NEWFOUNDLAND
VERSE
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