Canto 6To the Sea
Book 3. Part Three - Baroda and Bengal Circa 1900 – 1909
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
But I have loved thee for thyself indeed
And with myself have snared;
Immortal to immortal I made speed.
5Change I exceed
And am for Time prepared.
A Tree
A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
10Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous.
This is the soul of man. Body and brain
Hungry for earth our heavenly flight detain.
To the Sea
15O grey wild sea,
Thou hast a message, thunderer, for me.
Their huge wide backs
Thy monstrous billows raise, abysmal cracks
Dug deep between.
20One pale boat flutters over them, hardly seen.
I hear thy roar
Call me, “Why dost thou linger on the shore
With fearful eyes
Watching my tops visit their foam-washed skies?
25This trivial boat
Dares my vast battering billows and can float.
Death if it find,
Are there not many thousands left behind?
Dare my wide roar,
30Nor cling like cowards to the easy shore.
Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900–1909
Come down and know
What rapture lives in danger and o’erthrow.”
Yes, thou great sea,
35I am more mighty and outbillow thee.
On thy tops I rise;
’Tis an excuse to dally with the skies.
I sink below
The bottom of the clamorous world to know.
40On the safe land
To linger is to lose what God has planned
For man’s wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal.
Therefore He arrayed
45Danger and difficulty like seas and made
Pain and defeat,
And put His giant snares around our feet.
The cloud He informs
With thunder and assails us with His storms,
50That man may grow
King over pain and victor of o’erthrow
Matching his great
Unconquerable soul with adverse Fate.
Take me, be
55My way to climb the heavens, thou rude great sea.
I will seize thy mane,
O lion, I will tame thee and disdain;
Or else below
Into thy salt abysmal caverns go,
60Receive thy weight
Upon me and be stubborn as my Fate.
I come, O Sea,
To measure my enormous self with thee.