My song begins with the song of the sea,
For the song of the sea is the song eternal. . . .
The forests shout and are still: no leaf stirs:
The winds sleep. . . .
The rocks are the keeps of silence ...
But the sea sings unendingly on the shores of the human world,
And no prow puts out but is rippled with music ...
Restlessness and rest are in that song,
Varying measures, and snatches of tune, and thin whispers and braying trumpets,
And solo singing and chorals of multitude ...
Restlessness and rest ...
The toilers on the shore know that the brine is bitter and that the briny song is bitter. . . .
And the seafarer hears under the full moon the mother lullaby along the ship ...
This song is the cradle-song and the voyage-song and the gravesong of humanity ...
The land, born of the ocean, is eaten away by this hungry mother,
The inland pines long to go back and they remember the sea-songs of old time,
And in the ears of a man this song never ceases ...
One song, as the planet flies, rises unendingly from its lips,
And in that song the planet-children are enfolded, and never go free of it,
And never desire to go free of it,
The unborn are astir in water,
The elfin-faint song of the mother enfolds them
And the born hear that song again on the shores,
And the deep roots, yea, the sea-bottom roots of the soul tremble with that music,
And drink the miracle drink ...
For that song is the song that the sea of creation sings and sings,
Rolling with breakers and foaming billows and white-caps of stars,
Restlessness and rest,
Incessant, ceaseless on the shores of night,
On the shores of life ...
All-permeating sea-song,
Music of the fluid blood and the moving spirit, life that is never silent,
Energy rolling in rhythms, triumphant, despairing, solitary, multitudinous,
Ascending descending song, the impetuous storm-brine, the soothing moon-sheen,
The icy waters that burn, the balm of the equatorial baths,
Wails of the stricken, moans of the dying, shouts of the strugglers,
Dirge and lullaby, bells of the bridal and the burial, —
All within myself, all on the shores of my own body,
The unending song of the planet of my own flesh ...
The Mother forever near me ...
The great Mother singing to her child ...
Cities have also a deep sea music that ebbs in the darkness and flows in the morning,
Unending, unsilent ...
A solitary from the hills
Hearing that song, is aware of a cruel sea,
A sea whose singing is in antiphonies of yes and no,
Choruses that battle in hoarse conflict,
A surging of storm-music, untriumphant, discordant ...
A song that is noise with but overtones of concord ...
The city dweller never is amazed at the song in which he himself is a bleeding chord,
How could he be amazed, knowing the hearts of men,
The anguish, ambition, defeat?
I have heard the songs of great cities,
The dim bellowing of bare ebb-tides an hour or two after midnight,
The washing lull of the dead hours,
The tremulous footsteps of sleep-walkers,
The rumble of the tide turning and the fresh cold wind that whips the gutters from the East,
The clash and growl of the first foam of the flood,
The flood itself, roaring tumultuously and with urgent power through the streets,
The white-caps and choppy waters of high noon,
Bustle, gossip and chatter of the slow sun,
The mighty out-rolling and resistless pull of the shouting ebb-tide,
The last sweet babble, the whispers, kisses, delicious teasing of the moon-white ebb,
The silvery low-singing tunes of first sleep ...
Day after day, night after night, this song ...
Great, terrible and magical in London, Manhattan, and Paris ...
Foam of brief lovers in the gardens of the Tuileries,
Foam of the waifs of London at blue-lit crossings near Piccadilly Circus,
Foam of the sleepers on benches and the dry hot grass of parks in midsummer Manhattan ...
Foam and sparkle, and the clean blue sweep of waters, and the stormy crests of crowds, bursting billows of gnashing mobs, spumy moon-bursts of revolutionists. . . .
The election crowds on Broadway, the torchlight crowds, the concert crowds in the Mall ...
Day after day, night after night, this song ...
The sea, black in the winter cloud-light,
Swinging rough squares of sheeted water, laced with white foam,
And spouting spume through the wind's mouth, and slashing into blue about jutting rocks,
Hard, broken, like jostling steel, out to the sky-rim,
Heaves with a merciless menace, with a monstrous strength ...
There is no pity in the sea,
And nothing human ...
Indoors we may build a fire of faggots,
And read of lovers and of saviours ...
In human warmth we may open our hearts ...
But the wild light of November dusk glances along the windows,
The darkening room has a smile of fire,
Our backs shadow out through the walls to the shadow-shaking skies,
Backwardly we are hurled in the fight and fury of winds and waters,
The brutal ocean unleashed vents a venomous hatred,
Now the ship is clapped together, and fisted out of the flood, and pulled by talons under,
And the sea's song is a bellowing and uproar out of iced hell ...
