TO NORA MAY FRENCH

Importunate, the lion-throated sea, Blind with the mounting foam of winter, mourns To cliffs where cling the wrenched and laboured roots Of cypresses, and blossoms granite-grown Lose in the gale their tattered petals, cast On bleak, tumultuous cauldrons of the tide, Where fell thy molten ashes.**** Past the bay, The morning dunes a dust of marble seem— Wrought from primeval fanes to Beauty reared, And shattered by some vandal Titan’s mace To more than Time’s own ruin. Woods of pine, Above the dunes in Gothic gloom recede, And climb the ridge that arches to the north Long as a lolling dragon’s chine. The gulls, Like ashen leaves far-off upon the wind, Flutter above the broad and smouldering sea, That lightens with the fire-white foam: But thou, Of whom the sea is urn and sepulcher, Who hast thereof a blown, tumultuous sleep, And stormy peace in gulfs impacable— What carest thou if Beauty loiter there, Clad with the crystal noon? What carest thou If sharp and sudden balsams of the pine Mingle for her in the air’s bright thurible With keener fragrance proffered by the deep From riven gulfs resounding?*** Knowest thou What solemn shores of crocus-colored light, Reared by the sunset in its realm of change, Will mock the dream-lost isles that sirens ward, And charm the icy emerald of the seas To unabiding iris? Knowest thou The waxing of the wan December foam— A thunder-cloven veil that climbs and falls Upon the cliffs forever?

Thou art still As they that sleep in the eldest pyramid— Or mounded with Mesopotamia And immemorial deserts! Thou hast part In the wordless, dumb conspiracy of death— Silence wherein the warrior kings accord, And all the wrangling sages! If thy voice In any wise return, and word of thee, It is a lost, incognizable sigh, Upon the wind’s oblivious woe, or blown, Antiphonal, from wave to plangent wave In the vast, unhuman sorrow of the main, On tides that lave the city-laden shores Of lands wherein the eternal vanities Are served at many altars; tides that wash Lemuria’s unfathomable walls, And idly sway the weed-involvèd oars At wharves of lost Atlantis; tides that rise From coral-coffered bones of all the drowned, And sunless tombs of pearl that krakens guard.

As none shall roam the sad Leucadian rock, Above the sea’s immitigable moan, But in his heart a song that Sappho sang, And flame-like murmur of the muted lyres That time hath not extinguished, and the cry Of nightingales two thousand years ago, Shall mix with those remorseful chords that break To endless foam and thunder; and he learn The unsleeping woe that lives in Mytelene Till wave and deep are dumb with ice, and rime Hath paled the rose forever—even thus, Daughter of Sappho, passion-souled and fair, Whose face the lutes of Lesbos would have sung, And white Errina followed—even thus, The western wave is eloquent of thee, And half the wine-like fragrance of the foam Is attar of thy spirit, and the pines From breasts of mournful, melancholy green, Release remembered echoes of thy song To airs importunate. No wraith of fog, Twice-ghostly with the Hecatean moon, Nor rack of blown, fantasmal spume shall rise, But I will dream thy spirit walks the sea, Unpacified with Lethe. Thou art grown A part of all sad beauty, and my soul Hath found thy buried sorrow in its own, Inseparable forever. Moons that pass, Immaculate, to solemn pyres of snow, And meres whereon the broken lotus dies, Are kin to thee, as wine-lipped autumn is, With suns of swift, irreparable change, And lucid evenings eager-starred. Of thee, The pearlèd fountains tell, and winds that take In one white swirl the petals of the plum, And leave the branches lonely. Royal blooms Of the magnolia, pale as Beauty’s brow, And foam-white myrtles, and the fiery, bright Pome-granate flow’rs, will subtly speak of thee While spring hath speech and meaning. Music hath Her fugitive and uncommanded chords, That thrill with tremors of thy mystery, Or turn the void thy fleeing soul hath left To murmurs inenarrable, that hold Epiphanies of blind, conceiveless vision, And things we dare not know, and dare not dream.