EASTERLY WEATHER.
OFF MANOMET POINT.
The winds had whiffled for a week,
The tides ran high with choppy seas,
The buoys that marked the channel rocked,
The mortar-guns slept on their knees,
In readiness to leap when called;
The coast-patrol saw boding sign;
Men climbed the cliffs to scan the deep,
And spliced an extra breeches-line.
And then the weather settled down,
The green of every wave took flight,
And one great hollow voice made moan,
And rumbled, rumbled day and night,
In dull unbroken monotone,
The breakers running breast to breast,
Like hounds of Death, with frothy jaws,
From north to south, from east to west.
The low horizon rocked and swayed
To mazy motion of the spume,
Till ’yond the fog it crawled away
And hid behind a leaden gloom.
Oblivion swept through the night,
And coiled the dark through every place;
The old tarpaulins dripped with salt,
And flapped it in the eyes and face.
The dawn rolled in with rush and roar,
And blubbered with an outworn groan,
And up the sand-dunes’ terraced sides
In layers were the waters blown.
At last the drift of wreckage came;
What matters that to you or me?
Wild, with the east wind in their teeth,
The hounds of Death ran out to sea.