Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing
From the immense blue circle of the sea,
And the soft thunder where long waves whiten--
These were the same for Sappho as for me.
Two thousand years--much has gone by forever,
Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men--
But here on the beaches that time passes over
The heart aches now as then.
Connects your seashore moment to Sappho's, an ancient ache unchanged by millennia
If I could hang all the foam of the sea in my hair,
If I could sing all the songs that were ever invented,
If I could kiss all the pebbles that ever there were,
If I could hang all the foam of the sea in my hair,
If I could drink all the waves as they break over there,
Should I then be contented?
If I could hang all the foam of the sea in my hair?
If I could sing all the songs that were ever invented?
A dreamy litany of impossible sea-possessing desires that never finds contentment
The shadows of the ships
Rock on the crest
In the low blue lustre
Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide.
A long brown bar at the dip of the sky
Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt.
The lucid and endless wrinkles
Draw in, lapse and withdraw.
Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles
Wash on the floor of the beach.
Rocking on the crest
In the low blue lustre
Are the shadows of the ships.
Watches ship shadows rock on the tide, capturing the hush of waves drawing in and withdrawing
The tide makes music
At the foot of the beach;
The waves sing together
Rumble of breakers.
Ships there are swaying,
Into the distance,
Thrum of the cordage,
Slap of the sails.
The tide makes music
At the foot of the beach;
Low notes of an organ
'Gainst the dull clang of bells.
The tide's tense purple
On the untrodden sand:
Its throat is blue,
Its hands are gold.
The tide as living music — serpentine coils, organ notes, and shifting light on untrodden sand
I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.
Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea--
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me.
Walking the beach alone, wave thunder carries a shared memory that outlasts death
The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And inspirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine of foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.
The midnight tide's rush mirrors the soul's own involuntary surges of inspiration
Waves trough, rebound, and furious boil again,
Like plunging monsters rising underneath,
Who at the top curl up a shaggy mane,
A moment catching at a surer breath,
Then plunging headlong down and down, and on
Each following whirls the shadow of the last;
And other monsters rise when those are gone,
Crest their fringed waves, plunge onward and are past.
The chill air comes around me oceanly,
From bank to bank the waterstrife is spread;
Strange birds like snowspots oer the whizzing sea
Hang where the wild duck hurried past and fled.
On roars the flood, all restless to be free,
Like Trouble wandering to Eternity.
Waves as plunging monsters capture the sea's relentless, restless power
The sea-wash never ends.
The sea-wash repeats, repeats.
Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows?
Only the old strong songs?
Is that all?
The sea-wash repeats, repeats.
The endless repeating wash asks if that's all the sea has to offer
Small yellow stones
That, lifted, through my idle fingers fall
Leaving a score--
And these I toss between the parted lips
Of the lapping sea,
And the sea tosses again with millions more--
Yellow and white stones;
Then drawing back her snaky long waves all,
Leaves the stones
Yellow and white upon the sandy shore....
As they were bones
Yellow and white left on the silent shore
Of an unfoaming far unvisioned Sea.
Stones left on the shore become bones, evoking quiet mortality beside the waves
A THOUSAND miles beyond this sun-steeped wall
Somewhere the waves creep cool along the sand,
The ebbing tide forsakes the listless land
With the old murmur, long and musical;
The windy waves mount up and curve and fall,
And round the rocks the foam blows up like snow,--
Tho' I am inland far, I hear and know,
For I was born the sea's eternal thrall.
I would that I were there and over me
The cold insistence of the tide would roll,
Quenching this burning thing men call the soul,--
Then with the ebbing I should drift and be
Less than the smallest shell along the shoal,
Less than the sea-gulls calling to the sea.
Longing to trade inland heat for the cold tide and dissolve into the sea
Into the homelessness of the sea I awoke :
Oh, my heart of the wind and spray !
I am glad to be no-man to-day
With the laughter and dance of the sea-soul.
Dip the song of the sea and wind,
Throw it into my heart of longing !
I like to be with the clan of the waters and air :
Oh, my soul of the sea-soul and surge !
Roll in the wonder of the heart and sea, —
Oh, my joy of the sea-soul and flash !
Gather all the lights of the wind and sea,
To guard against the blackest night.
Ecstatic self-dissolution into the sea's laughter, wind, and light mirrors the joy of standing by the waves
Blue, brown, blue: sky, sand, sea:
I swell to your immensity.
