Classic Poem

Who that has heard the billows roar
On the rocky bastions of the shore,
Could restrain the sense of sublimity
Which drew him to overlook the sea —
One sea with the terror of many seas!
And held him with the mysterious law
Of wonder and soul-pervading awe,
And sympathy, the child of these?

Out to the foamy balcony,
Where the phosphor light
And the black of the night
Struggled in gloomy rivalry,
Strode Roland — his cloak and hair
Twitched by the briny hands of air,
And all his dusk garb instantly
Made white with the insult of the sea!

Burning through the eastern dark,
At the bow of a perilous bark,
Rising with alternate leap
Out of the valleys of the deep,
He beheld a crimson light
Driving shoreward through the night, —
Watched it as the lurid flame
Straight to its destruction came!
On it drove before the gale,
With empty mast or shivered sail;
And Roland shuddered in his fear
As he saw it neither tack nor veer,
And trembled to think of a crowded deck
Dashed at his feet a shapeless wreck!

A shock! A shriek! The light was drowned!
And the billows leaped with a higher bound!
And the skyward spray the instant after
Was stunned with the ocean's scornful laughter!

Then, bewildered with pain and fright,
Roland descended the stormy height,
Finding his way by the phosphor light,
To seek amid the wild uproar
The drowning bodies thrown on shore.
Suddenly at his feet a form
Lay like an offering from the storm!
White as a stranded wreath of foam,
White as a ghost from its charnel home,
It lay where the gust with blinding flight
Strove to hide the shape from sight,
Like a maniac murderer, to and fro
Raving and flinging the scattering snow
Over the victim that mocks his despair
With its unveiled face and tell-tale stare!
A moment the brave man's heart recoiled,
Then he lifted the body and upward toiled.