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Title: On old Cape Cod

Author: Ferdinand C. Lane

Illustrator: Rena V. Rockwell

Release date: July 31, 2025 [eBook #76602]

Language: English

Original publication: Orleans, Mass: The Cape Codder Printery, 1961

Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON OLD CAPE COD ***

[Pg 1]

ON OLD CAPE COD

By Ferdinand C. Lane

Drawings by Rena V. Rockwell

Second Edition

To Emma - my Wife

[Pg 2]

On Old Cape Cod

How rich is life on old Cape Cod

Where autumn smiles in golden rod,

And marshes flame, though not with fire -

A region blest of heart’s desire.

In vain we’d roam the Seven Seas

There are no quainter shores than these.

Here nature in indulgent mood

Enfolds us with her solitude;

And here her cleansing winds combine

The tonic of the salt and pine,

The while old ocean’s muffled swells

Are chiming like cathedral bells.

The days drift by without a care

As sweet fern odors scent the air,

And watching wheeling gulls at play

The world of strife seems far away.

It must have been a kindly God

Who shaped the sands of old Cape Cod.

[Pgs 3,4]

On Monomoy	5
The Song of the Sea Shell	6
Winds of the Cape	7
The Enchanted Marsh	8
The Fragrance of the Cape	9
Sea Lavender	10
The Final Rose	10
Fairy Rings	11
Beach Plums	12
On Truro Hills	13
My Drift Wood Fire	15
The Sand Piper	16
The Whistling Buoy off Nauset	17
Peaked Hill Bars	18
The Rime of the Three Captains	19
Storm Signals	20
Neptune’s Coursers	21
To a Spider Web wet with Dew	22
The Dunes	23
The Flight of the Wild Geese	25
Sweet Fern	26
White Sail	26
The Humming Bird	27
O Road that Winds Among the Hills	28
The Beach Grass Threnody	28
To a Rose Jar	29
Blue Berries	30
The Watcher	31
The Sea Shell Boat	32
Flotsam	33
The Ancient Log Book	34
The Dance of the Moon Beams	35
Marshes of Sandwich	37
The Smile of the Sea	37
Our Cape Cod Home	38
Thunder Storm Off Race Point	40
To a Scrimshawed Whale’s Tooth	41
Creeping Fog	42
Wooden Sailor	43
The Dreamer	44
The Chant of the Night Wind	45
Midnight	46
The Golden Rod	47
Wild Roses	48
The Coast Guard Station	49
Keeper of the Light	50
On Chatham Bars	51
The Old Timer’s Lament	52
Revery	53
The Old Hulk	54
The Modernists	55
When the Locusts are In Bloom	57
The Harvest of the Sea	58
Beach Grass	59
The Swamp Heron	61
The Throes of Creation	62
Hog’s Back Church	63
Beyond the Point	66
The Winds of Time	67
To an Aged Willow	68
The Old Woods Road	69
The Poverty Weed	70
The Sweep of the Tides	71
Lost Billingsgate	73
Transformed	74
Haunting Echoes	74
Lost at Sea	75
The Aspen	76
The Song of the Sea Gulls	77
Broken Fragments	78
Workers of Magic	79
My Golden Fleece	80
The Lone Lilac	81
Friendly Lights	82
To My Cherry Blossom	83
Grains of Sand	84
The Funeral Wreath	84
Memory	85
The Stoker	89
Imagination	91
In Wellfleet by the Sea	95

[Pg 5]

On Monomoy

Gigantic finger, joint by joint,

Thrust out in warning from the land

To lurking shoals, along your point

We tread a skeleton of sand,

Till at the end we seem to be

Where all the world dissolves in sea

On Monomoy.

O’er Stone Horse shoal and Pollock Rip

The sullen tides sweep on apace

Where many a gallant sailing ship

Has found her final resting place;

But of the dead - no man may say

Till redly dawns the judgment day

On Monomoy.

For fishermen tell ghastly tales

Of wrecks and shuddering moons that mark

Red murder done, and spectral hails

Of Yo-Hoes keening from the dark!

So in the night when breakers moan

Fear trails his steps who walks alone

On Monomoy.

Waif of the seas and old Cape Cod

Where Gosnold voyaged long ago,

Where bold Champlain in armor trod,

What tales the muttering undertow

Could Whisper - or the sea birds scream

To brooding dune and marsh adream

On Monomoy.

[Pg 6]

The Song Of The Sea Shell

Come press your coral lip against my ear

Frail vagrant of the sea,

And sing to me the songs I love to hear

From ocean’s symphony.

Of tides that set in far off palmy isles

Where ukuleles strum,

And star eyed maidens wreathed in flowers and smiles

Dance to your rhythmic hum.

No plaintive bird, full throated with the spring,

Warbles a sweeter note

Than those enchanting melodies that ring

Within your pearly throat.

Sonorous chords that sound a minor key,

Sea chanties hoarse and low,

The echoes of the mermaid’s minstrelsy,

And songs the sirens know.

But now a bit of flotsam on the beach

Imprisoned in my hand,

I listen to the mysteries you teach

And strive to understand.

Your music leaves me in a brooding vein

Sweet chantress of the deep,

For in those elfin strains you wake again

From death’s engulfing sleep

And when, like you, upon life’s farthest shore

Time bears my empty shell,

O may such songs as your immortal store

Be mine as well!

[Pg 7]

Winds Of The Cape

Winds of the Cape, go tearing by

Down the wild canyons of the sky!

When winter’s cold has stripped the trees,

And fields are bare and waters freeze,

We hear them in the dead of night

Careering on their headlong flight -

The formless horsemen of the blast

In gales of darkness rushing past!

Winds of the Cape in gladness ring

With all the lilting songs of spring!

When fresh and clean the world awakes,

And petals fall in snowy flakes

From beach plum bush and apple tree

There comes the haunting melody

From sky land’s caravans once more -

Wild geese in flight for Labrador!

Winds of the Cape in Summer days

When shore and dune dissolve in haze,

Come drifting down the heavenly leas

From cloudland’s floating Hebrides,

Caressing with your langorous calm,

And coolness like a healing balm;

And whispering tales of Araby

Palm fringing some enchanted sea.

Winds of the Cape, what sadness blends

In those wild gusts that Autumn sends

Down empty hallways of the sky,

To echo ever mournfully

The footsteps of the dying year;

To grieve o’er woods and meadows sere

For things we loved so much - but lost

Like blossoms withered by the frost.

[Pg 8]

The Enchanted Marsh

O ripples in the marshland grass

Like waves on an enchanted sea,

The winds, with trailing garments pass

Invisible adown the lea

Each footprint, evanescent, pressed

In shadowed highlight, trough and crest.

No spray upon those waves is seen

To splash upon the marshy bank;

Uncanny sea so strangely green!

While lurking in those coverts dank

What things of the abyss may dwell

Only the fear hushed winds might tell.

Far off where dunes aspiring melt

Into the sky, those currents flow

In turmoil neither heard nor felt

How furtively they come and go!

Things yet undreamed of well might be

Submerged beneath so weird a sea.

No surges break but in our ear

An elfin murmuring seems to sound,

So vague it is we scarce may hear.

O can it be the far off pound

Of foamless surf on sands unseen

Beyond that shimmering waste of green?

And we who sail that eerie sea

Go drifting on a tide of dreams

To unknown isles in fantasy,

Borne on the undulating beams

Of sun, dim litten, or the moon

That cringes o’er the farthest dune.

How timelessly it ebbs and flows,

That sea of ever changing light,

And whence it bears us no one knows

To what wild chasms of the night

Where fancy, yearning to explore

Pauses, aghast, upon the shore.

[Pg 9]

The Fragrance Of The Cape

The sun, that sovereign alchemist, and winds

That do his bidding, gleaning from the wilds

Sweet essences and savory condiments

Have mingled them in that vast crucible

Of hill and hollow, swamp and circling sea,

And like the witch’s cauldrons, from that brew

Evoked a fragrance sweet as Araby.

The honeyed breath of Mayflowers in the spring,

The nectar lingering in the elfin cups

Of purple lilacs, fairy scents distilled

By pendant locust blossoms, essences

That lade the air when the wild roses bloom

In scarlet flames that beautify the hills;

The resinous aroma of the pines

In summer heats when crows call languidly

To droning bumble bees and gulls float past

Like wisps of snowy cloud; the musk of swamps

Where swaying cat tails shimmer in the sun

And the noon stillness echoes to the calls

Of blackbirds clarion shrill; the pungent smell

Of sage grass by the tidal pool, the spice

Of sweet fern from the hillsides redolent

With beachplum and the subtle frankincense

Of waxen bayberry, and over all

The faint, elusive permeating scent

Of sand and salt and spray from shore and sea.

The mace and cinnamon of far off isles

Are in that odor intimate and quaint

And lasting as the memories that cling

To weathered houses, gardens colorful

With hollyhocks and dahlias, rimmed with shells;

Or stranded hulls that brood in lonely coves

By crumbling piers where once proud vessels lay.

The romance and adventure of those days

When stanch descendants of the Pilgrim band

Carved out from sand and wilderness their homes

And wrung a hard subsistence from the deep,

Still linger in the memories of that time,

And in the perfume subtle, vague and strange

That charm elusive as the whispering breeze,

Sad as the setting sun athwart the dunes,

Mysterious as the ever changing sea,

The wild sweet, haunting fragrance of the Cape.

[Pg 10]

Sea Lavender

Upon the marsh a filmy blur

As delicate as gossamer;

A wraith of fog, a vaporous wisp

With stem and leaves and branches crisp,

Their fibre toughened by the gale,

Can plant so hardy seem so frail?

Half hidden mid its stalks of green

The flowerets are scarcely seen

As dainty specks of ocean’s blue,

Or bits of sky that filtered through,

To melt in tints of amethyst

As evanescent as the mist.

And now through many a lacey line

That fairy fingers intertwine

Upon my mantelpiece at last

You shed the fragrance of the past;

A wraith of marshland witchery -

A floral memory of the sea.

The Final Rose

From an ember

bud that glows,

In September

flames a rose.

Bursting prison

doors of bark,

Blithely risen

like a lark.

Sweetly winging

to my room,

Ever singing

in perfume.

Tardy comer,

woodsprite blest,

Dying summer’s

last and best!

[Pg 11]

Fairy Rings

Far and near on every hand

Fairy rings bedeck the sand,

Footprints of the sportive elves

Dancing gaily with themselves;

Hand in hand and round and round

Treading circles on the ground

Nightly, by the glow worm’s ray

To the cricket’s roundelay.

Ardently each woodland gnome

Clasps a fairy from the foam,

Waltzing till the wondering moon

Sees each circle as a rune

In a maze of mystery

For the puzzled stars to see,

While the revellers at dawn

Leave a myriad circles drawn.

Or perchance the compass grass

Whirled by wandering airs that pass

Has engraved those strange designs

In its circumscribed confines.

Archimedes never drew

Circles more exact or true

Than each needle pointed blade

Razor edged and green as jade.

[Pg 12]

Can we delve the cryptic sense

From each grooved circumference?

In the grass that etched those rings

What immortal spirit springs?

Or what inspirations stir

The bewitched geometer

To such elfin tracery

On the sands beside the sea?

Beach Plums

How daintily your blossoms cling

Like memories of winter snows;

The maiden promises of spring

That Nature, wakening, bestows;

White as a bridal veil of gauze

O’er branches gnarled like eagle’s claws.

How richly ripe and purple hued

You lure the eager appetite

When autumn yields in kindliest mood

Those luscious globules of delight!

The sylvan elves must brew that taste

From sea and dune and scented waste.

For only skill like theirs could blend

From woodland wild and rolling brine

Such flavors. Or perchance they lend

Their elven powers to those divine

So that the tang of earth and sky

Is mingled in their alchemy.

Or were some darker rites invoked

Some ritual of the churchman’s hell;

Malignant imps and beldams cloaked

In blackness capering neath the spell

Of gibbous moons obscure and lone -

Such witchcraft we might yet condone.

Yes, though we know not whence you came

Your sweet caresses to the tongue

Would still delight us just the same

Whether from day or darkness sprung;

Content and carefree, from the stems

To pluck such epicurean gems.

[Pg 13]

On Truro Hills

Upon those dome like hills of sand

A wonderous carpet has been laid,

Rich as the rugs of Samarkand

And gorgeous as some rare brocade

Wrought on the looms of far Cathay

Or by the shrines of Mandalay.

It covers well those hills of sand

That glaciers rounded long ago,

Nor can the dyes of Samarkand

Display a stranger, deeper glow

Such tints of red and gray and green

With gold and amber in between.

To rolling slopes the lichens cling

And tufts of bunch grass russet sere,

Through them the murmurous breezes sing

While clustering sweet fern, far and near

Wafts spicy smells like incense o’er

Those lonely hills from wood to shore

The wild bearberry shyly twines

Its sinuous length through grass and moss,

How glossy are its clinging vines

From green to rusty red. Across

Its sheen the sunbeams dreamily

Play like the waves upon the sea.

Blueberry clumps in curving lines

Mingle with waxen bayberry

To trace their arabesque designs

On richly wrought embroidery,

With borders in the marshy sedge

And fringing beach grass for the edge.

