I

Night is above me,
And Night is above the night.
The sea is beside me soughing, or is still.
The earth as a somnambulist moves on
In a strange sleep ...
A sea-bird cries.
And the cry wakes in me
Dim, dead sea-folk, my sires--
Who more than myself are me.
Who sat on their beach long nights ago and saw
The sea in its silence;
And cursed it or implored;
Or with the Cross defied;
Then on the morrow in their boats went down.

II

Night is above me ...
And Night is above the night.
Rocks are about me, and, beyond, the sand ...
And the low reluctant tide,
That rushes back to ebb a last farewell
To the flotsam borne so long upon its breast.
Rocks ... But the tide is out,
And the slime lies naked, like a thing ashamed
That has no hiding-place.
And the sea-bird hushes--
The bird and all far cries within my blood--
And earth as a somnambulist moves on.

CHARTINGS

There is no moon, only the sea and stars;
There is no land, only the vessel's bow
On which I stand alone and wonder how
Men ever dream of ports beyond the bars
Of Finitude that fix the Here and Now.
A meteor falls, and foam beneath me breaks;
Dim phosphor fires within it faintly die.
So soft the sea is that it seems a sky
On which eternity to life awakes.

The universe is spread before my face,
Worlds where perchance a million seas like this
Are flowing and where tides of pain and bliss
Find, as on earth, so prevalent a place
That nothing of their wont we there should miss.
The Universe, that man has dared to say
Is but one Being--ah, courageous thought!
Which is so vast that hope itself is fraught
With shame, while saying it, and shrinks away.

Shrinks, even as now! For clouds sweep up the skies
And darken the wide waters circling round,
From out whose deep arises the old sound
Of Terror unto which no tongue replies
But Faith--that nothing ever shall confound.
Not only pagan Perseus but the Cross
Is shrouded--with wild wind and wilder rain,
That on me beat until my soul again
Sings unsurrendering to fears of Loss.

For this I know,--yea, tho all else lie hid
Uncharted on the waters of our fate,
All lands of Whence or Whither, whose estate
In vain imagination seeks to