Classic Poem

Survey the sliding sands, that down the bank
Ever precipitate, next snatched away
By ceaseless waves, so lead a moving life,
Now for a little fixed to mother earth,
Then sweeping far, erect new shoals whereon
The hapless Mariner his chart revoked,
Sleeps his perpetual sleep! The tide-wave,
Whose strange vigor rolls the breaker onward,
Knows no pause, no halt, ever renewed the same,
Curling transparent to long lines of foam
When softer airs dally with summer hours,
Next hurled in surges like a cannonade,
Where worlds in contest join, battles the coast,
Tossing the ship a pebble in its palm.
Strange creature, unsuggestive element!
Forever from the mind that cannot fix
Thy form in horizontal grandeur vast,
Still without likeness, swept; I see the ships,
A never-ending company desert
Their places, onward, out of sight, and feel
That were it not for what there is of life,
Of human life and human hope in them,
But for thy freshening airs, consummate Sea!
And endless beauty and provoking change,
Thou wert a lonely waste.
And yet I link
With thee, fathomless Ocean, that dear child!
A summer child, flower of the world,
Rosalba! for like thee, she has no bound
Or limit to her beauty, framed to spell
Words that the gods might copy; Venus-zoned
She rather, like thy billows, bends with grace.
Nor deem the Grecian fable all a myth,
That Aphrodité from a shell appeared,
Soft spanned upon the wave, for o'er thy heart,
Unheeding stranger! thus Rosalba falls,
And by one entrance on thy privacy
Unrolls the mysteries, and gives them tongue.
Dearest Rosalba! could a clumsy hand
Or paint or shape thy image, thou, who art
Not only fair but good, not only good but true,
Not borrowing from artificial plans thy virtue;
Rather, like the sun that all things warms,
Life in thyself, breath of humanities
That take their rise from milky natures,
Soft and fine and pure, refined so far
Beyond all touch of art, or word of praise,
That an interior sunlight tones thy days
To one profound contentment. O my child!
Child of the poet's thought, if ever God
Made any creature that could thee surpass,—
The lightest sunset cloud that purpling swims
Across the zenith's lake, the foam of seas,
The roses when they paint the green sand-wastes
Of the remotest Cape, or hour ere dawn,
I cannot fathom it; how thou art made,
How these attempered elements that in the mass
Run to confusion and exhale in fault,
Beget all monstrous passions and dark thoughts,
Or slow contriving malice or cold spite,
Or leagues of dulness self persuaded rare,
Or old delusion in the maiden's breast,—
Should rise in thee like the vast ocean's grace,
Ne'er to be bounded by my heart or hope,
Yet ever decorous, modest and complete.
Forgive me, O most beautiful, if I have sinned,
If e'er one feeling in my heart had place,
To link thee to myself! Forgive this song,
That here presumptuous I should name thy name,
Or feebly dare to celebrate thy charm!
Rose on her cheeks, are roses in her heart,
And softer on the earth her footstep falls
Than earliest twilight airs across the wave,
While in her heart the unfathomed sea of love,
Its never-ceasing tide pours onward.—