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From “The Sea-islands”
THERE is deliberateness in all sea-island ways, | |
| Outlandish to our days as stone wheels are. | |
| The islands cannot see the use of life | |
| Which only lives for change; | |
| Their days are flat, | 5 |
| And all things there move slowly. | |
| Even the seasons are conservative— | |
| No sudden flaunting of wild colors in the fall, | |
| Only a gradual fading of the green, | |
| As if the earth turned slowly, | 10 |
| Or looked with one still face upon the sun | |
| As Venus does; | |
| Until the trees, the fields, the marshes, | |
| All turn dun, dull Quaker brown, | |
| And a mild winter settles down, | 15 |
| And mosses are more gray. | |
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| All human souls are glasses which reflect | |
| The aspects of the outer world. | |
| See what terrible gods the huge Himalayas bred!— | |
| And the fierce Jewish Jaywah came | 20 |
| From the hot Syrian desert | |
| With his inhibitory decalogue. | |
| The gods of little hills are always tame; | |
| Here God is dull, where all things stay the same. | |
| No change on these sea-islands! | 25 |
| The huge piled clouds range | |
| White in the cobalt sky; | |
| The moss hangs, | |
| And the strong tiring sea-winds blow— | |
| While day on glistering day goes by. | 30 |
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| The horses plow with hanging heads— | |
| Slow, followed by a black-faced man, | |
| Indifferent to the sun. | |
| The old cotton bushes hang with whitened heads; | |
| And there among the live-oak trees | 35 |
| Peep the small whitewashed cabins, | |
| Painted blue perhaps, with scarlet-turbaned women, | |
| Ample-hipped, with voices soft and warm; | |
| And the lean hounds and chocolate children swarm. | |
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| Day after day the ocean pumps | 40 |
| The awful valve-gates of his heart, | |
| Diastole and systole through these estuaries; | |
| The tides flow in long gray weed-streaked lines; | |
| The salt water, like the planet’s lifeblood, goes | |
| As if the earth were breathing with long-taken breaths | 45 |
| And we were very near her heart. | |
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| No wonder that these faces show a tired dismay, | |
| Looking on burning suns, and scarcely blithe in May. | |
| Spring’s coming is too fierce with life, | |
| And summer is too long; | 50 |
| The stunted pine trees struggle with the sand | |
| Till the eyes sicken with their dwarfing strife. | |
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| There are old women here among these island homes, | |
| With dull brown eyes that look at something gray, | |
| And tight silver hair, drawn back in lines, | 55 |
| Like the beach grass that’s always blown one way; | |
| With such a melancholy in their faces | |
| I know that they have lived long in these places. | |
| The tides, the hooting owls, the daylight moons, | |
| The leprous lights and shadows of the mosses, | 60 |
| The funereal woodlands of these coasts, | |
| Draped like a hearse, | |
| And memories of an old war’s ancient losses, | |
| Dwell in their faces’ shadows like gray ghosts. | |
| And worse— | 65 |
| The terror of the black man always near, | |
| The drab level of the rice-fields and the marsh | |
| Lend them a mask of fear. | |
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