Classic Poem

Bright-minded were they both, the boy and girl;
Mirror'd in steel the world gleamed on their lives.
But each took now only the other's brightness,
Each burnisht mind turned wholly to its fellow;
While in between, and far into lucid depths,
Their love burnt white, unwavering poise of flame
Infinitely reflected back and forth.

They were among the dunes: valleys of sand,
And little alps of sand scarpt clean and sheer,
Whose fretting cliffs the wind still quarried down
To banks that slurred in landslide at a step.
The air was gentle, but as white as rime
With sea-fret, that came vapouring inland
Placidly and slowly on a warm breeze,—
Clinging along the ground, and smelling keen
As camphor. Light was shadowless and blancht
Dissolved in it; unless, far out at sea,
A tarnisht glare lay like a bar of brass,
The gleam of hidden sunshine, when the fog
Rifted and closed again. The tide was in;
It swayed a lazy pulse along the beach,
And drew the pebbles down purring and clucking
In shallow lapse of ripples—the noise stole
About the dunes soft as the stroking of silk.

They loiter'd, with the warm mist blank around them.

SHE . A stranger would be lost now. It's all one,
Right road or wrong road: the white fog gives way
And closes in behind, and you seem still
In the same place whichever way you go.
HE . All the better for idling: no world left
But where we are, and we need none.
SHE . None left
But an old quiet sea murmuring somewhere,
Deserted by the other creatures.
HE . Still
Thinking aloud of those courageous days
When there was stubborn land to quarrel with.
SHE . We must belong to the sea then; or why else
Should we stay hiding in its memory—
This whispering cloud of salty moist sea-smell—
When all the world beside has slipt away?
HE . When I'm inland, and I dream of the sea,
It always is a thing that comes to claim me;
Or, as the other night, I am its captive.
SHE . Drown'd, were you?
HE . No; walking upon the water
A good league from the land: the prisoner
Of some fierce tribe I might have been, set free
To watch the onslaught on his native town.
A high wind clamour'd there through bright blue weather,
And on the flashing tide I paced, the foam
And rocking sunshine firm to tread as marble.
The waves went charging by me like crazed troops
Fanatic to die fighting, and the cliffs
Flung them, and their brothers trampled them;
For the wind whoopt them on, and giant spray
Stood up like menacing priests in snowy gowns
And prophesied the conquest of the land.
Then I was swimming: I had slipt my guard,
And made off in the press towards the land.
Like prairie-herds thundering head-down
The senseless charge swept on: no heed for me,
Though the shouting gale that sat the high-curv'd crests
Pulled at their spindrift manes and knee'd their withers,
But could not turn them; and I won to shore,
And held as close to the rocks as if I'd been
Crucified to them. Then they saw my escape,
The waters; then they leapt upon me raging,
And pouring down on me to scour me off,
They became beasts: at ankle, hip, and shoulder
Hands wrencht with sinewy baboon fingers, mouths
Worried and tugg'd like wolves, the paws of bears
Cufft every sense in me stupid, rugged tails
Of alligators clubb'd me; thick and lithe
Bodies like snakes beneath me prized: I felt them
Tighten and sleek and swell and shrug against me.
But I clung on, and clamber'd safely away.
SHE . High seas and shining wind! This was a game
Your brain was playing. I have dreamt of music
Capturing me; I did not listen to it,
My mind past into sound like heaven's delight:
Your dream of sunlit waves and cloudless gale
Was nothing worse. But if you had been taken
By calm sea crooning to itself in mist,
You would have dreamt a sea-spell to be feared.
HE . The sea means most when it is like to-day,
In hiding and very quiet?—Yes; it would be
Such a veil'd sea as this first gave the pattern
To that old tale I spoke of.
SHE . Read it me.
It 's warm enough to linger here awhile.
HE . ‘There was a wicked emperor in Rome;
And when his body slept, his wickedness
Was waking still, and moved about his sleep
In likeness of the things his senses knew.
Sometimes a horse it would be, that would look
Winking upon him with old criminal eyes;
Or a great toad, licking the wither'd smile
Of rusty lips that rimm'd the flattish face
With a red tongue like a man's, dripping with pleasure,
And men and women frantic with desire
To be strange in sin, and all hopelessly frantic,
Were usual visitors. Or it might be
He saw a mountain towering in its furs
Of forest and bright cape of folded snow;
And, staring on it, suddenly to his eyes
The mountain turned obscene, a squatted hunch,
Bald hardy pate and fell of brutish hair,
Brooding some impossible lickerish greed.
This was the wicked emperor's punishment.
Awake, he was his own insatiate self;
Asleep, the whole world came and lookt at him
Wickedly: wickedness would not let him be.
‘And once he dreamt he saw an ancient man
With sorrowful shaggy face, laboriously
Footing towards him, clad in restless grey;
Up out of a grey fume of mist he trudged,
And his clothes hung on him like sopping things.
And like a fisherman who hauls a seine
With shoulders roped, plodding up the loose beach,
The stooping old man came, and after him
He lugg'd a trailing heaviness of broad
Swaying enormous water, that rebelled
Behind him, and in whiten'd fury swashring
Plunged like a netted beast. It was the sea,
The ancient ghost of the sea, come with his toil
Of everlasting water to confer
With him whose life dragg'd after it loads of lust.
The ghost stood panting; noise of broken waves
Shouted past him: a smell like stale salt weed
Came from his sloven clothes of tatter'd foam,
And caught the emperor's disgusted throat.
