One cry to God from the soul of the shuddering sea,
One moment of stifling lips and struggling hands;
"Burn, oh burn; for my love is coming to me;
And oh, I think the little one understands."
One moment of stifling lips and struggling hands,
Then only the glitter and gloom of the angry deep;
"And oh, I think the little one understands;
Dreamikin, Drowsy-head, sleep, my little one, sleep."
EARTH-BOUND
Ghosts? Love would fain believe,
Earth being so fair, the dead might wish to return!
Is it so strange if, even in heaven, they yearn
For the May-time and the dreams it used to give?
Through dark abysms of Space,
From strange new spheres where Death has called them now
May they not, with a crown on every brow,
Still cry to the loved earth's lost familiar face?
We two, love, we should come
Seeking a little refuge from the light
Of the blinding terrible star-sown Infinite,
Seeking some sheltering roof, some four-walled home,
From that too high, too wide
Communion with the universe and God,
How glad to creep back to some lane we trod
Hemmed in with a hawthorn hedge on either side.
Fresh from death's boundless birth,
How fond the circled vision of the sea
Would seem to souls tired of Infinity,
How kind the soft blue boundaries of earth,