Now all is gray desolation,
As up from the hoary coast,
Over snow-fields and islands her white arms in silence
Outspreading like a ghost,
Her feet in shroud, her forehead in cloud,
Pale walks the sheeted Dawn:
The sea's blue rim lies shorn and dim,
In the purple East withdrawn.
Where floated the fleets of commerce,
With proud breasts cleaving the tide,—
Like emmet or bug with its burden, the tug
Hither and thither plied,—
Where the quick paddles flashed, where the dropped anchor plashed,
And rattled the running chain,
Where the merchantman swung in the current, where sung
The sailors their far refrain,—
Behold! when ruddy Aurora
Peeps from her opening door,
Faint gleams of the sun like fairies run
And sport on a crystal floor;
Upon the river's bright panoply quivers
The noon's resplendent lance;
And by night through the narrows the moon's slanted arrows
Icily sparkle and glance.
Flown are the flocks of commerce,
Like wild swans hurrying south;
The lighter, belated, is frozen, full-freighted,
Within the harbor's mouth;
The brigantine, homeward bringing
Sweet spices from afar,
All night must wait with her fragrant freight
Below the lighthouse star.
The ships at their anchors are frozen,
From rudder to sloping chain:
Rock-like they rise: the low sloop lies
An oasis in the plain.
Like reeds here and there, the tall masts bare
Upspring: as on the edge
Of a lawn smooth-shaven, around the haven
The shipping grows like sedge.
Here, weaving the union of cities,
With hoar wakes belting the blue,
From slip to slip, past schooner and ship,
The ferry's shuttles flew:—
Now, loosed from its stall, on the yielding wall
The steamboat paws and rears;
The citizens pass on a pavement of glass,
And climb the frosted piers.
Where, in the November twilight,
To the ribs of the skeleton bark
That stranded lay in the bend of the bay,
Motionless, low, and dark,
Came ever three shags, like three lone hags,
And sat o'er the troubled water,
Each nursing apart her shrivelled heart,
With her mantle wrapped about her,—
Now over the ancient timbers
Is built a magic deck;
Children run out with laughter and shout
And dance around the wreck;
The fisherman near his long eel-spear
Thrusts in through the ice, or stands
With fingers on lips, and now and then whips
His sides with mittened hands.
Alone and pensive I wander
Far out from the city-wharf
To the buoy below in its cap of snow,
Low stooping like a dwarf;
In the fading ray of the dull, brief day
I wander and muse apart,—
For this frozen sea is a symbol to me
Of many a human heart.
I think of the hopes deep sunken
Like anchors under the ice,—
Of souls that wait for Love's sweet freight
And the spices of Paradise:
Far off their barks are tossing
On the billows of unrest,
And enter not in, for the hardness and sin
That close the secret breast.