Paul Hamilton Hayne: Verses about Water

GRIEVOUS, in sooth, was luckless Sindbad's plight,
Saddled with that foul monster of the sea;
But who of some soul-harrowing weight is free?
And though we veil our woe from public sight,
Full many a weary day and dismal night,
It chafes our spirits sorely! Yet, for thee,
Whate'er, O friend, thy special grief may be,
Range thou against it all thy manhood's might.
Thus, though thou may'st not smite on brow or breast
That irksome incubus, be sure some day
The load that blights shall droop and fall away,
And thou, because of torture borne so well,
Shall pass from out thy long, malign unrest
And walk thy future paths invincible!

SEE! See!
How the shadows steal along,
Blending in a golden throng,
Softly, lovingly;
From each mossed and quaint tree-column,
Stretched toward the dimpling river,
How they quiver!
While in low, pathetic tone
Twilight's herald-breeze is blown
Down the sunset solemn!

Hear! hear!
Dropped from gray mists, circling high,
The sea-wending curlew's cry,
Strangely wild and drear;
Echoed by a voice that thrills us,
From the murmurous verge of ocean-
Voice that fills us
With a sense of mystery old,
And vague memories which enfold
Many a weird emotion.

Turn! turn!
From yon loftier cloud-land dun;
Mark what splendors of the sun
Westward throb and burn-
Burn as if some glorious angel
Blessed the air and land and river
With his mute evangel:
All things own so rich a grace
That in Heaven's divine embrace
Earth seems clasped forever!

Here in these mellow grasses, the whole morn,
I love to rest; yonder, the ripening corn
Rustles its greenery; and his blithesome horn

Windeth the frolic breeze o'er field and dell,
Now pealing a bold stave with lusty swell,
Now falling to low breaths ineffable

Of whispered joyance. At calm length I lie,
Fronting the broad blue spaces of the sky,
Covered with cloud-groups, softly journeying by:

An hundred shapes, fantastic, beauteous, strange,
Are theirs, as o'er yon airy waves they range
At the wind's will, from marvelous change to change;

Castles, with guarded roof, and turret tall,
Great sloping archway, and majestic wall,
Sapped by the breezes to their noiseless fall!

Pagodas vague! above whose towers outstream
Banners that wave with motions of a dream—
Rising, or drooping in the noontide gleam;

Gray lines of Orient pilgrims: a gaunt band
On famished camels, o'er the desert sand
Plodding towards their prophet's Holy Land;

Mid-ocean,—and a shoal of whales at play,
Lifting their monstrous frontlets to the day,
Thro' rainbow arches of sun-smitten spray;

Followed by splintered icebergs, vast and lone,
Set in swift currents of some arctic zone,
Like fragments of a Titan's world o'erthrown;

Next, measureless breadths of barren, treeless moor,
Whose vaporous verge fades down a glimmering shore,
Round which the foam-capped billows toss and roar!

Calms of bright water—like a fairy's wiles,
Wooing with ripply cadence and soft smiles,
The golden shore-slopes of Hesperian Isles;

Their inland plains rife with a rare increase
Of plumed grain! and many a snowy fleece
Shining athwart the dew-lit hills of peace;

Wrecks of gigantic cities—to the tune
Of some wise air-god built!—o'er which the noon
Seems shuddering; caverns, such as the wan Moon

Shows in her desolate bosom; then, a crowd
Of awed and reverent faces, palely bowed
O'er a dead queen, laid in her ashy shroud—

A queen of eld—her pallid brow impearled
By gems barbaric! her strange beauty furled
In mystic cerements of the antique world.

Weird pictures, fancy-gendered!—one by one,
'Twixt blended beams and shadows, gold and dun,
These transient visions vanish in the sun.