I will run over the endless beach,
I will shout to the breaking spray,
I will touch the sky with my fingers.
My happiness is like this sand:
I let it run out of my hand.
Playful surrender to sea and sky, with happiness slipping away like sand, captures the seaside moment
The sea
Was even as a little child that sleeps
And keeps
All night its great unconsciousness of day.
No spray
Flashed when the wave rose, drooped, and slowly drew away.
No sound
From all that slumbering, full-bosomed water came;
The sea
Lay mute in childlike sleep, the moon was a gold candle-flame.
No sound
Save when a faint and mothlike air fluttered around.
No sound:
But as a child that dreams and in his full sleep cries,
So turned the sleeping sea and heaved her bosom of slow sighs.
A hushed moonlit sea breathing slow sighs like a sleeping child matches the quiet contemplation of waves
The high horses of the sea broke their white riders
On the walls that held and counted the hours
The wind lasted.
Two landbirds looked on and the north and the east
Looked on and the wind poured cups of foam
And the evening began.
The old men in the shanties looked on and lit their
Pipes and the young men spoke of the girls
For a wild night like this.
The south and the west looked on and the moon came
When the wind went down and the sea was sorry
And the singing slow.
Ask how the sunset looked between the wind going
Down and the moon coming up and I would struggle
To tell the how of it.
I give you fire here, I give you water, I give you
The wild breaking sea and the elusive beauty between wind and moon speak to watching elemental forces
The moon is cold over the sand-dunes.
And the clumps of sea-grasses flow and glitter ;
The thin chime of my watch tells the quarter after midnight ;
And still I hear nothing
But the windy beating of the sea.
Cold moonlight and the windy beating of the sea deepen a solitary midnight stillness on the shore
The sun glints the waves with silver;
The gull, a white butterfly of desire;
The barque, a fancy of some intoxicated singer.
The brown islets, lost souls from the world of song;
The wind, an ever-sounding, unseen gong,
Telling of the worship of the sun, the sea and the storm.
Blue, brown, silver, song, sound and storm;
Dreams of a dying hour, shadow of a morn
That we have seen mirrored in the heart of song.
Watching the waves becomes a dreamy immersion in sunlit sea and song, where each element mirrors fleeting beauty and longing
The sea is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs
an early sunset and a last morning star over the
oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land . . . five
white dice rolled from a tube.
Not so long ago ... the sea was large . . .
And to-day the sea has lost nothing ... it keeps all.
I am a loon about the sea.
I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I
forget so many sea songs and sea cries.
I am a loon about the sea.
So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper
shack trembling in a sand storm.
The sea knows more about them than they know themselves.
They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.
The overwhelming vastness of the sea dwarfs human life, echoing the watcher's sense of smallness and obsession
Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night on the ocean settles dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding "Strike the bell!"
All is black shadow but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Misled the pilgrim--such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends in life's long darkling way.
A dark coast at dusk mirrors a wavering inner light, capturing the pensive solitude of standing by the sea at night
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.
I see the Deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,--
The lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Bright waves and sunlit calm contrast with a weary heart, expressing dejection even in the midst of beauty
The shores of the world are ours, the solitary
Beaches that bear no fruit, nor any flowers,
Only the harsh sea-grass that the wind harries
Hours on unbroken hours.
No one will envy us these empty reaches
At the world’s end, and none will care that we
Leave our lost footprints where the sand forever
Takes the unchanging passion of the sea.
Desolate shores at the world's edge embrace isolation, where human footprints vanish against the eternal sea
Bowed as an elm under the weight of its beauty,
So earth is bowed, under her weight of splendor,
Molten sea, richness of leaves and the burnished
Bronze of sea-grasses.
Clefts in the cliff shelter the purple sand-peas
And chicory flowers bluer than the ocean
Flinging its foam high, white fire in sunshine,
Jewels of water.
Joyous thunder of blown waves on the ledges,
Make me forget war and the dark war-sorrow--
Against the sky a sentry paces the sea-cliff
Slim in his khaki.
The sea's beauty offers a fleeting reprieve from war's shadow, a bittersweet vigil
ON the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining—I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of
the future.