A treeless waste it seems, but no

The scrub oak, lichen crusted, cowers

And dwarf pines, gnarled and twisted, grow

By beach plum thickets, white with flowers

A waste that blooms with rarer dyes

Than jungles turn to tropic skies.

And there are thread bare patches too

That add more color to the heath

[Pg 14]

For where the texture is worn through

It shows the golden sands beneath,

While in the afternoon’s slant rays

All outlines blur in purple haze.

Uncanny moorland, desolate

And in the dusk how weirdly still,

A landscape one can ne’er forget.

O’er ghostly hollow wraithlike hill

What timid moonsprites nightly flee

The muttering demons of the sea!

The ebbing seasons merely change

That coverlet from day to day,

By shifting, in their varied range

From sober hues to some more gay,

While from the sea and sky and air

Fresh color splashes everywhere.

That turf rough seeded by the wind

And nurtured by the pensive sun,

Is richer than the shawls of Ind,

Or that famed carpet once begun

By Jinns and Peris, known of yore,

That through the air the Genii bore.

Perhaps on some enchanted breeze

From Kurdistan or Araby

Those Genii over unknown seas

Have borne this priceless tapestry,

This fabric wrought in Faery land

To beautify a barren strand.

’Tis woven on the loom of time

Spun from the filaments of dreams,

This magic carpet. Age nor clime

Can match its pattern, or the streams

Of color lavish Nature spills

O’er Truro’s ancient, windswept hills

[Pg 15]

My Drift Wood Fire

Heap high the wood on my rusty grate

As I sit enthroned like a potentate

In my old arm chair, while the crackling blaze

Unbars the gates, to my dazzled gaze,

Of a flame bright world that my fancy weaves

Though the storm may batter the creaking eaves.

There is Norway pine from the Arctic’s chill

From wrecks that splintered off Peaked Hill;

There is stout oak fashioned by broad axe blows,

And stranger wood that the jungle grows;

For such is the tribute I levy, - these

Are the far flung gifts of the seven seas.

The surf that claws at the wind swept beach

Like skeleton fingers seems to reach

For my lonely shelter; but staunch it stands

Though its walls resound to the rattling sands

In volleys hurled by the howling blasts; -

Pile on those staves and that stump of mast!

Up the roaring chimney the black smoke goes

But O the glory that ebbs and flows

On the heat warped ceiling and buckled floor,

In green and purple; with ruddy ore

That glints in gold where the salt burns through

Mid flames that dance in an elfin blue!

My home may seem but a weathered shack

Where the cold creeps in through many a crack;

But my fire’s bright magic has changed all these

To a castle hall where I take my ease,

With the window flaunting in sparkling lines

My royal crest that the frost designs.

Yes, I am a king carefree and bold

And I laugh at the gale and the winter’s cold.

My grate? ’Tis a jewel vault of Ind.

That music wild? - It is not the wind

But my minstrel’s songs, for my heart’s desire

I have found at last in my drift wood fire!

[Pg 16]

The Sand Piper

Quaint manikin, what bids you keep

Such formal distance with your droll

Divertisements, the while I stroll

In solitude beside the deep?

Your mannerisms first suggest

A Puritan sedate and prim;

Then change you by capricious whim

Into a gnome with hooded crest,

Or bit of animated foam,

Or e’en a cloud wisp drifting by, -

What region in the sea or sky

Or lonely dune can you call home?

Your footsteps mincing gleefully

Thread in and out along the verge

Embroidering the creamy surge, -

Strange little old man of the sea!

But in your antic frolicking,

Your beak grotesque and solemn eye,

Your stilt-like legs, your piping cry,

And sudden ecstasies of wing,

There is a kinship with the spray

Wind driven, and the restless sand,

A mingling of the sea and land,

The hither and the far away.

Blithe atomy, bold Nature’s child

Within you pulses glad and free

With joyous spontaneity

The tameless spirit of the wild!

[Pg 17]

The Whistling Buoy Off Nauset

Voice of unutterable woe

Wailing alone at sea!

Borne on the shuddering winds that blow

Out of the dark to me.

Now far - now near

To the frightened ear

Comes that monody wild and free.

Mingled of menace and grief and fear

With a maniac chuckle of glee -

O hear!

That note of demoniac glee!

Prophet of peril and storm,

Harbinger, Triton and brute,

Mariners peering to glimpse your form

Cheer at your hoarse salute -

That gurgling sound

Of a sob half drowned

That is vague as the muttering foam!

Staggering drunkenly to and fro,

You buffet the tide rips and undertow,

A fettered gnome

In the grip of the shoals below.

Hark to that ominous roar

Freezing the blood with dread!

Vampire waves on a spectral shore

Ravening over the dead.

O-oo, O-oo!

Is your wild adieu

To the souls that the winds have sped!

Breakers are howling like wolves on the trail,

Foaming and gnashing and leaping the rail,

Where a shrieking crew

Are lost in the maddened gale.

Wraith of the dangerous seas,

Haunting the skeleton sands,

Creature of iron and billow and breeze

Wrought by a mortal’s hands.

Your eerie moan

So weird - so lone

Is a medley of boding and rapture and groan.

Roisterer, mourner and demon I wis

Strangest of beings in ocean’s abyss

Your elfin cry

Is a note of its infinite mystery.

[Pg 18]

Peaked Hill Bars

On the dread bars at Peaked Hill

The sullen waves are strangely still;

And o’er that eerie sand dune’s crest

The winds, beguiling, seem at rest;

As the wild flare of Highland Light

Goes surging up into the night.

What sinister serenity

Pervades that graveyard of the sea,

Where sand bars, white as bone, submerge

Down where the tides intone a dirge

For houseless and unhallowed souls -

’Tis Death who broods among the shoals!

For hark, it comes, the thunderous gale

That makes those dunes and beaches quail,

As the wild winds and waves embroil

Those shoals until they seem to boil

And lift to heaven as loud a din

As though the fiends were caged within.

No mariners of old e’er sailed

More dangerous seas. Charybdis veiled

No starker terrors than those blue

And greenish shallows hide from view,

Where, crouched like tigers on the kill,

Lurk the dread bars at Peaked Hill!

[Pg 19]

The Rime Of The Three Captains

Three captains lounged before the blaze

Of drift wood burning cheerily,

And they warmed to ventures of other days

In salty tales of the sea.

Tarred were the ropes coiled under the eaves,

Tar had dripped on the warping floor,

Beach sand fluttered like withered leaves

And sifted under the door.

The salt that crusted the chimney wide

Had tinged the flames with yellows and reds;

Salt were the wavelets that lapped outside,

And white as the salt were their heads.

Visions of many a tropic clime

In the firelight seemed to come and go;

Till friends they had known in their youthful prime

Took form in the radiant glow.

As time cracked voices droned away

Through strange adventures in days gone by,

One voyaged with them to far Cathay

And spice swept Araby.

Quaint were the islands they knew so well

Zanzibar, Pitcairn, and Celebes;

Isles enchanted where reigned the spell

Of other and lonelier seas.

Seas that cringed at the typhoon’s wrath

When his thunderous roar was heard;

Silent seas in the calm of death

Where never a whisper stirred.

And the pulses quickened to hear their tales

of voices hailing from spectral sands;

Of dead men’s ships with their ghastly sails

Unfurled by skeleton hands!

Legends weird of an unplumbed deep

Where galleons foundered in days of yore;

And sightless monsters that grope and creep

In the slime of the ocean floor.

[Pg 20]

Sagas of shipwreck in days long gone,

Of pirate treasure and revelry,

Of clashing cutlass and fights hard won

In some blood stained mutiny.

On decks awash how they held their own

When faced by the knives of a cursing crew.

And they spoke of shoals and of ledges lone

Which only the sea birds knew.

Youth flushed once more on withered cheeks,

Bent shoulders squared defiantly,

At such deeds as fired the warlike Greeks

In their legended Odyssey.

And the murmuring tide ebbed once again,

And the fire burned low e’re the captains three

Recalled with a sigh they were old, old men

Who were done with their toil on the sea.

Storm Signals

Red blur against the western sky

A banner flutters threateningly

The sport of every treacherous air

It flaunts its warning note - “Beware”

Each wrinkle in its protean form

A portent of impending storm.

The darkening smudge where sank the sun

In bloody embers smoulders on

With brooding wrath. But angrier red

Invests that standard with the dread

Of unseen terrors. For it holds

Death’s shadow in its writhing folds!

[Pg 21]

Neptune’s Coursers

Horses of Neptune that bound and dash

Maddened with fear at the tempest’s lash,

Pawing the sand with their thudding feet

In a crashing rhythm of thunderous beat,

Swift as the startled winds they race,

Straining ever at fleeter pace;

Forms that curve where the billows comb,

Breasting a welter of seething foam,

What unseen riders spur them on

In a fierce stampede to be up and gone?

Out of the hoary deep they come,

Surging on with a booming roar,

Pounding ever along the shore,

Till the senses whirl and the ear grows numb.

Manes that stream in the wind swept spume,

Necks that arch in the breakers’ crest,

Hoofs resounding like drums of doom,

Rearing forward with frantic zest,

Wild are the steeds of the storm scarred deep!

Trident driven, they plunge and leap,

With nostrils spread and their eyes aglow,

And fetlocks gripped by the undertow,

Boisterous, raging, uncanny steeds

Out of an ocean waste that breeds

Chargers fit for a sea god’s needs -

Neptune’s coursers, untamed and free,

Fleeing the wrath of the unknown sea!

[Pg 22]

To A Spider Web Wet With Dew

Suspended o’er the grass there floats a web

More delicate than strands of gossamer

Wet with the morning dew, in pendant gems

That flame with reds and greens and darting blues

From the bright sun. A filmy nothingness

Made visible by jeweled drops and etched,

Like frosted silver, on a background dark

Of drooping pines. An airy talisman

As lustrous as a diamond necklace draped

About a Peri’s throat. What fleeting glimpse

Of loveliness ethereal and unreal

Inspired that rapt enchantment of design,

That harp of strings attuned to elfin songs,

That ladder for the moonsprites nightly trail

From sky to earth. What miracle of line,

What shimmering grace, what witchery of form!

So fragile that a fallen leaf may rend

Its warp of magic ne’er to know the woof

Of hard reality. A diagram

Of elfin tracery impalpable;

Each angle and its intersections squared

By that grotesque geometer who spins

Unseen, a hateful spider, ogre grim

To all the insect world. Can ugliness

So venomous create a thing so fair

Beyond the range of art? In pensive mood

We pause a moment to admire and scan

Its meaning. Can such fairy elegance

Spring from so foul a source? Yet legends tell

How crippled Vulcan, grimed with dust and smoke,

In darkness wrought the glorious shield of Mars.

The water lily, blossom honey sweet,

Draws nectar from the mire. Nor time nor bounds

May curb that hidden beauty that wells up

From secret springs in nooks obscure and dark,

Till gems of dew upon a spider’s web

Glow like the Pleiades in frosted skies.

[Pg 23]

The Dunes

The dunes, the silent sentinels of the land

That range along the lea,

In revery unbroken, there they stand

And gaze far out to sea

Across their wind swept crests the breezes play

In cadence sad and sweet,

The restless sands whip ever day by day

Their surf tormented feet.

The dying sunbeams gild their crags with gold

Then purple into night,

Around their slopes the elves of twilight fold

A film of spectral light.

A landscape wild that one might see in dreams

Or on the pallid moon,

Blue shadows traced in silver by her beams

In many a cryptic rune.

[Pg 24]

Or etched against the winter sky they show

An outline weird and stark,

Their pale sands melting like the sparser snow

Into a background dark.

With scudding clouds, reflected on the dull

Gray mirror of the sea.

Cut by the wing points of a lonely gull

In poised expectancy.

The distant sand bars mark the skeletons

Of other vanished dunes,

Their crests were once upreared to other suns

And other ghostly moons.

The seething shoals once foamed beneath your feet

And maddened tide rips swirled

Whence risen proudly you can stand and greet

The older, firmer world.

Unstable element of shifting sand

Whose contours ever change,

But moulded by great nature’s groping hand

In shapes bizarre and strange.

We too, from sand have fashioned castled towers

For waves to wash away,

But her creations crumble much like ours

Though in a grander way.

Nature, like man, forever vainly strives

To conquer time and tide;

She toils long aeons, we our briefer lives

And both unsatisfied!

[Pg 25]

The Flight Of The Wild Geese

Out of the sky they call to me

Honking geese in the far flung V

Of an angle traced on the filmy skies

As they float along, and their plaintive cries

Are the pipes of an elfin roundelay.

Tis the call of the wild to the Far-away!

“Northward Ho!” is their haunting chant

Down the rocking winds their long lines slant,

And the old gray gander who takes command

How he marshals the files of his climbing band,

As they wing their flight with a tireless haste,

To the ice rimmed seas and the tundra waste.

To the spruce fringed lakes and the virgin sod

Where never the foot of man has trod;

To the empty lands unspoiled and clean

That never the eye of man has seen;

Where the frost wraiths flee in the melting nights

That throb to the dance of the northern lights.

