Poem by Cale Young Rice

Cosmism

The sea asleep like a dreamer sighs;
  The salt rock-pools lie still in the sun,
Except for the sidling crab that creeps
  Thro the moveless mosses green and dun.
The small gray snail clings everywhere,
  For the tide is out; and the sea-weed dries
Its tangled tresses in the warm air,
  That seems to ooze from the far blue skies,
  Where not a white gull on white wing flies.

The mollusc gleams like a gem amid
  The scurf and the clustered green sea-grapes,
Whose trellis is but the rock's bare side,
  Whose husbandman but the tide that drapes.
The little sandpiper tilts and picks
  His food, on the wet sea-marges hid,
Till sudden a wave comes in and flicks
  Him off, then flashes away to bid
  Another frighten him--as it did.

O sweet is the world of living things,
  And sweet are the mingled sea and shore!
It seems as if I never again
  Shall find life ill--as oft before.
As if my days should come as the clouds
  Come yonder--and vanish without wings;
As if all sorrow that ever shrouds
  My soul and darkly about it clings
  Had lost forever its ravenings.

As if I knew with a deeper sense
  That good alone is ultimate;
That never an evil wrought of God
  Or man came truly out of hate.
That Better springs from the heart of Worse,
  As calm from the heaving elements;
That all things born to the Universe
  May suffer and perish utterly hence,
  But never refute its Innocence.

1. Finitude
2. The Colonel's Story
3. Off the Irish Coast
4. The Shore's Song to the Sea
5. I Know Your Heart, O Sea!

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