Chapter 4
O again, again, In my katamaran A-keel would I push To your palmy door! Again would I hear The heave and hush Of your song by the plantain-tree. But far away Do I toil and crush The hopes that arise At my sick heart's core. For never near Does it come, the day That draws me again to thee!
THE CITY
Soft and fair by the Desert's edge, And on the dim blue edge of the sea, Where white gulls wing all day and fledge Their young on the high cliff's sandy ledge, There is a city I have beheld, Sometime or where, by day or dream, I know not which, for it seems enspelled As I am by its memory.
Pale minarets of the Prophet pierce Above it into the white of the skies, And sails enchanted a thousand years Flit at its feet while fancy steers. No face of all its faces to me Is known--no passion of it or pain. It is but a city by the sea, Enshrined forever beyond my eyes!
FULL TIDE
Sea-scents, wild-rose scents, Bay and barberry too, Drench the wind, the Maine wind, That gulls are dipping thro, With soft hints, sweet hints, With lull, lure and desire; With memory-wafts and mysteries, And all the ineffable histories Made when the sea and land meet, And the sun lends nuptial fire.
Sea-foam, and dream-foam, And which is which, who knows, When all day long the heart goes out To every wave that blows, That blossoms on the bright tide, Then sheds a shimmering crest And yields its tossing place to one Whose blooming is as quickly done-- For beauty is ever swift--begot Of rapture and unrest.
Sea-deeps, and soul-deeps, And where shall faith be found If not within the heart's beat Or in the surging sound Of the sea, which is the earth's heart, Beating with tireless might; Beating--tho but a tragedy Life seems on every land and sea; Beating to bring all breath, somehow, Out of despair's blight.
THE HERDING
Quietly, quietly in from the fields Of the grey Atlantic the billows come, Like sheep to the fold. Shorn by the rocks of fleecy foam, They sink on the brown seaweed at home; And a bell, like that of a bellwether, Is scarcely heard from the buoy-- Save when they suddenly stumble together, In herded hurrying joy, Upon its guidance: then soft music From it is tolled.
Far out in the murk that follows them in Is heard the call of the fog-horn's voice, Like a shepherd's--low. And the strays as if waiting it seem to pause And lift their heads and listen--because It is sweet from wandering ways to be driven, When we have fearless breasts, When all that we strayed for has been given, When no want molests Us more--no need of the tide's ebbing And tide's flow.
ON THE MAINE COAST
The rocks, lean fingers of the land, Reach out into the sea And cool themselves, all day long, In the tide drippingly. They catch the seaweed in them And the starfish on their tips, And gulls that light And the swift flight Of swallows skimming grey and white-- And spars of broken ships.
The moon, God's perfect silver, With which He pays the world For toil and quest and day's unrest, Is washed on them and swirled. And avidly they seize it, Then let it slip away, Only again And yet again To grasp at it--as eager men At joy no hand can stay.
SEANCE
Hovering wings of terns Over the rock-pools flutter, For the tide, ebbed far out, Seems to stumble and stutter; Seems like a spirit lost, Unable to come again Back to the wonted ways and days Of ever-wanting men.
And the moon, a medium Trance-pale, is laying her light Over its surge--till, lo, It turns from the deep and night. And the spirit-word it brings Is the message of all time, That doubt is only the ebb of faith, Which ever reflows sublime!
A SIDMOUTH LAD
Salcombe Hill and four hills more Lie to leftward of this shore. On the right Peak Hill arises Ever rises, sickening, o'er.
Two score rotting years I've seen Sidmouth sit those hills between: Only Sidmouth--and twice over Must I bide it, as I've been.
Then a churchyard hole for me, By the dull voice of the sea. Rotting, still in Sidmouth rotting, Rotting to eternity.
WIDOWED
One wild gull on a wilder storm, Winging to keep her lone heart warm. One wild gull by the surf--and I, Beaten by wind and rain and sky.
One wild gull in the offing lost, Wilder heart in my bosom tost. One wild gull--O why but one! Two, dear God, should there be--or none!