Softly the human voice goes on intoning the tale of gentle lovers,
The sad sweet saviour story ...
" All is love, " the voice sings, " God is love " ...
Dimly in the smile of the fire we strive to create a circle and spot of love ...
But we are shadows in the light, and our life is swirling out over the rocking sea,
The house-walls fall apart, we stride clouds,
We ride the tempest like witches ...
And the human being whose soft voice remembers love for us,
We know is a demon with a strange mask.
Was it not yesterday that the sea was as gentle as a girl
Who after the restlessness of longing
Is with her lover again, in a secret place,
And he is caressing her?
Was it so long ago when the sea was as plaintive as a wounded child moaning for its mother,
Forsaken on the shore, hidden from the face of the moon?
Or so long ago when the sea, striding like heroic youth in the morning sunshine,
Shouted courage to the toilers on the shore,
And his laughter echoed among the rocks?
Or when the sea like a god, some ancient and understanding mother,
Laid soothing and healing hands of song on the hearts of men?
Sea of battles, sea of matings, sea mournful over the graves of the unremembered,
Rhapsodic on summer mornings with the flush of youth,
Sultry with passions, fogged with gropings, starry with unmeasured majesty,
Serene, furious, meditative, cold and hot, bitter and sweet,
Guised in all ages, the helpless child, the youth, the mature, the mother and father,
Brutal and delicate, divine, demonic,
What are you, sea? what are you, like something in my own depths?
Like something of humanity, yet not human?
I see the great race surging,
I see the great race rolling,
I hear the war-guns thunder and the clear-voiced choirs singing ...
I step in a house where a tired mother croons to her sleepy child,
I walk along the shore, in the gleaming summer night, and hear the babble of lovers. . . .
The murderer walks side by side with the saint,
The reactionist and the revolutionist hate one another,
The judge is judged by the convict, the sick are healing the doctors,
The waves break one through another, the waves appear only as tools and slaves of the resistless tides,
The tides interlink, the undertow pulls against the flood,
The sea storms, is calm, is diluted with rain and resalted out of its depths,
Mercy, anguish, tribulation, and sleep ... the weather changes ...
We help the delivery of the new-born, and shovel earth on the dead ...
Mare aeternis!
Out of the bowels of chaos, you sea of life,
Seething, divine, merciful and fiendish humanity,
Flood of ages, flood forever old, forever new,
Laced with the foam of thinking, with white-caps of idealism,
Silvered with moonlight dream, golden with the broken-up sun, each sun-splinter a hero and a saviour,
Changeless through incessant changing,
A sea with every wave striving to leap clear of the deeps and be a soul,
With every wave longing to walk self-contained on the hard bright shore,
Rolling yearningly toward the shore, and helplessly dragged back,
Sea in which each wave is only water swinging with the ebb and flow of the flood,
Sea that dreams of transcending itself because the sun sucks it up into shining vapor-drops,
But the rain falls, the sea drinks back the rain, and after the storm the sea is the same as before ...
Mare aeternis!
Circle of life turning viciously in on itself,
Serpent with its tail in its mouth, revolving like a wheel,
Dreams of millennium when the charmed circle is broken,
When the tail is torn from the mouth,
Dreams of education, of justice, of democracy, of religion
When at last there is freedom from the wash and backwash, the tide and undertow,
The mad multitude-passions, the helpless riding of storms, the helter-skelter of weather, the groping in the fog,
When at last the sea rises above itself
Out of demonic depths to clean divine peaks ...
The storm of revolution rides the sea,
Crying " We bring freedom, we bring peace " ...
And revolution, like reaction, brings a new slavery, a new war ...
For how shall the sea change its nature and how shall the sea be anything but the sea?
Beautiful over Russia shines the star of revolution ...
And beautiful in the manger of the Soviets again the Christ-child is born on Earth,
A divine song is in the air ...
And irresistibly, as of old, the Christ shall be crucified by his own people ...
For the sea has not changed because a golden light falls through the storm on the bitter waters ...
The sea of the people is the same sea that the tyrants rode,
" Whoever is not for us, is against us, " sang the tyrants,
And the people sing: " Because our cause is holy and a liberation,
Whoever is not for us, is against us. "
It is ever in the name of holiness and through divine sanction that man crucifies man,
The holier the cause, the more horrible the sacrifice ...
For so long as man is of the sea, like the sea he must sing all songs,
God-songs and devil-songs, music of mercy, music of brutality ...
So long as man is of the sea, all weathers shall sway him,
And out of the divine shall leap the demonic ...
