CLXI.A DAY UPON THE EUXINE SEA.
I
Seven times doth Asia's flowery coast give place
To Europe's shrubby cliffs and verdant Thrace;
And Europe into seven sweet bays retires
Where summer sunrise shoots his pearly fires;
There holy East and royal West are meeting,
Each from the other's headlands still retreating.
With currents and with counter-currents seven
The cold, bright waters, blue as bluest Heaven,
Seem like the beating pulses of the free
And angry spirit of the Euxine Sea.
II
Lift up the veil of legendary gloom
Which hangs before that dreadful sea, the womb,
So seemed it to the reverent men of old,
Where every direful shape and form untold
Of dark disaster lurked; upon whose flood
A mist, and no mere sea-born mist, did brood
With heavy, hanging shadow: it was then
A sea for gods and heroes, not for men;
Yet with a kindly name they worshipped thee,
The offering of their lips, dread Euxine Sea!
III
With what a very diadem of fear
They crowned thee king of waters! Far and near,
The Delian blessing his Ægean calm,
Or Attic dweller at some inland farm
Amid his oliveyards, had many a tale
Enough to make the listening throng turn pale.
Perplexing phantoms chasing ships behind,
Mists, monsters, sudden wreck, and wondrous wind,—
Such were their dim uncheerful thoughts of thee,
Thou legend-circled thing, dread Euxine Sea!
IV
Thy wandering waves had limits in the air,
Begotten of men's faith: they thought not where
Nor yet how near thou wert, but cast thee far
Unto the confines of their thoughts, a bar
Not reverently to be o'erleaped: the past
One streak of light across the darkness cast;
One pathway, moonbeam-like, the gloom did break,—
'Twas Argo passing with her burning wake;
And in a cloud of troubled minstrelsy
They wrapped thy sacred name, dread Euxine Sea!
V
But see this harmless glossy-surfaced ocean,
Cradling my boat with quiet-throbbing motion!
This is no dismal threshold to be strown
With horrid wreck, no tempest-spirit's throne.
Faith fails the legends; the eye seeks but sees
No monument, no twin Symplegades.
Oh how transfigured, waves and headlands drear!
The very soul of May is breathing here!
Such skies, winds, waters—can they truly be
Upon the veritable Euxine Sea?
VI
The hollow waves, like summer thunder, roar
On Thracia's rocks and low Silistria's shore.
There Russia looms, or mistwreaths cheat the eye,
Upon the horizon line of history;
And there, where yon white ship hath set her helm,
Are Persia's havens deep, the garden-realm,
The clime where earth, their thoughtless earth, discloses
Nought to the poet's soul but wine and roses.
These are the shadows, bygone or to be,
Which flit along thy coasts, dread Euxine Sea!
VII
Now that the Strait, her seven fair bays unbinding,
Draws the caique through each blue snaky winding,
My heart is lighted on from cape to cape
By torchlike song or legendary shape,
While from the flowery Kandili there come
Cool odorous breaths to old Byzantium.
The sight of thee, dread Euxine! calm and near,
Hath made thee not the less a thing to fear;
Else why this troubled thrill which works in me
When I have seen and touched the Euxine Sea?
VIII
But lo! Stamboul! A thousand sunset-fires
Are gilding tall ship masts and cypress spires.
White palace roof and glittering kiosk,
Old Latin tower, rude gate, and pillared mosque,
Trees, houses, fountains, ships—float off and rise,
Like clouds instinct with light, into the skies.
What shall Arabian prose or Persian verse
In after years to my dull ear rehearse,
When eye hath seen upon a Mayday even
Stamboul by sunset lifted into Heaven?
IX
To-day my thirsty spirit sought to drink
Of dreadful legends on the Black Sea's brink;
This sunset is a trouble in my soul;
Deep in my heart I heard the Euxine roll,
I felt it in me as a mighty thought,
The block whence forms of grandeur might be wrought:
But now 'twixt light and gloom my mind is tossed,
Bright thoughts in dark, and dark in bright, are lost;
Once more an untouched thing, outside of me,
I hear the murmur of the Euxine Sea!
