SONG OF AIR

DEAD! dark! flown! my primal happiness; The stark ice ribs my high and hollow cave. The vortex of the World spins raptureless, And languorously crawls the oily wave. From sun-shot peaks of dawn no more I leap Like a launching condor past control,-- O speak, Son of the West! if this be Sleep--  Or Death that is our destiny and goal? Thick torpor clouds the climes; eternal snow Falling, falling, falling, throngs my realm. Shall nevermore my breath o'er Ocean blow? Nor wrestle with his seas that roar and whelm? No balsam to the woods can I restore, Nor render pure my breath for man to drain; I faint within his nostrils that implore My draught to rouse his drooping heart again. My Earth that I enfolded like a bloom, Lies but a withered creature,--sterile, cold,-- Hither, fly hither! O winds who share my doom, Oh, wail your dying sire whose days are told.

A prone and expiring giant lifts up his bulk once more and would not die.

It is Ocean, usurper of Earth's deepest vales, besieger of islands, batterer of continents.

His great green front and land-fettered limbs glimmer up to his mistress Moon. His breast heaves unto her as of old with an awful and passionate longing.

But a film has veiled his eyes, and now stagnation builds up her muddy pillars in his heart. There Death reigns amidst havoc.

His leviathans and huge worms and wrecks of ships rot on every shore and in his dunnest deeps amidst pearls and sea-born blooms.

The innumerable myrmidons of his empire, fretted masses, chained by weeds, oppress the old Equator.

The coasts he laved and swept are marred with deadly froth. They are now but ruins of the vast poison-chalice of the sea, all fringed with bloody spume.

This is his final anguish and these his final groans.

It is the last song of the sorrowing Sea!

Hoarsely reverberates his threnody; he piles up higher and higher his tremendous tomb of sound, beneath which he shall compose himself in tideless calms of sleep.

 

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