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| SING the song of wave-worn Coogee,—Coogee in the distance white | |
| With its jags and points disrupted, gaps and fractures fringed with light! | |
| Haunt of gledes and restless plovers of the melancholy wail | |
| Ever lending deeper pathos to the melancholy gale. | |
| There, my brothers, down the fissures, chasms deep and wan and wild, | 5 |
| Grows the sea-bloom, one that blushes like a shrinking, fair, blind child; | |
| And amongst the oozing forelands many a glad green rock-vine runs, | |
| Getting ease on earthy ledges sheltered from December suns. | |
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| Often, when a gusty morning, rising cold and gray and strange, | |
| Lifts its face from watery spaces, vistas full with cloudy change; | 10 |
| Bearing up a gloomy burden which anon begins to wane, | |
| Fading in the sudden shadow of a dark determined rain; | |
| Do I seek an eastern window, so to watch the breakers beat | |
| Round the steadfast crags of Coogee, dim with drifts of driving sleet: | |
| Hearing hollow mournful noises sweeping down a solemn shore | 15 |
| While the grim sea-caves are tideless and the storm strives at their core. | |
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| Often when the floating vapors fill the silent autumn leas, | |
| Dreamy memories fall like moonlight over silver, sleeping seas, | |
| Youth and I and Love together!—other times and other themes | |
| Come to me unsung, unwept for, through the faded evening gleams; | 20 |
| Come to me and touch me mutely,—I that looked and longed so well, | |
| Shall I look and yet forget them? who may know or who foretell? | |
| Though the southern wind roams, shadowed with its immemorial grief, | |
| Where the frosty wings of winter leave their whiteness on the leaf? | |
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| Friend of mine beyond the waters, here and there these perished days | 25 |
| Haunt me with their sweet dead faces and their old divided ways. | |
| You that helped and you that loved me, take this song, and when you read | |
| Let the lost things come about you, set your thoughts and hear and heed: | |
| Time has laid his burden on us: we who wear our manhood now,— | |
| We would be the boys we have been, free of heart and bright of brow,— | 30 |
| Be the boys for just an hour, with the splendor and the speech | |
| Of thy lights and thunders, Coogee, flying up thy gleaming beach! | |
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| Heart’s desire and heart’s division! who would come and say to me | |
| With the eyes of far-off friendship, “You are as you used to be”? | |
| Something glad and good has left me here with sickening discontent, | 35 |
| Tired of looking, neither knowing what it was or where it went. | |
| So it is this sight of Coogee, shining in the morning dew, | |
| Sets me stumbling through dim summers once on fire with youth and you. | |
| Summers pale as southern evenings when the year has lost its power, | |
| And the wasted face of April weeps above the withered flower. | 40 |
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| Not that seasons bring no solace, not that time lacks light and rest; | |
| But the old things were the dearest, and the old loves seem the best. | |
| We that start at songs familiar, we that tremble at a tone, | |
| Floating down the ways of music, like a sigh of sweetness flown,— | |
| We can never feel the freshness, never find again the mood | 45 |
| Left amongst fair-featured places brightened of our brotherhood; | |
| This, and this, we have to think of, when the night is over all, | |
| And the woods begin to perish, and the rains begin to fall. | |
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