Friend, the sign we knew not heretofore
Towers in sight here present and sublime.
Faith in faith established evermore
Stands a sea-mark in the tides of time.
THE CLIFFSIDE PATH.
Seaward goes the sun, and homeward by the down
We, before the night upon his grave be sealed.
Low behind us lies the bright steep murmuring town,
High before us heaves the steep rough silent field.
Breach by ghastlier breach, the cliffs collapsing
yield:
Half the path is broken, half the banks divide;
Flawed and crumbled, riven and rent, they cleave and
slide
Toward the ridged and wrinkled waste of girdling sand
Deep beneath, whose furrows tell how far and wide
Wind is lord and change is sovereign of the strand.
Star by star on the unsunned waters twiring down.
Golden spear-points glance against a silver shield.
Over banks and bents, across the headland’s
crown,
As by pulse of gradual plumes through twilight wheeled,
Soft as sleep, the waking wind awakes the weald.
Moor and copse and fallow, near or far descried.
Feel the mild wings move, and gladden where they glide:
Silence, uttering love that all things understand,
Bids the quiet fields forget that hard beside
Wind is lord and change is sovereign of the strand.
Yet may sight, ere all the hoar soft shade grow brown,
Hardly reckon half the lifts and rents unhealed
Where the scarred cliffs downward sundering drive
and drown,
Hewn as if with stroke of swords in tempest steeled,
Wielded as the night’s will and the wind’s
may wield.
Crowned and zoned in vain with flowers of autumn-tide,
Soon the blasts shall break them, soon the waters
hide,
Soon, where late we stood, shall no man ever stand.
Life and love seek harbourage on the landward side:
Wind is lord and change is sovereign of the strand.
Friend, though man be less than these, for all his
pride,
Yet, for all his weakness, shall not hope abide?
Wind and change can wreck but life and waste but land:
Truth and trust are sure, though here till all subside
Wind is lord and change is sovereign of the strand.
IN THE WATER.
The sea is awake, and the sound of the song
of
the joy of her waking is rolled
From afar to the star that recedes, from anear
to
the wastes of the wild wide shore.
Her call is a trumpet compelling us homeward:
if
dawn in her east be acold,
From the sea shall we crave not her grace to rekindle
the
life that it kindled before,
Her breath to requicken, her bosom to rock us,
her
kisses to bless as of yore?
For the wind, with his wings half open, at pause
in
the sky, neither fettered nor free,
Leans waveward and flutters the ripple to laughter