Classic Poem

Salt sprays deluge it, wild waves buffet it, hurricanes rave;
Summer and winter, the depths of the ocean girdle it round;
In leaden dawns, in golden noon-tides, in silvery moonlight
Never it ceases to hear the old sea's mystical sound.
Surges vex it evermore
By gray cave and sounding shore.

Think of the numberless far-away centuries, long before man,
When the hot earth with monsters teemed, and with monsters the deep,
And the red sun loomed faint, and the moon was caught fast in the motionless air,
And the warm waves seethed through the haze in a secular sleep.
Rock was here and headland then,
Ere the little lives of men.

Over it long the mastodons crashed through the tropical forest,
And the great bats swooped overhead through the half-defined blue;
Then they passed, and the hideous ape-man, speechless and half-erect,
Through weary ages of time tore and gibbered and slew.
Grayer skies and chiller air,
But the self-same rock was there.

So shall it be when the tide of our greatness has ebbed to the shallows;
So when there floats not a ship on this storm-tossed westerly main,
Hard by, the minster crumbles, the city has shrunk to a village;
Thus shall we shrink one day, and our forests be pathless again;
And the headland stern shall stand,
Guarding an undiscovered land.

Salt sprays deluge it, wild waves buffet it, hurricanes rave;
Summer and winter, the depths of the ocean girdle it round;
In leaden dawns, in golden noon-tides, in silvery moonlight
Never it ceases to hear the old sea's mystical sound.
Surges vex it evermore
By gray cave and sounding shore.

Think of the numberless far-away centuries, long before man,
When the hot earth with monsters teemed, and with monsters the deep,
And the red sun loomed faint, and the moon was caught fast in the motionless air,
And the warm waves seethed through the haze in a secular sleep.
Rock was here and headland then,
Ere the little lives of men.

Over it long the mastodons crashed through the tropical forest,
And the great bats swooped overhead through the half-defined blue;
Then they passed, and the hideous ape-man, speechless and half-erect,
Through weary ages of time tore and gibbered and slew.
Grayer skies and chiller air,
But the self-same rock was there.

So shall it be when the tide of our greatness has ebbed to the shallows;
So when there floats not a ship on this storm-tossed westerly main,
Hard by, the minster crumbles, the city has shrunk to a village;
Thus shall we shrink one day, and our forests be pathless again;
And the headland stern shall stand,
Guarding an undiscovered land.