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Title: Pageants Of The Sea
Author: Cale Young Rice [
More Titles by Rice]
What memories have I of it,
The sea, continent-clasping,
The sea whose spirit is a sorcery,
The sea whose magic foaming is immortal!
What memories have I of it thro the years!
What memories of its shores!...
Of shadowy headlands doomed to stay the storm;
And red cliffs clawing ever into the tides;
Of misty moors whose royal heather purples;
Of channeled marshes, village-nesting hills;
Of crags wind-eaten, homes of hungry gulls;
Of bays--
Where sails float furled, resting softly at harbour,
Until, winging again, they sweep away.
What memories have I, too,
Of faring out at dawn upon tameless waters,
Upon the infinite wasted yearning of them,
While winds, the mystic harp-strings of the world,
Were sounding sweet farewells;
While coast and lighthouse tower were fading fast,
And from me all the world slipped like a garment.
What memories of mid-deeps!...
Of heaving on thro haunted vasts of foam,
Thro swaying terrors of tormented tides;
While the wind, no more singing, took to raving,
In rhythmic infinite words,
A chantey ancient and immeasurable
Concerning man and God.
What memories of fog-spaces--
Wide leaden deserts of dim wavelessness,
Smooth porpoise-broken glass
As gray as a dream upon despair's horizon;
What sailing soft till lo the shroud was lifted
And suddenly there came, as a great joy,
The blue sublimity of summer skies,
The azure mystery of happy heavens,
The passionate sweet parley of the breeze,
And dancing waves--that lured us on and on
Past islands above whose verdant mountain-heads
Enchanted clouds were hanging,
And whence wild spices wandered;
Past iridescent reefs and vessels bound
For ports unknown:
O far, far past, until the sun, in fire,
An impotent and shrunken orb lay dying,
On heaving twilight purple gathered round.
And then, what nights!...
The phantom moon in misty resurrection
Arising from her sepulchre in the East
And sparkling the dark waters--
The unremembering moon!
And covenants of star to faithful star,
Dewy, like tears of God, across the sky;
And under the moon's fair ring Orion running
Forever in great war adown the West.
What far, infinite nights!
With cloud-horizons where the lightning slumbered
Or wakened once and again with startled watch,
Again to fall asleep
And leave the moon-path free for all my thoughts
To wander peacefully
Away and still away
Until the stars sighed out in dawn's great pallor,
Just as the lands of my desire appeared.
What memories ... have I of it!
[The end]
Cale Young Rice's poem: Pageants Of The Sea
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