"The Ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,—
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been."
OLL 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 shore; 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, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, 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, shivering in thy playful spray,
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay.
Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses 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.
The Seas of England
HE seas of England are our old delight;
Let the loud billow of the shingly shore
Sing freedom on her breezes evermore
To all earth's ships that sailing heave in sight!
The gaunt sea-nettle be our fortitude,
Sturdily blowing where the clear wave sips;
O, be the glory of our men and ships
Rapturous, woe-unheeding hardihood!
There is great courage in a land that hath
Liberty guarded by the unearthly seas;
And ev❜n to find peace at the last in these
How many a sailor hath sailed down to death!
Their names are like a splendour in old song;
Their record shines like bays along the years;
Their jubilation is the cry man hears
Sailing sun-fronted the vast deeps among.
The seas of England are our old delight;
Let the loud billow of the shingly shore
Sing freedom on her breezes evermore
To all earth's ships that sailing heave in sight!
Walter de la Mare.
WO walls of precipices black and steep,
The storm-lashed ramparts of a naked land,
Are parted here by leagues of lonely sand
That make a bay; and up it ever creep
Billowy ocean ripples half asleep,
That cast a belt of foam along the strand,
Seething and white, and wake in cadence grand
The everlasting thunder of the deep.
And there is never silence on that shore
Alike in storm and calm foam-fringes gird
Its desolation, and the Atlantic's roar
Makes mighty music. Though the sea be stirred
By scarce a breath of breeze, yet evermore
The sands are whitened, and the thunder heard.
A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.
Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks
Touching, upjetted in spirts of wild sea-smoke,
And scaled in sheets of wasteful foam, and fell
In vast sea-cataracts—ever and anon
Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs
Heard thro' the living roar.
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea;
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder-everlastingly.
Flakes of foam are flown from the ebb,
White runners along the beach,
Where yesterday's margin of crab's green claws
And stubble and starfish bleach.
A filmy ship looms now and then
From the point where the keen winds blow, Ghostlike it hangs in the air, then fades Where the unknown keen winds go.
Wave after wave for ten thousand years
Has furrowed the brown sand here,
Wave after wave under clouds and stars
Has cried in the dead shore's ear.
Now, lay thine ear against this golden sand,
And thou shalt hear the music of the sea,
Those hollow tunes it plays against the land,-
Is 't not a rich and wondrous melody?
I have lain hours, and fancied in its tone
I heard the languages of ages gone.
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