Charles George Douglas Roberts

The Iceberg

    I was spawned from the glacier,
   A thousand miles due north
   Beyond Cape Chidley;
   And the spawning,
   When my vast, wallowing bulk went under,
   Emerged and heaved aloft,
   Shaking down cataracts from its rocking sides,
   With mountainous surge and thunder 
   Outraged the silence of the Arctic sea.

    Before I was thrust forth
  A thousand years I crept,
  Crawling, crawling, crawling irresistibly,
  Hid in the blue womb of the eternal ice,
  While under me the tortured rock
  Groaned,
  And over me the immeasurable desolation slept.

    Under the pallid dawning
  Of the lidless Arctic day
  Forever no life stirred.
  No wing of bird —
  Of ghostly owl low winnowing
  Or fleet-winged ptarmigan fleeing the pounce of death, —
  No foot of backward-glancing fox
  Half glimpsed, and vanishing like a breath, —
  No lean and gauntly stalking bear,
  Stalking his prey.
  Only the white sun, circling the white sky.
  Only the wind screaming perpetually.

    And then the night —
  The long night, naked, high over the roof of the world,
  Where time seemed frozen in the cold of space, —
  Now black, and torn with cry
  Of unseen voices where the storm raged by,
  Now radiant with spectral light
  As the vault of heaven split wide
  To let the flaming Polar cohorts through,
  And close ranked spears of gold and blue,
  Thin scarlet and thin green,
  Hurtled and clashed across the sphere
  And hissed in sibilant whisperings,
  And died.
  And then the stark moon, swinging low,
  Silver, indifferent, serene,
  Over the sheeted snow.

    But now, an Alp afloat,
  In seizure of the surreptitious tide,
  Began my long drift south to a remote
  And unimagined doom.
  Scornful of storm,
  Unjarred by thunderous buffetting of seas,
  Shearing the giant floes aside,
  Ploughing the wide-flung ice-fields in a spume
  That smoked far up my ponderous flanks,
  Onward I fared,
  My ice-blue pinnacles rendering back the sun
  In darts of sharp radiance;
  My bases fathoms deep in the dark profound.

    And now around me
  Life and the frigid waters all aswarm.
  The smooth wave creamed
  With tiny capelin and the small pale squid, —
  So pale the light struck through them.
  Gulls and gannets screamed
  Over the feast, and gorged themselves, and rose,
  A clamour of weaving wings, and hid
  Momently my face.
  The great bull whales
  With cavernous jaws agape,
  Scooped in the spoil, and slept,
  Their humped forms just awash, and rocking softly, —
  Or sounded down, down to the deeps, and nosed
  Along my ribbed and sunken roots,
  And in the green gloom scattered the pasturing cod.

    And so I voyaged on, down the dim parallels,
  Convoyed by fields
  Of countless calving seals
  Mild-featured, innocent-eyed, and unforeknowing
  The doom of the red flenching knives.
  I passed the storm-racked gate
  Of Hudson Strait,
  And savage Chidley where the warring tides
  In white wrath seethe forever.
  Down along the sounding shore
  Of iron-fanged, many-watered Labrador
  Slow weeks I shaped my course, and saw
  Dark Mokkowic and dark Napiskawa,
  And came at last off lone Belle Isle, the bane
  Of ships and snare of bergs.
  Here, by the deep conflicting currents drawn,
  I hung,
  And swung,
  The inland voices Gulfward calling me
  To ground amid my peers on the alien strand
  And roam no more.
  But then an off-shore wind,
  A great wind fraught with fate,
  Caught me and pressed me back,
  And I resumed my solitary way.

    Slowly I bore
  South-east by bastioned Bauld,
  And passed the sentinel light far-beaming late
  Along the liners' track,
  And slanted out Atlanticwards, until
  Above the treacherous swaths of fog
  Faded from the view the loom of Newfoundland.


    Beautiful, ethereal
  In the blue sparkle of the gleaming day,
  A soaring miracle
  Of white immensity,
  I was the cynosure of passing ships
  That wondered and were gone,
  Their wreathed smoke trailing them beyonf the verge.
  And when in the night they passed —
  The night of stars and calm,
  Forged up and passed, with churning surge
  And throb of huge propellers, and long-drawn
  Luminous wake behind,
  And sharp, small lights in rows,
  I lay a ghost of menace chill and still,
  A shape pearl-pale and monstrous, off to leeward,
  Blurring the thin horizon line.


