A Channel Passage and Other Poems | Page 2

wind bore down on it, freighted

with death
for fraught:
And the keen waves kindled and quickened as things
transfigured or
things distraught.
And madness fell on them laughing and leaping;
and madness came on
the wind:
And the might and the light and the darkness of storm were
as storm
in the heart of Ind.
Such glory, such terror, such passion, as lighten
and harrow the
far fierce East,
Rang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: the night
was an altar
with death for priest.
The channel that sunders England from shores
where never was man
born free
Was clothed with the likeness and thrilled with the strength
and
the wrath of a tropic sea.
As a wild steed ramps in rebellion, and rears
till it swerves from
a backward fall,
The strong ship struggled and reared, and her deck
was upright as a
sheer cliff's wall.
Stern and prow plunged under, alternate: a glimpse,
a recoil, a
breath,
And she sprang as the life in a god made man would spring at
the
throat of death.
Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of
supreme and supernal

joy,
Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's
heart in a boy.
For the central crest of the night was cloud that
thundered and
flamed, sublime
As the splendour and song of the soul everlasting
that quickens the
pulse of time.
The glory beholden of man in a vision, the music of
light
overheard,
The rapture and radiance of battle, the life that abides in
the
fire of a word,
In the midmost heaven enkindled, was manifest far on
the face of
the sea,
And the rage in the roar of the voice of the waters was heard
but
when heaven breathed free.
Far eastward, clear of the covering of
cloud, the sky laughed out
into light
From the rims of the storm to the sea's dark edge with
flames that
were flowerlike and white.
The leaping and luminous blossoms of
live sheet lightning that
laugh as they fade
From the cloud's black base to the black wave's
brim rejoiced in
the light they made.
Far westward, throned in a silent sky, where life
was in lustrous
tune,
Shone, sweeter and surer than morning or evening, the steadfast

smile of the moon.
The limitless heaven that enshrined them was
lovelier than dreams
may behold, and deep
As life or as death, revealed and transfigured,
may shine on the
soul through sleep.
All glories of toil and of triumph and passion and
pride that it
yearns to know
Bore witness there to the soul of its likeness and
kinship, above
and below.
The joys of the lightnings, the songs of the thunders, the
strong
sea's labour and rage,
Were tokens and signs of the war that is life
and is joy for the
soul to wage.
No thought strikes deeper or higher than the heights and
the depths
that the night made bare,
Illimitable, infinite, awful and joyful, alive
in the summit of
air--
Air stilled and thrilled by the tempest that thundered between its
reign and the sea's,
Rebellious, rapturous, and transient as faith or as
terror that
bows men's knees.
No love sees loftier and fairer the form of its
godlike vision in
dreams
Than the world shone then, when the sky and the sea were as
love
for a breath's length seems--
One utterly, mingled and mastering and
mastered and laughing with

love that subsides
As the glad mad night sank panting and satiate
with storm, and
released the tides.
In the dense mid channel the steam-souled ship
hung hovering,
assailed and withheld
As a soul born royal, if life or if death be
against it, is
thwarted and quelled.
As the glories of myriads of glowworms in
lustrous grass on a
boundless lawn
Were the glories of flames phosphoric that made of
the water a
light like dawn.
A thousand Phosphors, a thousand Hespers, awoke in
the churning
sea,
And the swift soft hiss of them living and dying was clear as a
tune could be;
As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the
keys of
life or of sleep,
Audible alway alive in the storm, too fleet for a dream
to keep: Too fleet, too sweet for a dream to recover and thought to
remember
awake:
Light subtler and swifter than lightning, that whispers and
laughs
in the live storm's wake,
In the wild bright wake of the storm, in the
dense loud heart of
the labouring hour,
A harvest of stars by the storm's hand reaped,
each fair as a
star-shaped flower.
And sudden and soft as the passing of sleep is the

passing of
tempest seemed
When the light and the sound of it sank, and the
glory was gone as
a dream half dreamed.
The glory, the terror, the passion that made of
the midnight a
miracle, died,
Not slain at a stroke, nor in gradual reluctance abated
of power
and of pride;
With strong swift subsidence, awful as power that is
wearied of
power upon earth,
As a God that were wearied of power upon