“The sea is everywhere the sea.”
I
GONE—faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember? | |
| Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign. | |
| Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle, | |
| Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea. | |
| |
| Never again will he come, with rings in his ears like a pirate, | 5 |
| Back to be living and seen, here with his roses and vines; | |
| Here where the tenants are shadows and echoes of years uneventful, | |
| Memory meets the event, told from afar by the sea. | |
| |
| Smoke that floated and rolled in the twilight away from the chimney | |
| Floats and rolls no more. Wheeling and falling, instead, | 10 |
| Down with a twittering flash go the smooth and inscrutable swallows, | |
| Down to the place made theirs by the cold work of the sea. | |
| |
| Roses have had their day, and the dusk is on yarrow and wormwood— | |
| Dusk that is over the grass, drenched with memorial dew; | |
| Trellises lie like bones in a ruin that once was a garden, | 15 |
| Swallows have lingered and ceased, shadows and echoes are all. | |
| |
II
WHERE is he lying to-night, as I turn away down to the valley, | |
| Down where the lamps of men tell me the streets are alive? | |
| Where shall I ask, and of whom, in the town or on land or on water, | |
| News of a time and a place buried alike and with him? | 20 |
| |
| Few now remain who may care, nor may they be wiser for caring, | |
| Where or what manner the doom, whether by day or by night; | |
| Whether in Indian deeps or on flood-laden fields of Atlantis, | |
| Or by the roaring Horn, shrouded in silence he lies. | |
| |
| Few now remain who return by the weed-weary path to his cottage, | 25 |
| Drawn by the scene as it was—met by the chill and the change; | |
| Few are alive who report, and few are alive who remember, | |
| More of him now than a name carved somewhere on the sea. | |
| |
| “Where is he lying?” I ask, and the lights in the valley are nearer; | |
| Down to the streets I go, down to the murmur of men. | 30 |
| Down to the roar of the sea in a ship may be well for another— | |
| Down where he lies to-night, silent, and under the storms. | |
