University of Virginia Library


120

V

He is as one who, treading salty scurf
Of lonely sea-sands, hears the roaring rocks
Of some lost isle of misty crags and lochs;
Who sees no sea, but, through a world of surf,
Gray ghosts of gulls and screaming petrel flocks:
When, from the deep's white ruin and wild wreck,
Above the fog, beneath the ghostly gull,
The iron ribs of some storm-shattered hull
Loom, packed with pirate treasure to the deck
A century rotten: feels his wealth replete,
When long-baulked ocean claims it; and one dull
Wave flings, derisive at despondent feet,
A skull, one doubloon rattling in the skull.