A friend comes to the solitary and says to him:
" But surely out of pity you are for the people,
Surely you are with the oppressed, the despised and the hungry ...
Surely you cannot stand by and see children suffer " ...
And the solitary answers: What shall I do?
" You shall become one of us, " says the friend,
" For whoever is not for us, is against us " ...
And the solitary ponders and answers:
" But if I become one of you, I become one of the oppressors ...
For what you believe in is of God, and what your enemies believe in is of the devil ...
Oppression begins when God hurls Satan out of heaven " ...
" Yet, " says the friend, " are we not more right than our enemies? "
And the solitary answers: " What is newest is most right ...
For the new desires things of glory, even as the old, when it was new, desired things of glory ...
But answer me: wherein do you and your fellows differ from those of old? "
" Our aims, our ideals, our purposes are different, " says the friend ...
And the solitary answers:
" The sea of man is littered all over with the spindrift of ideals ...
Great dreams and ideas go washing over the waves ...
Wreckages of divine civilizations mock the great flood ...
But so long as man is of the sea, so long will the sea use him in its eternal way ...
Man's world is what man is, not what he dreams " ...
" But this is hopelessness, " says the friend.
And the solitary answers:
" This is but life ...
And when men seek to transcend themselves, they shall break the wheel,
They shall come out of the sea ...
Only when a man becomes human does he cease to be a herd, an energy, a sea, a thing of nature,
And is healed of the mighty opposites ...
It is because of the sea in himself from which he has never emerged,
It is because of nature in himself, the flux, the tides, storms, visions and furies,
That he remains a primitive masked in a dream of divinity ...
" Let him start a revolution in his own soul, and free the slaves in his own spirit,
And conquer the tyrants in his own breast,
And harness the beast in his blood,
And put away the temptation to be a supreme god,
And the equal temptation to be a powerful demon ...
Then perhaps he shall step up on the shore of a new world,
And find what all are seeking ...
" It is weakness to seek freedom for self by slaughtering others ...
Equality, liberty, brotherhood are of the soul, and are of the self ...
The easy way is out and over, the hard way is in and through ...
It is man's soul that needs a millennium and not man's world ... "
So the solitary spoke, and of course his words were a riddle, they were not understood ...
And these two could be friends no longer ...
For the song of the sea is the song eternal. . . .
The forests shout and are still: no leaf stirs:
The winds sleep. . . .
The rocks are the keeps of silence ...
But the sea sings unendingly on the shores of the human world,
And no prow puts out but is rippled with music ...
Restlessness and rest are in that song,
Varying measures, and snatches of tune, and thin whispers and braying trumpets,
And solo singing and chorals of multitude ...
Restlessness and rest ...
The toilers on the shore know that the brine is bitter and that the briny song is bitter. . . .
And the seafarer hears under the full moon the mother lullaby along the ship ...
This song is the cradle-song and the voyage-song and the gravesong of humanity ...
The land, born of the ocean, is eaten away by this hungry mother,
The inland pines long to go back and they remember the sea-songs of old time,
And in the ears of a man this song never ceases ...
One song, as the planet flies, rises unendingly from its lips,
And in that song the planet-children are enfolded, and never go free of it,
And never desire to go free of it,
The unborn are astir in water,
The elfin-faint song of the mother enfolds them
And the born hear that song again on the shores,
And the deep roots, yea, the sea-bottom roots of the soul tremble with that music,
And drink the miracle drink ...
For that song is the song that the sea of creation sings and sings,
Rolling with breakers and foaming billows and white-caps of stars,
Restlessness and rest,
Incessant, ceaseless on the shores of night,
On the shores of life ...
All-permeating sea-song,
Music of the fluid blood and the moving spirit, life that is never silent,
Energy rolling in rhythms, triumphant, despairing, solitary, multitudinous,
Ascending descending song, the impetuous storm-brine, the soothing moon-sheen,
The icy waters that burn, the balm of the equatorial baths,
Wails of the stricken, moans of the dying, shouts of the strugglers,
Dirge and lullaby, bells of the bridal and the burial, —
All within myself, all on the shores of my own body,
The unending song of the planet of my own flesh ...
The Mother forever near me ...
The great Mother singing to her child ...
Cities have also a deep sea music that ebbs in the darkness and flows in the morning,
Unending, unsilent ...
A solitary from the hills
Hearing that song, is aware of a cruel sea,
A sea whose singing is in antiphonies of yes and no,
Choruses that battle in hoarse conflict,
A surging of storm-music, untriumphant, discordant ...
