THE ship went down at noonday in a cam,
When not a zephyr broke the crystal sea.
We two escaped alone: we reached an isle
Whereon the water settled languidly
In a long swell of music; luminous skies
O’erarched the place, and lazy, broad lagoons
Swept inland, with the boughs of plantain trees
Trailing cool shadows through the dense repose;
All round about us floated gentle airs,
And odors that crept upward to the sense
Like delicate pressures of voluptuous thought.
I, with a long bound, leapt upon the shore
Shouting, but she, pavilioned in dark locks,
Sobbed out thanksgiving; ‘twixt the world and us,
Distance that seemed Eternity outrolled
Its terrible barriers; on the waste a Fate
Stood up, and stretching its blank hands abroad
Muttered of desolation. Did we weep,
And groaning cast our foreheads in the dust?
So it had been, but in each others eyes
Smiled a new world, dearer than that which rose
Beneath the lost stars of the faded West.
That very morn the white-stoled priest of God
Had blessed us with the church’s choicest prayers,
And these did gird us like a sapphire wall
When the floods threatened, and the ghastly doom
Moaned itself impotent; free we were to love
To the full scope of passion; a few suns,
And in the deep recesses of the woods
We built ourselves a cabin; the dim spot
Was fortressed by the tropic’s giant growths,
Luxuriant Titans of a hundred years;
And the vines, laced and interlaced between,
Drooped with a flowery largess many-hued.
It was a place of Fa
(Paul Hamilton Hayne)
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