense 57
IV At the Ebb-Hour 58
V In a Dark Hour 59
VI Via Amorosa 59
VII Transfusion 61
Need of Storm 62
A Florida Interlude 63
A Florida Boating Song 65
Dawn Bliss 66
Atavism 68
Re-reckoning 69
To the Afternoon Moon, At Sea 70
Paths 71
From a Northern Beach 73
Passage 74
Aleen 75
To a Solitary Sea-Gull 76
Ineffable Things 77
The Song of a Sea-Farer 78
Waves 79
In a Storm 80
After Their Parting 80
A Word's Magic 82
Sea Rhapsody 83
In an Oriental Harbour 84
Under the Sky 85
A Song for Healing 86
A Singhalese Love Lament 87
The City 89
Full Tide 89
The Herding 91
On the Maine Coast 92
Seance 93
A Sidmouth Lad 93
Widowed 94
To the Sea 95
Sea-Mad 97
The Atheist 98
At the Helm 99
Imperturbable 100
Waste 100
Resurgence 101
Life's Answer 103
As the Tide Comes In 103
Sense-Sweetness 104
Tidals 105
A Sailor's Wife 105
To Sea! 106
Give Over, O Sea! 107
The Nun 109
Last Sight of Land 110
SEA POEMS
BY CALE YOUNG RICE
SEA-HOARDINGS
My heart is open again and sea flows in,
It shall fill with a summer of mists and winds and clouds and waves breaking,
Of gull-wings over the green tide, of the surf's drenching din,
Of sudden horizon-sails that come and vanish, phantom-thin,
Of arching sapphire skies, deep and unaching.
I shall lie on the rocks just over the weeds that drape
The clear sea-pools, where birth and death in sunny ooze are teeming.
Where the crab in quest of booty sidles about, a sullen shape,
Where the snail creeps and the mussel sleeps with wary valves agape,
Where life is too grotesque to be but seeming.
And the swallow shall weave my dreams with threads of flight,
A shuttle with silver breast across the warp of the waves gliding;
And an isle far out shall be a beam in the loom of my delight,
And the pattern of every dream shall be a rapture bathed in light--
Its evanescence a beauty most abiding.
And the sunsets shall give sadness all its due,
They shall stain the sands and trouble the tides with all the ache of sorrow.
They shall bleed and die with a beauty of meaning old yet ever new,
They shall burn with all the hunger for things that hearts have failed to do,
They shall whisper of a gold that none can borrow.
And the stars shall come and build a bridge of fire
For the moon to cross the boundless sea, with never a fear of sinking.
They shall teach me of the magic things of life never to tire,
And how to renew, when it is low, the lamp of my desire--
And how to hope, in the darkest deeps of thinking.
THE SHORE'S SONG TO THE SEA
Out on the rocks primeval,
The grey Maine rocks that slant and break to the sea,
With the bay and juniper round them,
And the leagues on leagues before them,
And the terns and gulls wheeling and crying, wheeling and crying over,
I sat heart-still and listened.
And first I could only hear the wind in my ears,
And the foam trying to fill the high rock-shallows.
And then, over the wind, over the whitely blossoming foam,
Low, low, like a lover's song beginning,
I heard the nuptial pleading of the old shore,
A pleading ever occultly growing louder:--
_O sea, glad bride of me!
Born of the bright ether and given to wed me,
Given to glance, ever, for me, and gleam and dance in the sun--
Come to my arms, come to my reaching arms,
That seem so still and unavailing to take you, and hold you,
Yet never forget,
Never by day or night,
The hymeneal delights of your embracings._
_Come, for the moon, my rival, shall not have you;
No, for tho twice daily afar he beckons and you go,
You, my bride, a little way back to meet him,
As if he once had been your lover, he too, and again enspelled you,
Soon, soon, I know it is only feigning!
For turning, playfully turning, tidally turning,
You rush foamingly, swiftly back to my arms!_
_And so would I have you rush; so rush now!
Come from the sands where you have stayed too long,
Come from the reefs where you have wandered silent,
For ebbings are good, the restful ebbings of love,
But, oh, the bridal flowings of it are better!
And now I would have you loose again my tresses,
My locks rough and weedy, rough and brown and brinily tangled,
But, oh, again as a bridegroom's, when your tide, whispering in,
Lifts them up, pulsingly up with kisses!_
_Come with your veil thrown back, breaking to spray!
And oh, with plangent passion!
Come with your naked sweetness, salt and wholesome, to my bosom;
Let not a cave or crevice of me miss you, or cranny,
For, oh, the nuptial joy you float into me,
The cooling ambient clasp of you, I have waited over-long,
And I need to know again its marriage meaning!_
_For I think it is not alone to bring forth life, that I mate you;
More than life is the beauty of life with love!
Plentiful are the children that you bear to me, the blossoms,
The fruits and all the creatures at your breast dewily fed,
But mating is troubled with a far higher meaning--
A hint of a consummation for all things.
Come utterly then,
Utterly to me come,
And let us surge together, clasped close, in infinite union,
Until we reach a transcendence of all birth, and all dying,
An ecstasy holding the universe blended--
Such ecstasy as is its ultimate Aim!_
So sang the shore, the long bay-scented shore,
Broken by many an isle, many an inlet bird-embosomed,
And the sea gave answer, bridally, tidally turning,
And leapt, radiant, into his rocky arms!
TO A FIREFLY BY THE SEA
Little torch-bearer, alone with me in the night,
You cannot light the sea, nor I illumine life.
They are too vast for us, they are too deep for us.
We glow with all our strength, but back the shadows sweep:
And after a while will come--unshadowed Sleep.
Here on the rocks that take the turning tide;
Here by the wide lone waves and lonelier wastes of sky,
We keep our poet-watch, as patient poets should,
Questioning earth's commingled ill and good to us.
