Pelicans were winging.
Palms waved passion plumes,
Beach sands were singing.
Stripped, save of strength,
I plunged into the sea
And swam, till the bliss of beauty
Died away in me.
ATAVISM
I leant out over a ledging cliff and looked down into the sea,
Where weed and kelp and dulse swayed, in green translucency;
Where the abalone clung to the rock and the star-fish lay about,
Purpling the sands that slid away under the silver trout.
And the sea-urchin too was there, and the sea-anemone.
It was a world of watery shapes and hues and wizardry.
And I felt old stirrings wake in me, under the tides of time,
Sea-hauntings I had brought with me out of the ancient slime.
And now, as I muse, I cannot rid my senses of the spell
That in a tidal trance all things around me drift and swell
Under the sea of the Universe, down into which strange eyes
Keep peering at me, as I peered, with wonder and surmise.
RE-RECKONING
Two years have gone, and again I stand
On the bow of a mighty ship
That pushes her way 'twixt sea and stars
With soft and dreamy dip.
Two years of labouring, heart and hand,
Of waging spirit-wars,
Of wondering ever what life is--
And if death heals its scars.
Two years; and again the mast-bell sounds
Above me--with a low voice,
As ghostly as the white phosphor-foam
That breaks with the old noise
Of waters that have washed all bounds
Of earth, that is man's home--
His ark--on the wide ether flung,
Unrestingly to roam.
For, even as we, is this our earth
An endless wanderer
Far down a universe with vast
Strange voyagings astir;
And where time ever brings to birth
A craving, never past,
To fare from where we are, to where
No anchor ever was cast.
A craving--in the mote, the man,
The mollusc and the star;
A yearning on--O life! O life!
How far leads it, how far?
All unbelievably began
Our voyage, mid a strange strife--
That, meaningless, yet seems to mean
It is with Wisdom rife.
But if it is not, shall we say,
"Let man scuttle his ship,
And drown in universal death
The griefs that at him grip?"
No; for no surety rests therein
To certain end of breath.
He can but let hope set the course
His soul foretokeneth.
TO THE AFTERNOON MOON, AT SEA
Take care, O wisp of a moon,
Vague on the sunny blue above the sea,
Or the gull flying across you
Will pierce your veil-thin shape with a sharp wing!
Take care, or the wind will wilt you,
As he does the clouds snowily drifting by you,
And diffuse you over the sky, a silvery mist,
To give more cool to the day!
Take care, so near the horizon,
Or a phantom skipper, one who has long been drowned,
Will reach above it and seize you
And make you his sail to circle the world forever!
Take care, take care! for frailty
Is the prey of the strong, and you, a wraith of it,
Have yet a long while to go before nightfall
Brings you to sure effulgence!
PATHS
Crushing in my hand
The bay as I pass,
Drinking in its fragrance
With the sea's scent,
While gull-wings write
Poems white and fast
On the blue sky
That is soft with content;
Crushing in my hand
The bay and the juniper,
While I record
Each line the gulls write,
I go by sea paths
Down to the sea's edge,
I go by heart paths
Deep into delight.
Simple is my joy
As the little sandpiper's,
Who follows beside me
With silvery song;
Blither than the breeze,
That skims great billows
Nor knows how deep
Is their flow--or strong.
Simple is my joy,
A sunny sense-sweetness,
Full of bird-bliss,
Bay-warmth, spray-leap.
Mysteries there are
And miseries beneath it,
But sunk, like wrecks,
Far down in the deep.
FROM A NORTHERN BEACH
Is it because for a million years
The tide has entered here
From cold north seas
Where ice-floes freeze
That ever unto my ear
Primordial loneness in its voice
Comes telling of that time
When life was not, upon the earth,
But only glacier-rime?
Is it because these granite rocks
I share with weed and scurf
Were held so long
By the ice-throng
That now they take the surf
So selflessly and soullessly,
As if God's Immanence
Had been pressed from them, never more
To enter, with sweet sense?
