THE SEA! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth’s wide regions round;
It plays with the clouds; it mocks the skies;
Or like a cradled creature lies.
I’m on the sea! I’m on the sea!
I am where I would ever be;
With the blue above, and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe’er I go;
If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.
I love, O, how I love to ride
On the fierce, foaming, bursting tide,
When every mad wave drowns the moon
Or whistles aloft his tempest tune,
And tells how goeth the world below,
And why the sou’west blasts do blow.
I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I lov’d the great sea more and more,
And backwards flew to her billowy breast,
Like a bird that seeketh its mother’s nest;
And a mother she was, and is, to me;
For I was born on the open sea!
The waves were white, and red the morn,
In the noisy hour when I was born;
And the whale it whistled, the porpoise roll’d,
And the dolphins bared their backs of gold;
And never was heard such an outcry wild
As welcom’d to life the ocean-child!
I’ve liv’d since then, in calm and strife,
Full fifty summers, a sailor’s life,
With wealth to spend and a power to range,
But never have sought nor sighed for change;
And Death, whenever he comes to me,
Shall come on the wild, unbounded sea!
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Comments
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Lovely
it begins feverishly, passionately and maintains the enthusiasm and passion throughout, without wavering one little bit. The reader gets caught in the excitement. The descriptions are beautiful and makes me crave to experience what the poet has experienced. -
Procter writes a passionate ode to the fire that licks warmth and light into his life and within The Sea the reader is left to mirror where they, themselves, may find equal majesty.
The Sea is his Mother, Father, Lover, Beginning and End, it his is closest companion, his forever and ever friend, rarely do we see, read or feel this empathy in modern society with its temporary time capsules of fascination.
The Poet revells in " a full fifty summers" despite calm and strife and the reader is left envying the spirit never left wintering but set upon sailing and swimming She who cannot be tamed, She takes men to distant shores and brings them back again, he regales the reader with the open armed opulence of the timeless Sea...
Procter may not be a well known poet internationally but he was rich beyond measure to have lived with the thrill of unbridled pleasure and perhaps this, this is why some men choose their Mistress to be the Sea... -
This guy would have loved Waterworld
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