Читать книгу Sea Poems - Rice Cale Young - Страница 6

I know your heart, O Sea!

You are tossed with cold desire to flood earth utterly;

You run at the cliffs, you fling wild billows at beaches,

You reach at islands with fingers of foam to crumble them;

Yes, even at mountain tops you shout your purpose

Of making the earth a shoreless circle of waters!

I know your surging heart!

Tides mighty and all-contemptuous rise within it,

Tides spurred by the wind to champ and charge and thunder —

Tho the sun and moon rein them —

At the troubling land, the breeding-place of mortals,

Of men who are ever transmuting life to spirit,

And ever taking your salt to savor their tears.

I know your tides, I know them!

"Down," they rage, "with the questing of men, and crying!

With their continents – cradles of grief and despair!

Better entombing waters for them, better our deeps unfathomed,

Where birth is soulless, life goalless, death toll-less for all,

And where dark ooze enshrouds past resurrection!"

Ah, yes, I know your heart!

I have heard it raving at coast-lights set to reveal you,

I have watched it foam at ships that sought to defy you,

I have seen it straining at cables that cross you, bearing whispers hid to you,

Or heaving at waves of the air that tell your hurricanes.

I know, I know your heart!

Men you will sink, and shores will sink; but a shore shall be man's forever,

From whence his lighthouse soul shall signal the Infinite,

Whose fleets go by, star after star, bearing their unknown burden

To a Port which only eternity shall determine!