Chapter I: A Coast

Scaling where a hundred crags
Disclose their high, precipitous walls,
Up hidden clefts and burnished jags,
The shore-line like a python crawls.
Along a league of ridges overspread
With the dead trunks of pine and oak, it drags
A roughening path; around the head
Of the last bluff it climbs, then falls,
Spilling its folds on spur and boulder,
Down a deep gulch where it rears and sprawls
Upon the Cape's lean shoulder.

Rolling dusks and vapors pour
A turgid silence on the shore,
Broken by a curlew screaming,
And a low, regurgitant note
Borne in from the laboring throat
Of a wave along a line of basalt streaming;
And, further off, where denser gloom
The headland and a reef-curve hides,
Falls the ground-swell's muttered boom
From the belfries of the tides.

Under a tattered curtain of fog
A flaw of wind makes the waters start;
They drift and scud and whirl;
And, held a moment near the heart
Of the eddy, a waterspout,--
Or some wild thing with twisted shape,
Compact of mist and wind and surge--
Hangs like a felon off the Cape.

II

LATER

(_A man speaks_)

Was that a cry you say you heard?
Where? No. The winds would drown it quite.
No sound would reach the shore to-night,
Except the scream of some wild bird.

A flash, you say, that cut the rain
Like a red knife? It could not be;
There's nothing living in this sea.
Don't look so frightened. What--again?

The lifeboat! They are hailing me.
They need a man for the stern oar;
The wind drives dead upon this shore,
A rudder's helpless in this sea.