“Our drink and food were long since gone....
We laid us down to die....
Then came a booming of the surf,
And palm trees met mine eye.
“I steered us through the broken reef;
Fainting, I won to shore;
I gazed upon her changèd face,
But she on mine no more.
“Below the palms I buried her
Whose bale star I had been.
And since, by this bleak coast of snows,
I sorrow for my sin.
“There was no other of our kind
That had her heavenly face.
On a far Day, by a far Sea,
I trust to know her grace.”
Smart Set George Sterling
EROS TURANNOS
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The seeker that she found him,
Her pride assuages her, almost,
As if it were alone the cost.
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits, and looks around him.
A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days,
Till even prejudice delays,
And fades—and she secures him.
The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The crash of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died
Becomes a place where she can hide,—
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.