Yet little of them, or naught, have truly understood.
Bright are the stars, and constellated thick.
To you, so quick to flit along your flickering course,
They seem perhaps as glowing mates in other fields.
And all the knowledge I have gathered yields to me
Scarce more of the great mystery their wonder wields.
For the moon we are waiting--and behold
Her ardent gold drifts up, her sail has caught the breeze
That blows all being thro the Universe always.
So now, little light-keeper, you no more need nurse
Your gleam, for lo! she mounts, and sullen clouds disperse.
And I with aching thought may cease to burn,
And humbly turn to rest--knowing no glow of mine
Can ever be so beauteous as have been to me
Your soft beams here beside the sea's elusive din:
For grief too oft has kindled me, and pain, and the world's sin.
INVOCATION
(_From a High Cliff_)
Sweep unrest
Out of my blood,
Winds of the sea! Sweep the fog
Out of my brain
For I am one
Who has told Life he will be free.
Who will not doubt of work that's done,
Who will not fear the work to do,
Who will hold peaks Promethean
Better than all Jove's honey-dew.
Who when the Vulture tears his breast
Will smile into the Terror's Eyes.
Who for the World has this Bequest--
Hope, that eternally is wise.
I KNOW YOUR HEART, O SEA!
I know your heart, O Sea!
You are tossed with cold desire to flood earth utterly;
You run at the cliffs, you fling wild billows at beaches,
You reach at islands with fingers of foam to crumble them;
Yes, even at mountain tops you shout your purpose
Of making the earth a shoreless circle of waters!
I know your surging heart!
Tides mighty and all-contemptuous rise within it,
Tides spurred by the wind to champ and charge and thunder--
Tho the sun and moon rein them--
At the troubling land, the breeding-place of mortals,
Of men who are ever transmuting life to spirit,
And ever taking your salt to savor their tears.
I know your tides, I know them!
"Down," they rage, "with the questing of men, and crying!
With their continents--cradles of grief and despair!
Better entombing waters for them, better our deeps unfathomed,
Where birth is soulless, life goalless, death toll-less for all,
And where dark ooze enshrouds past resurrection!"
Ah, yes, I know your heart!
I have heard it raving at coast-lights set to reveal you,
I have watched it foam at ships that sought to defy you,
I have seen it straining at cables that cross you, bearing whispers hid to you,
Or heaving at waves of the air that tell your hurricanes.
I know, I know your heart!
Men you will sink, and shores will sink; but a shore shall be man's forever,
From whence his lighthouse soul shall signal the Infinite,
Whose fleets go by, star after star, bearing their unknown burden
To a Port which only eternity shall determine!
A SEA-GHOST
Oh, fisher-fleet, go in from the sea
And furl your wings.
The bay is gray with the twilit spray
And the loud surf springs.
The chill buoy-bell is rung by the hands
Of all the drowned,
Who know the woe of the wind and tow
Of the tides around.
Go in, go in! Oh, haste from the sea,
And let them rest--
The throng who long for the air--still long,
But are still unblest.
Aye, even as I, whose hands at the bell
Now labour most.
The tomb has gloom, but oh, the doom
Of the drear sea-ghost!
He evermore must wander the ooze
Beneath the wave,
Forlorn--to warn of the tempest born,
And to save--to save!
Then go, go in! and leave us the sea,
For only so
Can peace release us and give us ease
Of our salty woe.
FINITUDE
I
One ruby, amid a diamond spray of stars,
The coast light flashes;
The tide plashes,
Across a mile of bay-sweet land the moon
Comes soon:
She has lost half of her lustre and looks old.
A cricket, finitude's incarnate cry,
And the infinite waters with their hushless sigh
Are the two sounds
The night has:
Each in eternal wistfulness abounds.
II
I have wakened out of my sleep because I too
Am wistful,
Tristeful;
Because I know that half of _me_ is gone,
And that all frailty cries in the cricket's tone.
I have wakened out of my sleep to watch and listen.
For what?
To see for a moment universes glisten;
To wonder and want--and go to sleep again,
And die,
And be forgot.
THE COLONEL'S STORY
No, no, my friend; there is an agony
Not to be exorcised out of the world
By any voice of hope.--But, I will tell you.
The _Sonia_ was sailing without lights--
Bearing three hundred souls--and without bells;
For she had reached the "Zone," where the Hun sharks
With their torpedo tongues could spit death at us
Out of the inky sea-hells where they hid.
On the main deck we stood, in a wind-shelter,--
My wife, and by us a pale girl whose eyes
Had all disaster in them. And my thought was,
"I hope to God the moon is shut so deep
In cloud-murk there in the East that hurricanes
Can't blow her out of it." For in the Zone
The moon had come to mean only betrayal,
And now, if ever, was her wanton chance.
The slipping water soaked with soulless dark
Fell under and around us shudderingly,
Yet somehow brought an anxious hopefulness.
"We're making twenty knots," I said; and felt
Our bow cut thro the tangle of the waves
As if the No Man's _Sea_ ahead of us
Would soon be crossed; and I, out to rejoin
My regiment, could set my wife safe somewhere,
And help again to stab that curst amphibian,
Autocracy--whose spawn in the sea gave it
A terror greater than infinitude's.
For God knows, with the woman that one loves
Aboard a ship, and only a cloud perhaps
Between the Hun's shark eyes and sure escape
From the black icy fathoms that would choke her,
There's little left within a man but nerves.
So when I drew her closer into the shelter,
Out of the sheering wind, the life belt
She wore seemed like a coffin in that sepulchre
Of night and sea. And when the other, there,
With the disaster eyes and pallid face,
Turned half toward us, I was shaken as if
The moon had suddenly walked out of her shroud
With phosphorescent purpose to reveal us.
