THE SEA
I in my childhood never saw the sea
Save in my dreams. There it was vast and lone,
Splendid in power, breaking against the stone
Walls of the world in thunder symphony.
From it arose mists growing into mists
Making a cool white curtain for the sun,
And melting mornward when the day was done,
A moving sphere where spirits kept their trysts.
A ceaseless swinging with the swinging earth,
A never-tiring ebbing to and fro,
Trenching eternal fastnesses; a girth
Round mountains in their everlasting snow.
It was a vast emotion, fibre-drawn
From all the elements since the first dawn.
THE CHART
Then came in further years the virgin sight
Of the live sea; the sea that marches down,
With sunny phalanxes and flags of foam,
To match its puissance with earth’s awful might.
Far off the purple mist drew into mist,
As thought melts into endless thought, and round
The rim of the sheer world was heard a sound,
Floating through palpitating amethyst.
And through the varying waste of elements
There passed a sail, which caught the opposing wind,
Triumphant, as an army in its tents
Beholds the foe it, conquering, left behind.
“And Life,” I said,—“Life is but like the sea;
And what shall guide us to our destiny?”
REVEALING
The prescience of dreams struck walls away
From mortal fact, and mortal fact revealed,
With myriad voices, potencies concealed
In the dim birth-place of a coming day.
Even as a blind man’s fingers wander o’er
His harpstrings, led by sound to dreams of sound,
Till in his soul an eloquence profound
Rises above the petulance and roar
Of the great globe: as in a rush of song
From feathered throats, one, in a mighty wood,
‘Mid sweet interpositions moves along
The avenues of some predestined good;
So I, dream-nurtured, standing by the sea,
Made levy on the wonders that should be.