S AT NIGHT OMETIMES when Darkness spread for me her robe of rest, And Silence guarded by, The Night-bird, Sleep, would startle from her nest, Stirred by the baby's cry. When night is deepest now, again and yet again I lie with wide eyes wet: It was his little cry which waked me then: His silence wakes me yet. -Edmund Vance Cooke. APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN T [From "Childe Harold"] HERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined and unknown. The armaments which thunderstrike the walls Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake, And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war; These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar. Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters washed them power while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts:-not so thou; Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now. Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Glasses itself in tempests; in all time, Calm or convulsed-in breeze or gale or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving;-boundless, endless and sublime The image of eternity-the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made: each zone Obeys thee: thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. -Lord Byron. |