With leagues of wasteful water ringed about,
And wrapped in sheeted foam from base to peak,
A sheer, stupendous monolith, wrought out
By the slow, ceaseless labor of the deeps,
In awful isolation, old as Time,
The gray, forbidding Rock of Skidloe stands--
Breasting the wild incursions of the North--
The grim antagonist of a thousand waves!
Far to the leeward, faintly drawn against
A dim perspective of perpetual storms,
A frowning line of black basaltic cliffs
Baffles the savage onset of the surf.
But, rolled in cloud and foam, old Skidloe lifts
His dark, defiant head forever mid
The shock and thunder of contending tides,
And fixed, immovable as fate, hurls back
The rude, eternal protest of the sea!
Colossal waters coil about his feet,
Deep rooted in the awful gulfs between
The measureless walls of mountain chains submerged;
An infinite hoarse murmur wells from all
His dim mysterious crypts and corridors:
The inarticulate mutterings that voice
The ancient secret of the mighty main.
In all the troubled round of sea and air,
No glimpse of brightness lends the vivid zest
Of life and light to the harsh monotone
Of gray tumultuous flood and spectral sky;
Far off the black basaltic crags are heaved
Against the desolate emptiness of space;
But no sweet beam of sunset ever falls
Athwart old Skidloe's cloudy crest--no soft
And wistful glory of awakened dawn
Lays on his haggard brows a touch of grace.
Sometimes a lonely curlew skims across
The seething torment of the dread abyss,
And, shrieking, dips into the mist beyond;
But, solitary and unchanged for aye,
He towers amid the rude revolt of waves,
His stony face seamed by a thousand years,
And wrinkled with a million furrows, worn
By the slow drip of briny tears, that creep
Along his hollow cheek. His hidden hands
Drag down the drowned and tossing wrecks that drive
Before the fury of the Northern gales,
And mute, inscrutable as destiny,
He keeps his sombre secrets as of yore.
The slow years come and go; the seasons dawn
And fade, and pass to swell the solemn ranks
Of august ages in the march of Time.
But changeless still, amid eternal change,
Old Skidloe bears the furious brunt of all
The warring elements that grapple mid
The mighty insurrections of the sea!
Gray desolation, ancient solitude,
Brood o'er his wide, unrestful water world,
While grim, unmoved, forbidding as of yore,
He wraps his kingly altitudes about
With the fierce blazon of the thunder cloud;
And on his awful and uplifted brows
The red phylactery of the lightning shines;
And throned amid eternal wars, he dwells,
His dread regality hedged round by all
The weird magnificence of exultant storms!