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Importunate, the lion-throated sea,

Blind with the mounting foam of winter, mourns

To cliffs where cling the wrenched and laboured roots

Of cypresses, and blossoms granite-grown

Lose in the gale their tattered petals, cast

On bleak, tumultuous cauldrons of the tide,

Where fell thy molten ashes.**** Past the bay,

The morning dunes a dust of marble seem—

Wrought from primeval fanes to Beauty reared,

And shattered by some vandal Titan’s mace

To more than Time’s own ruin. Woods of pine,

Above the dunes in Gothic gloom recede,

And climb the ridge that arches to the north

Long as a lolling dragon’s chine. The gulls,

Like ashen leaves far-off upon the wind,

Flutter above the broad and smouldering sea,

That lightens with the fire-white foam: But thou,

Of whom the sea is urn and sepulcher,

Who hast thereof a blown, tumultuous sleep,

And stormy peace in gulfs impacable—

What carest thou if Beauty loiter there,

Clad with the crystal noon? What carest thou

If sharp and sudden balsams of the pine

Mingle for her in the air’s bright thurible

With keener fragrance proffered by the deep

From riven gulfs resounding?*** Knowest thou

What solemn shores of crocus-colored light,

Reared by the sunset in its realm of change,

Will mock the dream-lost isles that sirens ward,

And charm the icy emerald of the seas

To unabiding iris? Knowest thou

The waxing of the wan December foam—

A thunder-cloven veil that climbs and falls

Upon the cliffs forever?

Thou art still

As they that sleep in the eldest pyramid—

Or mounded with Mesopotamia

And immemorial deserts! Thou hast part

In the wordless, dumb conspiracy of death—

Silence wherein the warrior kings accord,

And all the wrangling sages! If thy voice

In any wise return, and word of thee,

It is a lost, incognizable sigh,

Upon the wind’s oblivious woe, or blown,

Antiphonal, from wave to plangent wave

In the vast, unhuman sorrow of the main,

On tides that lave the city-laden shores

Of lands wherein the eternal vanities

Are served at many altars; tides that wash

Lemuria’s unfathomable walls,

And idly sway the weed-involvèd oars

At wharves of lost Atlantis; tides that rise

From coral-coffered bones of all the drowned,

And sunless tombs of pearl that krakens guard.

II.

As none shall roam the sad Leucadian rock,

Above the sea’s immitigable moan,

But in his heart a song that Sappho sang,

And flame-like murmur of the muted lyres

That time hath not extinguished, and the cry

Of nightingales two thousand years ago,

Shall mix with those remorseful chords that break

To endless foam and thunder; and he learn

The unsleeping woe that lives in Mytelene

Till wave and deep are dumb with ice, and rime

Hath paled the rose forever—even thus,

Daughter of Sappho, passion-souled and fair,

Whose face the lutes of Lesbos would have sung,

And white Errina followed—even thus,

The western wave is eloquent of thee,

And half the wine-like fragrance of the foam

Is attar of thy spirit, and the pines

From breasts of mournful, melancholy green,

Release remembered echoes of thy song

To airs importunate. No wraith of fog,

Twice-ghostly with the Hecatean moon,

Nor rack of blown, fantasmal spume shall rise,

But I will dream thy spirit walks the sea,

Unpacified with Lethe. Thou art grown

A part of all sad beauty, and my soul

Hath found thy buried sorrow in its own,

Inseparable forever. Moons that pass,

Immaculate, to solemn pyres of snow,

And meres whereon the broken lotus dies,

Are kin to thee, as wine-lipped autumn is,

With suns of swift, irreparable change,

And lucid evenings eager-starred. Of thee,

The pearlèd fountains tell, and winds that take

In one white swirl the petals of the plum,

And leave the branches lonely. Royal blooms

Of the magnolia, pale as Beauty’s brow,

And foam-white myrtles, and the fiery, bright

Pome-granate flow’rs, will subtly speak of thee

While spring hath speech and meaning. Music hath

Her fugitive and uncommanded chords,

That thrill with tremors of thy mystery,

Or turn the void thy fleeing soul hath left

To murmurs inenarrable, that hold

Epiphanies of blind, conceiveless vision,

And things we dare not know, and dare not dream.

Note: Nora May French, the most gifted poet of her sex that America has produced, died by her own hand at Carmel in 1907. Her ashes were strewn into the sea from Point Lobos.