But on we plunged and tumbled, till at last
The blank monotonous sink and swell lulled me
To faith. And I was only thinking softly
Of her--my wife's--first kiss on a summer night
Under the moonlit laurels of our home,
When came a cry from the wan girl gazing
Frozenly on the sea--where the moon now
Indeed was pointing at us pallidly
A death-path. And my throat was gripped by it,
That clutching cry, as if the glacial depths
Down under us already had risen up.
So starting toward the slipping rail I called,
"What is it? where?" For, tense as a clairvoyant,
With eyes that seemed to feel under the tide
The stealthy peril stalking us, she stood there.
After a moment's gazing, I too saw--
What she foresensed--destruction seething toward us.
"The boats!" I cried, "the rafts!" And stumbled back
Over the streaming deck to her I loved.
Then the shock came, as if the sea's wild heart
Had broken under us, and ripped the entrails,
The human hundreds, out of our vessel's hold,
To strew the foam with mania and despair,
With shrieks strangled by wind and wave and terror.
And thro that floating, mangled, blind confusion,
Where hands reached at the infinite then sank,
Where faces clung to wreckage as to eternity,
I sought for her who shared my life's voyage,
Who had been my heart's pilot; and who now,
Wrecked with me, swirled, too, in the torn waters....
And soon I saw her, still by that wan girl,
Tossed on a watery omnipotence.
Blind with brine I swam for her--as the moon,
Her treachery done, again got to a cloud.
Flung back by every wave, I fought; beating
Against them as against God. And soon, somehow,
Had reached to a limp body on the surge,
Limp and strange--but living ... and not drowned!
Then seeing a raft near, I struggled onward,
Gulping the sea and being gulped by it,
But finding arms at last that drew my burden
And me from horror to half-swooning safety.
I could have died, I think, of the relief.
But the moon came again, nakedly out,
As if to see what she had done. Then I,
Bending over the form that I had fought for,
And chafing it, saw ... not her I loved!
Infinite Cruelty, not her I loved!...
But that pale girl, with the eyes of all disaster.
Oh, yes, I raved, and said God was a Hun,
A Kaiser of a Universe that loathed him.
And back, too, would have leapt, into the waves,
But the same hands that saved were ready to hold me.
COSMISM
The sea asleep like a dreamer sighs;
The salt rock-pools lie still in the sun,
Except for the sidling crab that creeps
Thro the moveless mosses green and dun.
The small gray snail clings everywhere,
For the tide is out; and the sea-weed dries
Its tangled tresses in the warm air,
That seems to ooze from the far blue skies,
Where not a white gull on white wing flies.
The mollusc gleams like a gem amid
The scurf and the clustered green sea-grapes,
Whose trellis is but the rock's bare side,
Whose husbandman but the tide that drapes.
The little sandpiper tilts and picks
His food, on the wet sea-marges hid,
Till sudden a wave comes in and flicks
Him off, then flashes away to bid
Another frighten him--as it did.
O sweet is the world of living things,
And sweet are the mingled sea and shore!
It seems as if I never again
Shall find life ill--as oft before.
As if my days should come as the clouds
Come yonder--and vanish without wings;
As if all sorrow that ever shrouds
My soul and darkly about it clings
Had lost forever its ravenings.
As if I knew with a deeper sense
That good alone is ultimate;
That never an evil wrought of God
Or man came truly out of hate.
That Better springs from the heart of Worse,
As calm from the heaving elements;
That all things born to the Universe
May suffer and perish utterly hence,
But never refute its Innocence.
OFF THE IRISH COAST
Gulls on the wind,
Crying! crying!
Are you the ghosts
Of Erin's dead?
Of the forlorn
Whose days went sighing
Ever for Beauty
That ever fled?
Ever for Light
That never kindled?
Ever for Song
No lips have sung?
Ever for Joy
That ever dwindled?
Ever for Love that stung?
THE FAIRIES OF GOD
Last night I slipt from the banks of dream
And swam in the currents of God,
On a tide where His fairies were at play,
Catching salt tears in their little white hands,
For human hearts;
And dancing, dancing, in gala bands,
On the currents of God;
And singing, singing:--
_There is no wind blows here or spray--
Wind upon us!
Only the waters ripple away
Under our feet as we gather tears.
God has made mortals for the years,
Us for alway!
God has made mortals full of fears,
Fears for the night and fears for the day.
If they would free them of grief that sears,
If they would keep what love endears,
If they would lay no more lilies on biers--
Let them say!
For we are swift to enchant and tire
Time's will!
Our feet are wiser than all desire,
Our song is better than faith or fame;
To whom it is given no ill e'er came,
Who has it not grows chill!
Who has it not grows laggard and lame,
Nor knows that the world is a Minstrel's lyre,
Smitten and never still!..._
Last night on the currents of God.
THE SONG OF THE HOMESICK GAEL
(_In the characteristic minor of a recent literary movement_)
I long to see the solan-goose
Wing over Ailsa crag
At dusk again--or Girvan gulls at dawn;
To see the osprey grayly glide
The winds of Kamasaig:
For grayness now my heart is set upon.
The grayness of sea-spaces where
There's loneliness alone,
Save for the wings that sweep it with unrest,
Save for the hunger-cries that sound
And die into a moan,
Save for the moaning hunger in my breast.
For grayness is the hue of all
In life that is not lies.
A thousand years of tears are in my heart;
And only in their mystery
Can I be truly wise:
From light and laughter follies only start.
I long to see the mists again
Above the tumbling tide
Of Ailsa, at the coming of the night.
There's weariness and emptiness
And soul unsatisfied
Forever in the places of delight.
PAGEANTS OF THE SEA
What memories have I of it,
The sea, continent-clasping,
The sea whose spirit is a sorcery,
The sea whose magic foaming is immortal!
What memories have I of it thro the years!
What memories of its shores!...