On their venturous voyage no compass guides

Through the murmuring reefs and the chartless tides

Of the upper air. But their leader hoarse,

Like a pilot sage directs their course

To the sheltered fens and the coves they share

With the snow white fox and the arctic hare.

How we follow the wild geese’s homing flight

Till their chorus dies and they fade from sight,

And our pulses thrill to be up and away

Joyously buoyant, as free as they.

For their far off challenge seems to ring

“Awake, glad world, to the songs of Spring!”

[Pg 26]

Sweet Fern

Strange perfume of the wilderness,

Elusive as an elfin child

That broods above the landscape wild -

And haunting as a last caress.

From thickets broken and obscure

That spicy fragrance down the lea,

Brings to the ever murmuring sea

The sweetness of the barren moor.

Low risen thickets, scarcely seen

Among the clumps of reindeer moss;

What elfin traceries emboss

Your leafy arabesques of green!

And if no lonely passer by

Has trod your solitude to share

That incense - every wandering air

Has borne it to the bending sky.

White Sail

White sail beyond yon point of sand

Set like a gem upon the blue,

A fairy bark for elfin land

Receding gradually from view;

White sail a snow flake come to rest

Like thistledown, upon the sea;

A distant beacon on the breast

Of watery immensity.

White sail, a finger tip that seems

To beckon from the ocean’s rim,

To some enchanted isle of dreams

Beyond the skyline, vague and dim.

White sail that like a lonely tern

Fades out against the dying day,

We watch till you are gone and yearn

To voyage into the far away.

[Pg 27]

The Humming Bird

Blithe wanderer from some happier sphere

What hither darting brought you here

Swift as a flash of light,

With rainbow spatters on your throat

Aflutter like a dancing mote

Upon a sunbeam bright.

Bold atom of exultant life

With energy and action rife

And pinions all ablurr,

What glad exuberance of wing

Like harping on a fairy string

Evokes that vibrant whirr?

With humming, strumming melody

Like some supernal bumble bee

You flit about to sup

On honey dew. Your fearless beak

Probes, lancet like, those sweets to seek

Within each nectared cup.

Ah birdikin, now here, now there,

Poised elfinlike, upon the air

Aglitter like the dawn,

How ardently we would beguile

So fair a sprite to rest a while

But flash! and you are gone.

Yet the unspoken word you bring

Still lingers. Time is on the wing

And never may be stayed.

So let us sip each honeyed hour

For life itself is but a flower

That all too soon will fade.

[Pg 28]

O Road That Winds Among The Hills

O road that winds among the hills

With sinuous curves that lure the eye

Up distant slopes to meet the sky,

And wake a wanderlust that thrills

To scenes which beckon far beyond

From steep Kashmir or Trebizon.

How like a bird, we’d love to roam

Beyond the gray Horizon’s rim

That shuts us like a prison grim

Within that narrow niche - our home

While thoughts unfettered steal away

To Istanbul and far Cathay.

O road we tread in toil and strife

That climbs to greet the bending air,

The long, long trail to none knows where -

The weary highway we call Life -

What lies beyond? Ah, who can say

But we shall see and know - some day!

The Beach Grass Threnody

Lo in the wind the beach grass sings

A medley of fantastic things

That stirs the silence of the ear

With elfin notes we scarce may hear,

From formless shapes grotesque and strange

That lurk beyond the vision’s range.

The fingers of what moon beam sprite,

Or lonely demon of the night,

Have strummed those sweetly plaintive strings

To the weird melody that wrings

A note of haunting mystery

From the chill vastness of the sea.

[Pg 29]

To A Rose Jar

Fair chalice in your spicy store

The roses seem to blow

And childhood’s simple faith restore

In legend’s long ago;

Such as the Arab’s jewelled prose

Where Genii from the bottle rose

The magician’s command obeyed

And at his feet whole kingdoms laid.

From odorous depths I summon thee

O spirit of the past!

Weave all your spells of fantasy

And may your visions last.

Bring to my ear the murmuring breeze

The drowsy, far off hum of bees,

Unfolding to my raptured gaze

Those scenes beloved, of olden days.

Once more within this scented gloom

Forgotten sunbeams rest

On hedges drooped with odorous bloom

By blushing lips caressed.

Those roses faded with the dusk -

Her lips grew cold, but fixed in musk

The fragrance lingers - and her eyes

Do they smile down from Paradise?

Prophetic incense, subtly rare,

O may I understand

The poignant messages you bear

From Memory’s holy land

For petals torn from withered stems

Have filled this treasure casque with gems

And their sweet perfume brings to me

A hint of immortality.

[Pg 30]

Blue Berries

From elfland’s glades and coverts green

Peering through bars of sun and shade

Are friendly little eyes, I ween,

That glow like sapphires set in jade,

And shyly veil their azure spheres

In summer’s filmiest atmospheres.

There banqueting, we half recline

And sip the perfume redolent

With sweet fern, aromatic pine,

And bayberries’ seductive scent,

An incense rare as smoking spice

That censers raise to Paradise.

The stillness brooding like a pall

O’er thickets and entangled trees

Is stabbed by the shrill blackbird’s call,

And rippled by the wandering breeze

That trails a buzzing dragon fly

Where bumble bees hum drowsily.

Athwart the slant rays of the sun

Far off there glides a cloudland sail

To faery shores. Our task is done -

Our treasure won - a brimming pail.

And no blithe argonaut e’er bore

From legend’s quest a richer store!

[Pg 31]

The Watcher

A frail old lady bent and gray

She gazes out into the west.

To her it seems but yesterday

He sailed away with eager zest

“I pinned a rose upon his coat”

She falters, clutching at her throat.

A mariner he put to sea,

Twas more than fifty years ago,

The neighbors nod in sympathy,

She cannot understand they know.

What fancies throng her poor old head

“My Robert lost? He can’t be dead.”

And she is right. Her clearer eye

Sees through the storms and stress of years,

Full well she knows he did not die

The rainbow glistens through her tears

Enshrined within her heart in truth

Her Robert lives in deathless youth.

From her lone window on the shore

She nightly sets a lamp to burn

A beacon when the breakers roar

To guide him on his safe return.

No matter what the neighbors say

These two shall meet again some day!

[Pg 32]

The Sea Shell Boat

How now, little maid, in your bonnet arrayed

With that quaint little shell in your hand!

Not a shell but a boat? Ah, I see, let it float

Far away from these mountains of sand.

It will sail so I’m told, down the pathway of gold

Where the sun paves the sea with its beams,

To some fortunate isle where the skies ever smile

Upon childhood’s endeavors and dreams.

But, Honey, don’t cry if it sinks bye and bye

Like a fluttering bird to its nest;

For the wild waves at play in their blundering way,

Like the oncoming years never rest.

My hopes were aglow in the long, long ago

When my own little ship left the shore;

But my hair has grown grey since it drifted away

And it never came back any more!

[Pg 33]

Flotsam

O flotsam stranded on the beach

Half buried in the oozing sand,

A sudden step, an outstretched hand,

And you are snatched beyond the reach

Of clutching waves. What brought you here

From far off climes beyond the seas,

The sport of every furtive breeze,

A wanderer for many a year?

What gulfs of ocean’s nether world

Your paths have plumbed, I cannot know,

To what abyss the Krakens go,

Or where Leviathan was hurled.

What current dark, I wonder, links

Your lot with mine on this lone shore, -

But there is only silence more

Unbroken than the Memphian spinx.

And am I fain to speculate

Upon the burden of your past?

When I, myself, am flotsam cast

Ashore a little while to wait

For Time’s resistless tides that sweep

In endless waves of night and day

Across the shoaling milky way

From some vast, unimagined deep!

[Pg 34]

The Ancient Log Book

’Tis a time eaten volume with pages so blurred

That they seem to peer out through a fog,

But our fancy illumines each lustreless word

Of that battered old “wind-jammer’s” log.

Till our eyes gazing out through those angular lines

Like windows, transparent, behold

Far vistas of seas where adventure combines

With “spices” and “teak wood” and “gold.”

“Off the Horn” where the “greybeards” loomed up “mountain high”

All “our topsails were carried away”;

Then ’twas “cutlass and pike” when the “pirates drew nigh”

As “becalmed off Macassar we lay.”

“One man hurt” then a later notation, “he’s dead”

And “was buried at sea” all we know,

He “signed from Tahiti” a “good man” they said,

“The fo’castle hands called him ‘Joe’”

Lone wanderer far from his native lagoon

Was he mourned by some garlanded maid?

We ponder till jarred by a “roaring Typhoon”

And “there on our beam ends we laid”.

“With our water casks low” when our “Bread had give out”

“We fetched by some island unknown”

Though we “dragged on the coral” while “Going about”

We added “their stores” to our own.

There’s the wash and the surge of the murmurous deep

In each billowing flourish of ink.

Though the captains are silent in fathomless sleep

What they tersely inscribed is a link.

With a past, when our banner, its glory aflame

To the winds of the heavens was flung;

And their deeds are forever an epic of fame

Such as Homer of old might have sung.

[Pg 35]

The Dance Of The Moon Beams

O the moonbeams dance down the broad expanse

Of a path o’er the heaving sea,

And they blithely trip from tip to tip

Of the billows ranging free.

Down a highway bright of silvery light

They dance to the ghostly moon,

In the sprightly set of a minuet

And the whirl of a rigadoon.

To our lonely shore like a burnished floor

Streams that river of luminous sheen;

’Tis a fairy track through the shadows black

’Tis a bridge that spans between.

The regions here and that unseen sphere

Far off in the western sky,

Where the day is done with the setting sun

And the sunsets fade and die.

Where the moon holds court and her minions sport

As over the seas they roam,

And they dance their way through the glistening spray

And laugh in the rippling foam.

“O the night is ours and its witching powers

“And there’s never an eye to mark,

“For the demons sleep in the caverned deep

“And the goblins of the dark.

“Are far away where the shadows gray

“On the spectral sand dunes lie,

“So join in our mirth that is not of the earth

“But more of the sea and the sky!”

To the rhythmic beat of their twinkling feet

The creaming breakers fret,

As to and fro on a rollicking toe

They gracefully pirouette.

For the surges roll o’er the murmuring shoal

Through a brooding harmony

And the night wind sings of unspoken things

In an eerie melody.

[Pg 36]

“O cast your cares on the buoyant airs

“Where the star points smoulder dim”

Is their lilting song as they float along

To the skyline’s molten rim.

As their footsteps pave o’er the frosted wave

A path to the magic west,

With a carefree shout we would join the rout

And follow their homing quest.

But our feet are banned from that faery land

Though our vaulting fancy yearns

As it throbs in tune to the dying moon

Till the morning redly burns.

With our hearts in tune to the dying moon

We stand in the hush of dawn;

There are cryptic runes on the windswept dunes

But that luminous path has gone.

And the wet sands lie neath the empty sky

As drear as the lifeless sea,

But through our dreams flit the elfin beams

Of that moonsprite revelry.

[Pg 37]

Marshes Of Sandwich

Marshes of Sandwich where slow currents wind

Languidly seeking the outermost sea

Drifting, some ultimate haven to find,

Where far horizons stretch, boundless and free!

Out there beyond the white sea wall of dunes,

Murmurs of ocean that breathe faint and low

Looming like mountain peaks crusted with snow

Weaving blue shadows through hot afternoons.

Languorous meadows where dragon flies dream,

Level green solitudes soothing the eye,

Golden with mist from the sun’s slanting beam

Purpled by patches of cloud floating by.

Prairies beloved of the homing wild geese

Nature’s hurt children are healed by your balm;

How we have longed for the infinite peace

Born of your timeless, unchangeable calm!

The Smile Of The Sea

O the sun’s molten gold seems to spatter and spill

O’er the wavelets so dazzlingly bright,

As they dance to the songs of the sandpiper’s shrill

With their numberless sparkles of light.

For the languorous winds with their deft fingers press

Those wrinkles of sapphire and flame,

And the fires they enkindle all surge to express

A shout of exultant acclaim.

How they twinkle and glitter like sparks from the steel

While the gilded foam chuckles with glee,

Till all nature, attuned to the rapture they feel

Seems aglow with the smile of the sea.

[Pg 38]

Our Cape Cod Home

O ancient Cape Cod house whose drooping eaves

Prim as the bonnet of a Pilgrim maid

Are sere and grey as Autumn’s driven leaves,

What comfort seems to drowse beneath their shade

Comfort that fairly drips like Heaven’s own dew -

The tranquil calm that our forefathers knew.

How many gales about those eaves have roared,

How many summer heats have come and gone,

And left their imprint on each weathered board

Time seasoned and discolored, handed on

To younger generations. Quaint and queer

You seem, but O your wealth of homey cheer!

Your architects were of a sombre breed,

Their doctrines gnarled and knotty to the core,

And yet you gave them refuge, ’twas their need;

What battlemented towers had yielded more?

A treasure galleon, in your roomy hold

Were sanctuary from the storm and cold.

[Pg 39]

And beauty thralled them too, those builders dour,

Though beauty was to them, sedate and plain;

They wrought in harmony with marsh and moor

In simple lines, and time’s enduring stain

On crumbling shingles, where the lichens grow

To mingle with the greys their golden glow.

