THE SEA
by: John Stuart Blackie
(1809-1895)
- hat dost thou say,
- Thou old grey sea,
- Thou broad briny water
- To me?
- With thy ripple and thy plash,
- And thy waves as they lash
- The old grey rocks on the shore?
- With thy tempests as they roar,
- And thy crested billows hoar,
- And thy tide evermore,
- Fresh and free;
- With thy floods as they come,
- And thy voice never dumb,
- What thouhgt art thou speaking to me?
- What thing should I say
- On this bright summer day,
- Thou strange human dreamer, to thee?
- One wonder the same
- All things do proclaim
- In the sky, and the land, and the sea;
- 'Tis the unsleeping force
- Of a GOD in his course,
- Whose life is the law of the whole,
- As he breathes out his power
- In the pulse of the hour,
- And the march of the years as they roll;
- You may measure his ways
- In the weeks and the days,
- And the stars as they wheel round the pole,
- But no finger is thine
- To touch the divine
- All-plastic, all-permeant soul,
- As it shapes and it moulds,
- And its virtue unfolds,
- In the garden of things as they grow,
- And flings forth the tide
- Of its strength far and wide,
- In wonders above and below.
- Thou huge-heaving sea
- That art speaking to me
- Of the power and the pride of a God,
- I would travel like thee
- With force fresh and free
- Through the breadth of my human abode,
- Never languid and low,
- But with bountiful flow,
- Of thoughts that are kindred to God;
- Ever surging and streaming,
- Ever beaming and gleaming,
- Like the lights as they shift on the glass,
- Ever swelling and heaving,
- And largely receiving
- The beauty of things as they pass.
- Thou broad-billowed sea
- Never sundered from thee
- May I wander the welkin below;
- May the plash and the roar
- Of thy waves on the shore
- Beat the march to my feet as they go;
- Ever strong, ever free,
- When the breath of the sea
- Like the fan of an angel I know;
- Every rising with power,
- To the call of the hour,
- Like the swell of thy tides as they flow.
"The Sea" is reprinted from The Selected Poems of John Stuart Blackie. Ed. Archibald Stodart Walker. London: John Macqueen, 1896. |
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