A VAST SIMILITUDE interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids,
All the substances of the same, and all that is spiritual upon the same,
All distances of place, however wide,
All distances of time—all inanimate forms,
All Souls—all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes—the fishes, the brutes,
All men and women—me also;
Night waves and stars spark awe at the vast similitude uniting all existence
The sea that I watch from my window
Is grey and white;
I see it toss in the darkness
All the night.
My soul swoops down to sorrow
As the sea-gulls dip,
And all my love flies after
Your lonely ship.
Yet I am not despairing
Though we must part,
Nothing can be too bitter
For my high heart.
All in the dreary midnight,
Watching the flying foam,
I wait for the golden morning
When you come home.
Gazing over the restless sea, a high heart waits without despair for the loved one's return
Must I round my life to a song,
As the waves wear smooth the shore-stone?
Shall the mortal beat and throb
Of this heart of mine
Be only to crumble a dream,
And fashion the pebbles of fancy,
That the tides of time may cover,
Or a child may find?
Little in truth it matters;
But this at the most I know:
Infinite is the ocean
That thunders upon man's soul,
And the sooner the soul falls broken,
The smoother will be its song!
The ocean's endless waves wear the soul smooth, teaching surrender into song
With heavy doleful clamour, hour on hour, and day on day,
The muddy groundswell lifts and breaks and falls and slides away.
The cold and naked wind runs shivering over the sands,
Salt are its eyes, open its mouth, its brow wet, blue its hands.
It finds naught but a starving gull whose wings trail at its side,
And the dull battered wreckage, grey jetsam of the tide.
The lifeless chilly slaty sky with no blue hope is lit,
A rusty waddling steamer plants a smudge of smoke on it.
Stupidly stand the factory chimneys staring over all,
The grey grows ever denser, and soon the night will fall:
The wind runs sobbing over the beach and touches with its hands
The grinding groundswell and grey wreckage mourn both the sea's dead and the forgotten drowned
Careless forever, beautiful proud sea,
You laugh in happy thunder all alone,
You fold upon yourself, you dance your dance
Impartially on drift-weed, sand or stone.
You make us believe that we can outlive death,
You make us for an instant, for your sake,
Burn, like stretched silver of a wave,
Not breaking, but about to break.
Captures the sea's proud, endless dance and the fleeting sense of immortality it inspires
HE crawls to the cliff and plays on a brink
Where every eye but his own would shrink;
No music he hears but the billow’s noise,
And shells and weeds are his only toys.
No lullaby can the mother find
To sing him to rest like the moaning wind;
And the louder it wails and the fiercer it sweeps,
The deeper he breathes and the sounder he sleeps.
And now his wandering feet can reach
The rugged tracks of the desolate beach;
Creeping about like a Triton imp,
To find the haunts of the crab and shrimp.
He clings, with none to guide or help,
To the furthest ridge of slippery kelp;
And his bold heart glows while he stands and mocks
The seamew’s cry on the jutting rocks.
A child's fearless joy in the wild sea, finding freedom and comfort in its roar
Love in my heart was a fresh tide flowing
Where the starlike sea gulls soar;
The sun was keen and the foam was blowing
High on the rocky shore.
But now in the dusk the tide is turning,
Lower the sea gulls soar,
And the waves that rose in resistless yearning
Are broken forevermore.
The turning tide mirrors a fading love, with waves of yearning broken in the dusk
On ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none 's to spill nor spend.
How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
Being pure! We, life's pride and cared-for crown,
Have lost that cheer and charm of earth's past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
To man's last dust, drain fast towards man's first slime.
Contemplates the eternal purity of sea and skylark against human decay
Wild is the foaming Sea! The surges roar!
And nimbly dart the livid lightnings round!
On the rent rock the angry waves rebound;
Ah me! the less'ning bark is seen no more!
Along the margin of the trembling shore,
Loud as the blast my frantic cries shall sound,
My storm-drench'd limbs the flinty fragments wound,
And o'er my bleeding breast the billows pour!
Phaon! return! ye winds, O! waft the strain
To his swift bark; ye barb'rous waves forbear!
Taunt not the anguish of a lover's brain,
Nor feebly emulate the soul's despair!
For howling winds, and foaming seas, in vain
Assail the breast, when passion rages there!
A lover's anguish rages louder than the storm, waves and wind echoing inner turmoil
The wind stops, the wind begins.
The wind says stop, begin.
A sea shovel scrapes the sand floor.
The shovel changes, the floor changes.
