4.

Like ashes the low cliffs crumble,
  The banks drop down into dust,
The heights of the hills are made humble,
  As a reed’s is the strength of their trust: 
As a city’s that armies environ,
  The strength of their stay is of sand: 
But the grasp of the sea is as iron,
    Laid hard on the land.

5.

A land that is thirstier than ruin;
  A sea that is hungrier than death;
Heaped hills that a tree never grew in;
  Wide sands where the wave draws breath;
All solace is here for the spirit
  That ever for ever may be
For the soul of thy son to inherit,
    My mother, my sea.

6.

O delight of the headlands and beaches! 
  O desire of the wind on the wold,
More glad than a man’s when it reaches
  That end which it sought from of old
And the palm of possession is dreary
  To the sense that in search of it sinned;
But nor satisfied ever nor weary
    Is ever the wind.

7.

The delight that he takes but in living
  Is more than of all things that live: 
For the world that has all things for giving
  Has nothing so goodly to give: 
But more than delight his desire is,
  For the goal where his pinions would be
Is immortal as air or as fire is,
    Immense as the sea.

8.

Though hence come the moan that he borrows
  From darkness and depth of the night,
Though hence be the spring of his sorrows,
  Hence too is the joy of his might;
The delight that his doom is for ever
  To seek and desire and rejoice,
And the sense that eternity never
    Shall silence his voice.

9.

That satiety never may stifle
  Nor weariness ever estrange
Nor time be so strong as to rifle
  Nor change be so great as to change
His gift that renews in the giving. 
  The joy that exalts him to be
Alone of all elements living
    The lord of the sea.

10.

What is fire, that its flame should consume her? 
  More fierce than all fires are her waves: 
What is earth, that its gulfs should entomb her? 
  More deep are her own than their graves. 
Life shrinks from his pinions that cover
  The darkness by thunders bedinned: 
But she knows him, her lord and her lover,
    The godhead of wind.

11.

For a season his wings are about her,
  His breath on her lips for a space;
Such rapture he wins not without her
  In the width of his worldwide race. 
Though the forests bow down, and the mountains
  Wax dark, and the tribes of them flee,
His delight is more deep in the fountains
      And springs of the sea.

12.

There are those too of mortals that love him,
  There are souls that desire and require,
Be the glories of midnight above him
  Or beneath him the daysprings of fire: 
And their hearts are as harps that approve him
  And praise him as chords of a lyre
That were fain with their music to move him
      To meet their desire.