George Willis Cooke, comp. The Poets of Transcendentalism: An Anthology. 1903.
Seen and UnseenDavid Atwood Wasson (18231887)
T
A whited wave, but sable sky,
And many a league of tossing sea
Between the hearts I love and me.
These weary words the sailors say;
To weeks the days are lengthening now,—
Still mounts the surge to meet our prow.
I still accuse Time’s lagging flight,
Or gaze out o’er the envious sea,
That keeps the hearts I love from me.
How instant is the deep relief!
And what a hypocrite am I,
To feign forlorn, to ’plain and sigh!
For evermore it favoreth me,—
To shores of God still blowing fair,
O’er seas of God my bark doth bear.
This blast adverse is not my gale;
’T is here I only seem to be,
But really sail another sea,—
Whose beauty hides no heaving graves;
A sea all haven, whereupon
No helpless bark to wreck has gone.
Reach through all worlds beyond the sun;
Through life and death, through fate, through time,
Grand breaths of God they sweep sublime.
And, blowing, teach us how to steer;
And well for him whose joy, whose care,
Is but to keep before them fair.
Spread canvas to the airs divine!
Spread sail! and let thy Fortune be
Forgotten in thy Destiny.
By sea, by land, through heaven or hell;
It suffers Death alone to die,
Bids Life all change and chance defy.
Earth’s ocean thou, O Life! shalt drown;
Shalt flood it with thy finer wave,
And, sepulchred, entomb thy grave!
What most the spirit would, it must;
Deep wishes in the heart that be,
Are blossoms of Necessity.
Stronger than iron cables are;
And Love and Longing toward their goal
Are pilots sweet to guide the soul.
And Unseen over Seen prevail;
And all God’s argosies come to shore,
Let ocean smile, or rage or roar.
With snowy wake still nears her mark;
Cheerly the trades of being blow,
And sweeping down the wind I go.