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The minstered Vast of immemorial sea,
Blue vaults and green that cave the Island tides
Choruses solemn dark immensity
To that Moon priest that with its law abides;
The hoodéd waves march on cathedral dunes,
Flagelant spring the breakers on the rips,
And the encircling shore is writ with runes
Of voyaging souls and questing sails and ships.
Yea, all around Cathedral Vast of sea
Blue vaults and green that cave the island’s tides
Curled toppling Uncials of Eternity
Illumining the beaches’ glistening sides;
New consecrate the sand’s communion shell
With every moonlight chrism and sunrise swell.
Clean Island, cloistered ways unspoiled by man,
The thorn trees cloaked like prophets, and the reeds
Organ with murmurings of furtive Pan;
The spirits’ intense strange music, lost from creeds,
Lost far from love—lost in all modern places;
Lost from the reading by all human faces,
Isolate—dumb; but if one wanders here,
Vocal and strong, immaculate and clear.
For now one figure left of all the gods
Goes singing down the thistle-lighted way;
One figure wanders through these island moods
Back from the town and back of all the bay.
And where the goldenrods their censers sway
Against a brake or by a grey swamp wood,
Over the moor steals happy Solitude.
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The corn is stacked, the pumpkins’ on the roof,
Globule on grey their ponderous green and gold,
The laughing gull wantons its wild reproof,
The water’s blue is strangely laced with cold;
Vermilion berries coral the black-hedged pond,
Around the shore the chilly foam-patch quivers,
The sweet fern shrivels up its copper frond,
The owl flaps heavily, the farmland shivers.
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These are the roads the island farmers took,
Slow-following flocks that tinkled towards the town,
And stopped to crop the clover or to look
With hornéd stare across the purple down.
These are the roads the shearers of the sheep
In high-swung wagons rode; these winding trails
Moccasins knew, where now the children keep
To Shimmo Shore with huckleberry pails.
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