Classic and Contemporary Poetry
THE AEOLIAN HARP; AT THE SURF INN, by HERMAN MELVILLE Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: List the harp in window wailing Last Line: Thoughts that tongue can tell no word of! Subject(s): Disasters; Harps; Musical Instruments; Shipwrecks; Lyres | ||||||||
List the harp in window wailing Stirred by fitful gales from sea: Shrieking up in mad crescendo -- Dying down in plaintive key! Listen: less a strain ideal Than Ariel's rendering of the Real. What that Real is, let hint A picture stamped in memory's mint. Braced well up, with beams aslant, Betwixt the continents sails the Phocion, To Baltimore bound from Alicant. Blue breezy skies white fleeces fleck Over the chill blue white-capped ocean: From yard-arm comes -- "Wreck ho, a wreck!" Dismasted and adrift, Long time a thing forsaken; Overwashed by every wave Like the slumbering kraken; Heedless if the billow roar, Oblivious of the lull, Leagues and leagues from shoal or shore, It swims -- a levelled hull: Bulwarks gone -- a shaven wreck, Nameless, and a grass-green deck. A lumberman: perchance, in hold Prostrate pines with hemlocks rolled. It has drifted, waterlogged, Till by trailing weeds beclogged: Drifted, drifted, day by day, Pilotless on pathless way. It has drifted till each plank Is oozy as the oyster-bank: Drifted, drifted, night by night, Craft that never shows a light; Nor ever, to prevent worse knell, Tolls in fog the warning bell. From collision never shrinking, Drive what may through darksome smother; Saturate, but never sinking, Fatal only to the other! Deadlier than the sunken reef Since still the snare it shifteth, Torpid in dumb ambuscade Waylayingly it drifteth. O, the sailors -- O, the sails! O, the lost crews never heard of! Well the harp of Ariel wails Thoughts that tongue can tell no word of! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE GHOSTS LISTEN TO ORPHEUS SING by GREGORY ORR TO AN AEOLIAN HARP by SARA TEASDALE THE AEOLIAN HARP by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE THE MASTER-PLAYER by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR THE HARP by RALPH WALDO EMERSON THAT HARP YOU PLAY SO WELL by MARIANNE MOORE RUMORS FROM AN AEOLIAN HARP by HENRY DAVID THOREAU AEOLIAN HARP (1) by WILLIAM ALLINGHAM ON HEARING AN AEOLIAN HARP by PETER BAYLEY JR. FORMERLY A SLAVE' (AN IDEALIZED PORTRAIT, BY E. VEDDER) by HERMAN MELVILLE THE COMING STORM' (A PICTURE BY R. S. GIFFORD) by HERMAN MELVILLE A DIRGE FOR MCPHERSON; KILLED IN FRONT OF ATLANTA by HERMAN MELVILLE |
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