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5 am .  One-quarter past. Distant chimes inform me this. A bell peal knells the mist. And sunlight’s not yet bludgeoning. But some light gets blood going. Last night it was snowing and now every path’s a pall. Though mine the only footfalls at this hour of awe. Above hangs a canopy of needle leaf. Below, the season’s mean deceit— that everything stays white and clean. It doesn’t, of course, but I wish it. My prayers are green with this intent, imploring winter wrens to trill and begging scuttling bucks come back. There’s something that I lack. A wryneck bullet-beaks a branch. His woodworm didn’t have a chance. What I miss, I’ve never had. But I am not a ghost. I am a guest. And life is thirst, at best. So do not strike me, Heart. I am, too, tinder. I’m flammable as birch bark, even damp. Blue spruce, bee-eater— be sweeter to me. Let larksong shudder to its January wheeze, but gift these hands a happiness just once. It is half passed. And I am cold. Another peal has tolled. I’ve told the sum of my appeals. I need not watch for fox. They do not congregate at dawn. But I would, were I one.

1 An old man bending I come among new faces, Years looking backward resuming in answer to children, Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me, (Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;) Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances, Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;) Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth, Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us? What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains? 2 O maidens and young men I love and that love me, What you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls, Soldier alert I arrive after a long march cover’d with sweat and dust, In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the rush of successful charge, Enter the captur’d works—yet lo, like a swift running river they fade, Pass and are gone they fade—I dwell not on soldiers’ perils or soldiers’ joys, (Both I remember well—many of the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.) But in silence, in dreams’ projections, While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on, So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand, With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there, Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.) Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, Straight and swift to my wounded I go, Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground, Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital, To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again. I onward go, I stop, With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable, One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you. 3 On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!) The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,) The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine, Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard, (Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.) From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood, Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side falling head, His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump, And has not yet look’d on it. I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep, But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking, And the yellow-blue countenance see. I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound, Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail. I am faithful, I do not give out, The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.) 4 Thus in silence in dreams’ projections, Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals, The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

When I woke the darkness was so thick, So palpable and black that my eyes Seemed blind as stone staring into stone. The blade that I had dreamed, efficient and quick As it cut into my thigh, cleaning a gangrened Wound infected to the bone, seemed poised Above my throat: Close-grained, impenetrable, The blackness rose before me like a wall. And then off in the next room, nervous, light, A soft padding as of an animal Raced like my heartbeat in my temples Round and round, trapped, stealthily desperate As if hunting its own track, terrified And captivated by its own odor. Skin cool in the night air, eyes drilling Through the dark, who I was before I Slept had burned off like a vapor So that amnesiac and pure, witnessing My terror that I no longer recognized As my own, my mind floated beyond me To confront that frantic, closing footfall As Jacob dreaming met his dark angel— Though in my wrestling nothing blessed me Or promised any blessing; but was a mask whose eyes Were all black pupil, blind as molten tar. I strained to see what paced there, my eyes burning Through the dark until a pair of eyes blazed Back across the blackness, an insistent, glazed Staring that shimmered and disappeared. The shining blade plunged at my throat, my mind Stretched and twisted, its wires tightening And turning as the creature lunged back and forth And with a deep-throated yowling, thrashing And thrashing to fight clear of its own circling, Cleanly leapt away. I reached for the knife But gripped only air, my eyes pressing Deeper and deeper into the night’s black stone, Cutting the way the knife had cut into my wound, Probing for the white shining of the bone: What had I become? What darkness had my dream Led me down into? Too frightened even To move, I lay bound and sweating in The sheets, the moon a warning-bell beating On the glass, its light carving out the curtains Like the shadow of a wing across the windowpane.

1. The leaves asleep under the wind are the wounds’ ship, and the ages collapsed on top of each other are the wound’s glory, and the trees rising out of our eyelashes are the wound’s lake. The wound is to be found on bridges where the grave lengthens and patience goes on to no end between the shores of our love and death. The wound is a sign, and the wound is a crossing too. 2. To the language choked by tolling bells I offer the voice of the wound. To the stone coming from afar to the dried-up world crumbling to dust to the time ferried on creaky sleighs I light up the fire of the wound. And when history burns inside my clothes and when blue nails grow inside my books, I cry out to the day, “Who are you, who tosses you into my virgin land?” And inside my book and on my virgin land I stare into a pair of eyes made of dust. I hear someone saying, “I am the wound that is born and grows as your history grows.” 3. I named you cloud, wound of the parting dove. I named you book and quill and here I begin the dialogue between me and the ancient tongue in the island of tomes in the archipelago of the ancient fall. And here I teach these words to the wind and the palms, O wound of the parting dove. 4. If I had a harbor in the land of dreams and mirrors, if I had a ship, if I had the remains of a city, if I had a city in the land of children and weeping, I would have written all this down for the wound’s sake, a song like a spear that penetrates trees, stone, and sky, soft like water unbridled, startling like conquest. 5. Rain down on our desert O world adorned with dream and longing. Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound, tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound, that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands. World adorned with dream and longing world that falls on my brow like the lash of a wound, don’t come close—the wound is closer— don’t tempt me—the wound is more beautiful. That magic that your eyes had flung on the last kingdoms— the wound has passed over it, passed and did not leave a single sail to tempt toward salvation, did not leave a single island behind.

