ON the loose hot sands at foot of the cliffs— The cloudless blue burning above in furious midday heats— As I bask, Bathing my brown-tanned body in the warm dry clean grit, or cooling it in the sea; And the sea creeps up, spacious, in curves along the shore, With fringes of tawny lacework, and green and blue, deepening into the loveliest violet, And Aphrodite herself out of this marvellously beautiful robe, this liquid cincture, swiftly gliding, for a moment stands, (Her feet on the watery plain, her head in the great height against the Sun,} Vast, glorious, white-armed, visible and invisible; As the sea stretches miles and miles, and the grey chalk cliffs and capes, fainter and fainter, run forward into it, looking on, And the fisherman slumbers in the shade of his boat, impervious, And fainter still and more slumbrous on the horizon, in haze and silence the far ships go by; Through it all, meseems, I see How the human body bathed in the sheen and wet, steeped in sun and air, Moving near and nude among the elements Matches somehow and interprets the whole of Nature How from shoulder to foot of mountain and man alike the lines of grace run on; How, as the Greeks dreamed, in rock and rill divinest human forms lie shrined, or in the wild woods lurk embosomed; And how at length and only in the loving union and uncoveredness of Man with Nature may either know or understand the other. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...APPLES OF HESPERIDES by AMY LOWELL INVOCATION [TO LOVE] by WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE by MARY ANN EVANS THE AEOLIAN HARP; AT THE SURF INN by HERMAN MELVILLE HE FELL AMONG THIEVES by HENRY JOHN NEWBOLT |