Of shadowy headlands doomed to stay the storm;
And red cliffs clawing ever into the tides;
Of misty moors whose royal heather purples;
Of channeled marshes, village-nesting hills;
Of crags wind-eaten, homes of hungry gulls;
Of bays--
Where sails float furled, resting softly at harbour,
Until, winging again, they sweep away.
What memories have I, too,
Of faring out at dawn upon tameless waters,
Upon the infinite wasted yearning of them,
While winds, the mystic harp-strings of the world,
Were sounding sweet farewells;
While coast and lighthouse tower were fading fast,
And from me all the world slipped like a garment.
What memories of mid-deeps!...
Of heaving on thro haunted vasts of foam,
Thro swaying terrors of tormented tides;
While the wind, no more singing, took to raving,
In rhythmic infinite words,
A chantey ancient and immeasurable
Concerning man and God.
What memories of fog-spaces--
Wide leaden deserts of dim wavelessness,
Smooth porpoise-broken glass
As gray as a dream upon despair's horizon;
What sailing soft till lo the shroud was lifted
And suddenly there came, as a great joy,
The blue sublimity of summer skies,
The azure mystery of happy heavens,
The passionate sweet parley of the breeze,
And dancing waves--that lured us on and on
Past islands above whose verdant mountain-heads
Enchanted clouds were hanging,
And whence wild spices wandered;
Past iridescent reefs and vessels bound
For ports unknown:
O far, far past, until the sun, in fire,
An impotent and shrunken orb lay dying,
On heaving twilight purple gathered round.
And then, what nights!...
The phantom moon in misty resurrection
Arising from her sepulchre in the East
And sparkling the dark waters--
The unremembering moon!
And covenants of star to faithful star,
Dewy, like tears of God, across the sky;
And under the moon's fair ring Orion running
Forever in great war adown the West.
What far, infinite nights!
With cloud-horizons where the lightning slumbered
Or wakened once and again with startled watch,
Again to fall asleep
And leave the moon-path free for all my thoughts
To wander peacefully
Away and still away
Until the stars sighed out in dawn's great pallor,
Just as the lands of my desire appeared.
What memories ... have I of it!
A SONG OF THE OLD VENETIANS
The seven fleets of Venice
Set sail across the sea
For Cyprus and for Trebizond
Ayoub and Araby.
Their gonfalons are floating far,
St. Mark's has heard the mass,
And to the noon the salt lagoon
Lies white, like burning glass.
The seven fleets of Venice--
And each its way to go,
Led by a Falier or Tron,
Zorzi or Dandalo.
The Patriarch has blessed them all,
The Doge has waved the word,
And in their wings the murmurings
Of waiting winds are heard.
The seven fleets of Venice--
And what shall be their fate?
One shall return with porphyry
And pearl and fair agate.
One shall return with spice and spoil
And silk of Samarcand.
But nevermore shall _one_ win o'er
The sea, to any land.
_Oh, they shall bring the East back,
And they shall bring the West,
The seven fleets our Venice sets
A-sail upon her quest.
But some shall bring despair back
And some shall leave their keels
Deeper than wind or wave frets,
Or sun ever steals._
BASKING
Give me a spot in the sun,
With a lizard basking by me,
In Sicily, over the sea,
Where Winter is sweet as Spring,
Where Etna lifts his plume
Of curling smoke to try me,
But all in vain for I will not climb
His height so ravishing.
Give me a spot in the sun,
So high on a cliff that, under,
Far down, the flecking sails
Like white moths flit the blue;
That over me on a crag
There hangs, O aery wonder,
A white town drowsing in its nest
That cypress-tops peep thro.
Give me a spot in the sun,
With contadini singing,
And a goat-boy at his pipes
And donkey bells heard round
Upon steep mountain paths
Where a peasant cart comes swinging
Mid joyous hot invectives--that
So blameless here abound.
Give me a spot in the sun,
In a land whose speech is flowers,
Whose breath is Hybla-sweet,
Whose soul is still a faun's,
Whose limbs the sea enlaps,
Thro long delicious hours,
With liquid tenderness and light
Sweet as Elysian dawns.
Give me a spot in the sun
With a view past vale and villa,
Past grottoed isle and sea
To Italy and the Cape
Around whose turning lies
Old heathen-hearted Scylla,
Whom may an ancient sailor prayed
The gods he might escape.
Give me a spot in the sun:
With sly old Pan as lazy
As I, ever to tempt me
To disbelief and doubt
Of all gods else, from Jove
To Bacchus born wine-crazy.
Give me, I say, a spot in the sun,
And Realms I'll do without!
SAPPHO'S DEATH SONG
(_On her sea-cliff in Leucady_)
What have I gathered the years did not take from me?
(Swallows, hear, as you fly from the cold!)
Whom have I bound to me never to break from me?
(Whom, O wind of the wold?)
Whom, O wind! O hunter of spirits!
(Pierce his spirit whose spear is in mine!)
Then let Oblivion loose this ache from me, Proserpine!
Lyre and the laurel the Muses gave to me,
(Why comes summer when winter is nigh!)
Spent am I now and pain-voices rave to me.
(O sea and its cry!)
O the sea that has suffered all sorrow!
(Sea of the Delphian tongue ever shrill!)
Nought from the wreck of love can now save to me
Any thrill!
Life that we live passes pale or amorous.
(Tread, O vintagers, grapes in the press!)
Mine's but a prey to Erinnyes clamorous.
(O for wine that will bless!)
Wine that foams, but is free of all madness
(Free, O Cypris, of fury's breath!)
Free as I now shall be, O glamorous
Queen of Death!
THE WIND'S WORD
A star that I love,
The sea, and I,
Spake together across the night.
"Have peace," said the star,
"Have power," said the sea;
"Yea!" I answered, "and Fame's delight!"
