Classic Poem

Here rage the furies that have shaped the world,
Here where a beaked old headland splits the sea
And white Niagaras of the surf are hurled
In crashing enmity
Against the rocks' worn giant filigree.
Above the thunder where the wave and shore
Merge and re-merge in fountain-bursts of spray,
The weird continual half-yelping roar
Of congregated seals rings out all day
From islets wet and gray.
And pelicans in heavy lines flap by,
And gulls skim low beneath the precipice,
And hunchback cypresses, limb-twisted, lie
On the blunt slopes and in the hoarse abyss,
And here and there a skeleton tree that stares,
Like agony petrified, with ashen bole
And boughs where life with all her struggles and cares
Incarnates her writhing soul.

Step to the gnarled cliff-edge; some Siren power
Will urge you, pull you doomward … down and down
There where in turquoise pools the kelp lies brown,
And where tall rollers charge in shower on shower
Of fierce erupting white, and the salt cascade
Drenching the misty shoals, and waterfalls
Replenished with every breaker, look on walls
Of inlets paved with jade.
Wild as the earth's beginning! Lone and grand
This universe of reef and cave and foam
As when scale-armored dragons clawed the sand
And the fish-lizard made the brine its home!
Hear! In each billow clamoring at the rock
Voices of masters throned aloof from man,
Lords of the deep for whom the great world-clock
Ticks not in years, but by a Cyclops' span
Of epochs and of eons. Hear the moan
Of time that stretches out to timelessness,
And power that trumpets of the shock and stress
Of planets forged in wars of storm and stone!

Ranging the headland's verge,
For but an hour I come, a transient thing,
Yet from this tumult and this beat and surge
Of elemental frenzies I shall bring
Back to the soberer world a brooding sense
Of some fresh wonder and magnificence,
The overtones of some age-hallowed glory,
When on this furrowed cypress promontory
Gods speak from the torn waves' droning eloquence.