Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.
The Shrine
By H. D.
Have you sent galleys from your beach,
Are you graded—a safe crescent—
Where the tide lifts them back to port?
Are you full and sweet,
Tempting the quiet
To depart in their trading ships?
You are the land-blight.
You have tempted men
But they perished on your cliffs.
Slate and pebble and wet shells
And sea-weed fastened to the rocks.
When they found you,
When the quiet men looked at you.
They sought a headland
Shaded with ledge of cliff
From the wind-blast.
Cut with the weight of wind.
You shudder when it strikes,
Then lift, swelled with the blast.
You sink as the tide sinks,
You shrill under hail and sound,
Thunder when thunder sounds.
When the tides swirl
Your boulders cut and wreck
The staggering ships.
O grave, O beautiful.
The landsmen tell it—I have heard—
You are useless.
And the sea
Where rollers shot with blue
Cut under deeper blue.
Where wave-lengths cut you
Apart from all the rest—
For we have found you,
We watch the splendor of you,
We thread throat on throat of freesia
For your shelf.
O plunder of lilies,
Honey is not more sweet
Than the salt stretch of your beach.
But terror has caught us now.
We passed the men in ships,
We dared deeper than the fisher-folk;
And you strike us with terror,
O bright shaft.
And sparks that unknot the flesh—
Sorrow, splitting bone from bone,
Splendors thwart our eyes
And rifts in the splendor,
Sparks and scattered light.
Men said:
“There are wrecks on the fore-beach,
Wind will beat your ship,
There is no shelter in that headland;
It is useless waste, that edge,
That front of rock—
Sea-gulls clang beyond the breakers,
None venture to that spot.”
As the tide slackens,
As the wind beats out,
We hail this shore—
We sing to you,
Spirit between the headlands
And the further rocks.
Though boats and sea-men flounder,
And the strait grind sand with sand
And cut boulders to sand and drift—
Your hands have touched us;
You have leaned forward a little
And the waves can never thrust us back
From the splendor of your ragged coast.