Historical & Legendary Ballads & Songs By Walter Thornbury. Illustrated by J. Whistler, F. Walker, John Tenniel, J. D. Watson, W. Small, F. Sandys, G. J. Pinwell, T. Morten, M. J. Lawless, and many others |
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Sea-side Hexameters.
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 | Historical & Legendary Ballads & Songs |  |
Sea-side Hexameters.
I.
Many-footed and swift the trampling waves of the ocean,Breast to breast, rising and falling, leap on to the battle;
White-maned and fierce, three deep, fleet as the steeds of the prairie;
White-maned, tameless, and swift as the raging horse of the Tartar;
Level in rank, unsaddled, unbridled, unridden by any,
For none but the angel of wrath can bestride them, or rein them.
In madness, incessant, they dash on the jutting horns of the headlands,
Fierce as the patriot Swiss on the lances of tyrannous Hapsburgh.
White froth tossed from their lips like the slaver of madmen in fetters,
Pressing to shore as far as the eye can discover, they gather,
Hurrying on with a deafening shout, like the spearmen of Cæsar,
The white cliffs of Britain his goal, when he prayed kneeling down for a moment,
Then leaped on through the surf, deriding the hurtling arrows.
Lit by the flare of his torch, and the threatening glare of the beacons,
And with a cry to Mars the legions from Egypt strode after,—
Far in the distance the sea calls back its broken battalions,
Dyed red in the sunset, as stained with the gore of an onset.
Multitudinous, routed and baffled, now seaward they're plunging,
As the sun indeed were a bale-fire, and the Saxons were rising,
At the cry of the bands of the heathen, the Danes and the Norsemen.
Some are whispering hope, with a ceaseless murmurous music,
Others moaning with pain, but a few still mad for the battle.—
Thou, mighty ocean, though in calm or in storm, resteth never,
Grey and cloudy the sea, sky and water are blended together;
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Yet still on the shore you hear the long deep roll of thy thunder.
The white mist rose from the bay, but the tumult hoarse and cavernous
Ceases not ever, though the stars in the wet sand's reflected.
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Red shine the clouds on the beach like the glare of a gathering beacon;
But still plunge ever the waves with a deep diapason majestic,
As far from the din and the roar, and the feverish tumult of cities,
I watch the wave pressing smooth, the hard sand hollowed and ribbed.
Ay, for the planks of the ship the sea-worm and canker hath fretted
Ay, for the mast-bedded deep, and firm in the labouring sea-drift;
Ay, for the pennon of crimson the slippery dark weed hath tangled;
Ay, for the twine of the cable, now loosened, and shredded, and sodden;
Rough with the sea-shell, crisping and white with the glittering crystals;
Scurfed with the salt, and green and brown with wet glistening ribbons
Of bladdery weed, and branch of the uprooted trees of the ocean.
Deep lie the dead in the slope where the sand heaps in furrows and hollows;
Close and swelling and soft as the snow in the clustering mountains.
Wail on, O sea, and mourn for the creatures you slay in your anger.
God made us both, ocean and man: then why dost thou harm us?
Or why is thy cry full of sorrow, now shriller, now deeper?
Why in thy voice are contained all the choking shrieks of the drowning?
Heaving and leaping above us, splash, roaring and shouting, the breakers,
Beware of the surf in the bay, beware of the reefs to the leeward.
The waves climb up on the shore, but howling and ceaselessly falling
Back from the buttressed walls of their prison, a dungeon eternal.
II.
Roar, ye dumb giants, gasping, howling, and moaning, yet wordless,Your cry is no neigh of the war-horse, but of spirits in torture,
Despairing, but bent on destruction, resolved upon conquest;
No hope, but a moaning of anguish, no scream of the terrible onset;
No! but a dauntless despair and a courage and vigour undying;
Impotent—true—against God, but stormy and cruel and wrathful;
Feeding on man, wretched man, and tossing the dead in derision;
A prey for the fish and the birds, a sport to the tides and the currents,
Thy step to the shore is the slow irresistible step of the lion.
Blind is thy wrath, thou art deaf to the prayer of the wretched and drowning;
White with thy foam is the fluttering wing of the chattering sea-bird,
That flits and hovers around the raft, and the faint and the sinking.