The shock comes slowly as an afterthought. First you hear the words and they are like all other words, ordinary, breathing out of lips, moving toward you in a straight line. Later they shatter and rearrange themselves. They spell something else hidden in the muscles of the face, something the throat wanted to say. Decoded, the message etches itself in acid so every syllable becomes a sore. The shock blooms into a carbuncle. The body bends to accommodate it. A special scarf has to be worn to conceal it. It is now the size of a head. The next time you look, it has grown two eyes and a mouth. It is difficult to know which to use. Now you are seeing everything twice. After a while it becomes an old friend. It reminds you every day of how it came to be.

Cupid as he lay among Roses, by a Bee was stung. Whereupon in anger flying To his Mother, said thus crying; Help! O help! your Boy’s a dying. And why, my pretty Lad, said she? Then blubbering, replied he, A winged Snake has bitten me, Which Country people call a Bee. At which she smil’d; then with her hairs And kisses drying up his tears: Alas! said she, my Wag! if this Such a pernicious torment is: Come tell me then, how great’s the smart Of those, thou woundest with thy Dart!

From the guts of the house, I hear my mother crying for her mother and wish I understood the principles of tranquility. How to rest the mind on a likeness of a blast furnace framed in formica by anon. A photo of lounge chairs with folded tartan lap robes. An untitled typology of industrial parks. The gentle interface of yawn and nature. It would soothe us. It would soothe us. We would be soothed by that slow looking with a limited truth value. See how the realtor’s lens makes everything look larger and there’s so much glare the floor looks wow under the smartificial xmas tree. After studying Comparative Reality I began Die Polyvinylchloride Tannenbaumserie. Turn off that tiny tasteful star, I commanded. While you’re alive there’s no time for minor amazements. Turn off the sallow pages of your paralegal pad. I don’t need a light to think of you. I don’t need a god to pray. Some things are glow alone. I said one thing you said you remembered I said. Was it will you be my trophy friend? Or are you someone else’s difficult person? I mean the more myself I become the less intelligible I seem to otters. I know what you mean you said. It’s like the time I was compelled to speak on hedonism to the monks and nuns. Did I say most religion is devotional expediency? Or religion doesn’t worry about being religious, its wisdom corrupted by its brilliance as light passing near the sun is deflected in its path. Deep in its caprices, the whole body thinks it’s understood. To think otterwise is isolating. When I said hedonism stressed cheerfulness, there were disappointed groans. Look, I’m sorry I gave you an ornament shaped like a hollow look. I liked its trinket brightness. Just don’t give me a water tower dressed up as a church steeple or one of those silly thunderstorms that hang around volcanoes. See how those teardrop lights make every object jump? The memory does. You made me love. Was it exile in honey is still exile? Am I the fire or just another flame? Please sell me an indulgence, I begged a monk. And tell me what creature, what peril, could craft that sound that night dropped like a nubile sliver in my ear. There is no freedom of silence when morture forces us to speak from organs other than the heart. It was something about love. A far cry. It was come to me unmediated, go to god lengths. In great things, the attempt alone is sufficient. I think this ’cause I’m finite. That’s an understanding to which reason can only aspire though an entire speech community labored for generations to say it in a fair hand clearly dated and scented with lavender. My one and only only a crass color orgy will see us through the dusk ahead, the months gray as donkey. See how it grows its own cross of fur and bears it on its back? I showed you that.

My soul is not itself, A loud jargogle invades the plague of contingency. Of course, I often delicate in a state of confusion, Especially when I wildly corrade detritus with illusion. Many collages create mayhem, but these days folks Giggle and kench, hosting bitter tears in their eyes. No one seeks the mockery or scorn of ludibrious games. Our ailing world is dedicated to erase sanguinolency. Hence the decline of bloodshed in our current wars. Drones, our best-to-date grade A, silent, unmanned aerial vehicles, our sleek UAVs, aces of launch and leave, Save lives. SAVE LIVES. Hip, hip, hooray, yippee!? Remote control: surf the Web, site define In its prime: eye on the screen, eye in the sky. Get it down cold in comfy seats at safe old Creech. Skill the scan, learn the drill and clinch their cease. The shift is done, a setting sun, and home To ground round patties on the grill, a jog with the dog, A kiss for kids, drowsy, and wiped, hitting the sheets, Plus shades down for a fuck, a hug, and a good night's sleep. We've navigated a boundless longinquity. Life is luculent. War is kind.

