Poem by Cale Young Rice

* * *

I know your heart, O Sea!
You are tossed with cold desire to flood earth utterly;
You run at the cliffs, you fling wild billows at beaches,
You reach at islands with fingers of foam to crumble them;
Yes, even at mountain tops you shout your purpose
Of making the earth a shoreless circle of waters!

I know your surging heart!
Tides mighty and all-contemptuous rise within it,
Tides spurred by the wind to champ and charge and thunder--
Tho the sun and moon rein them--
At the troubling land, the breeding-place of mortals,
Of men who are ever transmuting life to spirit,
And ever taking your salt to savor their tears.

I know your tides, I know them!
"Down," they rage, "with the questing of men, and crying!
With their continents--cradles of grief and despair!
Better entombing waters for them, better our deeps unfathomed,
Where birth is soulless, life goalless, death toll-less for all,
And where dark ooze enshrouds past resurrection!"

Ah, yes, I know your heart!
I have heard it raving at coast-lights set to reveal you,
I have watched it foam at ships that sought to defy you,
I have seen it straining at cables that cross you, bearing whispers hid to you,
Or heaving at waves of the air that tell your hurricanes.

I know, I know your heart!
Men you will sink, and shores will sink; but a shore shall be man's forever,
From whence his lighthouse soul shall signal the Infinite,
Whose fleets go by, star after star, bearing their unknown burden
To a Port which only eternity shall determine!

1. Finitude
2. The Colonel's Story
3. Cosmism
4. Off the Irish Coast
5. The Shore's Song to the Sea

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