AMONG THE ROCKS
Never can we be strangers, you and I,
Nor quite disown our mysteries of kin,
Grey Sea-rocks, since I sat an hour to-day
Companion of the Ocean and of you.
I, sensitive soft flesh a thorn invades,
The light breath of a rose can win aside,
Flesh fashioned to be hourly tried and thrill'd,
Delighted, tortured, to betray whose ward
The unready heart is ruler, still surprised,
With emissary flushes swift and false,
And tremulous to touches of the stars.
You, spiny ridges of the land, rude backs,
Clawless and wingless, half-created things,
Monsters at ease before the sun and sea,
Untamed, unshrinking, unpersuadable,
My kindred.
For the wide-delivering womb
Which casts abroad a mammoth as a man,
And still conceals the new and better birth,
Bore me and you. Old parents of the Sphinx
What words primeval murmured in my ears
To-day between the lapping of the waves?
What recognitions flashed and disappeared?
What rare faint touches passed of sympathy
From you to me, from me to you? What sense
Of the ancestral things shadowed the heart,
Cloud-like, and with the pleasure of a cloud.
Therefore I know from henceforth that the shrill
Short crying of the sea-lark when his feet
Touch where the wave slips off the shining sand
Pierces you; and the wide and luminous air
Impregnate with sharp sea smells is to you
A passion and allurement; and the sun
At mid-day loads your sense with drowsy warmth,
And in the waver and echo of your caves,
You cherish memories of the billowy chaunt,
And ponder its dim prophecy.
And I,—
Lo here I strike upon the granite too,
Something is here austere and obdurate
As you are, something rugged and untamed.
A strength behind the will. I am not all
The shapely, agile creature named a man,
So artful, with the quick-conceiving brain,
Nerve-network, and the hand to grasp and hold,
Most dexterous of kinds that wage the strife
Of being through the years. I am not all
This creature with the various heart, alive
To curious joys, rare anguish, skilled in shames,
Prides, hatreds, loves, fears, frauds, the heart which turns
A sudden venomous asp, the heart which bleeds
The red, great drops of glad self-sacrifice.
Pierce below these and seek the primal layer!
Behind Apollo loom the Earth-born Ones,
Half-god, half-brute; behind this symmetry,
This versatility of heart and brain
A strength abides, sustaining thought and love,
Untamed, unshrinking, unpersuadable,
At ease before the powers of Earth and Heaven,
Equal to any, of no younger years,
Calm as the greatest, haughty as the best,
Of imprescriptible authority.
Down upon you I sink, and leave myself,
My vain, frail self, and find repose on you,
Prime Force, whether amassed through myriad years
From dear accretions of dead ancestry,
Or ever welling from the source of things
In undulation vast and unperceived,
Down upon you I sink and lose myself!
My child that shouts and races on the sand
Your cry restores me. Have I been with Pan,
Kissing the hoofs of his goat-majesty?
You come, no granite of the nether earth,
Bright sea-flower rather, shining foam that flies,
Yet sweet as blossom of our inland fields.
