NIGHT SONG BY THE SEA
Wind and rain are at the pane,
Shrilling, drumming without cease;
And the breakers' loud refrain
Gives the shuddering heart no peace.
Lord of all the things that be,
Pity Thou the souls at sea!
Snugly roofed with warmth and glow,
And encompassed soft by sleep,
Little we land-dwellers know
Of the terrors of the deep.
Lord, in Thy sweet charity,
Pity Thou the souls at sea!
On the smiling face of morn
Sure are we to gaze again;
What of those poor waifs forlorn
Furrowing the untracked main?
Lord, in their dire need of Thee,
Pity Thou the souls at sea!
Although riven be the rail,
Snapped the shroud and rent the mast,
May they into harbor sail,
All their perils overpast!
Lord, in Thy compassion, be
Pilot to the souls at sea!
WILD GEESE
Along the ocean's shingly edge,
Athwart the turquoise sweep of sky,
The wild geese in a winged wedge
Go darkling by.
From far lagoons be-plumed with palm,
By cove and cape, by bluff and bay,
Through depths of storm, through vasts of calm,
They speed their way.
The pharos flashes on their flight;
They do not heed its beckoning beam;
The great North, stretching weird and white,
Lures like a dream;
Lures, and they answer to the call;
Charms, and they yield them to the spell,
Moved ever by a subtle thrall
Inscrutable.
Do you not feel it, comrade, too,
The inescapable delight,
The mounting rapture, that bids you
Take vernal flight?
A SEA CHANGE
Night-long I heard the poignant undertone,
The interminable sobbing of the sea;
And now that morn breaks dim and dolorously
I mark the riotous surges landward blown,
Tempestuous and towering, and hurled prone
Upon the stark sand reaches; and the glee
Of the mad wind, its maniac monody,
Mingles with ocean's dithyrambic moan.
Not so yestreen, when westward flamed the sun,
Flinging athwart the waves a lustrous path,
Tinging the sky with colors rich and strange!
The black night wrought this mystery of wrath,
This mood demonic (reason seems there none),
This weird and inexplicable sea change!