Alone on the Beach at Night Read online

Low-hanging moon!

  What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?

  O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!

  O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

  Land! land! O land!

  Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again if you only would,

  For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

  O rising stars!

  Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

  O throat! O trembling throat!

  Sound clearer through the atmosphere!

  Pierce the woods, the earth,

  Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

  Shake out carols!

  Solitary here, the night’s carols!

  Carols of lonesome love! death’s carols!

  Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!

  O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!

  O reckless despairing carols.

  But soft! sink low!

  Soft! let me just murmur,

  And do you wait a moment you husky-nois’d sea,

  For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,

  So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,

  But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

  Hither my love!

  Here I am! here!

  With this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you,

  This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

  Do not be decoy’d elsewhere,

  That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,

  That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,

  Those are the shadows of leaves.

  O darkness! O in vain!

  O I am very sick and sorrowful.

  O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!

  O troubled reflection in the sea!

  O throat! O throbbing heart!

  And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

  O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!

  In the air, in the woods, over fields,

  Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!

  But my mate no more, no more with me!

  We two together no more.

  The aria sinking,

  All else continuing, the stars shining,

  The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,

  With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,

  On the sands of Paumanok’s shore gray and rustling,

  The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching,

  The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,

  The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,

  The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,

  The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,

  The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,

  The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,

  To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,

  To the outsetting bard.

  Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)

  Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?

  For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,

  Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,

  And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,

  A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

  O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,

  O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,

  Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,

  Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,

  Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,

  By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,

  The messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within,

  The unknown want, the destiny of me.

  O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)

  O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

  A word then, (for I will conquer it,)

  The word final, superior to all,

  Subtle, sent up – what is it? – I listen;

  Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?

  Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

  Whereto answering, the sea,

  Delaying not, hurrying not,

  Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,

  Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,

  And again death, death, death, death,

  Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,

  But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,

  Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,

  Death, death, death, death, death.

  Which I do not forget,

  But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,

  That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach,

  With the thousand responsive songs at random,

  My own songs awaked from that hour,

  And with them the key, the word up from the waves,

  The word of the sweetest song and all songs,

  That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,

  (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)

  The sea whisper’d me.

  As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life

  1

  As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,

  As I wended the shores I know,

  As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,

  Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,

  Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,

  I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,

  Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,

  Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,

  The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.

  Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows,

  Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,

  Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,

  Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,

  Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,

  These you presented to me you fish-shaped island,

  As I wended the shores I know,

  As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.

  2

  As I wend to the shores I know not,

  As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,

  As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,

  As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,

  I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,

  A few sands and dead leaves to gather,

  Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

  O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,

  Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,

  Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,

  But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,

  Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,

  With
peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,

  Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

  I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,

  Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,

  Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

  3

  You oceans both, I close with you,

  We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,

  These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.

  You friable shore with trails of debris,

  You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,

  What is yours is mine my father.

  I too Paumanok,

  I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores,

  I too am but a trail of drift and debris,

  I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.

  I throw myself upon your breast my father,

  I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,

  I hold you so firm till you answer me something.

  Kiss me my father,

  Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,

  Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.

  4

  Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)

  Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,

  Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,

  Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you.

  I mean tenderly by you and all,

  I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine.

  Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,

  Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,

  (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,

  See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)

  Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,

  Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,

  From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,

  Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,

  Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,

  A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random,

  Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,

  Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,

  We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,

  You up there walking or sitting,

  Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

  Tears

  Tears! tears! tears!

  In the night, in solitude, tears,

  On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand,

  Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,

  Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;

  O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?

  What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?

  Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;

  O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!

  O wild and dismal night storm, with wind – O belching and desperate!

  O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace,

  But away at night as you fly, none looking – O then the unloosen’d ocean,

  Of tears! tears! tears!

  To the Man-of-War Bird

  Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,

  Waking renew’d on thy prodigious pinions,

  (Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended’st,

  And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,)

  Now a blue point, far, far, in heaven floating,

  As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee,

  (Myself a speck, a point on the world’s floating vast.)

  Far, far at sea,

  After the night’s fierce drifts have strewn the shore with wrecks,

  With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene,

  The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun,

  The limpid spread of air cerulean,

  Thou also re-appearest.

  Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)

  To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,

  Thou ship of air that never furl’st thy sails,

  Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,

  At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America,

  That sport’st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,

  In them, in thy experiences, had’st thou my soul,

  What joys! what joys were thine!

  Aboard at a Ship’s Helm

  Aboard at a ship’s helm,

  A young steersman steering with care.

  Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,

  An ocean-bell – O a warning bell, rock’d by the waves.

  O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,

  Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

  For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,

  The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails,

  The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gayly and safe.

  But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!

  Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.

  On the Beach at Night

  On the beach at night,

  Stands a child with her father,

  Watching the east, the autumn sky.

  Up through the darkness,

  While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,

  Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,

  Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,

  Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,

  And nigh at hand, only a very little above,

  Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

  From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,

  Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,

  Watching, silently weeps.

  Weep not, child,

  Weep not, my darling,

  With these kisses let me remove your tears,

  The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,

  They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,

  Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,

  They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,

  The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,

  The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

  Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?

  Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

  Something there is,

  (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,

  I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)

  Something there is more immortal even than the stars,

  (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)

  Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,

  Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,

  Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

  The World Below the Brine

  The world below the brine,

  Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,

  Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, a
nd pink turf,

  Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water,

  Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,

  Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,

  The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,

  The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,

  Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,

  The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,

  The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

  On the Beach at Night Alone

  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,

  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 nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

  All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

  All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

  This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

  And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

  Song for All Seas, All Ships

  1

  To-day a rude brief recitative,

  Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal,

  Of unnamed heroes in the ships – of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach,

  Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing,

  And out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations,

  Fitful, like a surge.

  Of sea-captains young or old, and the mates, and of all intrepid sailors,