He kept both arms back to one shoulder crookt
To clutch his tightest on the rope, and leant
In forward strain against the bellowing
Ceaseless revolt of vast unwilling sea;
And ridged along his hands there was a gleam
Of silver and green scale, and on his cheeks
The skin was like the belly of a fish,
Glistering white and moist; and clotted spume
Made him his drooping rags of beard. The dream
Bowed to the emperor, and as he bowed
His eyes lookt up and leered; and instantly
The emperor knew the secret of the sea.
‘Suppose a man driven into his trade,
Like a wedge hammer'd to the butt and held
By the tough timber's pinch—one of the tools
His ruthless country must by thousands ply
To split and frame its fortune as it needs:
Suppose the helpless fasten'd man, his life
(All but imagination) fixt in work
And still forced deeper into duty, lets
His useless mind fly abroad in pleasures,
Fly in delights; the firmer he is gript,
The more his fancy takes the scope of frenzy;
Till his brain glows a gaiety of sin
His graspt incapable life can only love
In notions of anguishing desire. Just so
It was with this old spectre of the sea:
Bound in an endless task, spending his tides
Still in the great purpose of all the world;
No will allowed him but to thrust and pull
Like engine strokes his weight of ocean water,
Grinding the coasts of the earth with waves, to pile
New shingle on worn beaches otherwhere;
And all to him mere blank and senseless toil,
No use, no meaning; till the sea at last
Out of the ages of his slavery
Imagined his escaping will, in dreams
Of exquisitely speculated sin,
Immense and accurate abomination,
The quintessential wickedness that could
Finally satisfy lust, even the sea's.
But all was mood and impotence; and now
He came, poorly consoling his despair,
To lend the emperor's mind the darling splendour
Of his invention; to watch it in the act,
Radiant, dilating, though in another;
Its passion welling liberal as the sun
Utters his flame, but shapely in delight
And crystalline as vapour caught by frost:
The one perfectly calculated sin
Performed at last, no longer secret vision.
‘But nothing could be done of this: no words
Could pass, no understanding. There they stayed
Fixt in a quivering gaze while yearning ached
In both like perishing, the dream to teach,
The dreamer to be taught. Still the sea's eyes
Burn'd at the emperor; the man knew in them
That science blazing which his heart so long
Had of his brain implored; the Perfect Sin
Was there, beseeching to be known and loved.
He had a thundering vision of himself
Shuddering and grinning, sighing and clenching
In a torment of bliss; and like pufft flame
The glimpse went out; and there the staring sea
Croucht dumb and baffled; the green rage of his eyes
Grew to a glaring flood of icy fire,
Drowning the man in horrible flaming water;
And vast malignant green roar'd over him
Till all was deaf and blind.
‘The emperor woke;—
To labour his old dull routine of evil,
And drudge in habits of familiar sin.
SHE . This is just havering. My old peevish aunt
Is guinea-gold with jaundice, and her sight
Stains the whole world about her dismal yellow;
Your emperor was like that. There 's no real evil.
HE . Pah! How the sea-fret thickens!
SHE . And the chill
Now coming through it!
HE . Choking thick! It seems
To deafen now as well as blind.
SHE . Why, listen!
Listen! You cannot hear the least faint noise
Come from the sea.
HE . Not a breeze whispering,
And yet this chill comes pushing through the air!
SHE . And the mist crowding on us: look at it smoking
In from the sea over the ridge of dunes.
I wish I heard the sea.
HE . If we moved now,
I think we'ld have to make a work of it
Like breast-high wading, such a press of fog
Has muster'd round us.
SHE . But no water could
Weigh so shuddering cold as this white darkness.
The air 's as grave as death: and reeks!
HE . O, foul!
Like all the sea's decay breathing on us!
SHE . And still no noise! What has come to the sea
To fall in such a soundless spell? The bay,
When all the weather 's fast in summer drowse,
Still keeps a stir of little combing waves,
Toy surf thudding along the level sand
In pausing midget breakers, sounding like
Round after round of gun-fire miles away.
But silent now as frost!
HE . And a strange thing
That it was all at once, as instantly
As pouncing terror, every noise of water
Froze in the air.
SHE . You'ld think the sea were dead.
HE . The waters of the sea have died.
SHE . And this
Quiet coiling cold sea-smoke might be
The nature of the putrid underdepths
Come ghostly forth, leaving the waters stricken.
HE . Stifling now! The harsh cloud laps about us
Almost blindfolding.
SHE . There 's a living thing
Coming up from the water! I can feel
A power like a spirit making towards us!
HE . I hoped you could not feel it.
SHE . I was not sure
Now it is near, and dreadful.
HE . Loathing us
With foul desire, worse than the reeking chill
It casts upon the air!
SHE . The quivering force
Peals like a noiseless ringing in my brain,
Searching for something it can master there.
HE . It is behind that nearest mound of dunes,
Intent on us, like rage.
SHE . Will it find us?—
It must not look at us!
HE . It is held back;
It comes no nearer, for all its bitter longing:
As if it were a tether'd thing.
SHE . Now surely
Its striving towards us faints!—It has let go!
The grasp failed on my heart and slipt off like
The clutch of dying malice: I am free now!
HE . And breath comes sweet again; the brackish lank
Flies off in phantom, and an earthly warmth
Blesses the air, and tastes as kind as milk.
SHE . And hark! The silence rustled! Sure I heard
The waters sighing as their icy trance
Rouses along the shore.
HE . And hark again!
A little wave came stumbling up the sand.