TO THE SEA
Are you enraged, O sea, with the blue peace Of heaven, so to uplift your armied waves, Your billowy rebellion against its ease, And with Tartarean mutter from cold caves, From shuddering profundities where shapes Of awe glide thro entangled leagues of ooze, To hoot your watery omens evermore, And evermore your moanings interfuse With seething necromancy and mad lore?
Or do you labour with the drifting bones Of countless dead, O mighty Alchemist, Within whose stormy crucible the stones Of sunk primordial shores, granite and schist, Are crumbled by your all-abrasive beat? With immemorial chanting to the moon, And cosmic incantation, do you crave Rest to be found not till your wilds are strewn Frigid and desert over earth's last grave?
You seem drunk with immensity, mad, blind-- With raving deaf, with wandering forlorn, Parent of Demogorgon whose dire mind Is night and earthquake, shapeless shame and scorn Of the o'ermounting birth of Harmony. Bound in your briny bed and gnawing earth With foamy writhing and fierce-panted tides, You are as Fate in torment of a dearth Of black disaster and destruction's strides.
And how you shatter silence from the world, Incarnate Motion of all mystery! Whose waves are fury-wings, whose winds are hurled Whither your Ghost tempestuous can see A desolate apocalypse of death. Yea, how you shatter silence from the world, With emerald overflowing, waste on waste Of flashing susurration, dashed and swirled On isles and continents that shrink abased!
And yet, O veering veil of the Unknown, Gathered from primal mist and firmament; O surging shape of Life's unfathomed moan, Whelming humanity with fears unmeant; Yet do I love you, far above all fear, And loving you unconquerably trust The runes that from your ageless surfing start Would read, were they revealed, gust upon gust, That Immortality is might of heart!
SEA-MAD
(_A Breton Maid_)
Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me! One said: "Away! he is dead! Upon my foam I have flung his head! Go back to your cote, you never shall wed!-- (Nor he!)"
Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me. Two brake. The third with a quake Cried loud, "O maid, I'll find for thy sake His dead lost body: prepare his wake!" (And back it plunged to the sea!)
Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me. One bore-- And swept on the shore-- His pale, pale face I shall kiss no more! Ah, woe to women death passes o'er! (Woe's me!)
THE ATHEIST
Over a scurf of rocks the tide Wanders inward far and wide, Lifting the sea-weed's sloven hair, Filling the pools and foaming there, Sighing, sighing everywhere.
Merged are the marshes, merged the sands, Save the dunes with pine-tree hands Stretching upward toward the sky, Where the sun, their god, moves high: Would I too had a god--yea, I!
For, the sea is to me but sea, And the sky but infinity. Tides and times are but some chance Born of a primal atom-dance. All is a mesh of Circumstance.
In it there is no Heart--no Soul-- No illimitable Goal-- Only wild happenings, by wont Made into laws no might can shunt From the deep grooves in which they hunt.
Wings of the gull I watch or claws Of the cold crab whose strangeness awes: Faces of men that feel the force Of a hid thing they call life's course: It is their hoping or remorse.
Yet it may be that I have missed Something that only they who tryst, Not with the sequence of events But with their viewless Immanence, Find and acclaim with spirit-sense.
AT THE HELM
(_Nova Scotia_)
Fog, and a wind that blows the sea Blindly into my eyes. And I know not if my soul shall be When the day dies.
But if it be not and I lose All that men live to gain-- I who have known but heaving hues Of wind and rain--
Still I shall envy no man's lot, For I have held this great, Never in whines to have forgot That Fate is Fate.
IMPERTURBABLE
Three times the fog rolled in today, a silent shroud, From which the breakers ran like ghosts, moaning and tumbling. Three times a startled sea-bird cried aloud, On the wind stumbling.
But I cast my net with never a fear, tho wraiths in me And birds of wild unrest were stirring and starting and crying. For I knew that under the sway of every sea There is calm lying.
WASTE
I flung a wild rose into the sea, I know not why. For swinging there on a rathe rose-tree, By the scented bay and barberry, Its petals gave all their sweet to me, As I passed by.