The wind on his way
To Araby
Paused and listened and sighed and said,
"I passed on the sands
A Pharaoh's tomb:
All these did he have--and he is dead."
SUBMARINE MOUNTAINS
Under the sea, which is their sky, they rise
To watery altitudes as vast as those
Of far Himalayan peaks impent in snows
And veils of cloud and sacred deep repose.
Under the sea, their flowing firmament,
More dark than any ray of sun can pierce,
The earthquake thrust them up with mighty tierce
And left them to be seen but by the eyes
Of awed imagination inward bent.
Their vegetation is the viscid ooze,
Whose mysteries are past belief or thought.
Creation seems around them devil-wrought,
Or by some cosmic urgence gone distraught.
Adown their precipices chill and dense
With the dank midnight creep or crawl or climb
Such tentacled and eyeless things of slime,
Such monster shapes as tempt us to accuse
Life of a miscreative impotence.
About their peaks the shark, their eagle, floats,
In the thick azure far beneath the air,
Or downward sweeps upon what prey may dare
Set forth from any silent weedy lair.
But one desire on all their slopes is found,
Desire of food, the awful hunger strife,
Yet here, it may be, was begun our life
Here all the dreams on which our vision dotes
In unevolved obscurity were bound.
Too strange it is, too terrible! And yet
It matters not how we were wrought or whence
Life came to us with all its throb intense
If in it is a Godly Immanence.
It matters not,--if haply we are more
Than creatures half-conceived by a blind force
That sweeps the universe in a chance course:
For only in Unmeaning Might is met
The intolerable thought none can ignore.
THE SONG OF THE STORM-SPIRITS
Come over the tide,
Come over the foam,
Dance on the hurricane, leap its waves,
Dream not of the calm sea-caves
Nor of content in them and home.
For that is the reason the hearts of men
Are ever weary--they would abide
Somewhere out of the spumy stride
Of the world's spindrift--a want denied.
That is the reason: tho they know
That the restive years have no true home,
But only a Whence, Whither, and When--
Whence and Whither, for hearts to roam.
So who would tarry and rest the while,
Not dance as we, and sing on the wind,
Against the whole flow of the world has sinned,
And soon is weary and cannot smile.
Dance then, dance, on the fleeting spray!
None can gather eternity
Into his heart and bid it stay,
Swiftly again it slips away.
Dance, and know that the will of Life
Is the wind's will and the will of the tide,
And who finds not a home in its strife
Shall find no home on any side!
THE GREAT SEDUCER
Who looks too long from his window
At the gray, wide, cold sea,
Where breakers scour the beaches
With fingers of sharp foam;
Who looks too long thro the gray pane
At the mad, wild, bold sea,
Shall sell his hearth to a stranger
And turn his back on home.
Who looks too long from his window--
Tho his wife waits by the fireside--
At a ship's wings in the offing,
At a gull's wings on air,
Shall latch his gate behind him,
Tho his cattle call from the byre-side,
And kiss his wife--and leave her--
And wander everywhere.
Who looks too long in the twilight,
Or the dawn-light, or the noon-light,
Who sees an anchor lifted
And hungers past content,
Shall pack his chest for the world's end,
For alien sun--or moonlight,
And follow the wind, sateless,
To Disillusionment!
K'U-KIANG
Because the sun like a Chinese lantern
Set in a temple of clouds tonight,
I was back in K'u-Kiang!
Because in a temple of dragon clouds,
As if with incense misty red,
It hung there over the rim of the sea,
I was back in a narrow street,
Where amber faces pass all day,
Going to pay, going to pray,
Going the same old human way
They have gone for a thousand years, men say,
In K'u-Kiang.
And I heard the coolie cry for his fare,
I heard the merchant praise his ware
Of bronze and porcelain set to snare,
In K'u-Kiang!
I saw strange streaming signs in black
With gold and crimson on their back--
Opiate signs in an opiate street;
Where the slip and patter of felt-shod feet
Is old as the sun;
And the temple door
As cool and dark as the night.
And where dim lanterns, swinging there,
As a lure to human grief and care,
Half reveal and half conceal
The ancestral gloom of the gods.
I saw all this with sudden pang,
As if by hashish swept or bhang,
Because the sun, like a Chinese lantern,
Set in a temple of clouds!
TYPHOON
(_At Hong-kong_)
I was weary and slept on the Peak;
The air clung close like a shroud,
And ever the blue-fly at my ear
Buzzed haunting, hot and loud;
I awoke and the sky was dun
With awe and a dread that soon
Went shuddering thro my heart, for I knew
That it meant typhoon! typhoon!
In the harbour below, far down,
The junks like fowl in a flock
Were tossing in wingless terror, or fled
Fluttering in from the shock.
The city, a breathless bend
Of roofs, by the water strewn,
Lay silent and waiting, yet there was none
Within it but said typhoon!
Then it came, like a million winds
Gone mad immeasurably,
A torrid and tortuous tempest stung
By rape of the fair South Sea.
And it swept like a scud escaped
From crater of sun or moon,
And struck as no power of Heaven could,
Or of Hell--typhoon! typhoon!
And the junks were smitten and torn,
The drowning struggled and cried,
Or, dashed on the granite walls of the sea,
In succourless hundreds died.
Till I shut the sight from my eyes
And prayed for my soul to swoon:
If ever I see God's face, let it
Be guiltless of that typhoon!
PENANG
I want to go back to Singapore
And ship along the Straits,
To a bungalow I know beside Penang;
Where cocoanut palms along the shore
Are waving, and the gates
Of Peace shut Sorrow out forevermore.
I want to go back and hear the surf
Come beating in at night,
Like the washing of eternity over the dead.
I want to see dawn fare up and day
Go down in golden light;
I want to go back to Penang! I want to go back!
I want to go back to Singapore
And up along the Straits
To the bungalow that waits me by the tide.
