Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LEVIATHAN, by JOHN FREEMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LEVIATHAN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Leviathanic natures, / huge-browed, vast-spined
Last Line: Of time and night.
Subject(s): Death; Sea; Skulls; Dead, The; Ocean


LEVIATHANIC natures,
Huge-browed, vast-spined,
That floated centuries
Unchallenged, unconfined,
Sleep now since age pre-Adam
In frozen marl and stone,
No more by seasons summoned
From zone to zone.

Their many cubits shining
In landless seas—
Black islets ever restless,
Unanchored Cyclades,
Round whose steep cliff the foam-bows
Gathered and tossed and died,
And milk-white wake spread seething
In troublous tide;

From Arctic to Antarctic
Through wan brief days
To tropic seas o'erspangled
By wasting starry blaze;
Placid in sunny Pacifics,
Deep-caved neath Polar storm,
Sea's shallow bed for nuptials
And couch enorm;

Leviathanic creatures,
God's Ancients, you.
The cyclic springs and winters
Like snows on water flow;
And now when ebon nights
Of frozen time we scan,
Staring at callous shadows
Leviathan;

Now if the primal flux
Seem falsely stayed,
And men gaze back and forwards
At fuming gloom thin-rayed;
And cyclic springs and winters
Are guessed from this scarred hull,
From gibbous arch, stone ribs,
Unbuoyant skull;

Or wonderers, wit-wandering,
Tormented brood
On time that's past, the failing
Breath of earth's multitude;
On the green domestic shores,
On the unvalleyed sea,
On man's faint, fading passage
To infinity;

And how the sober earth
Flows with the wave,
Upheaved, dissolving, sinking
Sigh-like in the sea's grave;
How man's inhabitation
No longer space may last
Than the falling sea-hawk's feather
In the sea cast—

Staring so at your shadows
And fossil'd signs,
Phantasms of fled aeons,
God's young and fierce designs,
Imagination burns
And like a star from the height
Falls and is quenched in the hissing sea
Of time and night.





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