[Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore]
There in his room, whene'er the moon looks in,
To silver now a shell, and now a fin,
And o'er his chart glide like an argosy,
Quiet and old sits he.
Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.
Where hidest thou the while, heart's boast,
Strange face of beauty sought and lost,
Star-face that lured him out from boyhood's isle?
Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold
Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,
The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss
Their veering weight across.
On, on he wears, the seaman long exiled,
To lands where stunted cedars throw
A lace-like shadow over snow,
Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.
Again play up and down the briny spar
Odours of Surinam or Zanzibar,
Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,
The Labradorian blue;
All homeless hurricanes about him break;
The purples of spent day he sees
From Samos to the Hebrides,
And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.
Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,
Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,
Away, and far away, his barque is borne
Riding the noisy morn,
Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know
The helm and tightening halyards still
Follow the urging of his will,
And scoff at sullen earth a league below.
Alas! Fate bars him from his heirdom high,
And shackles him with many an inland tie,
And of his only wisdom makes a jibe
Amid an alien tribe:
No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.
The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!
Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?
Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?
Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,
Familiar Danger, Oh, forget not him!
Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole
Unto his subject soul,
Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,
Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,
But she may know that voice again,
And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.
And give him back, before his passion fail,
The singing cordage and the hollow sail,
And level with those ageing eyes let be
The bright unsteady sea;
And like a film remove from sense and brain
This pasture wall, these boughs that run
Their evening arches to the sun,
Yon hamlet spire across the sown champaign;
And on the shut space and the shallow hour,
Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,
With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,
Him whom thou lovedst, bring:
That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,
Not having, at the last, less grace
Of thee than had his roving race,
Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.
[OXFORD AND LONDON]
XXVI SONNETS