With broad axe and with adze those builders wrought

And in the wilderness foundations laid

For our great nation. Liberty they sought

With toil and thrift - sound virtues roughly made

Of homespun stuff, quite like the clothes they wore

As out of fashion as your buckled floor!

The times were hard, the men who lived them rude,

They lacked the many luxuries we know;

The life within your walls was drab and crude,

At least our demagogues have told us so;

And yet along your pathway rimmed with flowers

How shallow flows this flippant life of ours!

The new apartment in the city’s maze

Has fixtures that your age had never seen,

Machine made gadgets, till our very days

Seem spun for us, upon a vast machine;

And we ourselves an inconspicuous part

Of some grim Frankenstein without a heart.

Caught in the maelstrom of the times we strive

To please our gods of gold with feet of clay;

Exchange your solace for a noisy hive;

Clutch at the shell and throw the pearl away;

And your unbounded views of ocean’s foam

Shut out with walls that never can be home.

O quaint old Cape Cod house, precarious link

Between the past and present, Life, no doubt,

Means progress, - so at least we’re taught to think

Though often wonder what ’tis all about -

But as we smile at customs you have known

How are the angels saddened at our own!

[Pg 40]

Thunder Storm Off Race Point

Beyond the dunes what monstrous shapes are these

Like Titans rearing out of the abyss

To menace heaven? Terrible they loom

Upheaving with their shoulders till the sky

Is warped and yielding, and the trampled sea

Pales into death white foam. Impending doom

Sweeps to engulf the world, when flash on flash,

As far heat lightnings glint on burnished arms,

The wild Valkyries come! Their jet black steeds

Outpace the furious winds; and hark, the stroke

Of Thor, the Thunder God! His hammer dread

Splinters the silence, crashing downward, stuns

The firmament. That glare that blinds the eye

Is Woden’s Sword! It pierces coil on coil

Night’s writing dragon, pouring forth its flood

Of venomed gloom.

Redoubled is the din

The powers of Tartarus and Heaven locked,

In mortal strife. The adamantine base

Foundationing the everlasting hills,

And the resounding archways of the sky,

Reverberate and tremble!

Wildly burst

Like pent up tears, the rains that hurtle down

Sodden with chill; while whimpering, the surge

All tempest frayed and besomed, choked with sobs,

Fingers the whining sands.

Ages it seems,

Tumultuous aeons, e’er the torrents cease

And tides of blackness ebb. Far out to sea

The mighty conflict drifts, the thunders die

As scorpion whips of forked lightnings scourge

The cringing giants of the cloud that flee

Down to their dungeons in the vasty deep;

While o’er their tatters rides the full orbed moon

Glorious, resplendent like the shield of Mars,

Triumphant o’er the terrors of the storm.

[Pg 41]

To A Scrimshawed Whale’s Tooth

Quaint relic that the mellowing years

Have tinged with Autumn’s ripened gold,

What scene of olden time veneers

Your ivory surface smooth and cold!

Hard bitten by some huge sperm whale

You often gored the giant squid,

That nightmare of the deep, amid

Unfathomed gulfs of crag and vale.

Remotest seas, their bounds unknown,

That old bull whale was wont to cross

By ways uncharted, he alone,

Shared with the wandering albatross.

Marauder savage and morose,

He spurned the waves in pride and wrath,

No killer dared dispute the path

The monarch of the ocean chose.

Then came the whaler’s crew - and this

Lone carven fragment now remains

Of all his bulk, that the abyss

Long since engulfed. Yet it explains

A graphic story. Clothed with life

Its dead white surface - line by line -

Unfolds in intricate design

A sailor’s dreams - etched by his knife.

Through many an hour of summer haze

While the long swells rocked languidly

His patient fingers graved that maze

Of intertwining tracery.

And that sweet face with hair so trim,

Love’s arrow, and two hearts that bleed,

What touching romance we may read

In “H to J” - to Her from Him.

Old Time united them we trust -

Initials linked but separate -

Though both long mingled with the dust

Their story we may still translate

From this rude sketch. Devotedly

They passed a lifetime richly blest

And safe at home, together rest

In sad, sweet graves beside the sea.

[Pg 42]

Or did perchance, Fate intervene

To bow that head in sorrow low

For lover lost - what came between

Those twain we cannot hope to know.

The sadness of a far off day

The fading of a golden dream

Dim memories, how fresh they seem

To ever youthful H and J!

Enshrined as on a magic page

A clasp knife for his only aid,

Still fondly lingers age by age

The love a sailor bore a maid.

His name, nor hers, no one can say,

No evidence besides, endures,

But silent eloquence like yours

Immortalizes H and J!

The Creeping Fog

Rolling in from the sea, rolling on

Ghostly floods chill as death, in the dawn

Swallow up all the world in their sweep

As the grey currents stealthily creep

Over marshland and dune, while the sun

Dripping mist, scarce proclaims day begun

To a landscape all eerie and wan

Drowned in fog, rolling in, rolling on!

Trees by oceans of droplets bedimmed

Loom like shapes that our fancy has limned;

Beacons set where the weird torrents range

Through invisible channels and change

All the loved, olden landmarks we know,

Till dissolved in that strange overflow

Earth and sky seem to blend and begin

In the fog’s swelling tide, rolling in!

[Pg 43]

Wooden Sailor

Wooden sailor swinging war clubs

On my lawn with furious tempo,

Like the Don of Spanish legend

He of old, who braved the windmills

Looming up like giants, charged them

Splintering his lance and bruising

His frail bones on mad illusions;

You resemble him - bold warrior,

Struggling with the summer breezes,

Lunging at the clouds above you.

But your ludicrous gyrations

In my yard, your droll gymnastics

Point a world of deeper meaning,

For we too, are often harried

By imaginary perils;

Spend the years in aimless striving

Wearying the heart and sinews

On fantastic undertakings;

Cursed by impotent endeavor

Unproductive, never-ending.

If we smile at your contortions

Toiling furiously for - nothing

It is less in mirth than sadness.

For I fear we fail to equal

Your stout heart and resolution

Wigwagging your bold defiance.

Yes, while we are battling shadows,

Wasting life in futile effort,

Can we wonder that the angels

Grieve in Heaven at our folly?

[Pg 44]

The Dreamer

He lounges on the wharf and whittles pegs

While his pathetic gaze drifts out to sea,

Around him fishnets, anchors, empty kegs

And coils of rope are stored. His revery

Though deep, is sometimes broken by a sigh

As strange lights kindle in his faded eye.

A shapeless hat seems floating on his hair

Of wavy white. His clothes are patched and worn

His fingers palsy shaken, and an air

Of pathos and of helplessness forlorn

Enfolds him, as he lays his pipe aside

And gazes sadly at the ebbing tide.

His vision seems athirst to drink its fill

Of ocean’s mystery that he loves so well,

For he has lived adventure, lives it still,

Though age, long since, has yielded to the spell

Of brooding calm. No idle dreamer he,

His thoughts are busied on some far off sea.

Stern old Magellan and Sir Francis Drake

Heard tales from just such ancient sailor men,

Tales that inspired a zeal to undertake

Those stirring voyages beyond the ken

Of their small world. Discoverers bold, - and yet

They steered the course some unknown dreamer set!

[Pg 45]

The Chant Of The Night Wind

O the wind in the chimney place thrums a wild strain

A chant that no mortal has known,

And my soul deeply stirs at its eerie refrain

In my dim lighted chamber, - alone.

For strange lifting cadences mark its sweet song

With gladness and beauty and fear,

Till chords, long forgotten, in memory throng

Like a shell that I press to my ear.

O where have you wandered, melodious breeze

That sounds such a magical note,

Have you winged on your journey, o’er limitless seas

From some Ultima Thule remote?

A region no mortal may ever explore

Whose legended boundaries lie

On foam whitened beaches and sinister shore

And crags that are gnashing the sky!

Where ice fields aglow in the dark of the moon

Reflect the volcano’s red glare -

We may ponder and doubt - but our souls are in tune

To the verve of that uncanny air!

For the spirits of night strum their wild elfin lyres

And they harp on invisible strings,

While a music, unearthly, floats down from those wires

Like the tremulous flutter of wings.

For those notes so elusive, so mystically sweet,

We may sense but their vague undertone,

For they baffle our hearing, so faintly they beat

On the verge of the audible zone.

O restless and fitful, those wandering airs,

As the sad breezes sigh to the rain,

Then dying, evasively mock at our prayers,

For silent, we hear them again!

’Tis the music of elfland that rings in our ears

With its haunting notes witching and low,

Like the voices of friends that have gone with the years

Or the echoes of songs long ago.

[Pg 46]

Midnight

In the dead watches of the night

As time drifts by on endless flight,

Drowsing upon our couch we hear

A distant clock sound faint but clear,

And chiming from its lonely tower

Ring out the solemn midnight hour.

That warning stirs the unquiet air

A golden day has flown - but where?

Another burns to greet the dawn

But one day has forever gone -

And pendulum and iron tongue

Their mournful requiem have sung.

Aghast the present moment flies

Midway between eternities,

As, winging on without a stay

Tomorrow flees from yesterday,

And vanished moments that have been

Will never come to us again!

[Pg 47]

The Golden Rod

What dazzling shape is this that seems to rise

At the command

Of some magician, till it glorifies

The barren sand?

A stately canopy for some proud elve!

And that rich sheen

The grand creation of the gnomes that delve

Grotesque, unseen,

In caverns dim. There while the forges ring

To blow on blow

Those humble artisans are burnishing

That wondrous glow!

How gorgeously the molten yellow gleams

As they combine

The sand’s bright ore with sunlight’s minted beams

In rare design.

Until the wealth that jade green leaves disguise

And buds enfold!

Wells upward with resplendent ecstasies

In jets of gold!

Fountains that o’er the sterile desert play

Erect and tall

With pendent droplets from their golden spray

That never fall.

Oases of enchantment where the bees

And beetles come,

To mingle with the murmur of the seas

Their drowsy hum.

Such splendor glitters in each regal nod

Of gilded bloom

We pause in doubt; is this the golden rod,

Or seraph’s plume?

A scepter, or perchance a magic wand

For elfin kings?

Our fancy pictures in each jewelled frond

Fantastic things.

And still our wonder grows, and a vague fear

Of regions banned

Steals o’er us—lest our footsteps draw too near

To fairyland!

[Pg 48]

Wild Roses

Whence comes that swooning fragrance on the air

That riot of rich color on the hill

Like smouldering embers? red, deep red, and fair

They are, beyond our groping words. We thrill

To inner surgings of unuttered things

When we behold, strewn o’er this alien lea

Exotic bloom that to our spirit sings

In perfume sweet as lifting melody,

Fresh from immortal Eden’s radiant bowers

Where angels coveted our earthly flowers.

Like elfin torches tipped with odorous fire

Raining their ashen petals on the grass,

These flowering censers rouse a wild desire

For beauty yet unseen, in those who pass

This solitary way. O incense sweet!

The bees are drunken with it, the wild bees

And dragon flies that hunt this still retreat

Far from the world of men. Is it for these

That Nature lavishes her perfume rare

To scent this moorland waste and wandering air?

Wild roses, O but they were meant to be

More than the sweet companions of an hour;

Theirs is a loftier role, their destiny

In this sad world, to glorify the power

Of beauty welling up beyond the range

Of mortal view. Strange ecstasies concealed

Aforetime from our blighting frost and change

Aurora’s swinging gates have here revealed;

Such perfect beauty as the seraph knows

Hid in that floral miracle - a rose.

[Pg 49]

The Coast Guard Station

Stout fortress on the battle line

Of shrieking winds and thunderous surge,

A barbican against the brine,

A challenge to the breakers’ dirge;

Not all the wild Atlantic’s wrath

Can bar your men from life boats frail,

Nor all the fury of the gale

Can swerve them from their destined path!

The churning foam may pelt and freeze,

The stinging sleet cut to the bone,

They venture forth on perilous seas,

They venture forth, unsung, alone.

Like knights of olden time arrayed

In oilskin armor, theirs the role

To battle with the raging shoal

And beard the tempest unafraid!

No martial strains ring in their ears,

No banners blaze their desperate way;

Only a wife or mother peers

From distant sand dunes through the spray.

And yet no crown that fame may give

Can e’re transcend the solemn pride

Of men, whatever may betide,

Who risk their lives that men may live.

[Pg 50]

Keeper Of The Light

Aloft within the beacon tower alone

She trims the lamps that send their luminous beams

Far out into the night. The eerie moan

Of the wild shoal is smothered by the screams

Of winds that make the thrumming walls resound

With deafening din. She listens, mute with dread,

To voices mingling vaguely in the sound

Of the storm maddened waves, and shakes her head.

“Is it the waves?” she mutters. Bent and old

Her fingers tremble so,—but not from cold!

Her husband tosses on his cot below

Burning with fever, often calls her name.

But she must stand his watch though none may know

Of her long vigil. Vestal of a flame

Whose warning beams guide mariners aright

Mid perilous reefs, through all engulfing gloom

Though unclean spirits rage throughout the night

Riding the furious winds in rain and spume,

No matter if she shivers and turns pale,

Her courage, like her light, endures the gale.