Level, and barren, and waste, broad as the mighty Atlantic;
Vast, and level, and dim, shapeless, and veined with broad shadows.
Thou art obedient still to a nameless, majestical presence;
Restless as heart of a spirit, still pulsing and throbbing and breathing;
Many may sleep on the reef, or the raft, that approaches the whirlpool;
The gull folds its wings in the evening, the fisher the sail of his pinnace.
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Deep is thy roar, as the tumult of gathering nations revolting;
Vast, and boundless, and level, and waste thy watery prairies,
Stemming the rocks in the bay, thy waves hurry on like bold swimmers;
Tossing the spray and the froth, in the sunlight prismatic it flashes,
While the long deep roll of thy tide washes over its torrents.
The keystone of the arch of the rainbow's the throne of the Father,
But its triple shaft, shedding light, rooteth deep as thy caverns,
Ere it smoulders away like a dream in the flames of the sunset.
Red shines the light on the sand like the glimmering flare of a beacon,
Warning the seaman in storm of the shore and its breakers and danger.
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And the boatmen, aged and blind, listen with joy to the storm-wind,
Telling tales to each other of wreck on those shores, and of danger;
Flickering blue, like a flame dyed with the colour of heaven,
The crystal, wavering sea, restless with dimple and ripple,
Grows cloudy and grey, toward the evening, stormy and wrathful,
Inky, and streaked with dark green, threatening, white with its foam-crest;
No longer creeps up to the shore with the murmuring voice of a lover,
Whispering and wooing and gentle, in dusk of the glimmering twilight,
But stormy and fierce as a knight at the ebony gate of a giant,
Cursing Mahommed, and vowing to heap up despair and destruction
On Soldan, and Paynim and hound, by the help of the guardian angels,
By the help of our Lady the Virgin, the saints, and confessors, and martyrs.
The old grey tower on the cliff stands like a crumbling landmark,
Dark through the mists of the eve, silver-flamed in the mellowing moonlight,
Now red, and burning, and bright, a pillar of fire in the sunset;
On the shore the waves break in with the foam of the breakers dyed crimson,
Like the surf that pours in on the swamps of the black Malebolge,
The cry of whose waves is the howl of the creatures in lingering torment—
Of Cain, Holofernes, and Herod, Ananias, Sapphira, and Judas.
They leap up high, and curvet with the proud-crested neck of a war-horse;
And around the ambient air is filled with their loud acclamations,
For the sea has voices of woe, as well as of wrath and of anger—
Amid all the roar and the foam, I hear the hoarse shells of the Tritons;
See the nymphs diving and soaring, flashing like swallows in æther,
Heralds of Neptune, the long green mane of whose trampling horses
I can discern through the waves that the sun makes bright and transparent;
Glaucus, and Sylla, and Circe, the Syrens, and daughters of Nereus,
Trapped in rich fetters of shells, and the crimson fibres of sea-weed,
Led by the winds, and lulled by the voice of the creatures of ocean,
Who follow behind as the flocks do the pipe and the hurrying shepherd.
Proteus drives after them all the glittering shoals of the tunny,
For already the spears are sharpened, the eager fisherman, waiting,
Prays to the Gods of the Ocean, adoring with frequent libation;
Soon shall his sail brace out with the favouring gale from the western,
His prey come rolling and leaping and sporting and gleaming to windward;
Food for the hearth and the altar, food for the long nights of Winter.
Beware of the ledge of the rock, black and jagged as the snout of a monster,
Glimmering, frothy, and white as a shark's teeth glitter and glisten;
And beyond, dark as backs of the whales in the ocean antarctic,
Deep in the sand-troughs, blindly the billows welter and wallow.
The waves, like the Magi, bring presents, but not of red gold and of spices,
For their gifts are unworthy and base, deluding, and scornful, and mocking:
Sea-weed and leaves that are torn from the wavering forests of ocean;
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Washings of sand, bright silt, grit, coloured and sparkling and golden;
Or, pale and shroudless, the dead, borne on the wandering billow,
The dead of a region unknown, the driftings of gale and of tempest,
Washed up on the land as in scorn, with a roar of derision;
At night when the star on the cliff seems to answer the lights on the water,
Far from the din, and the roar, and the feverish tumult of cities.
| Historical & Legendary Ballads & Songs | |