SONG OF AIR

AGAIN I clasp the pure, the passive globe, Her delving valleys and each granite range,-- The Sun and Heaven's bent azure form my robe:  With me the Oceans rove, the cloudlands change. Once more the quarters of the world I part, And part those quarters 'twixt my princely sons And pennoned fowl! Let lark and eagle dart! And warbling flocks fill my dominions! Son of the South! bring perfume, nard and spice, Lade all thine amorous burdens on my gales:-- Thou that the Pole-star wooest, mailed in ice, Let swarm thy snow-white bees upon these vales! O West Wind, from each rude and swooping wing Shake forth thy salty tempests, from the plains Transport me healing! Golden Orient, sing, And fan me with thy murmurous painted vanes. O whirlwinds, rash and rude! O headlong wrath Of your unbridled and cyclonic staves! Shall man yet tread you like some earthly path? Shall I, your king, wear shackles like his slaves?

Lord of all waters, Ocean, wrapped in emerald robes, clasps and usurps the world.

The flagrant arrows of the Sun shower on his glancing mail. The estray Winds are wanton with his locks. His mutinous waves whisper each to each, and leap and sink.

Desire irresistible roves within his heaving deeps. Life wields a goad in every drop.

He decks his floods for the face of the Moon, and enlaces them with chains of shackled pearls and bands of foam.

He sends his salty breath aloft and wreathes the Sun with clouds. But his mists return again, falling as tears upon his face.

Inert in the profounds the blind bathybus lies. Fecundity flings her seeds and spores into the glazed abysses, and they teem. There is a heaving in the broken, sunless bottoms; the continents and islands are upcast, rugged and black, shaking the roaring Seas from their flanks.

The labour and song of the Sea begin; the billows repeat it to the lips of the infant land.

 

 

 

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