Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By Louise ImogenGuiney

1416 Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore

THERE in his room, whene’er the moon looks in,

And silvers now a shell, and now a fin,

And o’er his chart glides like an argosy,

Quiet and old sits he.

Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.

Where hidest thou the while, heart’s boast,

Strange face of beauty sought and lost,

Star-face that lured him out from boyhood’s isle?

Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold

Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,

The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss

Their phosphor-flowers across.

Towards ocean’s either rim the long-exiled

Wears on, till stunted cedars throw

A lace-like shadow over snow,

Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.

Awhile, play up and down the briny spar

Odors of Surinam and Zanzibar,

Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,

The Labradorian blue;

All homeless hurricanes about him break;

The purples of spent day he sees

From Samos to the Hebrides,

And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.

Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,

Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,

Away, and far away, his pride is borne,

Riding the noisy morn,

Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know

The helm and tightening halyards still

Follow the urging of his will,

And scoff at sullen earth a league below.

Mischance hath barred him from his heirdom high,

And shackled him with many an inland tie,

And of his only wisdom made a jibe

Amid an alien tribe:

No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.

The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!

Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?

Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?

Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,

Familiar Danger, O forget not him!

Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole

Unto his subject soul,

Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,

Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,

But she may know that voice again,

And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.

O give him back, before his passion fail,

The singing cordage and the hollow sail,

And level with those aged eyes let be

The bright unsteady sea;

And move like any film from off his brain

The pasture wall, the boughs that run

Their evening arches to the sun,

The hamlet spire across the sown champaign;

And on the shut space and the trivial hour,

Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,

With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,

Him whom thou lovedst bring:

That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,

Not having, at the last, less grace

Of thee than had his roving race,

Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.