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 G.o.d, 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 sh.o.r.es, 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 sh.o.r.e-- His pale, pale face I shall kiss no more!
Ah, woe to women death pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d, moves high: Would I too had a G.o.d--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 Circ.u.mstance.
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.