Volume Iii Part 59 (2/2)

O fair green-girdled mother of mine, Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain, Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine, Thy large embraces are keen like pain.

Save me and hide me with all thy waves, Find me one grave of thy thousand graves, Those pure cold populous graves of thine, Wrought without hand in a world without stain.

I shall sleep, and move with the moving s.h.i.+ps, Change as the winds change, veer in the tide; My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips, I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside; Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were, Filled full with life to the eyes and hair.

As a rose is fulfilled to the rose-leaf tips With splendid summer and perfume and pride.

This woven raiment of nights and days, Were it once cast off and unwound from me, Naked and glad would I walk in thy ways, Alive and aware of thy waves and thee; Clear of the whole world, hidden at home, Clothed with the green, and crowned with the foam, A pulse of the life of thy straits and bays, A vein in the heart of the streams of the Sea.

Fair mother, fed with the lives of men, Thou art subtle and cruel of heart, men say; Thou hast taken, and shalt not render again; Thou art full of thy dead, and cold as they.

But death is the worst that comes of thee; Thou art fed with our dead, O Mother, O Sea, But when hast thou fed on our hearts? or when Having given us love, hast thou taken away?

O tender-hearted, O perfect lover, Thy lips are bitter, and sweet thine heart.

The hopes that hurt and the dreams that hover, Shall they not vanish away and apart?

But thou, thou art sure, thou art older than earth; Thou art strong for death and fruitful of birth; Thy depths conceal and thy gulfs discover; From the first thou wert; in the end thou art.

Algernon Charles Swinburne [1837-1909]

THE SEA From ”Childe Harold's Pilgrimage”

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely sh.o.r.e, There is society where none intrudes By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin, his control Stops with the sh.o.r.e; upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain A shadow of man's ravage, save his own, When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths, thy fields Are not a spoil for him,--thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth's destruction thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send'st him, s.h.i.+vering in thy playful spray And howling, to his G.o.ds, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth:--there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain t.i.tle take Of lord of thee and arbiter of war,-- These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy sh.o.r.es are empires, changed in all save thee;-- a.s.syria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters washed them power while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their sh.o.r.es obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts:--not so thou; Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play, Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow; Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Gla.s.ses itself in tempests; in all time, Calm or convulsed,--in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving;--boundless, endless, and sublime,-- The image of Eternity,--the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

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