The sun sinks scarlet as a barberry. Far off at sea one vessel lifts a sail, Hurrying to harbor from the coming gale, That banks the west above a choppy sea. The sun is gone; the tide is flowing free; The bay is opaled with wild light; and pale The lighthouse spears its flame now; through a veil That falls about the sea mysteriously. Out there she sits and mutters of her dead, Old Ocean; of the stalwart and the strong, Skipper and fisher whom her arms dragged down: Before her now she sees their ghosts; o'erhead, As gray as rain, their wild wrecks sweep along, And all night long lay siege to this old town.
The road leads up a hill through many a brake, Blueberry and barberry, bay and sassafras, By an abandoned quarry, where, like glass, A round pool lies; an isolated lake, A mirror for what presences, that make Their wildwood toilets here! The road is grass Gray-scarred with stone: great bowlders, as we pass, Slope burly shoulders towards us. Cedars shake Wild balsam from their tresses; there and here Clasping a glimpse of ocean and of shore In arms of swaying green. Below, at last, Beside the sea, with derrick and with pier, By heaps of granite, noise of drill and bore, A Cape Ann town, towering with many a mast.
Here where the coves indent the shore and fall And fill with ebb and flowing of the tides; Whereon some barge rocks or some dory rides, By which old orchards bloom, or, from the wall, Pelt every lane with fruit; where gardens, tall With roses, riot; swift my gladness glides To that old pasture where the mushroom hides, The chicory blooms and Peace sits mid them all. Fenced in with rails and rocks, its emerald slopes,-- Ribbed with huge granite,--where the placid cows Tinkle a browsing bell, roll to a height Wherefrom the sea, bright as adventuring hopes, Swept of white sails and plowed of foaming prows, Leaps like a Nereid on the ravished sight.
Far as the eye can see, in domes and spires, Buttress and curve, ruins of shifting sand,-- In whose wild making wind and sea took hand,-- The white dunes stretch. The wind, that never tires, Striving for strange effects that he admires, Changes their form from time to time; the land Forever passive to his mad demand, And to the sea's, who with the wind conspires. Here, as on towers of desolate cities, bay And wire-grass grow, wherein no insect cries, Only a bird, the swallow of the sea, That homes in sand. I hear it far away Crying--or is it some lost soul that flies, Above the land, ailing unceasingly?