And yet I flung it into the tide, And went my way. I climbed the gray rocks, far and wide, And many a cove of peace I tried, With none of them all to be satisfied, The whole long day.
For I had wasted a beautiful thing, Which might have won Each passing heart to pause and sing, On the sea-path there, of its blossoming. And who wastes beauty shall feel want's sting, As I had done.
RESURGENCE
I was content, O Sea, to be free for a space from striving, Content as the brown weed is, at rest on rocks in the sun, When the salt tide is out, and the surf no more is riving At its roots, or swirling and bidding it sway where the white waves run.
I was content--with life, and love, and a little over; A little achieved of the much that is given to men to do. But now with your tidal strife do you come again, vain rover, And tell of vastitudes, to be sailed, or sounded, anew.
Now again do you surge. And the fathomless tides of thinking, Of wanting, waiting, despairing--or daring--with you come; The inner tides of the soul, that had ebbed with slumberous shrinking, But now are bursting again, thro the caves of it long numb.
So vainly I lie on the cliff with the blissful Blue above me And listless sated gulls afloat below on the swells, For I am soothless, sateless, because of desires that shove me Out and away with the winds, on quests no distance quells!
LIFE'S ANSWER
A stroke of lightning stabbed the storm-black sea, As if it sought the heart of Life thereunder, And meant to put an end to it utterly;-- Then came thunder-- Wildly applauding thunder.
Riven with fear the foam-crests ran before it, Hissed by the rain and beaten down to darkness. A gull rose out of the murk with wings that tore it-- Life's answer to the storm's terrible starkness.
AS THE TIDE COMES IN
The quivering terns dart wild and dive, As the tide comes tumbling in. The calm rock-pools grow all alive, With the tide tumbling in. The crab who under the brown weed creeps, And the snail who lies in his house and sleeps, Awake and stir, as the plunging sweeps Of the tide come tumbling in.
Gray driftwood swishes along the sand, As the tide comes tumbling in. With wreck and wrack from many a land, On the tide, tumbling in. About the beach are a broken spar, A pale anemone's torn sea-star And scattered scum of the waves' old war, As the tide tumbles in.
And, oh, there is a stir at the heart of me, As the tide comes tumbling in. All life once more is a part of me, As the tide tumbles in. New hopes awaken beneath despair And thoughts slip free of the sloth of care, While beauty and love are everywhere-- As the tide comes tumbling in.
SENSE-SWEETNESS
Flowers are dancing, waves playing, pines swaying, gulls are a-swarm; Sea and heather, sunning together, glad of the weather, with God are warm.
Flowers are dancing, clouds winging, larks singing, summer abrew-- Summer the old ecstatic passion of Life to fashion the world anew.
TIDALS
Low along the sea, low along the sea, The gray gulls are flying, and one sail swings; The tide is foaming in; the soft wind sighing; The brown kelp is stretching, to the surf, harp-strings.
Low along the sea, low along the sea, The gray gulls are flying, and one sail fades; The tide is foaming out; the soft wind dying; And white stars are peeping from the night's pale shades.
A SAILOR'S WIFE
Into port when the sun was setting Rode the ship that bore my love, Over the breakers wildly fretting, Under the skies above.
Down to the beach I ran to meet him; He would come as he had said: And he came--in a sailor's coffin, Dead! . . . . . .
O the ships of the sea! the lovers Torn by them apart!... The tide has nothing now to tell me, The breakers break my heart!
TO SEA!
Give me the tiller; up with the sail! Now let her swing to the breeze. Out to sea with a dripping rail, To sea, with a heart at ease!
Out of the Harbour! out of the Bay! Out by the valiant Light, Out by rocks where the young gulls lay-- And glad winds teach them flight!
Out of the Harbour! out of the Bay! Out to the open sea! O there's not in the world a way To feel so wildly free!
So, let her quiver! So, let her leap! So, let her dance the foam! All life else is a narrow keep, The sea alone is home!