A song that is noise with but overtones of concord ...
The city dweller never is amazed at the song in which he himself is a bleeding chord,
How could he be amazed, knowing the hearts of men,
The anguish, ambition, defeat?
I have heard the songs of great cities,
The dim bellowing of bare ebb-tides an hour or two after midnight,
The washing lull of the dead hours,
The tremulous footsteps of sleep-walkers,
The rumble of the tide turning and the fresh cold wind that whips the gutters from the East,
The clash and growl of the first foam of the flood,
The flood itself, roaring tumultuously and with urgent power through the streets,
The white-caps and choppy waters of high noon,
Bustle, gossip and chatter of the slow sun,
The mighty out-rolling and resistless pull of the shouting ebb-tide,
The last sweet babble, the whispers, kisses, delicious teasing of the moon-white ebb,
The silvery low-singing tunes of first sleep ...
Day after day, night after night, this song ...
Great, terrible and magical in London, Manhattan, and Paris ...
Foam of brief lovers in the gardens of the Tuileries,
Foam of the waifs of London at blue-lit crossings near Piccadilly Circus,
Foam of the sleepers on benches and the dry hot grass of parks in midsummer Manhattan ...
Foam and sparkle, and the clean blue sweep of waters, and the stormy crests of crowds, bursting billows of gnashing mobs, spumy moon-bursts of revolutionists. . . .
The election crowds on Broadway, the torchlight crowds, the concert crowds in the Mall ...
Day after day, night after night, this song ...
The sea, black in the winter cloud-light,
Swinging rough squares of sheeted water, laced with white foam,
And spouting spume through the wind's mouth, and slashing into blue about jutting rocks,
Hard, broken, like jostling steel, out to the sky-rim,
Heaves with a merciless menace, with a monstrous strength ...
There is no pity in the sea,
And nothing human ...
Indoors we may build a fire of faggots,
And read of lovers and of saviours ...
In human warmth we may open our hearts ...
But the wild light of November dusk glances along the windows,
The darkening room has a smile of fire,
Our backs shadow out through the walls to the shadow-shaking skies,
Backwardly we are hurled in the fight and fury of winds and waters,
The brutal ocean unleashed vents a venomous hatred,
Now the ship is clapped together, and fisted out of the flood, and pulled by talons under,
And the sea's song is a bellowing and uproar out of iced hell ...
Softly the human voice goes on intoning the tale of gentle lovers,
The sad sweet saviour story ...
" All is love, " the voice sings, " God is love " ...
Dimly in the smile of the fire we strive to create a circle and spot of love ...
But we are shadows in the light, and our life is swirling out over the rocking sea,
The house-walls fall apart, we stride clouds,
We ride the tempest like witches ...
And the human being whose soft voice remembers love for us,
We know is a demon with a strange mask.
Was it not yesterday that the sea was as gentle as a girl
Who after the restlessness of longing
Is with her lover again, in a secret place,
And he is caressing her?
Was it so long ago when the sea was as plaintive as a wounded child moaning for its mother,
Forsaken on the shore, hidden from the face of the moon?
Or so long ago when the sea, striding like heroic youth in the morning sunshine,
Shouted courage to the toilers on the shore,
And his laughter echoed among the rocks?
Or when the sea like a god, some ancient and understanding mother,
Laid soothing and healing hands of song on the hearts of men?
Sea of battles, sea of matings, sea mournful over the graves of the unremembered,
Rhapsodic on summer mornings with the flush of youth,
Sultry with passions, fogged with gropings, starry with unmeasured majesty,
Serene, furious, meditative, cold and hot, bitter and sweet,
Guised in all ages, the helpless child, the youth, the mature, the mother and father,
Brutal and delicate, divine, demonic,
What are you, sea? what are you, like something in my own depths?
Like something of humanity, yet not human?
I see the great race surging,
I see the great race rolling,
I hear the war-guns thunder and the clear-voiced choirs singing ...
I step in a house where a tired mother croons to her sleepy child,
I walk along the shore, in the gleaming summer night, and hear the babble of lovers. . . .
The murderer walks side by side with the saint,
The reactionist and the revolutionist hate one another,
The judge is judged by the convict, the sick are healing the doctors,
The waves break one through another, the waves appear only as tools and slaves of the resistless tides,
The tides interlink, the undertow pulls against the flood,
The sea storms, is calm, is diluted with rain and resalted out of its depths,
Mercy, anguish, tribulation, and sleep ... the weather changes ...
We help the delivery of the new-born, and shovel earth on the dead ...
Mare aeternis!
