Chapter I: Foreword

The poems of this volume, gathered here after many requests, are, with a few exceptions, from my previous lyrical publications. They are also in a real sense an intimate record. For the sea has often enough seemed to me almost as a vast external subconsciousness in which the forces of my being--as well as the world's--were at play.

Cale Young Rice.

Louisville, Ky., August, 1921.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Sea-Hoardings 3

The Shore's Song to the Sea 5

To a Firefly by the Sea 9

Invocation 11

I Know Your Heart, O Sea! 11

A Sea-Ghost 13

Finitude 15

The Colonel's Story 16

Cosmism 21

Off the Irish Coast 22

The Fairies of God 23

The Song of the Homesick Gael 24

Pageants of the Sea 26

A Song of the Old Venetians 29

Basking 30

Sappho's Death Song 32

The Wind's Word 33

Submarine Mountains 34

The Song of the Storm-Spirits 36

The Great Seducer 37

K'u-Kiang 38

Typhoon 39

Penang 41

Nights on the Indian Ocean 42

Sighting Arabia 44

"All's Well" 45

Somnambulism 47

Chartings 48

The Trail from the Sea 50

Haunted Seas 54

Sea Lure 54

Songs to A. H. R.

I Minglings 56
II Love and Infinity 56
III Recompense 57
IV At the Ebb-Hour 58
V In a Dark Hour 59
VI Via Amorosa 59
VII Transfusion 61

Need of Storm 62

A Florida Interlude 63

A Florida Boating Song 65

Dawn Bliss 66

Atavism 68

Re-reckoning 69

To the Afternoon Moon, At Sea 70

Paths 71

From a Northern Beach 73

Passage 74

Aleen 75

To a Solitary Sea-Gull 76

Ineffable Things 77

The Song of a Sea-Farer 78

Waves 79

In a Storm 80

After Their Parting 80

A Word's Magic 82

Sea Rhapsody 83

In an Oriental Harbour 84

Under the Sky 85

A Song for Healing 86

A Singhalese Love Lament 87

The City 89

Full Tide 89

The Herding 91

On the Maine Coast 92

Seance 93

A Sidmouth Lad 93

Widowed 94

To the Sea 95

Sea-Mad 97

The Atheist 98

At the Helm 99

Imperturbable 100

Waste 100

Resurgence 101

Life's Answer 103

As the Tide Comes In 103

Sense-Sweetness 104

Tidals 105

A Sailor's Wife 105

To Sea! 106

Give Over, O Sea! 107

The Nun 109

Last Sight of Land 110

SEA POEMS

BY CALE YOUNG RICE

SEA-HOARDINGS

My heart is open again and sea flows in,
It shall fill with a summer of mists and winds and clouds and waves breaking,
Of gull-wings over the green tide, of the surf's drenching din,
Of sudden horizon-sails that come and vanish, phantom-thin,
Of arching sapphire skies, deep and unaching.

I shall lie on the rocks just over the weeds that drape
The clear sea-pools, where birth and death in sunny ooze are teeming.
Where the crab in quest of booty sidles about, a sullen shape,
Where the snail creeps and the mussel sleeps with wary valves agape,
Where life is too grotesque to be but seeming.

And the swallow shall weave my dreams with threads of flight,
A shuttle with silver breast across the warp of the waves gliding;
And an isle far out shall be a beam in the loom of my delight,
And the pattern of every dream shall be a rapture bathed in light--
Its evanescence a beauty most abiding.

And the sunsets shall give sadness all its due,
They shall stain the sands and trouble the tides with all the ache of sorrow.
They shall bleed and die with a beauty of meaning old yet ever new,
They shall burn with all the hunger for things that hearts have failed to do,
They shall whisper of a gold that none can borrow.

And the stars shall come and build a bridge of fire
For the moon to cross the boundless sea, with never a fear of sinking.
They shall teach me of the magic things of life never to tire,
And how to renew, when it is low, the lamp of my desire--
And how to hope, in the darkest deeps of thinking.

THE SHORE'S SONG TO THE SEA

Out on the rocks primeval,
The grey Maine rocks that slant and break to the sea,
With the bay and juniper round them,
And the leagues on leagues before them,
And the terns and gulls wheeling and crying, wheeling and crying over,
I sat heart-still and listened.