Where the Tamil and Malay tell their lore
At evening--and the fates
Have set no soothless canker at life's core.
I want to go back and mend my heart
Beneath the tropic moon,
While the tamarind-tree is whispering thoughts of sleep.
I want to believe that Earth again
With Heaven is in tune.
I want to go back to Penang! I want to go back!
I want to go back to Singapore
And ship along the Straits
To the bungalow I left upon the strand.
Where the foam of the world grows faint before
It enters, and abates
In meaning as I hear the palm-wind pour.
I want to go back and end my days
Some evening when the Cross
On the southern sky hangs heavily far and sad.
I want to remember when I die
That life elsewhere was loss.
I want to go back to Penang! I want to go back!
NIGHTS ON THE INDIAN OCEAN
Nights on the Indian Ocean,
Long nights of moon and foam,
When silvery Venus low in the sky
Follows the sun home.
Long nights when the mild monsoon
Is breaking south-by-west,
And when soft clouds and the singing shrouds
Make all that is seem best.
Nights on the Indian Ocean,
Long nights of space and dream,
When silent Sirius round the Pole
Swings on, with steady gleam;
When oft the pushing prow
Seems pressing where before
No prow has ever pressed--or shall
From hence forevermore.
Nights on the Indian Ocean,
Long nights--with land at last,
Dim land, dissolving the long sea-spell
Into a sudden past--
That seems as far away
As this our life shall seem
When under the shadow of death's shore
We drop its ended dream.
SIGHTING ARABIA
My heart, that is Arabia, O see!
That talismanic sweep of sunset coast,
Which lies like richly wrought enchantment's ghost
Before us, bringing back youth's witchery!
"Arabian Nights!" At last to us one comes,
The crescent moon upon its purple brow.
Will not Haroun and Bagdad rise up now
There on the shore, to beating of his drums?
Is not that gull a roc? That sail Sindbad's?
That rocky pinnacle a minaret?
Does the wind call to prayer from it? O yet
I hear the fancy, fervid as a lad's!
"Allah il Allah," rings it; O my heart,
Fall prostrate, for to Mecca we are near,
That flashing light is but a sign sent clear
From her, your houri, as her curtains part!
Soon she will lean out from her lattice, soon,
And bid you climb up to your Paradise,
Which is her panting lips and passion eyes
Under the drunken sweetness of the moon!
O heart, my heart, drink deeply ere they die,
The sunset dome, the minaret, the dreams
Flashing afar from youth's returnless streams:
For we, my heart, must grow old, you and I!
"ALL'S WELL"
I
The illimitable leaping of the sea,
The mouthing of its madness to the moon,
The seething of its endless sorcery,
Its prophecy no power can attune,
Swept over me as, on the sounding prow
Of a great ship that steered into the stars,
I stood and felt the awe upon my brow
Of death and destiny and all that mars.
II
The wind that blew from Cassiopeia cast
Wanly upon my ear a rune that rung;
The sailor in his eyrie on the mast
Sang an "All's well," that to the spirit clung
Like a lost voice from some aerial realm
Where ships sail on forever to no shore,
Where Time gives Immortality the helm,
And fades like a far phantom from life's door.
III
"And is all well, O Thou Unweariable,
Who launchest worlds upon bewildered space,"
Rose in me, "All? or did thy hand grow dull
Building this world that bears a piteous race?
O was it launched too soon or launched too late?
Or can it be a derelict that drifts
Beyond thy ken toward some reef of Fate
On which Oblivion's sand forever shifts?"
IV
The sea grew softer as I questioned--calm
With mystery that like an answer moved,
And from infinity there fell a balm,
The old peace that God _is_, tho all unproved.
The old faith that tho gulfs sidereal stun
The soul, and knowledge drown within their deep,
There is no world that wanders, no not one
Of all the millions, that He does not keep.
SOMNAMBULISM
I
Night is above me,
And Night is above the night.
The sea is beside me soughing, or is still.
The earth as a somnambulist moves on
In a strange sleep ...
A sea-bird cries.
And the cry wakes in me
Dim, dead sea-folk, my sires--
Who more than myself are me.
Who sat on their beach long nights ago and saw
The sea in its silence;
And cursed it or implored;
Or with the Cross defied;
Then on the morrow in their boats went down.
II
Night is above me ...
And Night is above the night.
Rocks are about me, and, beyond, the sand ...
And the low reluctant tide,
That rushes back to ebb a last farewell
To the flotsam borne so long upon its breast.
Rocks ... But the tide is out,
And the slime lies naked, like a thing ashamed
That has no hiding-place.
And the sea-bird hushes--
The bird and all far cries within my blood--
And earth as a somnambulist moves on.
CHARTINGS
There is no moon, only the sea and stars;
There is no land, only the vessel's bow
On which I stand alone and wonder how
Men ever dream of ports beyond the bars
Of Finitude that fix the Here and Now.
A meteor falls, and foam beneath me breaks;
Dim phosphor fires within it faintly die.
So soft the sea is that it seems a sky
On which eternity to life awakes.
The universe is spread before my face,
Worlds where perchance a million seas like this
Are flowing and where tides of pain and bliss
Find, as on earth, so prevalent a place
That nothing of their wont we there should miss.
The Universe, that man has dared to say
Is but one Being--ah, courageous thought!
Which is so vast that hope itself is fraught
With shame, while saying it, and shrinks away.
Shrinks, even as now! For clouds sweep up the skies
And darken the wide waters circling round,
From out whose deep arises the old sound
Of Terror unto which no tongue replies
But Faith--that nothing ever shall confound.
Not only pagan Perseus but the Cross
Is shrouded--with wild wind and wilder rain,
That on me beat until my soul again
Sings unsurrendering to fears of Loss.
