THREE SONNETS BY THE NIGHT SEA

Surely the dome of unremembered nights Was heavy with those stars! The peaceless sea, Casting in foam their fallen shafts to me Makes ancient music to their awful heights. O quenchless and insuperable lights! What life shall meet your gaze and thence go free From litten midnights of eternity To havens open to your final flights? Abides nor goal nor ultimate of peace, Nor lifts a beacon on the cosmic deep To guide our wandering world on seas sublime, Nor any night to grant the soul release, Swung as a pendulum from life to sleep, From sleep to life, from Timelessness to Time.

Now, as I hear upon the caverned night The ocean’s ceaseless and stupendous dirge, And one by one the stars approach its verge, The deep seems all one prayer, and the light Of farthest suns but questions for the sight Of men who yet may test the Dark, to urge Life’s portent from the starlight and the surge, And read the ancient Mystery aright. Do blinded powers from their darkness seek, Thro human sight, that secret to attain? From fonts how distant is the spirit fed? And who are we? And is it we who speak The Why we utter to the night of pain, The Whither to the unresponding dead?

Thou seemest inexhaustible, O sea! And infinite of nature; yet I know That by divine permission could we go Within thy sealed and silent deeps, and be Of all thy glooms and treasuries made free, The soul at last each marvel would outgrow, Till each were vain as festal fires that glow Beneath the stars’ immortal scrutiny. And were all alien worlds and suns laid bare Till Mystery their secret should declare, The finite soon its utmost would impart, And sun nor world at last have power to thrill Man’s wayward and insatiable heart, Which God and all His truth alone can fill.