GIVE OVER, O SEA!
Give over, O sea! You never shall reach Nirvana! Your tides, like the tidal generations, ever shall rise and fall, And your infinite waves find birth, rebirth, and billowy dissolution.
The years of your existence are unending. The years of your unresting are forever. The sun, who is desire, ever begets in you his passion, And the moon is ever drawing you, with silvery soft alluring, To surge and sway, to wander and fret, to waste yourself in foam. So Buddha-calm shall never descend upon you.
And tho it may often seem you have found the Way, Your tempest-sins return and quicken to wild reincarnations, And again great life, pulsing and perilous, Omnipotent life, that ever resurges thro the universe, Lashes you back to striving, back to yearning, back to speech. To utterance on all shores of the world Of things unutterable.
Give over then, you never shall reach Nirvana! Nor I, who am your acolyte for a moment; Who swing a censer of fragrant words before your priestly feet, That tread these altar-rocks, bedraped with weeds gently afloat, And with the wild flutter of gulls wildly mysterious.
Give over and call your winds again to join you! O chanter of deep enchantments, of uncharted litanies, Call them and bid them say with you that life transcends retreat, And that, in the temple of its Immanence, There is no peace that does not spring daily from peacelessness, And no Nirvana save in the lee of storm.
THE NUN
A lone palm leans in the moonlight, Over a convent wall. The sea below is waking and breaking With a calm heave and fall. A young nun sits at a window; For Heaven she is too fair; Yet even the dove of God might nest In her bosom beating there.
A lone ship sails from the harbour: Whom does it bear away? Her lover who, sin-hearted, has parted And left her but to pray? She has no lover, nor ever Has heard afar love's sigh. Only the Convent's vesper vow Has ever dimmed her eye.
For naught knows she of her beauty, More than the palm of its peace: And none shall cross her portal, to mortal Desires to bend her knees. The ways of the world have flowers, And any who will pluck those; But in His hand, against all harm, God still will keep some rose.
LAST SIGHT OF LAND
The clouds in woe hang far and dim; I look again, and lo, Only a faint and shadow line Of shore--I watch it go.
The gulls have left the ship and wheel Back to the cliff's gray wraith. Will it be so of all our thoughts When we set sail on Death?
And what will the last sight be of life As lone we fare and fast? Grief and a face we love in mist-- Then night and awe too vast?
Or the dear light of Hope--like that, Oh, see, from the lost shore Kindling and calling "Onward, you Shall reach the Evermore!"
THE END
On this and following pages are listed other books by Cale Young Rice. They are all published by The Century Co., 353 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
SHADOWY THRESHOLDS
By CALE YOUNG RICE
"Cale Young Rice is far too great a pout to be acclaimed in some partisan circles.... He is intensely American ... as authentic an artist as Shelley or Keats.... He has the magic of Poe without that poet's morbidity.... He is America's living master-poet."--_D. F. Hannigan (The Rochester Post-Express)._
"This volume maintains Mr. Rice's usual high level and proves anew his right to one of the high places among modern poets."--_Edward J. Wheeler (Current Opinion)._
"Mr. Rice is modern in the broadest sense of that term. Many of his poems are without rhyme and have irregular metres, but they never offend thereby.... His place in contemporary first class company is secure.--_The Springfield Republican._
"A volume possessing range and variety, together with a lyric quality which distinguishes this poet, who ranks among the foremost American writers."--_The Post-Intelligencer (Seattle)._
"Mr. Rice in his dramas is an enchanter, and to cast a spell is better than to have uttered the most lovely lyrics--but he has done both."--_E. A. Jonas (The Louisville Herald)._
"A new volume showing again the power and beauty of Mr. Rice's genius."--_The Boston Globe._
"What a pleasure to take up a new book by Cale Young Rice. Here we have variety, if ever.... If one can only own one of his books this is a good volume to choose."--_The Galveston News._
"Cale Young Rice is a poet capable of sounding the deep imaginative strain not only with melody, but with vigor and power of thought. This volume will add another shining stone to his reputation."--_The San Francisco Chronicle._