To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875 I Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World's strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress. The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? I whirled out wings that spell And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host. My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast, To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace. I am soft sift In an hourglass—at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift. I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west: Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder, His mystery must be instressed, stressed; For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand. Not out of his bliss Springs the stress felt Nor first from heaven (and few know this) Swings the stroke dealt— Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver, That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt— But it rides time like riding a river (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss). It dates from day Of his going in Galilee; Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey; Manger, maiden's knee; The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat; Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be, Though felt before, though in high flood yet— What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay, Is out with it! Oh, We lash with the best or worst Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet, Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither then, last or first, To hero of Calvary, Christ,'s feet— Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go. Be adored among men, God, three-numberéd form; Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man's malice, with wrecking and storm. Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue, Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then. With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still: Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul, Or as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll, Make mercy in all of us, out of us all Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King. II "Some find me a sword; some The flange and the rail; flame, Fang, or flood" goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame. But wé dréam we are rooted in earth—Dust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come. On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, Take settler and seamen, tell men with women, Two hundred souls in the round— O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned; Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in? Into the snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps. She drove in the dark to leeward, She struck—not a reef or a rock But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her Dead to the Kentish Knock; And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel: The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock; And canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheel Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured. Hope had grown grey hairs, Hope had mourning on, Trenched with tears, carved with cares, Hope was twelve hours gone; And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone, And lives at last were washing away: To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs. One stirred from the rigging to save The wild woman-kind below, With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave— He was pitched to his death at a blow, For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew: They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave? They fought with God's cold— And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check— Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told. Ah, touched in your bower of bone Are you! turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! make words break from me here all alone, Do you!—mother of being in me, heart. O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth, Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start! Never-eldering revel and river of youth, What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own? Sister, a sister calling A master, her master and mine!— And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling; The rash smart sloggering brine Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one; Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine Ears, and the call of the tall nun To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling. She was first of a five and came Of a coifèd sisterhood. (O Deutschland, double a desperate name! O world wide of its good! But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town, Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood: From life's dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.) Loathed for a love men knew in them, Banned by the land of their birth, Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them; Surf, snow, river and earth Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth, Thou martyr-master: in thy sight Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them. Five! the finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man's make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced— Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake. Joy fall to thee, father Francis, Drawn to the Life that died; With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his Lovescape crucified And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride, Are sisterly sealed in wild waters, To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances. Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales; She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling "O Christ, Christ, come quickly": The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best. The majesty! what did she mean? Breathe, arch and original Breath. Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been? Breathe, body of lovely Death. They were else-minded then, altogether, the men Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth. Or ís it that she cried for the crown then, The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen? For how to the heart's cheering The down-dugged ground-hugged grey Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing Of pied and peeled May! Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher, With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way, What by your measure is the heaven of desire, The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing? No, but it was not these. The jading and jar of the cart, Time's tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart, Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart: Other, I gather, in measure her mind's Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragonèd seas. But how shall I . . . make me room there: Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster— Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she ... there then! the Master, Ipse , the only one, Christ, King, Head: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there. Ah! there was a heart right There was single eye! Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why; Wording it how but by him that present and past, Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?— The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light. Jesu, heart's light, Jesu, maid's son, What was the feast followed the night Thou hadst glory of this nun?— Feast of the one woman without stain. For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright. Well, she has thee for the pain, for the Patience; but pity of the rest of them! Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the Comfortless unconfessed of them— No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee? I admire thee, master of the tides, Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall; The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides, The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides; With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark Our passion-plungèd giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides. Now burn, new born to the world, Doubled-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne! Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming his own; A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled. Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.

It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr, To bear him company. Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, That ope in the month of May. The skipper he stood beside the helm, His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The smoke now West, now South. Then up and spake an old Sailòr, Had sailed to the Spanish Main, "I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane. "Last night, the moon had a golden ring, And to-night no moon we see!" The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe, And a scornful laugh laughed he. Colder and louder blew the wind, A gale from the Northeast, The snow fell hissing in the brine, And the billows frothed like yeast. Down came the storm, and smote amain The vessel in its strength; She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed, Then leaped her cable's length. "Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr, And do not tremble so; For I can weather the roughest gale That ever wind did blow." He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat Against the stinging blast; He cut a rope from a broken spar, And bound her to the mast. "O father! I hear the church-bells ring, Oh say, what may it be?" "'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" — And he steered for the open sea. "O father! I hear the sound of guns, Oh say, what may it be?" "Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!" "O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?" But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he. Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, With his face turned to the skies, The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes. Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That savèd she might be; And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave On the Lake of Galilee. And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe. And ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. The breakers were right beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like icicles from her deck. She struck where the white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool, But the cruel rocks, they gored her side Like the horns of an angry bull. Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, With the masts went by the board; Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank, Ho! ho! the breakers roared! At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a drifting mast. The salt sea was frozen on her breast, The salt tears in her eyes; And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed, On the billows fall and rise. Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!