Sea Variations
MORNING
Old, old is the sea to-day.
A sudden stealth of age
Has torn away
The texture of its youth and grace,
And filched the rose of daybreak from its waters.
Now lines of grey
And dragging vapors on its brow
Heavily are drawn;
And it lies broken as with centuries,
Though yesterday,
Blue-eyed and shadowless as a child's face,
It held the promise of a luminous dawn;
Though through its merry after-hours
It bade the sun to pour
Its flaming mintage on the ocean floor
That by a conjuror's touch was turned
To rarer treasure manifold,
Where jacinth, emerald and sapphire burned—
A fringe around a core of gold....
Old, old is the sea to-day,
Forsaken, chill and grey,
And banished is the glory of its waters;
Though through the silent tenure of the night
It bade the sterile moon to multiply
A thousand-fold its undivided light,
Within the nadir of a richer sky;
When every star a thousand cressets glowed
That, caught in wider conflagration, sent
Vast leagues of silver fire wherever flowed
The waters of its shoreless firmament.
But old and grey
Is the sea to-day,
With the morning colors blanched upon its waters.
MASKS
What hidden soul residing
Within these forms, O sea!
Should, every hour changing,
To Time yet changeless be?
What masks hast thou not worn,
What parts not played,
Thou Prince of all the Revels
In Life's Masquerade?
Light-hearted as a jester,
The motley fits thy mood,
As the gold and the purple,
Thy statelier habitude.
At dawn—
A trumpeter preluding a day's pageant.
At noon—
A dancer weaving new measures around the
furrows of ships with white sails.
Later—
A courier with sealed tidings hastening towards the shore.
At sunset—
A dyer steeping colors on a bay.
Again—
A sculptor teasing faces out of the moonlit foam on a reef.
Or carving bric-a-brac upon a beach,
Or fashioning, with age-toiled hands, a grotto
out of limestone.
The wind blows—
And a master puts a flute to his lips.
It blows again—
And his fingers take hold of organ stops ....
THE DESTROYER
Once more, the wind—
And thou dost go on an old familiar way
In tragic fashion,
As a corsair, pursuing his prey
With the lust of passion,
Falls like a burst of hail
On an autumn yield,
Till every reach and gulf and bay
Is left with the stubble of life and sail,
With the face of the waters like unto the face of the field.
IN RETREAT
Now like a fugitive, who, on the desert sand,
A moment broods upon the life he spilt.
And, with averted gaze,
Circling the dusky ruin of his hand,
Surveys
The Arab measure of his guilt
Before a Presence standing there that calls
His name; in cloud and shadow and in whirlwind reads
The inviolate scripture of the fates;
Then full across the desert speeds,
Until he falls,
Caught by the Avenger near the City Gates;—
So underneath the heavens' lighted scroll,
Ablaze with cryptic tokens of the slain,
Headlong to shore thy spiral waters roll
Swept by the besom of the winds; by rain
And thunder driven in flight
Along the galleries of the night,
Until upon the surge-line locked in strife
With reef and breaker thou art shattered, soon
In fang and sinew to be strewn
Around the cliffs that guard the ports of life.
O wild, tumultuous sea!
Thy waters mock our liturgy,
For thou dost take the threads of faith apart.
Wherewith the cables of our life are spun,
Strand upon strand unravelling;—thou dost hear,
Recited from a tide-wet shore,
Our creeds. Each hope and fear
Filtered from life's confessions—one by one,
Out of the dumb confusions of the heart,
Are spread before thy sight—thou Arch-Inquisitor!
How in a ruthless moment dost thou strip
The veilings from our eyes, and bid us cast
Our glances on a labyrinthine past,
Stirred by a flash that on a wave's white lip
Gleams for an instant, or by some dark sign
Within thy fearful hollows where night flings
Her crape of shadow on a tossing line
Of jetsam, will our years turn back,
To gather from a weed-grown track
A bitter tale of dimmed rememberings.
RE-BORN
As to its end the tempest drags
Its way, thou art re-born
To strength of body and beauty of face;
And thou dost cover with a tranquil grace
Those whom the winds had buffeted,
And laid upon the waters—dead.
In darkness dost thou cover them,
As some white-winged mother of the crags,
That daily gathering food
From sea-weed and from tide-wash, brings,
At fall of night, to her rock-nurtured brood
The drowsy silence of her wings.
THE DEAD CALM
How like a Pontiff dost thou lie at last,
Impassive, robed at Death's high-unctioned hour
With those grey vestments that the storm,
In the dread legacy of its power,
Around thy level form
Majestically hast cast,—
In the pale light of the moon's slow tapers burning;
All-silent in the calm recessional
Of the tide's turning;
All-passionless, though on the distant sands
Where the wreathed lilies of the spray, keen-sifted
By the late winds, are strewn, thy children call,
Their patient hands
In prayer, to thee, uplifted.