And first I could only hear the wind in my ears,
And the foam trying to fill the high rock-shallows.
And then, over the wind, over the whitely blossoming foam,
Low, low, like a lover's song beginning,
I heard the nuptial pleading of the old shore,
A pleading ever occultly growing louder:--

_O sea, glad bride of me!
Born of the bright ether and given to wed me,
Given to glance, ever, for me, and gleam and dance in the sun--
Come to my arms, come to my reaching arms,
That seem so still and unavailing to take you, and hold you,
Yet never forget,
Never by day or night,
The hymeneal delights of your embracings._

_Come, for the moon, my rival, shall not have you;
No, for tho twice daily afar he beckons and you go,
You, my bride, a little way back to meet him,
As if he once had been your lover, he too, and again enspelled you,
Soon, soon, I know it is only feigning!
For turning, playfully turning, tidally turning,
You rush foamingly, swiftly back to my arms!_

_And so would I have you rush; so rush now!
Come from the sands where you have stayed too long,
Come from the reefs where you have wandered silent,
For ebbings are good, the restful ebbings of love,
But, oh, the bridal flowings of it are better!
And now I would have you loose again my tresses,
My locks rough and weedy, rough and brown and brinily tangled,
But, oh, again as a bridegroom's, when your tide, whispering in,
Lifts them up, pulsingly up with kisses!_

_Come with your veil thrown back, breaking to spray!
And oh, with plangent passion!
Come with your naked sweetness, salt and wholesome, to my bosom;
Let not a cave or crevice of me miss you, or cranny,
For, oh, the nuptial joy you float into me,
The cooling ambient clasp of you, I have waited over-long,
And I need to know again its marriage meaning!_

_For I think it is not alone to bring forth life, that I mate you;
More than life is the beauty of life with love!
Plentiful are the children that you bear to me, the blossoms,
The fruits and all the creatures at your breast dewily fed,
But mating is troubled with a far higher meaning--
A hint of a consummation for all things.
Come utterly then,
Utterly to me come,
And let us surge together, clasped close, in infinite union,
Until we reach a transcendence of all birth, and all dying,
An ecstasy holding the universe blended--
Such ecstasy as is its ultimate Aim!_

So sang the shore, the long bay-scented shore,
Broken by many an isle, many an inlet bird-embosomed,
And the sea gave answer, bridally, tidally turning,
And leapt, radiant, into his rocky arms!

TO A FIREFLY BY THE SEA

Little torch-bearer, alone with me in the night,
You cannot light the sea, nor I illumine life.
They are too vast for us, they are too deep for us.
We glow with all our strength, but back the shadows sweep:
And after a while will come--unshadowed Sleep.

Here on the rocks that take the turning tide;
Here by the wide lone waves and lonelier wastes of sky,
We keep our poet-watch, as patient poets should,
Questioning earth's commingled ill and good to us.
Yet little of them, or naught, have truly understood.

Bright are the stars, and constellated thick.
To you, so quick to flit along your flickering course,
They seem perhaps as glowing mates in other fields.
And all the knowledge I have gathered yields to me
Scarce more of the great mystery their wonder wields.

For the moon we are waiting--and behold
Her ardent gold drifts up, her sail has caught the breeze
That blows all being thro the Universe always.
So now, little light-keeper, you no more need nurse
Your gleam, for lo! she mounts, and sullen clouds disperse.

And I with aching thought may cease to burn,
And humbly turn to rest--knowing no glow of mine
Can ever be so beauteous as have been to me
Your soft beams here beside the sea's elusive din:
For grief too oft has kindled me, and pain, and the world's sin.

INVOCATION

(_From a High Cliff_)

Sweep unrest
Out of my blood,
Winds of the sea! Sweep the fog
Out of my brain
For I am one
Who has told Life he will be free.
Who will not doubt of work that's done,
Who will not fear the work to do,
Who will hold peaks Promethean
Better than all Jove's honey-dew.
Who when the Vulture tears his breast
Will smile into the Terror's Eyes.
Who for the World has this Bequest--
Hope, that eternally is wise.