XXXVI.
The sands lay heaved, as heaved by waves,
As fashion'd in a thousand graves:
And wrecks of storm blown here and there,
And dead men scatter'd everywhere;
And strangely clad they seem'd to be
Just as they sank in that old sea.
The mermaid with her splendid hair
Had clung about a wreck's beam there;
And sung her song of sweet despair,
The time she saw the seas withdrawn
And all her home and glory gone:
Had sung her melancholy dirge,
Above the last receding surge,
And, looking down the rippled tide,
Had sung, and with her song had died.
The monsters of the sea lay bound
In strange contortions. Coil'd around
A mast half heaved above the sand,
The great sea-serpent's folds were found,
As solid as ship's iron band.
And basking in the burning sun
There rose the great whale's skeleton.
A thousand sea things stretch'd across
Their weary and bewilder'd way:
Great unnamed monsters wrinkled lay
With sunken eyes and shrunken form.
The strong sea-horse that rode the storm
With mane as light and white as floss,
Lay tangled in his mane of moss.
And anchor, hull, and cast-away,
And all things that the miser deep
Doth in his darkling locker keep,
To right and left around them lay.
Yea, coins lay there on either hand,
Lay shining in the silver sand;
As plenty in the wide sands lay
As stars along the Milky Way.
And golden coin, and golden cup,
And golden cruse, and golden plate,
And all that great seas swallow up,
Right in their dreadful pathway lay....
The hungry and insatiate
Old sea, made hoary white with time,
And wrinkled cross with many a crime,
With all his treasured thefts was there,
His sins, his very soul laid bare,
As if it were the Judgment Day.