And is it because I, too, evolved
From ice and sea and shore,
Can understand
How life has spanned
The lifeless ages o'er,
That as I sit here, suddenly
The tide again seems stilled
And earth beneath a great white pall
Again lies changed and chilled?
So it must be--ah, so; for soft
Within my muted brain
The heritage
Of age on age
Reverberates again.
Wherefore when glacial Silence comes
With Death shall I emerge
From that as from the frozen Past,
Under Life's endless urge?
PASSAGE
A dark sail,
Like a wild-goose wing,
Where the sunset was.
The moon soon will silver its sinewy flight
Thro the night watches,
And the far flight
Of those immortal migrants,
The ever-returning stars.
ALEEN
The long line of the foaming coast
Is muffled by the fog's gray ghost.
I cross the league of sea between
And lift the latch and kiss Aleen.
She throws a log upon the fire.
I draw her to me, nigh and nigher.
She does not know what a brief time
Ago it was my arms held--crime.
The surf is beating on the shore.
We hear our own heart-beatings more.
She speaks of _him_ and my reply
Is silence: does she wonder why?
"I do not love him: have no fear,"
Her whisper is, against my ear.
At last, "I have no fear," say I.
She starts, as at a wild-beast's cry.
And then she sees red on my coat.
A still-born cry throbs in her throat.
The fog sweeps by the window pane.
Her sight is fixed on one dull stain.
I rise and light my pipe and go,
Leaving her standing, staring so.
The wind means storm, I think, to-night:
But more than that will make her white.
And yet had it been yesterday
She said those words, I still could pray.
There would be still a God above--
For two, now overwhelmed, to love!
TO A SOLITARY SEA-GULL
Lone white gull with sickle wings,
You reap for the heart inscrutable things:
Sorrow of mists and surf of the shore,
Winds that sigh of the nevermore;
Fret of foam and flurry of rain,
Swept far over the troubled tide;
Maths of mystery and grey pain
The sea's voice ever yields, beside.
Lone white gull, you reap for the heart
Life's most sad and inscrutable part.
INEFFABLE THINGS
The little song-sparrow is gone
And the summer is nearly ended,
The rill of his song was a happy rift
In the surging sound of the sea.
The swallow is lingering on,
And the silvery swift sandpiper,
And I--tho I know my saddened heart
Has lost an ineffable thing,
That summer no more can bring.
With the first bay-leaves that flung
Their scent to me by the billows,
I twined some faith, some trust,
As glad as the sparrow's song.
And the terns that darted among
The tides seemed weaving for me
Impalpable wings of peace and hope--
That now have taken flight
Beyond the day and the night.
Ah, Life, you have known my plea
For sun and the tide of fortune,
For winds to waken my sail and bear
Me joyously over the world.
Know too how much of your fog
And storm and rain I will suffer,
If only you do not sweep from me
The dear ineffable things,
To which your fragrance clings.
THE SONG OF A SEA-FARER
Many are on the sea to-day
With all sails set.
The tide rolls in a restive gray,
The wind blows wet.
The gull is weary of his wings,
And I am weary of all things.
Heavy upon me longing lies,
My sad eyes gaze
Across sad leagues that sink and rise
And sink always.
My life has sunk and risen so,
I'd have it cease awhile to flow.
WAVES
The evening sails come home
With twilight in their wings.
The harbour-light across the gloam
Springs;
The wind sings.
The waves begin to tell
The sea's night-sorrow o'er,
Weaving within their ancient spell
More
Than earth's lore.
The rising moon wafts strange
Low lures across the tide,
On which my dim thoughts seem to range,
Stride
Upon stride,
Until, with flooding thrill,
They seem at last to blend
With waves that from the Eternal Will
Wend,
Without end.
IN A STORM
(_To a Petrel_)
All day long in the spindrift swinging,
Bird of the sea! bird of the sea!
How I would that I had thy winging--
How I envy thee!
How I would that I had thy spirit,
So to careen, joyous to cry,
Over the storm and never fear it!
Into the night that hovers near it!
Calm on a reeling sky!
All day long, and the night, unresting!
Ah! I believe thy every breath
Means that life's best comes ever breasting
Peril and pain and death!
