Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Oceanica: Vol. XXXI. 1876–79.
The Coral Islands
By Philip Gilbert Hamerton (18341894)D
Where the water is warm and deep,
There are gardens fairer than any bee
Ever saw in its honeyed sleep.
And green and purple and blue,
In the waters deep which the golden light
Of the sun sinks softly through.
And many a sea-bird flies,
And fishes swim with silvery scales,
Above where that garden lies.
You have seen the bright red stem
Of the wondrous coral tree;
But its living flowers,—you saw not them,—
They died beneath the sea.
The ghastly skeleton;
But the living flowers were a fairer sight
That used to grow thereon.
When the lovely flowers are dead,
And their substance wastes away,
Their skeletons lie on the ocean’s bed
Like wrecks in slow decay.
The streams of the lower deep
Lay sand and shell and polished stones
In many a little heap.
And this goes on and on,
And the creatures bloom and grow,
Till the mass of death they rest upon
Comes upward from below.
In blue unfathomed seas,
Give rest to the feet of emigrant flocks,
But have no grass nor trees.
And white along the shore
The surf leaps high, and the waters make
Strong barrows as before.
For ancient British chiefs,
Wherein they lie with torques of gold,
Are those long coral reefs.
Those barren reefs extend,
Connecting distant groups of isles
With paths from end to end.
And a thousand conscious flowers
Open their fleshy leaves
To the ocean spray, whose snowy showers
The thankful mouth receives.
In the thrush’s happy nest,
Open those flowers of starry shape,
When the sea disturbs their rest.
Above the highest tide,
It is a city of lifeless stone,
Whose citizens have died.
Where the waters never rise,
And each one, lifted from the sea
To the parching sunshine, dies.
Brings other seeds to sow;
And on the rock new tenants find
A soil whereon to grow.
Than the flowers the ocean fed;
The hot sun nurses the living plants,
And withers up the dead.
Of many a hundred years,
When the coral rock is green and old,
A stunted shrub appears;
And herbs that thickly teem
Out of the soil on a lake’s green bank,
Or the margin of a stream.
Have grown maturely fair;
Green forests wave, and summer smiles,
And human homes are there.