Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the airand the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
IA brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,-The sea was still breaking violently and
Had steamed into our north Atlantic Fleet,when the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net.
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs;
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of red and whites,
It's open, starring
Were lusterless
Or cabin-windows on a stranded
Heavy with sand. we weight the body,
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks at its
On Ahab's void and forehead; and the
Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this at the portent at the
Where dreadnoughts shall
It's hell-bent
When you are
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark,
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied,
In his steel scales; ask for no Orphean
To pluck life back.
The guns of the steeled
Recoiled and then
The hoarse
II.
Whenever winds are moving and their
Heaved at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,
Then terns and sea-gulls tremble at your
In these waters.
Sailor, can you
The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward,
Headlong and break on our Atlantic
Off 'Sconset, where the yawing
The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,
As the entangled, screeching mainsheet
The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers
The heavy surf and throw their long lead
For blue-fish?
Sea-gulls blink their heavy
Seaward.
The winds' wings beat upon the stones,
Cousin, and scream for you and the claws
At the sea's throat and wring it in the
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the
Cry out in the long night for the hurt
Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East.
All you recovered from Poseidon
With you, my cousin, and the harrowed
Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,
Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,
Nantucket's westward haven.
To Cape
Guns, cradled on the tide,
Blast, the eelgrass about a
Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and the
Lashing earth's scaffold,
Our warships in the
Of the great God, where time's contrition
Whatever it was these Quaker sailor's
In the mad scramble of their lives.
They
When time was open-eyed,
Wooden and childish; only bones
There, in the nowhere, where their boats were
Sky-high, where mariners had fabled
Of IS, the whited monster. what it
Them is their secret.
In the sperm-whale's slickI see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:"If God himself had not been by our side,
If God himself had not been on our side,
When the Atlantic rose against us, why,
Then it had swallowed us up
This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed
And stirred the troubled waters to
To send the Pequod packing off to hell:
This is the end of them, three quarters fools,
Snatching at straws to
Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,
Spouting out blood and water as it
Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:
Clamavimus,
O depths.
Let the sea-gulls
For water, for the deep where the high
Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.
Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,
Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,
The beach increasing, its enormous
Sucking the ocean's side.
This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. who will
The mast-lashed master of
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
When the whales viscera go and the
Of its corruption overruns this
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Holewhistle and fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary,
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and
And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor and gulls go round the stoven
Where the morning stars sing out
And thunder shakes the white surf and
The red flag hammered in the mast-head.
Our steel,
Jonas Messias, in Thy side.
Our Lady of
There once the penitents took off their shoesand then walked barefoot the remaining mile;
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows
Slowly along the munching English lane,
Like cows to the old shrine, until you
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree,
Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make you
And whistled Sion by that stream.
But see:
Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar.
There's no
At all or charm in that
Face with its heavy eyelids.
As before,
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque
Expressionless expresses God: it
Past castled Sion.
She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.
The empty winds are creaking and the
Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,
The boughs are trembling and a
Bobs on the untimely
Of the greased wash exploding on a
In the old mouth of the Atlantic.
It's well;
Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,
Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:
Unmarried and corroding, spare of
Mart once of supercilious, winged clippers,
Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its
You could cut the brackish winds with a
Here in Nantucket and cast up the
When the Lord God formed man from the sea's
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And the blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