AFTER THEIR PARTING
(_A Woman Speaks_)
You know that rock on a rocky coast,
Where the moon came up, a ruined ghost,
Distorted until her shape almost
Seemed breaking?
Came up like a phantom silently
And dropped her shroud on the red night sea,
Then walked, a spectral mystery,
Unwaking?
You know how, sudden, there came a change,
When she had left the sea's low range,
Its lurid crimson, stark and strange,
Behind her?
How, sudden, her silver self shone thro,
Tranquilly free of the earth's stained hue,
And found a way where the clouds were few
To bind her?
You know this? Then go back some day,
When I have gone the moonless way,
To that dark rock whereon we lay
And waited;
And when the moon has arisen free,
Your soiling doubt shall fall from me,
And eased of unrest your heart shall be,
And sated.
A WORD'S MAGIC
Do you remember Etajima,
And how, upon a moon-fogged sea,
As ghostly as ever a tide shall be,
We passed an island silently?
And how a low voice in the gloom
Of the temple pine-trees leaning there
Said _sayonara_ to one somewhere
Unseen in the shadow-haunted air?
Just _sayonara_: but it seemed
The soul of all farewells that night,
The sigh of all withdrawn delight,
The sound of love's last rapture-rite.
And now, after long years, it comes
Again from isles of memory
To bring once more to birth in me
The breath of all lost witchery.
Yes, one low word of parting, now
Echoing, thro the fog of years,
Has touched my heart with beauty's tears,
And youth thro all things reappears.
SEA RHAPSODY
(_Out of Hong-kong_)
Never again, never again
Did I hope to breathe such joy!
The sea is blue and the winds halloo
Up to the sun "Ahoy!"
"Ahoy!" they shout and the mists they rout
From the mountain-tops go streaming
In happy play where the gulls sway,
And a million waves are gleaming!
And every wave, billowing brave,
Is tipped with a wild delight.
A garden of isles around me smiles,
Bathed in the blue noon light,
The rude brown bunk of the fishing junk
Seems fair as a sea-king's palace:
O wine of the sky the gods have spilt
Out of its crystal chalice!
For wine is the wind, wine the sea,
Wine for the sinking spirit,
To lift it up from the cling of clay
Into high Bliss--or near it!
So let me drink till I cease to think,
And know with a sting of rapture
That joy is yet as wide as the world
For men, at last, to capture!
IN AN ORIENTAL HARBOUR
All the ships of the world come here,
Rest a little, then set to sea;
Some ride up to the waiting pier,
Some drop anchor beyond the quay.
Some have funnels of blue and black,
(Some come once but come not back!)
Some have funnels of red and yellow,
Some--O war!--have funnels of gray.
All the ships of the world come here,
Ships from every billow's foam;
Fruiter and oiler, pirateer,
Liner and lugger and tramp a-roam.
Some are scented of palm and pine,
(Some are fain for the Pole's far clime).
Some are scented of soy and senna,
Some--ah me!--are scented of home.
All the ships of the world come here,
Day and night there is sound of bells,
Seeking the port they calmly steer,
Clearing the port they ring farewells.
Under the sun or under the stars
(Under the light of swaying spars),
Under the moon or under morning
Do they swing, as the tide swells.
All the ships of the world come here,
Rest a little and then are gone,
Over the crystal planet-sphere
Swept, thro every season, on.
Swept to every cape and isle
(Every coast of cloud or smile),
Swept till over them sweeps the sorrow
Of their last sea-dawn.
UNDER THE SKY
Far out to sea go the fishing junks,
With all sails set,
The tide swings gray and the clouds sway,
The wind blows wet;
Blows wet from the long coast lying dim
As if mist-born.
Far out they sail, as the stars pale,
The stars of morn.
Far out to sea go the fishing junks,
And I who pass
Upon a deck that is vaster reck
No more, alas,
Of all their life, or they of mine,
Than comes to this,--
That under the sky we live and die,
Like all that is.
