- As I ponder’d in silence,
- Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
- A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
- Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
- The genius of poets of old lands,
- As to me directing like flame its eyes,
- With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
- And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
- Know’st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
- And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
- The making of perfect soldiers.
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- Be it so, then I answer’d,
- I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,
- Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance
- and retreat, victory deferr’d and wavering,
- (Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the
- field the world,
- For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
- Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
- I above all promote brave soldiers.
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- In Cabin’d Ships at Sea
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- In cabin’d ships at sea,
- The boundless blue on every side expanding,
- With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,
- Or some lone bark buoy’d on the dense marine,
- Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails,
- She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under
- many a star at night,
- By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
- In full rapport at last.
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- Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
- Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
- The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
- We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
- The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
- briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
- The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
- The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
- And this is ocean’s poem.
-
- Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny,
- You not a reminiscence of the land alone,
- You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos’d I know not
- whither, yet ever full of faith,
- Consort to every ship that sails, sail you!
- Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it
- here in every leaf;)
- Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the
- imperious waves,
- Chant on, sail on, bear o’er the boundless blue from me to every sea,
- This song for mariners and all their ships.