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Title: A Cruise
Author: William Johnson Cory [
More Titles by Cory]
Your princely progress is begun;
And pillowed on the bounding deck
You break with dark brown hair a sun
That falls transfigured on your neck.
Sail on, and charm sun, wind, and sea.
Oh! might that love-light rest on me!
Vacantly lingering with the hours,
The sacred hours that still remain
From that rich month of fruits and flowers
Which brought you near me once again,
By thoughts of you, though roses die,
I strive to make it still July.
Soft waves are strown beneath your prow,
Like carpets for a victor's feet;
You call slow zephyrs to your brow,
In listless luxury complete:
Love, the true Halcyon, guides your ship;
Oh, might his pinion touch my lip!
I by the shrunken river stroll;
And changed, since I was left alone,
With tangled weed and rising shoal,
The loss I mourn he seems to own:
This is, how base soe'er his sloth,
This is the stream that bore us both.
For you shall granite peaks uprise
As old and scornful as your race,
And fringed with firths of lucent dyes
The jewelled beach your limbs embrace.
Oh bather, may those Western gems
Remind you of my lilied Thames.
I too have seen the castled West,
Her Cornish creeks, her Breton ports,
Her caves by knees of hermits pressed,
Her fairy islets bright with quartz:
And dearer now each well-known scene,
For what shall be than what hath been.
Obeisance of kind strangers' eyes,
Triumphant cannons' measured roar,
Doffed plumes, and martial courtesies,
Shall greet you on the Norman shore.
Oh, that I were a stranger too,
To win that first sweet glance from you.
I was a stranger once: and soon
Beyond desire, above belief,
Thy soul was as a crescent moon,
A bud expanding leaf by leaf.
I'd pray thee now to close, to wane,
So that 'twere all to do again.
[The end]
William Johnson Cory's poem: Cruise
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