A SONG FOR HEALING
(_On the South Seas_)
When I return to the world again,
The world of fret and fight,
To grapple with godless things and men,
In battle, wrong or right,
I will remember this--the sea,
And the white stars hanging high,
And the vessel's bow
Where calmly now
I gaze to the boundless sky.
When I am deaf with the din of strife,
And blind amid despair,
When I am choked with the dust of life
And long for free soul-air,
I will recall this sound--the sea's,
And the wide horizon's hope,
And the wind that blows
And the phosphor snows
That fall as the cleft waves ope.
When I am beaten--when I fall
On the bed of black defeat,
When I have hungered, and in gall
Have got but shame to eat,
I will remember this--the sea,
And its tide as soft as sleep,
And the clear night sky
That heals for aye
All who will trust its Deep.
A SINGHALESE LOVE LAMENT
As the cocoanut-palm
That pines, my love,
Away from the sound
Of the planter's voice,
Am I, for I hear
No more resound
Your song by the pearl-strewn sea!
The sun may come
And the moon wax round,
And in its beam
My mates may rejoice,
But I feast not
And my heart is dumb,
As I long, O long, for thee!
In the jungle-deeps,
Where the cobra creeps,
The leopard lies
In wait for me,
But O, my love,
When the daylight dies
There is more to my dread than he!
Harsh lonely tears
That assail my eyes
Are worse to bear,--
For the misery
That makes them well
Is the long, long years
That I moan away from thee!
O again, again,
In my katamaran
A-keel would I push
To your palmy door!
Again would I hear
The heave and hush
Of your song by the plantain-tree.
But far away
Do I toil and crush
The hopes that arise
At my sick heart's core.
For never near
Does it come, the day
That draws me again to thee!
THE CITY
Soft and fair by the Desert's edge,
And on the dim blue edge of the sea,
Where white gulls wing all day and fledge
Their young on the high cliff's sandy ledge,
There is a city I have beheld,
Sometime or where, by day or dream,
I know not which, for it seems enspelled
As I am by its memory.
Pale minarets of the Prophet pierce
Above it into the white of the skies,
And sails enchanted a thousand years
Flit at its feet while fancy steers.
No face of all its faces to me
Is known--no passion of it or pain.
It is but a city by the sea,
Enshrined forever beyond my eyes!
FULL TIDE
Sea-scents, wild-rose scents,
Bay and barberry too,
Drench the wind, the Maine wind,
That gulls are dipping thro,
With soft hints, sweet hints,
With lull, lure and desire;
With memory-wafts and mysteries,
And all the ineffable histories
Made when the sea and land meet,
And the sun lends nuptial fire.
Sea-foam, and dream-foam,
And which is which, who knows,
When all day long the heart goes out
To every wave that blows,
That blossoms on the bright tide,
Then sheds a shimmering crest
And yields its tossing place to one
Whose blooming is as quickly done--
For beauty is ever swift--begot
Of rapture and unrest.
Sea-deeps, and soul-deeps,
And where shall faith be found
If not within the heart's beat
Or in the surging sound
Of the sea, which is the earth's heart,
Beating with tireless might;
Beating--tho but a tragedy
Life seems on every land and sea;
Beating to bring all breath, somehow,
Out of despair's blight.
THE HERDING
Quietly, quietly in from the fields
Of the grey Atlantic the billows come,
Like sheep to the fold.
Shorn by the rocks of fleecy foam,
They sink on the brown seaweed at home;
And a bell, like that of a bellwether,
Is scarcely heard from the buoy--
Save when they suddenly stumble together,
In herded hurrying joy,
Upon its guidance: then soft music
From it is tolled.
Far out in the murk that follows them in
Is heard the call of the fog-horn's voice,
Like a shepherd's--low.
And the strays as if waiting it seem to pause
And lift their heads and listen--because
It is sweet from wandering ways to be driven,
When we have fearless breasts,
When all that we strayed for has been given,
When no want molests
Us more--no need of the tide's ebbing
And tide's flow.
ON THE MAINE COAST
The rocks, lean fingers of the land,
Reach out into the sea
And cool themselves, all day long,
In the tide drippingly.