The sandpipers, maybe they know.
Maybe a three-pointed foot can tell.
Maybe the fog moon they fly to, guesses.
The sandpipers cheep " Here " and get away.
Five of them fly and keep together flying.
Night hair of some sea woman
Curls on the sand when the sea leaves
The salt tide without a good-by.
Boxes on the beach are empty.
Shake 'em and the nails loosen.
They have been somewhere.
Captures the transient, ever-shifting dialogue between wind, sea, and shore
THE sun set, the wind fell, the sea
Was like a mirror shaking:
The one small wave that clapped the land
A mile-long snake of foam was making
Where tide had smoothed and wind had dried
The vacant sand.
A light divided the swollen clouds
And lay most perfectly
Like a straight narrow footbridge bright
That crossed over the sea to me;
And no one else in the whole world
Saw that same sight.
I walked elate, my bridge always
Just one step from my feet:
A robin sang, a shade in shade:
And all I did was to repeat:
Still seaside dusk mirrors inner solitude and a mingled joy and farewell
Out in the dim harbor
I hear the sound of bells:
Out on the gray-blue meadows of the sea,
I think mild water-cattle graze
Among the ripples.
Transforms distant harbor bells into a calm sea meadow for grazing water-cattle
What being in rank-old nature should earlier have that breath been
That hйre pйrsonal tells off these heart-song powerful peals?—
A bush-browed, beetle-brуwed bнllow is it?
With a soъth-wйsterly wнnd blъstering, with a tide rolls reels
Of crumbling, fore-foundering, thundering all-surfy seas in; seen
Ъnderneath, their glassy barrel, of a fairy green.
. . . . . . . .
Or a jaunting vaunting vaulting assaulting trumpet telling
Hears in wind and rolling surf a sublime trumpet blast of elemental power
I started Early -- Took my Dog --
And visited the Sea --
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me --
And Frigates -- in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands --
Presuming Me to be a Mouse --
Aground -- upon the Sands --
But no Man moved Me -- till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe --
And past my Apron -- and my Belt --
And past my Bodice -- too --
And made as He would eat me up --
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve --
And then -- I started -- too --
Turn of tide becomes a consuming, intimate approach that reshapes the self
When I am alone,
The wind in the pine-trees
Is like the shuffling of waves
Upon the wooden sides of a boat.
Turns pine wind into ocean waves, recreating the sea's sound from afar
Tan ala tan glaukan otan onemos atrema Balle--k.t.l.
When winds that move not its calm surface sweep
The azure sea, I love the land no more;
The smiles of the serene and tranquil deep
Tempt my unquiet mind.--But when the roar
Of Ocean's gray abyss resounds, and foam
Gathers upon the sea, and vast waves burst,
I turn from the drear aspect to the home
Of Earth and its deep woods, where, interspersed,
When winds blow loud, pines make sweet melody.
Whose house is some lone bark, whose toil the sea,
Whose prey the wandering fish, an evil lot
Has chosen.--But I my languid limbs will fling
Beneath the plane, where the brook's murmuring
Moves the calm spirit, but disturbs it not.
Captures the pull toward a calm sea and retreat from its stormy roar
No matter what I say,
All that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie and bleach
At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach:
Nothing in this place.
Finds deep solace in rain on the bay and tide-line remnants, a quieter seaside devotion
The Sea called--I lay on the rocks and said:
“I am come.”
She mocked and showed her teeth,
Stretching out her long green arms.
“Go away!” she thundered.
“Then tell me what I am to do,” I begged.
“If I leave you, you will not be silent,
But cry my name in the cities
And wistfully entreat me in the plains and forests;
All else I forsake to come to you--what must I do?”
“Never have I uttered your name,” snarled the Sea.
“There is no more of me in your body
Than the little salt tears you are frightened of shedding.
What can you know of my love on your brown rock pillow....
Come closer.”
Personifies the sea as a mocking lover, embodying the anxious desire in standing before it
In the pull of the wind I stand, lonely,
On the deck of a ship, rising, falling,
Wild night around me, wild water under me,
Whipped by the storm, screaming and calling.
Earth is hostile and the sea hostile,
Why do I look for a place to rest?
I must fight always and die fighting
With fear an unhealing wound in my breast.
Stands lonely on deck amid storm and hostility, mirroring the fear of the deep