Out of the bowels of chaos, you sea of life,
Seething, divine, merciful and fiendish humanity,
Flood of ages, flood forever old, forever new,
Laced with the foam of thinking, with white-caps of idealism,
Silvered with moonlight dream, golden with the broken-up sun, each sun-splinter a hero and a saviour,
Changeless through incessant changing,
A sea with every wave striving to leap clear of the deeps and be a soul,
With every wave longing to walk self-contained on the hard bright shore,
Rolling yearningly toward the shore, and helplessly dragged back,
Sea in which each wave is only water swinging with the ebb and flow of the flood,
Sea that dreams of transcending itself because the sun sucks it up into shining vapor-drops,
But the rain falls, the sea drinks back the rain, and after the storm the sea is the same as before ...
Mare aeternis!
Circle of life turning viciously in on itself,
Serpent with its tail in its mouth, revolving like a wheel,
Dreams of millennium when the charmed circle is broken,
When the tail is torn from the mouth,
Dreams of education, of justice, of democracy, of religion
When at last there is freedom from the wash and backwash, the tide and undertow,
The mad multitude-passions, the helpless riding of storms, the helter-skelter of weather, the groping in the fog,
When at last the sea rises above itself
Out of demonic depths to clean divine peaks ...
The storm of revolution rides the sea,
Crying " We bring freedom, we bring peace " ...
And revolution, like reaction, brings a new slavery, a new war ...
For how shall the sea change its nature and how shall the sea be anything but the sea?
Beautiful over Russia shines the star of revolution ...
And beautiful in the manger of the Soviets again the Christ-child is born on Earth,
A divine song is in the air ...
And irresistibly, as of old, the Christ shall be crucified by his own people ...
For the sea has not changed because a golden light falls through the storm on the bitter waters ...
The sea of the people is the same sea that the tyrants rode,
" Whoever is not for us, is against us, " sang the tyrants,
And the people sing: " Because our cause is holy and a liberation,
Whoever is not for us, is against us. "
It is ever in the name of holiness and through divine sanction that man crucifies man,
The holier the cause, the more horrible the sacrifice ...
For so long as man is of the sea, like the sea he must sing all songs,
God-songs and devil-songs, music of mercy, music of brutality ...
So long as man is of the sea, all weathers shall sway him,
And out of the divine shall leap the demonic ...
A friend comes to the solitary and says to him:
" But surely out of pity you are for the people,
Surely you are with the oppressed, the despised and the hungry ...
Surely you cannot stand by and see children suffer " ...
And the solitary answers: What shall I do?
" You shall become one of us, " says the friend,
" For whoever is not for us, is against us " ...
And the solitary ponders and answers:
" But if I become one of you, I become one of the oppressors ...
For what you believe in is of God, and what your enemies believe in is of the devil ...
Oppression begins when God hurls Satan out of heaven " ...
" Yet, " says the friend, " are we not more right than our enemies? "
And the solitary answers: " What is newest is most right ...
For the new desires things of glory, even as the old, when it was new, desired things of glory ...
But answer me: wherein do you and your fellows differ from those of old? "
" Our aims, our ideals, our purposes are different, " says the friend ...
And the solitary answers:
" The sea of man is littered all over with the spindrift of ideals ...
Great dreams and ideas go washing over the waves ...
Wreckages of divine civilizations mock the great flood ...
But so long as man is of the sea, so long will the sea use him in its eternal way ...
Man's world is what man is, not what he dreams " ...
" But this is hopelessness, " says the friend.
And the solitary answers:
" This is but life ...
And when men seek to transcend themselves, they shall break the wheel,
They shall come out of the sea ...
Only when a man becomes human does he cease to be a herd, an energy, a sea, a thing of nature,
And is healed of the mighty opposites ...
It is because of the sea in himself from which he has never emerged,
It is because of nature in himself, the flux, the tides, storms, visions and furies,
That he remains a primitive masked in a dream of divinity ...
" Let him start a revolution in his own soul, and free the slaves in his own spirit,
And conquer the tyrants in his own breast,
And harness the beast in his blood,
And put away the temptation to be a supreme god,
And the equal temptation to be a powerful demon ...
Then perhaps he shall step up on the shore of a new world,
And find what all are seeking ...
" It is weakness to seek freedom for self by slaughtering others ...
Equality, liberty, brotherhood are of the soul, and are of the self ...
The easy way is out and over, the hard way is in and through ...
It is man's soul that needs a millennium and not man's world ... "
So the solitary spoke, and of course his words were a riddle, they were not understood ...
And these two could be friends no longer ...