A
SEAMARK
A
THRENODY FOR ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
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COLD,
the dull cold! What ails the sun,
And takes the heart out of the day?
What makes the morning look so mean,
The Common so forlorn and gray?
The wintry city’s granite heart
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Beats
on in iron mockery,
And like the roaming mountain rains,
I hear the thresh of feet go by.
It is the lonely human surf
Surging through alleys chill with grime,
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The
muttering churning ceaseless floe
Adrift out of the North of time.
Fades, it all fades! I only see
The poster with its reds and blues
Bidding the heart stand still to take
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| Its
desolating stab of news.
That intimate and magic name:
“Dead in Samoa.” . . . . Cry your
cries,
O city of the golden dome,
Under the gray Atlantic skies!
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But I have wander-biddings now.
Far down latitudes of sun,
An island mountain of the sea,
Piercing the green and rosy zone,
Goes up into the wandrous day.
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And
there in the brown-limbed island men
Are bearing up for burial,
Within the sun’s departing ken,
The master of the roving kind.
And there where time will set no mark
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For
his irrevocable rest,
Under the spacious melting dark,
With all the nomad tented stars
About him, they have laid him down
Above the crumbling of the sea,
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| Beyond
the turmoil of renown.
O all you hearts about the world
In whom the truant gipsy blood,
Under the frost of this pale time,
Sleeps like the daring sap and flood
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That dream of April and reprieve!
You whom the haunted vision drives,
Incredulous of home and ease,
Perfection’s lovers all your lives!
You whom the wander-spirit loves
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To lead
by some forgotten clue
Forever vanishing beyond
Horizon brinks forever new;
The road, unmarked, ordained, whereby
Your brothers of the field and air
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Before
you, faithful, blind and glad,
Emerged from chaos pair by pair;
The road whereby you too must come,
In the unvexed and fabled years
Into the country of your dream,
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| With
all your knowledge in arrears!
You who can never quite forget
Your glimpse of Beauty as she passed,
The well-head where her knee was pressed,
The dew wherein her foot was cast;
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O you who bid the paint and clay
Be glorious when you are dead,
And fit the plangent words in rhyme
Where the dark secret lurks unsaid;
You brethren of the light-heart guild,
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The
mystic fellowcraft of joy,
Who tarry for the news of truth,
And listen for some vast ahoy
Blown in from sea, who crowd the wharves
With eager eyes that wait the ship
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Whose
foreign tongue may fill the world
With wondrous tales from lip to lip;
Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
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| And
melted on the white sea-rim.
O granite hills, go down I blue!
And like green clouds in opal calms,
You anchored islands of the main,
Float up your loom of feathery palms!
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For deep within your dales, where lies
A valiant earthling stark and dumb,
This last night he receives his friends,
The journey-wonder on his face.
He “was not born for age.” Ah no,
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For
everlasting youth is his!
Part of the lyric of the earth
With spring and leaf and blade he is.
‘Twill nevermore be April now
But there will lurk a thought of him
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At the
street corners, gay with flowers
From rainy valleys purple-dim.
O chiefs, you do not mourn alone!
In that stern North where mystery broods,
Our mother grief has many sons
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| Bred
in those iron solitudes.
It does not help them, to have laid
Their coil of lightening under seas;
They are as impotent as you
To mend the loosened wrists and knees.
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And yet how many a harvest night,
When the great luminous meteors flare
Along the trenches of the dusk,
The men who dwell beneath the Bear,
Seeing those vagrants of the sky
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Float
through the deep beyond their hark,
Like Arabs through the wastes of air,—
A flash, a dream, from dark to dark,—
Must feel the solemn large surmise:
By a dim vast and perilous way
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We sweep
through undetermined time,
Illumining this quench of clay,
A moment staunched, then forth again.
Ah, not alone you climb the steep
To set your loving burden down
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| Against
the mighty knees of sleep.
With you we hold the somber faith
Where creeds are sown like rain at sea;
And leave the loveliest child of earth
To slumber where he longed to be.
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120 |
His fathers lit the dangerous coast
To steer the daring merchant home;
His courage lights the dark’ning port
Where every sea-worn sail must come.
And since he was the type of all
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That
strain in us which still must fare,
The fleeting migrant of a day,
Heart-high, outbound for otherwhere,
Now therefore, where the passing ships
Hang on the edges of the noon,
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And
Northern liners trail their smoke
Across the rising yellow moon,
Bound for his home, with shuddering screw
That beats its strength out into speed,
Until the pacing watch descries
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On
the sea-line a scarlet seed
Smolder
and kindle and set fire
To
the dark selvedge of the night,
The deep blue tapestry of stars,
Then sheet the dome in pearly light,
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There in perpetual tides of day,
Where men may praise him and deplore,
The place of his lone grave shall be
A seamark set forevermore,
High on a peak adrift with mist,
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And
round whose bases, far beneath
The snow-white wheeling tropic birds,
The emerald dragon breaks his teeth.
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