But what drives hard like spray against the glass

Hurtling from out the dark? a tiny form

With battered wings, a tern which flees, alas,

Like some lost soul from the pursuing storm

Dashed to the rocks below. “Dear God!” she cries

“Why must my light that points great ships the way

“Be blooded by his piteous sacrifice?

“Life saving beams, who gave them power to slay?

“How hopelessly must good and evil blend

“When harmless birds meet such a cruel end.”

[Pg 51]

On Chatham Bars

On Chatham bars the surges moan

And sea birds cry;

A gull goes winging stark and lone

Across the sky;

While on the shore, with menace low,

Mutters the seething undertow.

O’er Chatham bars a frighted cloud

Goes driven fast;

The shoals are answering hoarse and loud

The roaring blast,

And joining that wild revelry

Of frenzied winds and raging sea.

Through blinding sands with bended head

The coast guard goes

By Chatham bars, in silent dread

For well he knows,

That surf may leave, on its retreat,

Some ghastly trophy at his feet!

On Easter morn the mourners stand

On Chatham hill,

To chant again His high command,

Of - “Peace be still”

And scatter flowers upon the wave

To drift above some nameless grave.

For Chatham bars are silent now

On Easter Day,

Before that solemn group who bow

Their heads and pray

To Him, the Risen One, Who said,

“Then shall the sea give up its dead.”

[Pg 52]

The Old Timer’s Lament

O where is the Cape that I used to know

In the quaint old days of the long ago?

The weathered house with its friendly smoke

From the looming background of silver oak;

And the huge brick oven that flanked the grate

Where the fireplace yawned like the flaming gate

Of a fairy world to my childish gaze

While the russets sputtered before the blaze—

Was there ever such comfort and homey cheer

As the Cape that my memory holds so dear?

There were braided rugs on the sanded floor

And that queer round cellar—what bounteous store

Of pickle and relish and sweet preserve

Seemed overflowing each ample curve!

What jars of berries and stewed beach plum

And jugs—half hidden—of cherry rum—

And jugs that frothed with potato yeast,

And the dainties saved for Thanksgiving’s feast

I think of them often and sigh—“Heigh-ho”

O where is the Cape that I used to know?

And that open chamber and corded bed

Where I listened to pattering rain overhead.

Rope handled sea chests and leathern trunks

And models of clippers and Chinese junks,

And apples drying in clustered strings

With numberless other wonderful things.

No cave from the storied Arabian Nights

Was filled with more treasures and marvelous sights

Than our storehouse under the eaves could show—

O where is the Cape that I used to know?

And the fragrant gardens that memory links

With the olden days—O those sweet Cape pinks,

And the hollyhocks and the columbine,

And the savory herbs by the ivy vine,

With the fish nets drying along the slope

Mid tangles of buoys and fresh tarred rope—

Yes the modern gardens are trim and neat

But I often think—“Do they smell as sweet

“As those beds where the roses loved to grow?”

O where is the Cape that I used to know?

[Pg 53]

The captains turned from the seven seas

To end their days in such homes as these;

And the tales they spun for my youthful ear

I have waited a lifetime their like to hear.

But they sleep where the mournful willows bend

O’er that silent city where voyages end;

Though their memory lingers in many a page

Of log books crumbling with salt and age,

And many a rare old curio—

O where is the Cape that I used to know?

But time flows on like the ceaseless tide

And cabins clutter the country side

Like nesting gulls. Where the horse, hock deep,

Once plodded the sands the autos sweep

Before my eyes in a dizzy blur

Of mad confusion and noise and stir.

For peace and quiet have never a place

In this modern world with its feverish pace

With its movie glare and its radio—

O where is the Cape that I used to know?

Revery

Sweet angel of the backward look

And trailing wings,

We wander by Time’s restless brook

Of transient things

That from some far off, unseen nook

Forever springs.

Old Time may lay aside his glass

For just a day,

Let not the jewelled moments pass

But bid them stay,

The while we stretch upon the grass

In revery.

[Pg 54]

The Old Hulk

Moored to the decaying piling

Of a ruined wharf, and whiling

Endless hours away in dreams of days gone by,

Lies a battered hulk, dismasted,

Broken backed and tempest blasted,

Like a dolphin fast aground and left to die.

Deck awash and planking slanted

Like a broken lily planted

In the mud, where every tide the eddies swirl,

Years have gone since last it floated

And the sea growths all unnoted,

Underneath its rotting timbers twine and curl.

Often when my footsteps tended

To that lonely shore that ended

All its voyagings there sounded in my ear,

What the shrilling sea birds uttered

And the voiceless current muttered

Solemn messages it meant for me to hear;

“Far off seas no more beguile me

“But their memories reconcile me

“To the shelter of this silver mirrored cove

“Where my outline seems engraven

“Like an etching. Safe in haven

“I am home at last, and nevermore shall rove.”

[Pg 55]

The Modernists

Bam, wham!

Clangor of cymbals and shriek of a fife,

That stabs like a knife.

Zam, slam!

Bang on the tambourine, beat on the drums,

Symphony comes!

Greet her with tom-toms while savages dance,

Let any discord the riot enhance,

Down with all melody, harmony, poise,

Give us more noise!

Tonal inebriates, drunken with sound,

Pound, brothers, pound!

Furiously, frenziedly, round and around

Whirls the mad medley of ear splitting notes,

Like the yelling of demons with flame blackened throats.

Music is stricken, is dying, ’tis said,

Over her head,

Set all the boiler works off on a spree!

Jazz and more jazz in a mad jamboree,

Music is dead!

But still in the morning the song sparrow sings

And blithely she wings,

And from her gay throat a sweet melody springs,

Old as the Pyramids, new as the dawn,

Music will live when this madness has gone.

Blah, blurb!

Pronoun and verb.

For poetry give us a barbaric yawp

Slop, Stop!

The stuff that some long haired Bohemian raves

Would make Keats and Tennyson turn in their graves

Miscalled free verse,

And trash that is worse.

Nothing too banal or trite or absurd,

Such is the artistic triumph preferred,

To melodies sung

When old Homer was young.

Out with the rhyming brook, limpid and pure,

Open a sewer!

[Pg 56]

Let the nymph Poesy cover her face,

Downcast and blushing at such a disgrace.

Garbage of words and cesspool of thought

Columns and pages of rubbish and rot,

Only a blot!

This is not Poesy spawned in the mire,

High on Olympus she still sounds her lyre

With the immortals. Her rapt, vibrant fire

Blasts like a flame

All the abortions brought forth in her name.

Smear, daub!

Plaster on canvas an unsightly gob

Yellow and scarlet and purple and pink,

Looks like a mess that has spilled in the sink.

But call it a sunset o’er Harlem, in truth

Or a beautiful woman enamoured with youth.

Just a name, any name that you think of will do,

And if you insert a poor outline or two,

Be sure that you violate all the known rules.

The masters were fools!

For painting is only a sleep walker’s trance.

Walpurgis is with us so on with the dance!

For the forms that great Phidias carved out of stone

Misshapen monstrosities, muscle and bone

Now simper and leer,

At vapid admirers who openly jeer

At beauty of tinting or outline or form

And foment a storm,

Of sickly approval at each newest fright

That clutters our galleries, angers our sight.

For art is a blight!

O that some genius great hearted and sane

Would banish such trash of a disordered brain!

For beauty will ever be noble and fine

And speaking through music or color or line

Her voice is divine!

[Pg 57]

When The Locusts Are In Bloom

When the locusts are in bloom

Every bud - a riven tomb

Yields a spirit form, emerging pure as snow,

Dancing lightly on the breeze

Like the foam on fairy seas,

Swinging like enchanted censers to and fro.

And the moonbeams, white and chaste,

Through the branches interlaced,

How they seem to drip into each ivory cup,

Where anon, the summer heats

Mingle all those honeyed sweets

That the bee, with nectar drunken, loves to sup.

Wondrous pendants set with gems

Clinging to the swaying stems

How each chalice overflows into the stream

Of the scented hours that glide

Down a timeless, golden tide

To the islands where the lotus eaters dream.

So we idly float along

On the bluebird’s lilting song

To a region where the blossoms never die.

For through all the cloying hours

In the thralldom of the flowers

Fancy roams in far off cloudlands of the sky.

[Pg 58]

The Harvest Of The Sea

It is harvest time in the teeming sea

And the surges labor tirelessly

Like toil bent reapers with sickles of foam

They garner the harvest and carry it home,

Till the beaches throb to the rhythmic beat

As they strew it in windrows at our feet.

Slender strands like a whip lash, tear

At the cowering sands - ’tis the Dead-Man’s Hair

And the rockweed bulges with bulbous lumps

All yellow and brown, with the jagged stumps

Of kelp stalks wrenched by the undertow

From sunken glens where the sea things grow.

Eel grass rolled by the waves at play

In fresh cut swaths like the new mown hay;

Lettuce that glints with a fragile sheen:

And Irish moss with its mottled green

And cream and purple and pink and brown

From the matted gulfs where sailors drown!

Algae dyed like a fresh blown rose

Red is their telltale hue that glows

On the white sands edging the brooding sea.

A network of delicate imagery

Like the thin fine lines of an etching traced

That the blundering surges have not erased.

Harvest from tide tilled fields that bloom

Deep down where the sunlight fades in gloom.

Gardens of sinister mystery

Under the waves of the heaving sea.

Gardens the living may never know

Where dead men drift in the ebb and flow!

Jungles where fishes and creatures strange

Through the lush profusion may freely range.

Not for the living but for the dead

Are those fields submerged that we may not tread,

But their harvest is scattered within our reach

By the wild waves mourning along the beach.

[Pg 59]

Beach Grass

Tremulous as elfin lances

Are the thin shafts of the beach grass,

Blades and tufted points that quiver

Eerily to winds of midnight;

Magic strings on lyres enchanted,

Strings that strum a lilting cadence

Played upon by fairy fingers.

Beach grass blades that whirl and struggle

In the clutch of boisterous breezes.

Needle tips that mark strange circles

In the cowering sands beneath them,

Tracings of a fairy stylus,

Runic etchings vague and ghostlike.

Tenuous roots, like bamboo jointed

Delving, burrowing neath the surface

Of the rough hewn sand dunes moulded

By great Nature’s groping fingers;

(Waves and tempests are her fingers)

With their living network binding

Crumbling sands that melt and vanish -

In a woven web of fibre.

Threading with tenacious purpose

Mantles lovely and protective,

Till the battered landscape brightens

Smiles through scars and cruel gashes

Smiles in glossy, rippling beach grass

Undulating in the breezes

Like a field of ripened barley.

Beach grass, desperate, clinging, gripping

Braving wrath of winter tempests,

Scourged by sands that sting like nettles,

Blinding clouds that lash and smother,

Wet with driven spume and frosted,

With the salt and oft half buried,

As the tortured dunes roll landward,

Uncouth monsters, struggling, straining

By the rage of Neptune driven

Stumbling, sprawling, lurching onward.

[Pg 60]

But the beach grass, fragile, yielding

Like a seine whose mesh entangles,

Binds their heaving bulks together -

In a fibrous web of rootlets;

Gripping fiercely for each foothold

Yielding grudgingly and battling

Till the storm winds howl in fury,

And the baffled ocean smothers

Futile wrath in foam and roaring,

Till the lowly beach grass triumphs;

Holds in magic chains the forces

Of ungovernable chaos.

Beach grass drawing life and nurture

From the sterile sands, a living

Energy from out the desert.

Hardy warrior, silent tamer

Of primeval urgings rampant,

Barrier to the clamorous ocean,

Staunch preserver of the landscape,

Not content with curbing surges

Or restraining restless sand dunes,

How you bless that sterile desert

With your wild and pensive beauty;

Cover o’er its savage harshness

With the mantle of your verdure

Till your patient, steadfast purpose

Glorifies the vanquished sea shore.

[Pg 61]

The Swamp Heron

“Quawk”, comes that harshly guttural note

In the night stillness, hear it? “Quawk”.

A hoarse “good hunting” from the throat

Of a night heron, feathered gawk,

Ungainly, droll, the awkward child

And threadbare outcast of the wild.

’Tis not his custom to intrude

Where others are, while on his way

To his beloved solitude

Nor has he overmuch to say;

His only greeting is a squawk

But filled with cheer, a friendly “Quawk”.

Thanks, humble neighbor of the moors

For such philosophy is rare;

Though neither grace nor charm are yours

You envy no one, nor compare

Their lissome poise - your stilt like walk!

Their lilting song - your throaty “Quawk”.

He knows, illfavored bird of night

The finest feathers in the dark

Are little worth, nor pleasing flight

Nor beauty’s form with none to mark;

Contented but to nightly stalk

His supper like a wise old quawk.

[Pg 62]

The Throes Of Creation

Crash and a smother of foam

Drowned in a booming roar!

That is the way the surge comes home

Pounding along the shore.

Hiss and a seething tongue

Laps at the crumbling sand!

That is the way the sea has wrung

Room from the grudging land.

Rasp of the undertow

As its white tongue flays the beach,

Flensing the pebbles to and fro

Into its treacherous reach.

Ever the sob and moan

Of the tortured ledges rings

Grinding to dust and welding to stone

Ever the hammer swings.

Never a solid ground

Nor a fixed and steadfast place;

Shoals new risen and islands drowned

Sculpture the landscape’s face.

