Classic Poem

L EVIATHANIC natures,
Huge-browed, vast-spined,
That floated centuries
Unchallenged, unconfined,
Sleep now since age pre-Adam
In frozen marl and stone,
No more by seasons summoned
From zone to zone.

Their many cubits shining
In landless seas —
Black islets ever restless,
Unanchored Cyclades,
Round whose steep cliff the foam-bows
Gathered and tossed and died,
And milk-white wake spread seething
In troublous tide;

From Arctic to Antarctic
Through wan brief days
To tropic seas o'erspangled
By wasting starry blaze;
Placid in sunny Pacifics,
Deep-caved neath Polar storm,
Sea's shallow bed for nuptials
And couch enorm;

Leviathanic creatures,
God's Ancients, you.
The cyclic springs and winters
Like snows on water flow;
And now when ebon nights
Of frozen time we scan,
Staring at callous shadows
Leviathan;

Now if the primal flux
Seem falsely stayed,
And men gaze back and forwards
At fuming gloom thin-rayed;
And cyclic springs and winters
Are guessed from this scarred hull,
From gibbous arch, stone ribs,
Unbuoyant skull;

Or wonderers, wit-wandering,
Tormented brood
On time that's past, the failing
Breath of earth's multitude;
On the green domestic shores,
On the unvalleyed sea,
On man's faint, fading passage
To infinity;

And how the sober earth
Flows with the wave,
Upheaved, dissolving, sinking
Sigh-like in the sea's grave;
How man's inhabitation
No longer space may last
Than the falling sea-hawk's feather
In the sea cast —

Staring so at your shadows
And fossil'd signs,
Phantasms of fled aeons,
God's young and fierce designs,
Imagination burns
And like a star from the height
Falls and is quenched in the hissing sea
Of time and night.