Dim reaches wait, untrodden shores exist,
The sea of Death completes the solemn scheme;
But comes the light to sweep away the mist,
And comes the heart to rightly read the Dream.
* * * *
I see the Search-light in the years to come,
Moving anew on borders strange and far;
I see new coast lines set with lights of home,
Men’s faces turned toward a near-burning Star.
LOST BEAUTY.
Because my fathers did, I seek my bed
While winter night over my dreaming head
Opens its gorgeous book of trees and stars
Upon a world that sleeps. The Eastern bars
Are crossed by ships, all constellation shaped,
That sail the winter hills where snowy trees are draped.
So I, whose muscles and whose blood are bound
To this faint-hearted scheme of life, do pray
Those that come after me, that they shall found
Some life that does not sever night and day;
So when God’s fleet sweeps up the midnight skies,
His starry ships will hail unsleeping eyes.
THE BRANCH OF STRANGE BERRIES.
(An Old Man Tells a Story to Some Boys.)
Black tunnels grooved the sea
Into caves of night;
And the furrowed walls of foam
Were jagged chrysolite.
No star stayed to chart the way—
We shuddered, lurching on boiling spray
In piteous plight of swinging stay
And black sails torn to flapping rags,
Blowing in knots and bellying bags.
I could not sleep; I walked with the salt
Caking in rifts on my face,
And I heard my men up in the bows
Cursing our dreary case.
They ground their bitter words in their jaws
As we reeled in the furred seas’ tigress paws.
Paladin came with his eyes of omen,
His loose mouth hanging dry:
“Senor,” he said, “We men leave women—”
He turned and sneered at the sky—
“Maybe your love is the love of the ghost
That shrieks your name from a rock-cursed coast,
But we know there’s no land like the land thou dreamest—
No land like thy boyish fancy deemest....
“Man, if thou knowest the way, turn back
Over the lost and surging track.
The men are mad for the food they lack,
Two ships are lost, the water-skins sag;
Scurvy’s aboard, the torn sails drag....
St. Mary! Thou knowest there is no land
Offers food nor place for our starving band;
Thou and thy dupes our lives have hurled
White bones on the reef of a Western World.
With your jewel-bought quadrants and King-got-gold
Our homes and kith and kin ye have sold....”
Paladin whined: “Turn back, turn back
Over the lost and tossing track;
Up from this dreaming, silly and slack.”
I turned on him, I shook my head,
Through burned and bleeding lips I said:
“Sail on....” “Sail on,” I said.
(Though it seemed to me I spoke from the dead),
“Sail on—Sail on,” I said.