For this I know,--yea, tho all else lie hid
Uncharted on the waters of our fate,
All lands of Whence or Whither, whose estate
In vain imagination seeks to thrid,
Yet cannot, for the fog within Death's gate,--
This thing I know, that life, whatever its Source
Or Destiny, comes with an upward urge,
And that we cannot thwart its mighty surge,
But with a joy in strife must keep the course.
THE TRAIL FROM THE SEA
I took the trail to the wooded canyon,
The trail from the sea:
For I heard a calling in me,
A landward calling irresistible in me:--
_Have done with things of the sea--things of the soul;
Have done with waters that slip away from under you.
Have done with things faithless, things unfathomable and vain;
With the vast deeps of Time and the Hereafter._
_Have done with the fog-breather, the fog-beguiler;
With the foam of the never-resting.
Have done with tides and passions, tides and mysteries for a season.
Have done with infinite yearnings cast adrift on infinite vagueness--
With never a certain sail, never a rudder sure for guidance,
With never a compass-needle free of desire._
_For the ways of earth are good, as well as sea-ways,
The peaks of it as well as ports unknown.
Not only perils matter, stormy perils, over the pathless,
Not only the shoals that sink your ship of dreams.
Not only the phantom lure of far horizons,
Not only the windy guess at the goals of God._
_But morning matters, and dew upon the rose,
And noon, shadowless noon, and simple sheep on the pastures straying.
And toil matters, amid the accustomed corn,
And peace matters, the valley-spirit of peace, unprone to wander,
Unprone to pierce to the world's end--and past it.
And zephyrs matter, that never lift up a sail,
Save that of the thistle voyaging over the meadow._
_And the lark--oh--the sunny lark--as well as the songless petrel,
Who cries the foamy length of a thousand leagues.
And silence matters, silence free of all surging,
Silence, the spirit of happiness and home._
_And oh how much the laugh of a child matters:
More than the green of an island suddenly lit by sun at dawn.
And friends, the greetings of friends, how they matter:
More than ships that meet and fling a wild ahoy and pass,
On any alien tides however enchanted.
And the face of love, the evening face of love, at a window waiting,
Shall ever a kindled Light on any long-unlifting shore,
Shall ever a Harbor Light like that light matter?_
_Ah no! so enough of the sea and the soul for a season.
Too long followed they leave life as a dream,
Reality as a mirage when port is made.
"Ever in sight of the human," is the helm-word of the wisest,
For earth is not earth to one upon the flood of infinity;
To the eye, then, it is but an atom-star, adrift, and oh,
No longer warm with the beating of countless hearts._
_No longer warm with the human throb--the simple breath of today,
With yester-hours or the near dreams of to-morrow.
No longer rich with the little innumerous blooms of brief delights,
Nor all divinely drenched with sympathy.
No longer green with the humble grass of duties that must grow,
To clothe it against desert aridity.
No longer zoned with the air of hope, no longer large with faith--
No longer heaven enough--if Heaven fails us!_
HAUNTED SEAS
A gleaming glassy ocean,
Under a sky of gray;
A tide that dreams of motion,
Or moves, as the dead may;
A bird that dips and wavers
Over lone waters round,
Then with a cry that quavers
Is gone--a spectral sound.
The brown sad sea-weed drifting
Far from the land, and lost.
The faint warm fog unlifting,
The derelict long-tossed,
But now at rest--tho haunted
By the death-scenting shark,
Whose prey no more undaunted
Slips from it, spent and stark.
SEA LURE
(_The Maine Coast_)
It is so, O sea! wild roses
Bloom here in the scent of your brine.
And the juniper round them closes,
And the bays amid them twine,
To guard and to praise their beauty;
And the gulls above them cry,
And the stern rocks stand on duty,
Where the surf beats white and high.
It is so, O sea! wild roses,
With the day-long fog bedrenched,
Have come from their inland closes
With a thirst for you unquenched.
And over your cliffs they clamber,
And over your vast they gaze;
For the tides of you can enamour
Even them with their woodland ways.
Yea, the passion of you and the power
And the largeness are a lure
To even the heart of a flower,
O sea, with a heart unsure!
For love is a thing unsated,
Nor ever in any breast
Has it dwelt, all want abated,
At rest.
SONGS TO A. H. R.
I
MINGLINGS
It is the old old vision,
The moonlit sea--and you.
I cannot make disseverance
Between the two.
For all the world's wide beauty
To me you seem,
All that I love in shadow
Or glow or gleam.
It is the old old murmur,
The sea's sound and your voice.
God in his Bliss between them
Could make no choice.
For all the world's deep music
In you I hear:
Nor shall I ask death, ever,
For aught more dear.
II
LOVE AND INFINITY
Across the kindling twilight moon
A late gull wings to rest.
The sea is murmuring underneath
Its vast eternal quest.
The coast-light flashes over the tide
A red and warning eye,
And oh the world is very wide,
But you are nigh!
The stars come out from zone to zone,
The wind knows every one
And blows their message to my heart,
As it has ever done.
"They are all God's," it tells me, "all,
However huge or high."
But ah I could not trust its call--
Were you not by!
III
RECOMPENSE
Not if I chose from a world of days
Could I find a day like this.
The sky is a wreath of azure haze
And the sea an azure bliss.
The surf runs racing the young salt wind,
Shouting without a fear
Over reef, bar, cliff and scaur,
Where you and I lie near.
O you and I who have watched the sky
And sea from many a shore!
You, love, and I who will live and die--
And watch the sea no more!
O joy of the world! Joy of love,
Joy that can say to death,
"Tho you end all with your wanton pall,
We two have had this breath!"
IV
AT THE EBB-HOUR
As I hear, thro the midnight sighing,
The low ebb-tide withdrawn,
And gulls on the dark cliff crying
For far discernless dawn,
It seems that all life is lying
Within your every breath,
Yet I can not believe in dying,
Or death.
