Classic Poem

Summer, and summer — and three summers passed.
The cradle and its ghost were hid away.
A calm and rainless, scorching fall came on.
Even the cactus withered. Then one night
The waves down in the cove began to lisp,
Then whisper, and then hiss, then higher climb.
Breakers along the cliff broke into spray,
And hurried in with backs in oily ranks
That glittered underneath a copper sun,
As if the stagnant and reluctant sea
Somewhere, far off, was troubled. And a wind
Sucked through the parching grasses, and then rose,
Then stopped a breathless hour, then began
But dropped again. Then for a day blew on,
Harder and stronger, till the branches moaned,
And overhead long, strangling scarfs of mist
Raced till they drew a net across the sky.
Then came a hollow silence while the birds
Circled for cover with despairing cries,
While snake-like breezes hurried through the grass.
A grayness grew like fear upon the face
Of one who dies when morning lamps burn dim.
Up from the world's edge, just beyond the rim
Of stifled waters flashing mirrors back
To the dim, mist-wreathed sun, an agony
Of huge gray serpents writhed. The bar
Boomed and grew frantic till the island quaked
From quivering sea to sea. A midnight cloud
Rushed up and over and came billowing down
With frontlet of red lightnings like the veins
Upon the forehead of a driving Baal,
Pulling dark hemispheres across the bright.
Dun smoke filled all the land. The sun went out.
And with a metal scream from scorching throats
Of white-maned horses in a molten sea,
The storm shot down and writhed his whips about,
Lashing the leaves off with white wires of spray,
Roaring and inundating all the land.
Safe in her steadfast house with rope-tied blinds
Sarah had gathered all her little host
Of bleating, clucking, barking, mewing things.
While the house shook, ducks quacked upon the floor;
Kids gamboled; and dogs cowered by the walls.
The rain in one unceasing torrent rang,
And dashed straight lines against the staggering roof.
The wind bounced down and soughed itself away,
And then leapt down again upon its kill.
The anvil blows from hammers of the sea
Shook the hard ground, while in the twilit room
Lamps fluttered and went out, the flame plucked off —
Blue in the ghastly fingers of the draught —
Snuffed out; and then let back; then snuffed again.
It seemed as if the chimney were a pump
That drew the air clean out of Sarah's lungs,
Leaving her head veins throbbing — then let go.
Blue lightning flickered through the slatted blinds.
The thunder crashed gargantuan crockery,
And rolled enormous drumfire over things.
Horizon to horizon roared the sky,
One ululating bellows. Stronger grew
The heaving pressure, and the streaming sand
Scoured the window panes. Rocks bounded by
And smote the dinted walls. The threshold drank,
While plank by plank the spreading leakage grew.
But one more effort and the world would go!

Sarah looked out and saw the little hill,
Which sloped into the headland, capped with foam,
Slanting the wind and spray across her house
That nestled by the cove-side at its foot,
Else had it never stood thus to the storm.
Plowing the waves back like a vessel's prow,
That sharpened headland stood and seemed to move
Into the elements with V-shaped wake.
From every fang of rocks upon its crest
The spume streamed back in long and wisping lines
Like seaweed from the tushes of a whale.
Down in the cove the waters had withdrawn
And left the sea-bed dry, a bowl-like place,
Where sea gulls sheltered, dotted, or in lines,
Facing the wind, their beaks peaked in the blast
That strove to tear them from their coral base.
In loops of little valleys that gave down
In usual weather on a blue, flat sea
The waves like painted plaques moved up and down
Against the leaden back-drop of the sky,
Foaming and yeasting, and then swirled around
As if the earth changed axis, while the trees
Spun on their gaping bases and screamed out,
As with one last and god-demented blast
That shook the cowering island like a rag
And seemed to thrash it in the soapy sea,
The wind passed. . . .
Only the rain dripped from the sodden eaves.
A sickly sun peered out. It seemed at first
As if perpetual silence claimed the land.
After a while some birds began to cheep,
And then a sigh went up from living things.
And gradually a distant yelling sound
As of strange animals in fearful pain
Forced on the mind the presence of the sea
Torturing the rocks, though that seemed quiet, too,
To what had been before. The dog got up,
And whimpering followed Sarah to the door
She slowly opened, carefully peering out
To listen to the pother of the sea
Stammering like drunken giants in a brawl.
Boom! What was that? A " turtle in the net, "
Some ship upon the reefs! Where was it, then?
Boom! How she flew now to the headland's crest,
Tripping on sprawling branches! — Doom ...
And a flash there in the scudding murk
Against the cloud still trailing out to sea.
Yes, she could see it now a half mile out,
A long black object, figures clinging there,
Where the spray dashed a full ten fathoms high
Smothering the sagging deck, and halfway in
A floating mast poked up — a bundle there.

Down to the cove raced Sarah, where the boat
Lay bottom up, half smothered in the foam
The wind had blown from yeasty miles of sea.
How could she right it, neighbors miles away?
A wave washed in and moved it; let it down.
And with a summoned strength that almost tore
Her arms out of her sockets, and with oars
Drawn from their rocky hiding place she heaved
Against the boat upon the yielding sand,
Inching it slowly, wave by wave by wave
Into the water till it floated free,
Still bottom up. But like the storm itself
She leaped upon it, pressing down the keel
Until it righted; and from left to right
Rocked out the water; bailed it with her skirt;
Poled with her oars to keep her from the land,
And in the saddle of a racing sea
Shot from the cove, her back against the waves.
Up, up she went, then boiling down. It seemed
In those vast hollows she was surely lost.
The gulls screamed under curling caverns,
And no one saw her but the howling dog
Running along the cliff's edge, mad with fear.
Sometimes she glimpsed, poised on a ragged crest
Amid the wallowing mountains of the sea,
The white mast wavering, nodding drunkenly,
Yet drifting in, she thought — so strove again,
Staggering through hissing craters. Then once more
The mast shot up with something flapping there,
And yet again, and on she pulled, and on.
How Sarah crossed that half a mile of sea;
How she stood up and cut that bundle down
While mast and boat both bobbed like bottle corks,
Only the dog upon the cliff might know.
She found a sheath knife round the sailor's neck,
Else he had drifted bound and to his death.
So firmly was he lashed, the blue chafed weals
Were on his body, raw for many a day.
But he came loose and fell into the boat,
Slumping between the thwarts like bundled clothes —
A bearded man she saw, and saw no more.
For now the lull passed, and a tearing sound,
As if the air rent like a frozen sail,
Flattened the sea. This saved her, for the wind
Came roaring shoreward, ripping off in spray
The tops of combers, and her boat drove down
Into the water, and then shot away
As if the earth turned under it, and washed
In one vast smothering surge upon the shore,
Rolled over, and left Sarah clinging there
To the limp body she had snatched from sea.
Determined as a panther with its prey,
She dragged him limply by a ledge of rocks,
Taking the ruts for shelter, inch by inch
And foot by foot and upward toward her lair.
This was the final, bitterest test of all
Between her spirit and the elements.
Only the strong heart and the vivid mind
That longed for life, more life, and ever life,
And chose the way to find it through the storm,
Brought her at last to shelter, while the trees
Rose from their roots and slanting walked away.
Roaring like harps of furies. Yet she came,
Battered by lashing branches and debris,
Into the shelter of the hill and house;
Stood upward; forced the door back with last strength;
Dragged her limp man beyond it, and fell down —
With nothing left but life — thought blown away.
Outside the tireless fury bugled on.