    Day dragged on day,
  And then came fog,
  By noon, blind-white,
  And in the night
  Black-thick and smothering the sight.
  Folded therein I waited,
  Waited I knew not what
  And heeded not,
  Greatly incurious and unconcerned.
  I heard the small waves lapping along my base,
  Lipping and whispering, lisping with bated breath
  A casual expectancy of death.
  I heard remote
  The deep, far carrying note
  Blown from the hoarse and hollow throat
  Of some lone tanker groping on her course.
  Louder and louder rose the sound
  In deepening diapason, then passed on,
  Diminishing, and dying, —
  And silence closed around.
  And in the silence came again
  Those stealthy voices,
  That whispering of death.


    And then I heard
  The thud of screws approaching.
  Near and more near,
  Louder and yet more loud,
  Through the thick dark I heard it, —
  The rush and hiss of waters as she ploughed
  Head on, unseen, unseeing,
  Toward where I stood across her path, invisible.
  And then a startled blare
  Of horror close re-echoing, — a glare
  Of sudden, stabbing searchlights
  That but obscurely pierced the gloom;
  And there
  I towered, a dim immensity of doom.


    A roar
  Of tortured waters as the giant screws,
  Reversed, thundered full steam astern.
  Yet forward still she drew, until,
  Slow answering desperate helm,
  She swerved, and all her broadside came in view,
  Crawling beneath me;
  And for a moment I saw faces, blanched,
  Stiffly agape, turned upward, and wild eyes
  Astare; and one long, quavering cry went up
  As a submerged horn gored her through and through,
  Ripping her beam wide open;
  And sullenly she listed, till her funnels
  Crashed on my steep,
  And men sprang, stumbling, for the boats.


    But now, my deep foundations
  Mined by those warmer seas, the hour had come
  When I must change.
  Slowly I leaned above her,
  Slowly at first, then faster,
  And icy fragments rained upon her decks.
  Then my enormous mass descended on her,
  A falling mountain, all obliterating, —
  And the confusion of thin, wailing cries,
  The Babel of shouts and prayers
  And shriek of steam escaping
  Suddenly died.
  And I rolled over,
  Wallowing,
  And once more came to rest,
  My long hid bases heaved up high in air.


    And now, from fogs emerging,
  I traversed blander seas,
  Forgot the fogs, the scourging
  Of sleet-whipped gales, forgot
  My austere origin, my tremendous birth,
  My journeyings, and that last cataclysm
  Of overwhelming ruin.
  My squat, pale, alien bulk
  Basked in the ambient sheen;
  And all about me, league on league outspread,
  A gulf of indigo and green.
  I laughed in the light waves laced with white, —
  Nor knew
  How swiftly shrank my girth
  Under their sly caresses, how the breath
  Of that soft wind sucked up my strength, nor how
  The sweet, insidious fingers of the sun
  Their stealthy depredations wrought upon me.


    Slowly now
  I drifted, dreaming.
  I saw the flying-fish
  With silver gleaming
  Flash from the peacock-bosomed wave
  And flicker through an arc of sunlit air
  Back to their element, desperate to elude
  The jaws of the pursuing albacore.


    Day after day
  I swung in the unhasting tide.
  Sometimes I saw the dolphin folk at play,
  Their lithe sides iridescent-dyed,
  Unheeding in their speed
  That long grey wraith,
  The shark that followed hungering beneath.
  Sometimes I saw a school
  Of porpoise rolling by
  In ranked array,
  Emerging and submerging rhythmically,
  Their blunt black bodies heading all one way
  Until they faded
  In the horizon's dazzling line of light.
  Night after night
  I followed the low, large moon across the sky,
  Or counted the large stars on the purple dark,
  The while I wasted, wasted and took no thought,
  In drowsed entrancement caught; —
  Until one noon a wave washed over me,
  Breathed low a sobbing sigh,
  Foamed indolently, and passed on;
  And then I knew my empery was gone;
  As I, too, soon must go.
  Nor was I ill content to have it so.


    Another night
  Gloomed o'er my sight,
  With cloud, and flurries of warm, wild rain.
  Another day,
  Dawning delectably
  With amber and scarlet stain,
  Swept on its way,
  Glowing and shimmering with heavy heat.
  A lazing tuna rose
  And nosed me curiously,
  And shouldered me aside in brusque disdain,
  So had I fallen from my high estate.
  A foraging gull
  Stooped over me, touched me with webbed pink feet,
  And wheeled and skreeled away,
  Indignant at the chill.


    Last I became
  A little glancing globe of cold
  That slid and sparkled on the slow-pulsed swell.
  And then my fragile, scintillating frame
  Dissolved in ecstasy
  Of many coloured light,
  And I breathed up my soul into the air
  And merged forever in the all-solvent sea.