Thus were the corners laid

For the continents and the seas;

That is the way the world was made

Out of such conflicts as these.

Up from the ocean’s bed;

Into the ocean cast

Surging through infinite ages ahead

Out of an infinite past.

[Pg 63]

The Methodist Meeting House at South Truro was known to many old timers as Hog’s Back Church. The following verses were written while it was still standing, though long deserted and neglected. But to those who knew and admired it, as I did, it deserves something more than the simple granite slab that marks its site. For it remains a lasting memory of a former era on old Cape Cod.

[Pg 64]

Hog’s Back Church

Foursquare it stands!

A stalwart witness year by year

To courage steadfast but austere.

The toilworn hands

That shaped its beams and laid its floors

Are folded now. The toilers lie

In marble dotted rows nearby

Though some found graves on distant shores

And some were lost at sea!

This fickle, carefree world might heed

Those iron men of Pilgrim breed,

Though rude their lives and stern their bent

They built a during monument

To strict integrity.

Foursquare it stands!

And gazes out o’er Pamet Bay

Once whitened by the sails that lay

Where now are choking sands.

The weathered houses prim and square

That marked the hillsides everywhere

Have disappeared,

But that old church in stately pride

Still dominates the countryside;

Is still revered.

Foursquare it stands!

The dust upon the pulpit lies

Whence lurid texts and prophecies

Were hurled like burning brands.

No more the silent walls are stirred

By thunders of Jehovah’s wrath

That seekers for the “Narrow Path”

Once, trembling, heard;

They reverenced an awful Name

And glimpsed the pit of quenchless flame

In God’s own word.

Foursquare it stands on hallowed ground

And from its lonely windswept height

A landmark like a beacon light

Its spire is seen for leagues around.

Though times may change, and changing creeds

[Pg 65]

Are modified to modern needs

Still staunch and true,

Memorial of a former age

It keeps the priceless heritage

From olden time to new.

The plaster from the ceiling falls

On creaking floors, and in the dead

Of night there sounds the ghostly tread

Of phantom footsteps. But the walls

Still battle with the winter gale

That roars about the ancient spire,

Nor all its torrents can avail

To drown that spark of living fire -

The spirit of that temple set

On crowning heights, lest men forget!

Foursquare it stands!

The bell, long silent, seems to ring

And to the world its message fling;

“I yield alone to God’s commands.

“Though all about may change, not I.

“True to my settled destiny

“I still remain.

“Though constancy be but a wraith

“Steadfastly I have kept the faith

“And shall maintain

“That faith, unfaltering, down the years

“Through all the shoals of doubts and fears,

“A lighthouse on that shoreless sea

“That broadens to Eternity”.

There, like the Sphinx the old church broods

Among its deepening solitudes.

In simple grandeur let it stand

For years unborn, to bless the land,

And when its timeworn tower has gone

Still may its memory linger on.

Struck by lightning in a thunder storm on the night of March 21, 1940 and totally destroyed.

[Pg 66]

Beyond The Point

A ridge of sand dunes barricades the rim

Of the horizon like a gilded bar

To roving sight; a lonely point, the brim

Of earth against the moaning surge. Afar

My glances wander, wistfull, ill at ease

From longing to explore those far off seas.

The murmuring tide creeps up before my feet

And leaves a shell or two, a broken spray

Of strange sea growth; then to some chill retreat

In ocean’s depths it slowly ebbs away.

How blithely thought can trail the screaming terns

Beyond the boundaries that the eye discerns!

On the horizon looms that point beside

The pathless main, a prison door to me;

For I would follow on that restless tide

To lands remote beyond a shoreless sea;

Through shimmering haze how like a magic wand

That dune ridged finger beckons me beyond!

The rolling hills enclose me and the sky

Bends overhead, but these are different things;

Somehow they do not seem to press so nigh

As that wind fretted wall of sand that rings

My little world about, and intervenes

To shut my vision from enchanted scenes.

And though in happier days I sailed those seas

Around the globe upon the buoyant trades

To Ceylon, Singapore and Celebes,

Beheld their fanes and trod their tropic glades

Those voyages leave me still unsatisfied

In this lone cottage where I now abide.

Beyond the point what vistas of romance

Of golden kingdoms still their wealth unfold:

Though fettered by the bonds of circumstance

My failing vision and my limbs grown old

Among the embers of my memories

One lingering flame, adventure, never dies.

[Pg 67]

The Winds Of Time

O the winds of time sweep the lonely years

Like withered leaves down the path of night,

And their notes, like a dirge, sound in our ears

As our eyes are strained for a glimpse of light.

And our sad heart utters a voiceless prayer -

Whence do ye come - ye bitter winds,

Where do ye go - O where?

Through the swarming suns where the Zodiac’s blaze

Fades out in the awful deeps of space,

As you hurry us on your unknown ways,

Shall our feet leave never a trace?

Rushed from the light to the silent dark,

Tell us, tell us, O mocking winds

Is there a voice - O hark!

And the wondrous things we planned to do

In those far off days when our hearts were young.

But the task was long and the hours were few

And the songs we dreamed of are still unsung.

Will our hopes fade out when the light is gone?

Whisper, whisper, O pitiless winds,

Is there another dawn?

Where are the friends that we used to know?

Like the fallen leaves gone one by one.

And the scenes that we loved in the long ago

Faint shadows still in the setting sun.

They have gone - we go - for the wild winds rave -

“The path that ye tread in silent dread

Leads on to an open grave!”

But those voices hushed, they linger yet

Like the haunting chords of a lost refrain.

And those scenes we can see with a sweet regret

Though their outlines are blurred they still remain

Shall they live - those things - in our groping brain,

Like the ocean’s surge in an empty shell

Nor live elsewhere again?

[Pg 68]

To An Aged Willow

Ancient willow, drooping low

Gnarled old trunk and withered bough.

Though they say you’re dying now

I can never have it so.

Massive limbs against the sky

Wrestling with the winds of heaven,

E’en the thunder crashing levin

Like old Ajax you defy.

Where your mournful branches bend

Countless birds their nests have made

Woodland songsters unafraid.

You, old willow, were their friend.

And you sheltered me as well,

Often in the summer’s heat

Idly musing at your feet

I have felt your soothing spell.

Rustling softly through the leaves

Pendulous to every air,

Peace and solace everywhere

Dripped like raindrops from the eaves.

And the white clouds floating by

Bore me to the shores of dreams -

Blissful yet the memory seems -

Loved companion, must you die?

No cathedral’s gloomy nave

Or cold monument for me,

Rather let me have a tree

As a marker for my grave.

And the Land of Yet-to-Be

Where sun risen glories play,

May it see you clothed some day

In immortal greenery.

[Pg 69]

The Old Woods Road

It blunders off through ways obscure

The old woods road I used to tread,

Until its columned walls immure

The sunbeams dripping overhead.

Through scented gloom it seems to wind

O’er fallen branches mossy green,

And leaving all the world behind

Gropes blindly toward a world unseen.

The ancient wheel ruts disappear

With pine and scrub oak overgrown,

No creaking wain for many a year

Has trailed its coverts wild and lone.

“I wonder where that old road goes?”

I hear some blithe young voices say

And I might tell them if I chose

“Back to the land of yesterday.”

[Pg 70]

The Poverty Weed

O the poverty weed is so shabby and poor

That she seems to disfigure the land,

The russet clad waif of the desolate moor

She buries her face in the sand.

Her threadbare old mantle all faded and frayed

What beauty can ever adorn?

As she cowers in the background this shy desert maid

So lowly, despised and forlorn.

But over that moorland in splashes of gold

Like sunbeams enriching the gloom,

What visions of loveliness seem to unfold

When the poverty weed is in bloom!

Aglow are those hillsides once barren and lone

And golden those patches of green,

When this poor floral outcast comes into her own

And the blossoms all bow to their queen.

[Pg 71]

The Sweep Of The Tides

Out of the fathomless ocean

Shaking the earth with their strides,

Chaos resurgent in motion,

Battle the foam bearded tides.

Titans stupendous, upheaving,

Flouting the roaring Monsoon,

Hoarse with the joy of achieving

Freedom to reach for the moon.

Titans whose dungeons are riven

Sped on their turbulent path,

Not by Poseidon driven

Nor by grim Eolus’ wrath,

Clamorous, never delaying,

Scouring the outermost dune,

Sullen but ever obeying

That mocking enchantress - the moon.

Fundy is choked with their foaming,

Fiercely they snarl ’round the Horn,

Glinting like steel in the gloaming,

Patined with gold at morn;

White with the ice of the Behring,

Green with sargassum strewn

Wolves of the deep, never nearing,

But ever pursuing the moon.

Round and around and forever

Dizzily circling the globe;

Torn by impassioned endeavor

Clutching, to touch but her robe;

Wraithlike that robe, but enduring,

Trailing her silvery lune,

Woven of moonbeams alluring,

Tracing the path to the moon.

Formless, uncouth, terrifying,

Goading the indolent seas;

Breathing out clouds with their sighing,

Draining the deep of its lees,

Mountainous troughing and cresting,

Then calm as a coral lagoon,

Limitless yearning and questing

Madness bewitched by the moon.

[Pg 72]

Monstrous caress of the ocean

Fondling the obdurate land,

Urged by abyssmal emotion

Granite may hardly withstand,

Beats of a world olden measure

Savage but roughly in tune,

Floodtime and ebb at the pleasure

Of that horned enchantress - the moon.

Alternate plunge and upheaval

Strong as earth giants who strove

Grandly in aeons primeval

Braving omnipotent Jove;

Forces terrific, whose rages

Drown out the shrieking Typhoon

Storming through infinite ages

After a phantom - the moon!

[Pg 73]

Lost Billingsgate

From Billingsgate the beacons’s flash

No longer stabs the quivering dark,

But fang like breakers foam and gnash

Above its sand bars ribbed and stark.

Where whispering grasses used to grow

And nesting terns their shelter made,

Now snarls the rasping undertow

And breezes mutter - half afraid!

For it has gone like Lyonnesse

Of Arthur’s reign - enchanted realm

Of dreamy eyed forgetfulness

That saw the ocean overwhelm

Her shores, till e’en the towers were drowned

Where Merlin spun his evil spells,

And fishers startle - when the sound

Wells upward as from sunken bells!

Yes, Billingsgate is lost to view

Beneath the all engulfing sea,

The lonely Isle the Pilgrims knew -

But still it lives in memory.

And sometimes in the dead of night

We hear the shoal bemoan its fate

Clothed in a shroud of breakers white -

The ghost of vanished Billingsgate!

[Pg 74]

Transformed

A battered thing it seems

That salt encrusted drift wood, but the skies

Showed never rainbow with more gorgeous dyes

Than gild that firelight’s beams.

The cloud banks dull and grey

Far in the west, are but a canvas spread

For supernatural scenes in gold and red

When ends the dying day.

The icy Frost King lays

His finger on the leaves and lo, the fires

Of fairy land on autumn’s funeral pyres

Seem everywhere ablaze.

And so each inner trace

Of life’s deep grief and cankered bitterness

Is graven in those lines of kindliness

Upon an aged face.

Haunting Echoes

The music dies upon the strings

But lingers on

Like other sweetly treasured things

Here once - and gone.

The breeze that blurs the mirror pool

Cannot erase

The outline of the forest cool

Upon its face.

The haunting fragrance of the flowers

Of yesterday

Not all the intervening hours

Can steal away.

And loving friends we used to know

Nor e’er forget

Although they left us long ago

Seem with us yet.

[Pg 75]

Lost At Sea

Through bushes half obscured, a marble slab

Peers out like a pale face. Inscribed upon

Its weathered surface that the lichen growth

And winter’s storms have blurred, a few brief words

The curious eye may spell with labored care.

To “H” and “M” - perhaps - and the terse phrase

So haunting in its stark simplicity

And pathos, - “Lost at sea.” The changeless gulfs

Of ocean knew the dead man mentioned here

Where bushes riot o’er an empty grave,

But what old friend remembers him today?

Ofttimes, no doubt, upon the wet sea sand

He traced his name in childhood, while the waves

Erased the halting script. Another hand

Has etched that name in form more durable;

But year by year, the ceaseless ebb and flow

Of time’s remorseless tides obliterate

The letters shrunken to initials faint,

And that last solemn statement - “Lost at sea”.

Much has been written on the vanity

Of human life, but never penned more tense

With meaning than this lonely epitaph

Set in a thicket on a crumbling stone.

[Pg 76]

The Aspen

Lonely aspen rising high

Straight and true you greet the eye.

Bent by every passing breeze

Weakest, slenderest of trees;

Yet what grace, what stateliness

Every leaf and twig express!

Brittle limbs of little worth,

How from out thy meager girth

May we fashion wood for use?

What may be the frail excuse

For thy lovely shaft of green

On the verge of my ravine?

But the aspen, wise and shy

Never deigned to make reply.

Swayed to every wandering air

Shed its beauty everywhere,

Till its friendly dignity

Made its message clear to me.

God designed thee, aspen slim

Who am I to question Him?

In the mighty scheme of things

You and I play minor strings

Yet your part has been well done

Mine is only half begun!