They catch the seaweed in them
And the starfish on their tips,
And gulls that light
And the swift flight
Of swallows skimming grey and white--
And spars of broken ships.
The moon, God's perfect silver,
With which He pays the world
For toil and quest and day's unrest,
Is washed on them and swirled.
And avidly they seize it,
Then let it slip away,
Only again
And yet again
To grasp at it--as eager men
At joy no hand can stay.
SEANCE
Hovering wings of terns
Over the rock-pools flutter,
For the tide, ebbed far out,
Seems to stumble and stutter;
Seems like a spirit lost,
Unable to come again
Back to the wonted ways and days
Of ever-wanting men.
And the moon, a medium
Trance-pale, is laying her light
Over its surge--till, lo,
It turns from the deep and night.
And the spirit-word it brings
Is the message of all time,
That doubt is only the ebb of faith,
Which ever reflows sublime!
A SIDMOUTH LAD
Salcombe Hill and four hills more
Lie to leftward of this shore.
On the right Peak Hill arises
Ever rises, sickening, o'er.
Two score rotting years I've seen
Sidmouth sit those hills between:
Only Sidmouth--and twice over
Must I bide it, as I've been.
Then a churchyard hole for me,
By the dull voice of the sea.
Rotting, still in Sidmouth rotting,
Rotting to eternity.
WIDOWED
One wild gull on a wilder storm,
Winging to keep her lone heart warm.
One wild gull by the surf--and I,
Beaten by wind and rain and sky.
One wild gull in the offing lost,
Wilder heart in my bosom tost.
One wild gull--O why but one!
Two, dear God, should there be--or none!
TO THE SEA
Are you enraged, O sea, with the blue peace
Of heaven, so to uplift your armied waves,
Your billowy rebellion against its ease,
And with Tartarean mutter from cold caves,
From shuddering profundities where shapes
Of awe glide thro entangled leagues of ooze,
To hoot your watery omens evermore,
And evermore your moanings interfuse
With seething necromancy and mad lore?
Or do you labour with the drifting bones
Of countless dead, O mighty Alchemist,
Within whose stormy crucible the stones
Of sunk primordial shores, granite and schist,
Are crumbled by your all-abrasive beat?
With immemorial chanting to the moon,
And cosmic incantation, do you crave
Rest to be found not till your wilds are strewn
Frigid and desert over earth's last grave?
You seem drunk with immensity, mad, blind--
With raving deaf, with wandering forlorn,
Parent of Demogorgon whose dire mind
Is night and earthquake, shapeless shame and scorn
Of the o'ermounting birth of Harmony.
Bound in your briny bed and gnawing earth
With foamy writhing and fierce-panted tides,
You are as Fate in torment of a dearth
Of black disaster and destruction's strides.
And how you shatter silence from the world,
Incarnate Motion of all mystery!
Whose waves are fury-wings, whose winds are hurled
Whither your Ghost tempestuous can see
A desolate apocalypse of death.
Yea, how you shatter silence from the world,
With emerald overflowing, waste on waste
Of flashing susurration, dashed and swirled
On isles and continents that shrink abased!
And yet, O veering veil of the Unknown,
Gathered from primal mist and firmament;
O surging shape of Life's unfathomed moan,
Whelming humanity with fears unmeant;
Yet do I love you, far above all fear,
And loving you unconquerably trust
The runes that from your ageless surfing start
Would read, were they revealed, gust upon gust,
That Immortality is might of heart!
SEA-MAD
(_A Breton Maid_)
Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me!
One said:
"Away! he is dead!
Upon my foam I have flung his head!
Go back to your cote, you never shall wed!--
(Nor he!)"
Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me.
Two brake.
The third with a quake
Cried loud, "O maid, I'll find for thy sake
His dead lost body: prepare his wake!"
(And back it plunged to the sea!)
Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me.
One bore--
And swept on the shore--
His pale, pale face I shall kiss no more!
Ah, woe to women death passes o'er!
(Woe's me!)
THE ATHEIST
Over a scurf of rocks the tide
Wanders inward far and wide,
Lifting the sea-weed's sloven hair,
Filling the pools and foaming there,
Sighing, sighing everywhere.
