Classic Poem

Cheerily blew the soft mid-summer wind,
And morn's first freshness had not left the sky,
As our small craft shot past the harbor-buoy
And left the light-house far upon the lee,
And stood right out into the glistening bay;
Leaving behind the sad and sullen roar
Of the great waves that broke upon the rocks,
Tossing the rock-weed madly to and fro;
Leaving behind the voices clear and sweet
Of happy children playing on the beach,
And the one ancient, immemorial man
Whose dory rocked amid the boiling surf,
While he, as ever, sat with eyes cast down,
Wondering what luck his lines would bring that day.
Dimmer and dimmer grew the distant shore;
Down dropped the spires below the violet line
Where sea and sky were married into one,
And still we sailed.


And more and more there fell
Upon our spirits such a subtle charm,
So weird a spell of sea-wrought sorcery,
That all things seemed unto our spirits strange.
Strange seemed the sky above, and strange the sea,
And strange the vessels flitting to and fro
Across the bay. Strange seemed we each to each
And to ourselves; and, when our voices smote
The stillness, half they seemed like voices heard
In lives long gone, or lives that were to be.
Little we spoke, and less of words our own;
But now and then some poet's music heard
In that old time before we sailed away,
It might have been a hundred years ago.
Dream-like grew all the past, until it seemed
To be no past of ours.
But when the sun
Began to linger towards the western verge,
We turned our prow and bade him be our guide;
Yet more in doubt than faith that we should find
The land from which we once had sailed away,—
Ay, whether such a land there was at all,
Save as some baseless phantom of our brains,
And when again we heard the roaring surf,
And saw the old, familiar, storm-bleached crags,
And the long curve of pebbly beach beyond,
The wonder grew, till it was keen as pain,
Whether indeed we sailed away that morn,
Or in some dim gray morning of the world;
Whether some few brief hours had flitted by
Between the morning and the evening stars,
Or generations had arrived and gone,
And states had fallen 'mid the crash of arms,
And justice grown more ample on the earth.
There sat the ancient, immemorial man,
Tending his line amid the boiling surf,
And still the charm was not dissolvèd quite:
So long had he been there, it seemed not strange
That he should sit a thousand years or more,
Paying no heed to aught that passed him by.
At length our moorings reached, our anchor dropped,
Amid a crowd we stood upon the shore,—
A crowd whose faces looked a trifle strange;
Till from among them came a little child,
And put her hand in mine and lifted up her face
For kisses. Then the charm was snapped;
And I went homeward, glad to be restored
To the firm earth and its familiar ways.