[Pg 77]

The Song Of The Sea Gulls

Hark how the sea gulls are screaming with glee

Piercing as Pipes of Pan!

Keening their songs to the beach and the sea

Sung since the world began;

O’er breakers combing in jubilant strife,

Flecked with their foaming and throbbing with life,

Here they come homing - O shrill as a fife

List to their wild elan!

They are the spirits exultant and free,

Up in the clouds they belong.

Ever aspiring in skyland to be,

Theirs is the verve of the strong.

Here they go steering through canyons of air,

Onward careering, and eager to dare,

Scornful of fearing with never a care

List to the lilt of their song!

[Pg 78]

Broken Fragments

Only a bit of broken glass

Half concealed in the tangled grass,

But the sunbeam found a pathway through

On its arrow flight from the vault of blue

And straight through the weed grown thicket came

To touch that glass with its kindling flame.

Only a sunbeam’s glinting gold

On a splintered bit that we now behold

Rich with crimson and purple sheen

Autumn yellow and vernal green

Until, transfigured, it glows arrayed

In the rainbow aura the sunbeam made.

Only an old man bent and gray

Gazing into the far-away.

Human wreckage forlorn and lone

But his face with a sudden glory shone.

Was it the sunbeam’s magic wand

Or hidden splendors he glimpsed beyond?

Only a bit of shattered glass,

And a poor old man that we idly pass,

But the shard like a diamond, glittered bright

And the time worn face suffused with light,

When the gates in the jasper walls swung wide

And those broken fragments were glorified.

[Pg 79]

Workers Of Magic

Immured in the downy cocoon

A marvelous artisan spins

With threads like the beams of the moon

So gossamer fine. Have the Djinns

Who dream in the mulberry trees,

O weaver beyond compare,

Bewitched with the shimmer of orient seas

Your fabric so lustrous and fair?

Toiler imprisoned who weaves and weaves

A silken glory from naught but leaves.

To the mollusc, tormented, which holds

The irritant sand in his shell,

What radiant vision unfolds

Invoked by the mermaiden’s spell?

As he fashions that shape, and imbues

It with colors he never has seen,

With opalescent and rainbow hues,

A pearl with the fairylike sheen

Of the sea. O artist whom fate condemns

To gild with beauty this queen of gems.

In his desolate attic alone

In the gloom of the midnight hour,

The poet, despondent, unknown

Is thrilled by that wizardly power

That the silk worm and pearl oyster feel

The urge to create! And his brain

Like the anvil resounding to steel

In a minstrelsy vibrant with pain,

Sends sparkles blazing through singing lines

As the verse with his burning thought combines.

[Pg 80]

My Golden Fleece

When but a child my eyes would oft forsake

The blurring page, and through the window seek

Like an escaping bird, the wonderland

Of dreams, till my instructor, grave, enquired

“Wool gathering again?” So mid the halls

Of classic learning out into the world

Of bruise and bitterness but softening all

As summer haze dissolves the jagged peaks

And makes the deserts bloom - my fancy blithe,

Drinking the waters of eternal youth,

Has ventured many a lordly enterprise

Wool gathering down the years.

Now older grown

Calm in the tranqil gloaming of my life

I dwell apart, the while my mellow lamp

With tapestry of shadow drapes the wall

And e’en the crickets shrilling greets my ear

Like pipes of Arcady. There friends long gone

Cluster about with gladsomeness, and scenes

From recollection gleaned or fancy limned

Expand my chamber to horizons vast

Till pensively I muse “Wool gathering still?”

Bless all kind fairies of fond Memory’s brood,

Or those which grace Imaginations court,

For treasures such as these. Jason of old,

Who led his argonauts through seas of blood

Seeking the golden fleece, has set the course

For dreamers through all ages yet to come.

O Hero legended, thine be the goal

My yearning eyes would glimpse. What cloudland slopes

Feed those immortal sheep whose fleeces bright

Are woven into dreams are ever hid

Beyond my ken. But the great quest is mine

To glorify the drabness of the years

Life’s sterile day by day.

One need not gain

The fabled hoard that marks the rainbow’s end

To feel, beholding that resplendent arch

A link with faery land. Wool gathering - yes

But rather say the guerdon wisdom brings,

The magic touch that gilds the commonplace

With beauty and delight, the lustrous threads

In life’s rough fabric drawn from fleece of gold.

[Pg 81]

The Lone Lilac

Only a cellar broken

Down to a dimpled mound,

Of the olden time a token

In the brier entangled ground.

And a lonely lilac vagrant

As a sunbeam lost in gloom,

Close by like a garland fragrant

At the door of a crumbling tomb.

Full many a tree appearing

Has ploughed through the sodden loam

Where once was a fertile clearing

Protecting a friendly home.

And sweet as the perfume welling

From the lilac over the way,

Was life in that quaint old dwelling

In that long forgotten day.

Under the eaves, enfolded

It mothered its little brood;

But the sills long since have molded

To dust in that solitude.

Now through the locusts treading

(A grove from a single one)

Like the virile banyan spreading

Neath the burning Indian sun.

We can vision those fields in culture;

And the beds once bright with flowers,

Where a crow now sits like a vulture,

And broods through the sunlit hours.

While stark through the verdure risen

Like the tides in the distant bay,

Through a cleft in its leafy prison

Peers the lilac over the way.

Anon as the breezes bluster,

Then die and are strangely mute,

The echoing memories cluster

Like strains from a far off lute.

We can almost hear the fingers

Strumming an elfin lay -

For the soul of that home still lingers

In the lilac over the way.

[Pg 82]

Friendly Lights

Welcome greetings through the dark

From the lamp light burning clear

In some lonely home, a spark

Radiating warmth and cheer.

Lighthouse darting from the lea

Flaming lances o’er the foam,

Wandering mariners at sea

You are guiding safely home.

Glow worm on a summer night

Torch within an elfin hand,

Marking by your zig zag flight

Ways obscure to fairy land.

Starry twinkle in the blue

To illumine worlds on high

Far off orb we share with you

Friendliness of earth and sky.

[Pg 83]

To My Cherry Blossom

From old Japan beyond the sea

A fairy vision beckons me,

A vale where cool the shadows rest

From Fujiyama’s towering crest,

A ruined temple’s crumbling wall

Lulled by a drowsy waterfall,

A shrine in whose corroding bell

Faint murmurs, long forgotten, dwell,

And Buddha, brooding day by day

Dreams the slow centuries away

In old Japan.

There might the careworn find release

In calm Nirvana’s perfect peace.

There might the traveler inhale

The haunting sweetness of that vale,

An incense from the flowery gloom

Where clustering cherry blossoms bloom

In petaled purity that glows

Like Fujiyama’s drifting snows;

The fragrance of a far off clime

From some remote, forgotten time

In old Japan.

There might I roam in fancy free

That Orient vale beyond the sea,

By Nippon’s shores an Eden seek

Neath Fujiyama’s storied peak.

But here, - where happier far, I’d be

A CHERRY BLOSSOM blooms for me.

I glimpse within her starry eyes

A nearer view of Paradise,

My Shrine and Eden is our home,

Nor need my wandering fancy roam

To old Japan.

[Pg 84]

Grains Of Sand

Fine gleanings of the ledges, golden grains

That ponderous glaciers reaped long, long ago

From battlemented crags and furrowed plains

Grinding and crushing with resistless flow,

To mingle with the melting seas, and heap

Their flinty harvestings in windrows; strew

The granite kernels for the thunderous deep

To winnow endlessly and grind anew.

Where are those lordly peaks that once defied

The fury of the gales, nor deigned to bow

To heaven’s own lightning? How the scornful tide

Washes about and putters with them now;

Yes, even my weak fingers have the power

To fashion as I will or idly thrust

Into a glass to mark the fleeting hour,

These grains of sand - some crumbled mountain’s dust

The Funeral Wreath

There is a cottage trim and neat,

Who dwelt within I cannot say,

It seemed so homey a retreat,

My steps have often led that way.

But now a wreath is hung before

Its silent door.

A funeral wreath of sombre tone

Where Death has shed a ray of gloom;

And someone mourns for someone gone

Within a vacant darkened room.

So eloquent of human grief

Is every leaf!

Such is the laurel crown that waits

Our journey’s end through toil and tears;

The emblem grim that decorates

Your door and mine, e’er many years

So that some idle passer by

May wonder why!

[Pg 85]

Memory

She crouches in the caves of thought

Enchantress, brooding o’er the fire,

And those her mystic charms have sought

Shall sometime gain their heart’s desire.

With mumblings and averted gaze

She weaves her spells, while to and fro

Like shadows from the mounting blaze,

Upon the walls there come and go

The scenes of far off happier days

Faint visions of the long ago.

The eastern tyrant steals in dead of night

Down rock hewn stairs and through an iron door;

And feasts his eyes by flaring torch’s light

Upon the wealth heaped on his treasury floor;

On bursting sacks of coin, caskets of gems

Scepters of ruby, diamond diadems,

A kingdom’s plunder. We, like him, have stored

Our hidden wealth, and memory keeps the key,

No jewels lustreless, are in our hoard

But trophies of a richer dynasty,

The sweet experiences that time endears

Sifted and winnowed gleanings of the years.

With halting steps and labored breath we climb

The attic stairs and rummage sadly through

The toys and trifling things our childhood knew,

Until our brooding thoughts are lost to time,

And like the dust motes dancing in the beams

Come thronging memories through a mist of dreams.

Forth from an aged tome there falls a flower

Faded and crumbling, yet its petals glow,

Once more in the sweet memory of that hour

When loving fingers gave it long ago.

As through the spectral city of the dead

With downcast eyes and reverential tread

We note the broken columns and the urns

In marble draped, and e’er our gaze returns

To our own name graved on the granite bare

The death date blank - yet it will soon be there!

Then Memory leads us with a sad, sweet smile

Among those grass grown mounds. On many a stone

Are names of those we loved - A little while

[Pg 86]

And we shall be with them among our own.

We seem to hear their welcoming voices ring;

A whisper comes - “O death where is thy sting?”

Alone we came into this world - alone

We venture forth. And recollections fond

Are all that we may bear to the beyond

To lay, some day, before a great white throne!

Our life has been a path forlorn that winds

Forever on through gnarled and twisted years

Of forest gloom. A path that memory finds

And helps us trace it backward through our tears.

Upon a beechen trunk, deep in the bark

Two carven hearts by single arrow cleft:

How many years since youth, with ardent hand

Inscribed them there. Two hearts and one bereft!

In the long autumn afternoons we go

By russet moors and watch the slanting rays

Bathe all the landscape with a golden haze

That melts its harsher outlines. Thus the flow

Of years has smoothed away each grief and pain

Of childhood and life’s later bitterness,

While Memory, with a witching tenderness,

Has glorified the things that still remain.

In pensive revery our fancy turns

Out to the west where the red sunset burns,

Fain would we ponder when our sun may set

And yield to the sad sweetness of regret,

But Memory thrills with wild ecstasies

Before that miracle of blazing skies.

In awe we gaze as lengthening shadows loom

And night peers forth. But Memory hovers near

We clutch her fingers in the deepening gloom

And trembling hang upon her words of cheer,

Till with a hopeful glance she points afar

Where, like a gem on velvet, gleams a star!

We stand aghast beneath the vaulted dome

Aglitter with creation’s rhapsodies

The countless stars. And let our fancy roam

[Pg 87]

Through space unfathomed, past the Pleiades

Out to the deeps beyond. Until the veil

That shuts us from the past seems strangely stirred

And recollections vague - beyond the pale -

Flit through our brain, half thoughts confused and blurred.

A former life upon some sunnier sphere!

Things long forgot and dimly sensed again

Far off, for one rapt moment hover near.

We strive to clutch them, but we strive in vain.

Does Memory mock us, or in fear perchance

Shield us from some grim Terror’s Gorgon glance

That glares unseen, from out the dark! Farflung

A wisp of cloud darts like a dragon’s tongue

And laps Orion’s belt. At glowing dawn

The constellations fade - the veil is drawn!

The blood stained trail of history winds away

Through ruined cities and past crumbling walls

Half buried, where the tottering columns sway

To winds that blunder through the vacant halls.

Beyond lie relics of remoter time

Dolmens and cromlechs, monoliths of stone

Inscriptions weird and uncouth monsters carved

On cavern walls, and bits of splintered bone

Traced when the hairy mammoth ranged among

Wild fens and woodlands when the world was young.

For all the runes inscribed on History’s page

As Time’s slow finger etched them age by age

For our dim eyes to see,

Are but the priceless, deathless heritage

Of Memory.

The traveler venturing into deserts grim

That shimmer on the hot horizon’s rim,

Does battle with the demons of the heat

While sands like burning fingers, claw his feet

But other wayfarers have braved the wrath

Of scorching wastes - their bones still mark the path!

Our counsellor and guide, calm Memory holds

The golden balances whose scale unfolds

The wisdom of the tried - experience true.

The balance trembles, what ought we to do?

[Pg 88]

It dips, it falls, the standard points the way

Today’s decisions rest on yesterday.

Upon the shores of Time’s vast sea we stand

And peer into the gathering mists that rise

Dark and portentious before our eyes,

While through our fingers slip the grains of sand.

We know the waves advancing, will not stay

But wash our stumbling footprints all away.

