Alfred H. Miles, ed. The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Poems. III. Christ on the ShoreWilliam Alexander (1824–1911)
I
Of the morning grey and clouded,
Mist enshrouded,
On the shore of Galilee,
Like a shape upon a column,
Sad and solemn
Christ is standing by the sea,
In the silence of the morning.
Like a rock, its dark back lifting
Through the drifting
Vapours, heaves the fisher’s boat.
Still through grey-fog hood and mantle
That most gentle
Watcher looketh where they float
On the waters cold and misty.
Comes a voice, a susurration;
Tribulation
Melteth, melteth like the mist;
Yet, like music rich and olden
Hiding golden
Words, that sweet voice hideth Christ
From the hearts that wait, and weep Him.
When a greyer fog falls dreary
And we weary
With the sea’s beat evermore,
Cometh One, and pale and wounded,
Mist-surrounded,
Looketh from another shore
In another morning silence.
On the wet sands grandly singing,
Bear a swinging
Little bark call’d Life by men;
While the bark is swinging slowly,
That most Holy
Watcher looks: light silvers then
On the waters cold and misty.
Falls a voice, O sweet but broken!
Falls a token
Light bedimm’d with blinding mist.
Take us where there are no ocean’s
Wild commotions;
Where we shall not know, O Christ!
Weary hearts, or tear-wet eyelids.