As I hear, from the gray church tower,
The bell's unfailing sound
Peal forth hour after hour
To night's lone reaches round,
It seems as if Time's wan power
Would sear all things apace--
All, save in my heart one flower,
Your face.
V
IN A DARK HOUR
You are not with me--only the moon,
The sea and the gulls' cry, out of tune;
The myriad cry of the gulls still strewn
On the sands where the tide will enter soon.
You are not with me, only the breath
Of the wind--and then the wind's death.
A shrouding silence then that saith,
"Even as wind love vanisheth."
You are not with me--only fear,
As old as earth's first frenzied bier
That severed two whose hearts were near,
And left one with all Life unclear.
VI
VIA AMOROSA
When we two walk, my love, on the path
The moon makes over the sea,
To the end of the world where sorrow hath
An end that is ecstasy,
Should we not think of the other road
Of wearying dust and stone
Our feet would fare did each but care
To follow the way alone?
When we two slip at night to the skies
And find one star that we keep
As a trysting-place to which our eyes
May lead our souls ere sleep,
Should we not pause for a little space
And think how many must sigh
Because they gaze over starry ways
With no heart-comrade by?
When we two then lie down to our dreams
That deepen still the delight
Of our wandering where stars and streams
Stray in immortal light,
Should we not grieve with the myriads
From East of earth to West
Who lay them down at night but to drown
A longing for some loved breast?
Ah, yes, for life has a thousand gifts,
But love it is gives life.
Who walks thro his world in loneness lifts
A soul that is sorrow-rife.
But they to whom it is given to tread
The moon-path and not sink
Can ever say the unhappiest way
Earth has is fair, to the brink.
VII
TRANSFUSION
A shoal-light flashes east,
And livid lightning west,
The silvery dark night-sea between,
On which we ride at rest,
And gaze far, far away
Into the fretless skies,
World-sadness in our thought--but ah,
Content within our eyes.
The ship's bell strikes--the sound
Floats shrouded to our ears,
Then suddenly, as at a touch,
The universe appears
A Presence Infinite
That penetrates our love
And makes us one with night and sea
And all the stars above.
NEED OF STORM
(_Naples-on-the-Gulf_)
On the green floor of the Gulf the wind is walking,
Printing it with invisible feet;
The tide is talking.
Purple and grey the horizon walls them round
With purpler clouds.
They wander in it like guests gently astray
In a house deep mystery shrouds.
I do not know the speech of the tide,
For too articulate have become my years:
Beauty brings only words, not breathless tears.
So the young heron fishing there in the foam
On the sand's edge,
Would once have taken my spirit far, far home
To the infinite, when he vanished thro the gloam.
But now I am left behind on the beach--a shell
That no more knows the wonder of the sea's swell,
Or more than the empty echo of its knell.
To sea then, Life, wildly to sea with a storm
Sweep me again,
From the smooth dull beach of custom where I lie,
That I may feel once more
The swaying surge of passion thro me swarm!
A FLORIDA INTERLUDE
(_Naples-on-the-Gulf_)
I
Behind me lie the Everglades,
The mystic grassy Everglades,
Where the moccasin and the Seminole glide
In secret silent Indian ways.
Before me lies the Gulf,
The cup of blue bright tropic waters,
Held to the parched lips of the South
To cool and quench its thirst.
Behind me lie the Everglades,
Before me lies the Gulf,
Which the sunset soon shall change to wine,
A Eucharist for the longing soul.
Its rim of land shall be transformed
To Mexic opal and chrysoprase,
And then shall come the moon
As calm as a thought of Christ.
As calm as a thought of Christ--
Over the cup's sand-rim enchased
With palm and pine, Floridian friends,
Saying their twilight litanies;
While homeward flies the heron
To his island cypress in the swamp,
Which Spanish mosses drape and the moon
Silverly soothes to peace.
II
Behind me lie the Everglades,
Where the bittern wails to the moon's face.
Peace is gone as I wake
And memory in me wails
From the primal swamp, Heredity,
Whence I have come with all the desires
Of creeping, walking, flying things,
To creep or walk or fly.
With all the desires of the earth-creatures;
Yet with a want transcendent,
A want that comes with the glimmer of stars
And pierces to my heart.
A want of the life I have not known,
Of the life unknowable,
In the Everglades of the Universe
Where the Great Spirit glides.
A FLORIDA BOATING SONG
Down thro Florida keys,
From island, to island!
Down thro Florida keys,
Where mangrove roots dip in the seas!
A myriad tangled roots
From each palmetto byland,
Oyster-encrusted roots mid which
The heron wades in the shallow shades!
Down thro Florida keys,
Around them, between them,
Thro low green Florida keys,
So low they scarce seem born of the seas!
Where pouchy pelicans roost
On cypresses that lean them
Out over the idle lap of the tide
That comes and goes with balmy flows!
Down thro Florida keys,
Thro mazes on mazes
Of ripple-encircled keys,
Where sun and wind play as they please!
Where the eaglet, high in air,
Or the wild white ibis, dazes
Eyes that follow them up the blue,
As the heart would do, the heart too!
Down thro Florida keys
I'm going, I'm going!
Thro low green Florida keys
And greener glades of Florida seas!
And this is all I know,
That all in the world worth knowing
Is joy like that of the tarpon's leap
In air divine with the warm sunshine!
DAWN-BLISS
(_Naples-on-the-Gulf_)
I went out at dawn,
Pelicans were fishing,
Big-beaked, grey and brown;
Little waves were swishing.
Clouds creamed the sky,
As shells creamed the shore;
Wild aery hues of beauty
Round seemed to pour!
I went out at dawn,
Pelicans were floating,
Big beaks on their breasts;
Up the sun came boating.
"Ship ahoy!" I cried,
To his golden sail.
Bliss-winds of beauty in me
Broke--to a gale!