Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

George Willis Cooke, comp. The Poets of Transcendentalism: An Anthology. 1903.

Seen and Unseen

David Atwood Wasson (1823–1887)

THE WIND ahead, the billows high,

A whited wave, but sable sky,

And many a league of tossing sea

Between the hearts I love and me.

The wind ahead! day after day

These weary words the sailors say;

To weeks the days are lengthening now,—

Still mounts the surge to meet our prow.

Through longing day and lingering night,

I still accuse Time’s lagging flight,

Or gaze out o’er the envious sea,

That keeps the hearts I love from me.

Yet, ah! how shallow is my grief!

How instant is the deep relief!

And what a hypocrite am I,

To feign forlorn, to ’plain and sigh!

The wind ahead! The wind is free!

For evermore it favoreth me,—

To shores of God still blowing fair,

O’er seas of God my bark doth bear.

This surging brine I do not sail;

This blast adverse is not my gale;

’T is here I only seem to be,

But really sail another sea,—

Another sea, pure sky its waves,

Whose beauty hides no heaving graves;

A sea all haven, whereupon

No helpless bark to wreck has gone.

The winds that o’er my ocean run

Reach through all worlds beyond the sun;

Through life and death, through fate, through time,

Grand breaths of God they sweep sublime.

Eternal trades, they cannot veer,

And, blowing, teach us how to steer;

And well for him whose joy, whose care,

Is but to keep before them fair.

O thou God’s mariner, heart of mine!

Spread canvas to the airs divine!

Spread sail! and let thy Fortune be

Forgotten in thy Destiny.

For Destiny pursues us well,

By sea, by land, through heaven or hell;

It suffers Death alone to die,

Bids Life all change and chance defy.

Would earth’s dark ocean suck thee down?

Earth’s ocean thou, O Life! shalt drown;

Shalt flood it with thy finer wave,

And, sepulchred, entomb thy grave!

Life loveth life and good, then trust

What most the spirit would, it must;

Deep wishes in the heart that be,

Are blossoms of Necessity.

A thread of Law runs through thy prayer,

Stronger than iron cables are;

And Love and Longing toward their goal

Are pilots sweet to guide the soul.

So Life must live, and Soul must sail,

And Unseen over Seen prevail;

And all God’s argosies come to shore,

Let ocean smile, or rage or roar.

And so, ’mid storm or calm, my bark

With snowy wake still nears her mark;

Cheerly the trades of being blow,

And sweeping down the wind I go.