William Gay: Verses about Nature

Dear lowly flower that liftest up
Among the grass thy golden cup,
I take thee from thy earthly bed
And plant thee in my heart instead.
Ye ocean waves that mount on high
As emulous of the lofty sky,
'Tis in my breast ye onward sweep
Which as the sea is wide and deep.
Great sun, from thy supernal height
On flower and wave who pourest light,
My soul doth clasp thee in the skies,
And thou in me dost set and rise.
O thou I love, thy lips of fire
Have waked an infinite desire,
And unto all things as to thee
Flames out the love that burns in me.

Dark ocean walls, majestically steep,
That dare the skies, that guard a solitude
Of straitened sea from every tempest rude
That uncontrolled molests the outer deep!
White pinnacles, where Summer suns will reap
A silent store of clouds, unloose the flood
That captive long in Winter's hold hath stood,
And wake the mountain mosses from their sleep!
Dark walls! white peaks! unravished silences!
Grey sinuous lane of solitary sea!
Wild cataracts plunging fearless from the height!
And glaciers patient through the centuries!
O would that my revering soul might be
Among your lonely shrines an eremite!

SHE sits a queen whom none shall dare despoil,
Her crown the sun, her guard the vigilant sea,
And round her throne are gathered, stalwart, free,
A people proud, yet stooping to the soil,
Patient to swell her greatness with their toil,
And swift to leave, should dire occasion be,
The mine, the flock, the desk, the furrowed lea,
And force the invader to a dark recoil.—
Yet as she gazes o’er the plains that lie
Fruitful about her throne, she sighs full sore
To see the barriers Greed has builded high,
Dividing them who brothers were before,
When still they dwelt beneath a sterner sky
And heard the thunders of a wilder shore.

I love not when the oily seas
Heave huge and slow beneath the sun,
When decks are hot, and dead the breeze,
And wits are dropping one by one.
But when the South wind fiercely breaks
His frozen bonds and rushes forth
Across the roaring sea and shakes
His icy spear against the North;
When breakers thunder on the lee,
When timbers crash and sails are rent,
When wild and louder grows the sea,
And black the reeling firmament;
O then at last my soul awakes,
A thousand joys within her rise,
And all the bounds of sense she breaks
To soar exulting through the skies.
I love not when my ship of Fate
Glides on before some fragrant breeze,
And slowly tracks with costly freight
The sapphire deeps of prosperous seas.
But when beneath the sky of death
She staggers through the seas of pain,
When passion's hot tempestuous breath
Through shroud and tackle shrieks amain,
When deepening glooms the day o'erwhelm,
And all is one wild wreck of form,
O then resolved I grasp the helm
And proudly guide her through the storm.

Three Ghosts that haunt me have I,
Three Ghosts in my soul that fight,
Three grandsire Ghosts in my soul,
That haunt me by day and by night.

The first was a dark mountaineer,
Who hunted with arrow and knife,
To whom the turf was a bed,
And the wind of the moorland was life.
And the next was a mariner rude,
Whose home and whose grave was the sea,
For whom the land was a prison
And only the ocean was free.
And the last was a shrunken recluse,
Who lived with the dust and the gloom
And wrote of the Saints and of Him
Who went for us to His doom.

And all through the days and years
These ancient Ghosts contend,
And my soul is a battle-field
Of passions that pierce and rend.
And whenever a sunbeam alights
All gleaming and fresh on my page,
I am wild for the hills and the bush,
I am torn with the hunter's rage.
I am sick of the smell of a book,
I am off with the dogs or a gun,
Or I gallop my fifty miles
Before the set of the sun.
And yet from some loftier peak
When I look on the sea from afar,
I feel like one in a grave;
And I long for a ship full-sailed
And an ocean wide on the lee
I choke on the solid land
For the lift of the undulant sea.

Yet ever the battle goes on,
And ever there rises a day
When the Ghosts of the wave and the wood
To the Ghost of the cell give way.
Then the land is a wilderness drear,
And dismal and vast is the sea,
But cloistered in peace with my books
My soul is uplifted and free.

Three Ghosts that haunt me have I,
Three Ghosts in my soul that fight,
Three grandsire Ghosts in my soul,
That haunt me by day and by night.
Yet ofttimes there joins in the fray
One gross and sluggish of limb,
No spectre is he but a man,
Whose strokes are heavy and grim.
For a man is not nothing, I swear,
Nor a braggart am I when I boast
That though he be slothful or sleep,
A man is more than a ghost.
And my soul is my own, I aver,
The master and lord of it I,
And whenever I will to bestir,
All ghostly usurpers shall fly.
Then I what is mine will assume,
Nor diverge from the path of my will.
Though the Ghosts I have routed still call
From the desk and the sea and the hill.