Merged are the marshes, merged the sands,
Save the dunes with pine-tree hands
Stretching upward toward the sky,
Where the sun, their god, moves high:
Would I too had a god--yea, I!
For, the sea is to me but sea,
And the sky but infinity.
Tides and times are but some chance
Born of a primal atom-dance.
All is a mesh of Circumstance.
In it there is no Heart--no Soul--
No illimitable Goal--
Only wild happenings, by wont
Made into laws no might can shunt
From the deep grooves in which they hunt.
Wings of the gull I watch or claws
Of the cold crab whose strangeness awes:
Faces of men that feel the force
Of a hid thing they call life's course:
It is their hoping or remorse.
Yet it may be that I have missed
Something that only they who tryst,
Not with the sequence of events
But with their viewless Immanence,
Find and acclaim with spirit-sense.
AT THE HELM
(_Nova Scotia_)
Fog, and a wind that blows the sea
Blindly into my eyes.
And I know not if my soul shall be
When the day dies.
But if it be not and I lose
All that men live to gain--
I who have known but heaving hues
Of wind and rain--
Still I shall envy no man's lot,
For I have held this great,
Never in whines to have forgot
That Fate is Fate.
IMPERTURBABLE
Three times the fog rolled in today, a silent shroud,
From which the breakers ran like ghosts, moaning and tumbling.
Three times a startled sea-bird cried aloud,
On the wind stumbling.
But I cast my net with never a fear, tho wraiths in me
And birds of wild unrest were stirring and starting and crying.
For I knew that under the sway of every sea
There is calm lying.
WASTE
I flung a wild rose into the sea,
I know not why.
For swinging there on a rathe rose-tree,
By the scented bay and barberry,
Its petals gave all their sweet to me,
As I passed by.
And yet I flung it into the tide,
And went my way.
I climbed the gray rocks, far and wide,
And many a cove of peace I tried,
With none of them all to be satisfied,
The whole long day.
For I had wasted a beautiful thing,
Which might have won
Each passing heart to pause and sing,
On the sea-path there, of its blossoming.
And who wastes beauty shall feel want's sting,
As I had done.
RESURGENCE
I was content, O Sea, to be free for a space from striving,
Content as the brown weed is, at rest on rocks in the sun,
When the salt tide is out, and the surf no more is riving
At its roots, or swirling and bidding it sway where the white waves run.
I was content--with life, and love, and a little over;
A little achieved of the much that is given to men to do.
But now with your tidal strife do you come again, vain rover,
And tell of vastitudes, to be sailed, or sounded, anew.
Now again do you surge. And the fathomless tides of thinking,
Of wanting, waiting, despairing--or daring--with you come;
The inner tides of the soul, that had ebbed with slumberous shrinking,
But now are bursting again, thro the caves of it long numb.
So vainly I lie on the cliff with the blissful Blue above me
And listless sated gulls afloat below on the swells,
For I am soothless, sateless, because of desires that shove me
Out and away with the winds, on quests no distance quells!
LIFE'S ANSWER
A stroke of lightning stabbed the storm-black sea,
As if it sought the heart of Life thereunder,
And meant to put an end to it utterly;--
Then came thunder--
Wildly applauding thunder.
Riven with fear the foam-crests ran before it,
Hissed by the rain and beaten down to darkness.
A gull rose out of the murk with wings that tore it--
Life's answer to the storm's terrible starkness.
AS THE TIDE COMES IN
The quivering terns dart wild and dive,
As the tide comes tumbling in.
The calm rock-pools grow all alive,
With the tide tumbling in.
The crab who under the brown weed creeps,
And the snail who lies in his house and sleeps,
Awake and stir, as the plunging sweeps
Of the tide come tumbling in.
Gray driftwood swishes along the sand,
As the tide comes tumbling in.
With wreck and wrack from many a land,
On the tide, tumbling in.
About the beach are a broken spar,
A pale anemone's torn sea-star
And scattered scum of the waves' old war,
As the tide tumbles in.