| |
| ROUND and red in a golden haze | |
| Had the sun gone up from his eastern bed | |
| For days and days, and as round and red | |
| The sun had gone down for days and days. | |
| |
| The windless hills were bathed in the gold | 5 |
| Of their own autumnal atmosphere,— | |
| The thousand hues of the parting year | |
| In their banners of glory mixed, fold on fold. | |
| |
| Round and red in the midnight sky | |
| The lone moon rode with never a star,— | 10 |
| The bronzed right wheel of her noiseless car | |
| With a broad tire girdling her throne on high. | |
| |
| Then came the storm with its signal drum, | |
| All night we heard on the eastern shore | |
| The steady booming and muffled roar | 15 |
| Of the great waves’ tramp ere the winds had come! | |
| |
| They came with the morning! the lurid glow | |
| Of the sunrise into black ashes burned; | |
| The torn clouds whirled, overturned and turned, | |
| Wrung till they streamed with a torrent’s flow. | 20 |
| |
| With the measured march of a mighty host | |
| The ground-swell came, with wave upon wave, | |
| On the red Saugonnet rocks they drave, | |
| And scattered their foam over leagues of coast. | |
| |
| Out of the Infinite, up from the smoke | 25 |
| Of the watery Gehenna the wild waves rose, | |
| Lashed into wrath by invisible foes, | |
| On the crags of the headland their fury broke. | |
| |
| Spectral and dim over sunk Cuttywow | |
| The white spray hung, but ye heard no shock, | 30 |
| For the liquid thunder on red Wall Rock | |
| Crushed out all sound with its deafening blow. | |
| |
| From the granite jaws of the Clump, the foam | |
| Of a maniac wrath was drifted, white, | |
| Snowed on the blast with the snowy flight | 35 |
| Of the screaming gulls driven out from home. | |
| |
| In the swirl of the Hopper the waves were ground | |
| To impalpable dust; the Ridge Rock roared | |
| To the crash of a new Niagara poured | |
| Right up the crags with a slippery bound! | 40 |
| |
| Over Brenton’s Reef where the west hung black, | |
| O’er the cloudy bar of the Cormorant Rocks, | |
| The white seas hurried in huddling flocks | |
| With the wolf-winds howling along their track. | |
| |
| They came and went in a wavering mist, | 45 |
| The phantoms that hung on the skirts of the blast; | |
| While the nearer Cliff his defiance cast; | |
| Maddening the seas with his granite fist. | |
| |
| Far inland the moan of the tempest told | |
| What war was waged on the crumbling crags, | 50 |
| How the charging billows were torn on jags | |
| Of the Island Cliff as they backward rolled. * * * * * | |
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