Classic Poem

I listen to the plashing of the lake,—
The tideless tide that silvers all its edge,
And stirs, yet rouses not, the sleepy sedge,—
While the glad, busy sky is wide awake,
And coves along the shore its fleeting shadows take.

I listen to the plashing, clear and faint;
Now sharp against the stones that slide it back,
Now soft and nestling in a mossy track,
Or rocking in an eager, homeless plaint,
Or stifled in the ooze, whose yielding is restraint.

Nature's deep lessons come in silences,
Or sounds that fall like silence on our sense;
And so this plashing seeks my soul's pretense,
And bids it say what its fulfillment is,
And bares to searching light its fond alliances.

I cannot fathom all my soul doth hide,
Nor sound the centres that the waves conceal;
Yet in a dim, half-yearning way I feel
The urging of the low, insistent tide,—
Till the plashing seems like sobbing, and the sky grows cold and wide.