Into that sea have sailed the winged hours

Like argosies by youthful fancy sent

On joyous quest to some far Orient

Created in our dreams, pagoda’d towers

To bold adventure beckoning gaily on,

While tropic skies lent their romantic lure.

But those exotic hours, alas, have gone

And broken memories alone endure.

O time may rob us of our dearest friends.

But not our memories! The present blends

Into the vanished vistas of the past.

Riches have taken wings but at the last

A pittance left us. Old, we yet may drink

From youth’s eternal fount. A golden link

Still binds us with the loved we see no more.

The lamp lit circle on our chamber floor

Our little kingdom bounds. Within its space

Our eyes, through Memory’s magic, see a face

That shed, long years ago, a reliance there,

A form adorned that graced a vacant chair.

How rich and full was life, how barren now!

Forsaken in our poverty we bow

To Fate’s decree. But in despairing mood

Kind Memory, pitying, shares our solitude.

Are memories but the vain desire

For happier hours that once were mine?

The embers of a dying fire.

The dwindled lees of life’s rich wine?

Or echoes from a seraph’s lyre

But lightly touched by hands divine?

[Pg 89]

The Stoker

While a student at college, I voyaged to Naples in the steerage of an Italian liner. That was long before the days of the modern oil burner and the engine room was a fair reproduction of Dante’s Inferno. One afternoon a young stoker, begrimed and perspiring, crept up the iron ladder from the stoke hold and sat for a few minutes gazing out of an open port. His wistful face remains a vivid memory and occasioned the following lines.

Framed in the iron port there looms a face

That Rembrandt’s stilus or the sombre muse

Of Dante might have etched. Pale cheeks and eyes

That gaze unseeing, out - a forehead damp

With sweat and smeared with grime - a haunting face

Through which there peers in wistful apathy

A parched and withered soul. Some stoker crept,

Gasping for air up from that hell below,

Of lurid fires and gloom, where engines groan

Like blinded Titans, and with giant strength

Shoulder the huge hulk forward through the brine.

What thoughts beguile the furrows of that brow

Does he perchance, recall the sunlit days

Of childhood in some cottage gay with flowers

Where Italy, enthroned among her rocks

Broods o’er her vanished grandeur? Does the spell

Of romance conjure up the golden past

When his proud forbears bore the pomp of Rome

To seas remote, when Roman legions ruled

The servile world? Did he in flaunting crest,

And burnished armour tread the galley deck?

Or did a scourging destiny condemn

His pain wracked shoulders to the oaken oar?

To his dulled ears float strains of music sweet

From gilded cabins where the zest of life

Enthralls the voyagers, while his the hand

That drives the moving palace on her course

Through seas of shimmering light. A gnome begrimed,

Breathing foul dust and blistered by the heat

In caverns far below. A galley slave

Heaving and straining at a deadlier oar -

An iron bar that burns the calloused palm.

[Pg 90]

Whene’er the furnace gapes its dragon jaws

And blasts him with its breath, with reckless hand

He flings his youth into that Moloch’s maw!

And his reward? O bargain infamous

A mess of pottage for a birth right riven

Like Esau’s ancient sin. Repulsive fare

A stinking hole to kennel like a cur

Battling with vermin, foul and desperate

Too bitter punishment for branded crime.

Chained by the manacles of circumstance

To Vulcan’s smoking forge, a fate more dire

Than once befell Prometheus wracked upon

His cross of crags on grizzled Caucausus;

With every shovel speed the winged hours

His hopes, his dreams, his life but sordid lumps

Of coal to feed those flames insatiate.

Then Death, the pitiful, brings welcome rest.

His body, warped and shrivelled, slides adown

The tilted hatchway, weighted at the feet

A burned out clinker cast into the sea!

[Pg 91]

Imagination

Blest Being from some happier sphere

O bend thy luminous footsteps near

Were Heaven’s gates ajar,

When down a moonlit path you came

With dazzling smile and wings of flame

Fair as the morning star?

Imagination, radiant sprite

With crescent crown and stars bedight,

And seraph’s eyes;

O guide us up that filmy stair

By ladders raised on buoyant air

To vaulting skies!

Imagination is the singing rhyme

In life’s dull prose.

She blooms among the cruel thorns of time

A beauteous rose.

No Circe’s spell is hers, the poppy’s lure

From present pain

In drug engendered dreams; but calm and pure

Is her sweet reign.

Her finger traces in the storm cloud gray

The rainbow’s arc;

She sees within the gnarled volcanic clay

The diamond’s spark;

Forecasts the harvests in the sodded rows

The plough shares fling;

When all the world is buried neath the snows

She dreams of spring.

The cave man followed up the savage road

The torch she bore,

She marks within life’s rock encumbered lode

The glinting ore.

Imagination melts in purple mist

The jagged peaks;

And petty things yield to this alchemist

The gold she seeks.

No priestess of illusions, vague, unreal

And not of earth,

She rather helps us know and see and feel

A thing’s true worth.

[Pg 92]

Along the wistful trail of yesterdays

Backward sad Memory directs her gaze

And points her withered hand.

“Tomorrow” is the magic word that cheers

Imagination onward through the years

Where lies her promised land.

Imagination only can explain

Those jewelled etchings on our window pane

By fairies of the frost;

From icy peaks and breaker fretted seas

To elven glens beneath snow laden trees

So cunningly embossed.

Calm reason tells us there is nothing there

But mists congealing in the frosted air;

’Tis false, calm reason lies.

For in that witching square the eye beholds

A glittering world of wonder that unfolds

Its luminious mysteries.

Imagination plumbs the deeps of space

To roam among the stars,

She gilds the workshop, lights the market place,

And sunders prison bars.

Her inspiration made Da Vinci thrill

And o’er his canvas shone,

And Michelangelo’s god like visions still

Endure in living stone.

Beyond the sunset’s molten lava flood

Lie mysteries yet untold -

Imagination sails those seas of blood

And mounts those walls of gold.

Her finger laid on blind old Milton’s eyes

Kindled no earthly glow -

And deaf Beethoven thrilled to melodies

No mortal ear may know.

[Pg 93]

Imagination decks the naked tree

With candles burning clear,

Until transfigured by her witchery

It blooms with Christmas cheer.

Life’s pathway leads us to the yawning tomb

And there it seems to end -

Imagination peering through the gloom

Sees visions that transcend.

Imagination marked the goal

That fired Columbus’ burning soul,

Till like a vision through the haze

A new world burst upon his gaze

That voyage of destiny.

And ancient chroniclers relate

Magellan, groping through the strait,

Beyond the blue horizon’s rim

Saw far off islands beckon him

Out to an unknown sea!

“Imagination rules the world” so said

The great Napoleon, and at the head

Of conquering armies drove his ruthless way

Made Afric sands and Russian snows obey

His iron decrees. Upon an Alpine height

Poised like an eagle, terrible as night,

He swooped on Italy. His boundless reign

Was the creation of his lonely brain.

On upstart thrones he set his underlings.

Like puppets played with kingdoms and with kings -

His fingers marked their bounds, his will their power

Earth’s dictator, in that tremendous hour

He dreamed like Lucifer, as grandly wove

His dreams into realty, then strove

For Godlike heights, and from those heights was hurled

And in his meteor fall amazed the world!

[Pg 94]

The naked truth itself is never true.

Stern facts are but the skeleton that binds

Our living fancies. If we seek to view

Truth absolute, her grisly horror blinds

Our eyes, for her’s is but the mocking skull,

Stark, hideous, the poor grain’s withered hull

After the kernel dies. The glance, the smile,

Expression, character, the soul beguile

When, taking form o’er Truth’s repellent base

Imagination beams with radiant face.

Imagination is the martial strain

That fires disheartened soldiers for the fray;

Her pitying fingers smooth the brow of pain,

She whispers low, - “This too, shall pass away.”

Her’s is the vision, the all seeing eye

That pierces where truth’s nuggets lie concealed.

Illusions crumble at her query, “Why?”

The Sphinx’s ancient wisdom is revealed

To her clear sight. She holds the golden key

That can unlock the guarded door of fate.

She is the lodestar of our destiny,

Her’s is the Godlike impulse to create.

The treasure that Prometheus once stole

From Heaven’s high altar is her sacred fire;

To the insensate clod she is the soul,

The Phoenix risen from the funeral pyre!

The atoms spin, the elements adhere

Till matter forms like mold: and vaunted life

A fungus growth upon a dying sphere

Whirls on into the dark. “The futile strife

“Of some vast mechanism’s grinding gears.” -

Grim science tells us - but the vision comes

Of life immortal ranging down the years

Through endless vistas of milleniums!

[Pg 95]

In Wellfleet By The Sea

“Why do you dwell in Wellfleet by the sea?”

Inquires some wondering friend,

“Is this quaint village in the dunes the end

To life’s bright trail, the world that you have known

Shut out behind you? From a weed draped stone

“A barnacle might thus survey the sky,

“As the grand pageant of mankind sweeps by.”

To this I answer, “Not this quiet place

But vaster regions are his home as well

Who humbly seeks where the immortals dwell,

Those kingly souls of every clime and race.

The seven branching candlestick ablaze

With wisdom’s radiant light

Brightens his studious library at night

And sheds its all illuminating rays

Across the lengthening years,

Till loving presences sages and seers,

Are his true friends. Must he alone abide

With Socrates or Shakespeare as his guide?

Art’s priceless treasures stored in Greece or Rome

The mighty masters limned

By the slow lapse of centuries undimmed.

Fade into nothingness beneath the dome

Whereon a mightier Artist graves His lines

And blocks His bold designs;

For He can etch with lightnings, and His dyes

Are wrung from clouds that drip with red and gold,

While silent watchers, awestruck, may behold

His wonders blazoned on the midnight skies.

One need not dwell alone beside the sea,

There are no bars

To sunder Him who walked on Galilee

Or blur the vision of the loftiest stars

No solitary being, set apart,

Is he who feels the soul sustaining calm

Steal o’er his spirit like a healing balm

From Mother Nature’s all embracing heart.

[Pg 96]

His dreams are lulled by the resounding sea,

The rhythm of the waves that never tire,

While sweeter than the strains of Orpheus’ lyre

The dying wind’s melodious minstrelsy,

Ranging this narrow bourne of surf and sand,

Seems echoing from the horns of fairyland.

And when he strolls in solitude, the breeze

That breathes upon his face,

Was never curbed by this confining space,

For once it roamed the lonely Hebrides.

The murmuring tide

That swells the shallows of this pleasant bay,

Washed coral islands half a world away

And coursed through boundless oceans far and wide.

Rather he looks with sympathetic eye

As with their faces tense and shut from heaven

By scorpion whips of fear and envy driven

The jostling multitudes of men rush by;

Spurning the bounties kindly Nature gave

As though in haste for an untimely grave.

No shadows cast by avarice or pride

Darken this countryside;

That tyrant trinity, fame, wealth, and power

Have somehow lost their spell. Each passing hour

Bears costlier freight than theirs, the gifts divine -

Health, gratitude, content. Those gifts are mine

So why should reckless wastrels pity me

With all my wealth, in Wellfleet by the sea?

PRINTED BY THE CAPE CODDER PRINTERY

ORLEANS, MASSACHUSETTS

Transcriber’s Notes

Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Unusual punctuation has been retained as printed.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of On old Cape Cod

ON OLD CAPE COD

On Old Cape Cod

Table Of Contents

On Monomoy

The Song Of The Sea Shell

Winds Of The Cape

The Enchanted Marsh

The Fragrance Of The Cape

Sea Lavender

The Final Rose

Fairy Rings

Beach Plums

On Truro Hills

My Drift Wood Fire

The Sand Piper

The Whistling Buoy Off Nauset

Peaked Hill Bars

The Rime Of The Three Captains

Storm Signals

Neptune’s Coursers

To A Spider Web Wet With Dew

The Dunes

The Flight Of The Wild Geese

Sweet Fern

White Sail

The Humming Bird

O Road That Winds Among The Hills

The Beach Grass Threnody

To A Rose Jar

Blue Berries

The Watcher

The Sea Shell Boat

Flotsam

The Ancient Log Book

The Dance Of The Moon Beams

Marshes Of Sandwich

The Smile Of The Sea

Our Cape Cod Home

Thunder Storm Off Race Point

To A Scrimshawed Whale’s Tooth

The Creeping Fog

Wooden Sailor

The Dreamer

The Chant Of The Night Wind

Midnight

The Golden Rod

Wild Roses

The Coast Guard Station

Keeper Of The Light

On Chatham Bars

The Old Timer’s Lament

Revery

The Old Hulk

The Modernists

When The Locusts Are In Bloom

The Harvest Of The Sea

Beach Grass

The Swamp Heron

The Throes Of Creation

Hog’s Back Church

Beyond The Point

The Winds Of Time

To An Aged Willow

The Old Woods Road

The Poverty Weed

The Sweep Of The Tides

Lost Billingsgate

Transformed

Haunting Echoes

Lost At Sea

The Aspen

The Song Of The Sea Gulls

Broken Fragments

Workers Of Magic

My Golden Fleece

The Lone Lilac

Friendly Lights

To My Cherry Blossom

Grains Of Sand