"Once more a book of the same high order as all Mr. Rice's work."--_The Rochester Democrat-Chronicle._
"Shadowy Thresholds has as great a variety of poetic forms as any volume of late years.... Mr. Rice illumines many phases of life, uniting in his work the finish and romance of the older poetry with the directness that constitutes the best merit of the new."--_The Louisville Evening Post._
_12mo. 179 pages. Price $1.50_
WRAITHS AND REALITIES
By CALE YOUNG RICE
"In the writing of lyrics Mr. Rice is unequalled by any modern poet.... One must go outside of contemporary life to find anything of similar excellence."--_Gordon Ray Young (The Los Angeles Times)._
"A new book by Mr. Rice is always an event in American letters...."--_The New York Tribune._
"Here, for all to read, is poetic genius spurred and wrought upon ... by a rare and wondrous poetic inspiration.... It is like great chimes sounding--jangled at times or overborne--but always great."--_The Philadelphia North American._
"Mr. Rice in his narratives can tell such tales as the old ballad-makers would have gloated over, and can make them contemporary and convincing. He can create life tragedies or comedies in a few lines and leave the reader with a sense of having been given a full meal of circumstance.... He is original without striving to be so, and one can never be embarrassed by the affirmation that he has come to hold a high place among poets of America."--_The Chicago Tribune._
"Cale Young Rice has been credited with some of the finest poetry, and regarded as a distinguished master of lyric utterance, and this latest volume is warrant for such approval."--_The Brooklyn Eagle._
"We find in Mr. Rice the large and elemental vision a poet must have to serve his people when overwhelmed by elemental sorrows and passions. His poetry is a spiritual force interpreting life in the various phases of intellect and emotion, with a beauty of finish and sense of form that are unerring."--_The Louisville Post._
"All that has been said of Cale Young Rice, and that is much indeed, is justified in this latest volume."--_The San Francisco Chronicle._
"Cale Young Rice is a real poet of genuine and sincere inspiration, never reminiscent or imitative or obvious, but singing from a full heart his keen, meditative songs."--_The New York Times._
_12mo. 187 pages. Price $1.50_
COLLECTED PLAYS AND POEMS
By CALE YOUNG RICE
"The great quality of Cale Young Rice's work is that, amid all distractions and changes in contemporary taste, it remains true to the central drift of great poetry. His interests are very wide ... and his books open up a most varied world of emotion and romance."--_Gilbert Murray._
"The quality of Mr. Rice's work is high. It is seen at its best in his poetic dramas, which maintain an astonishing elevation and intensity of passion ... but his visionary and philosophical poems are nearly as fine. He has a thorough mastery of form, yet notwithstanding the ease of his verse it is never slipshod or mechanical."--_The Spectator (London)._
"With variations of phrase Cale Young Rice has been described by critics here and in America as "the most distinguished master of lyric utterance in the New World." ... He has dramatic genius ... and is a born maker of songs.... His later volumes confirm the judgment of those who have named him the first and most distinctive of modern American lyrists, and one of the world's true poets."--_F. Heath (The London Bookman)._
"Mr. Rice is an American poet whose reputation is deserved.... He has achieved a high position as poet and dramatist, a great fertility and variety of outlook being marked features of his work."--_The London Times._
"Foremost among writers who have brought America into prominence in the realm of modern thought is Mr. Cale Young Rice.... 'Collected Plays and Poems' is one of the best offerings of verse we have had for long. Indeed, it has real brilliance.... Mr. Rice's plays are masterful."--_The Book Monthly (London)._
"Cale Young Rice is highly esteemed by readers wherever English is the native speech."--_The Manchester Guardian._
"In Mr. Rice we have a voice such as America has rarely known before."--_The Rochester (N. Y.) Post-Express._
"Mr. Rice of today is the poet who sang to us yesterday of the big, vital things of life.... With real genius he brings to the soul a sense of things many of us have but dimly sensed in all our years."--_The Philadelphia Record._