Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BASS ROCK, by DAVID MACBETH MOIR



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BASS ROCK, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Twas summer's depth; a more enlivening sun
Last Line: Oft make the hush of midnight more profound.
Alternate Author Name(s): Delta
Subject(s): Guests; Scotland; Stones; Travel; Wandering & Wanderers; Visiting; Granite; Rocks; Journeys; Trips


The scout, the scart, the cattiwake,
The solan-goose sits on the laik,
Yearly in the spring.
RAY'S ITINERARIES, (1661.)

I.

'TWAS Summer's depth; a more enlivening sun
Never drank up the gelid morning dews,
Or crimsoned with its glow the July flowers,
Than that on which our boat, with oar and sail,
Left Canta Bay, with its embosomed huts,
And through the freshening tide, with eager prow,
Bore onward to thy rocks, horrific Bass!

II.

Light blew the breeze, the billows curled around;
'Mid clouds of sea-fowl, whose unceasing screams
Uncouth filled all the empty heavens with sound,
Forward we clove: at times the solan's wing,
As if to show its majesty of strength,
Brushed near us with a roughly winnowing noise;
And now, aloft, a lessening speck, was seen
Over the cloudlets, 'mid engulfing blue.
Around us, and around, the plovers wheeled
In myriads, restless, multitudinous,
Wedge-like, at intervals their inner plumes
Glancing like silver in the sunny ray;
The parrot dived beside us; slowly past
Floated the graceful eider-duck; with shrieks
The snipe zig-zagg'd, then vanished in alarm;
And all in air and ocean seemed astir;
Until the sole and narrow landing-place
We reached, and, grappling with the naked crags,
Wound to a smoother ledge our sheer ascent.

III.

Never was transit more electrical!
An hour ago, and by thy traceried walls
We drove, Newbyth, beneath the o'erhanging boughs
Of forests old, wherein the stock-dove plained
In sequestration; while the rabbit, scared,
Took to its hole under the hawthorn's root;
And lay our path through bright and bloomy fields,
Where, from the scented clover to the cloud,
Arose the lyric lark on twinkling wings;
And linnets from each brake responsively
Piped to each other, till the shady groves
Of Tyningham seemed melody's abode.
Everything breathed of happiness and life,
Which in itself was joy; the hill-side farms
Basked in the sunshine with their yellow cones
Of gathered grain; the ploughboy with his team
Stalked onward whistling; and, from cottage roofs,
Bluely ascended to the soft clear sky
The wreathing smoke, which spake domestic love,
In household duties cheerfully performed;
And, wading in the neighbouring rivulet,
With eager fingers, from the wild-flower banks
Sweet-scented, childhood gathered nameless blooms.
And now, as if communion were cut off
Utterly with mankind and their concerns,
Amid the bleak and barren solitude
Of that precipitous and sea-girt rock
We found ourselves; the waves their orison
Howled to the winds, which from the breezy North
Over the German Ocean came, as 'twere
To moan in anger through the rifted caves,
Whose echoes gave a desolate response!

IV.

Far in the twilight of primeval time,
This must have been a place (ponderingly
Methought) where aboriginal men poured forth
Their erring worship to the elements,
Long ere the Druid, in the sullen night
Of old oak forests, tinged his altar-stone
With blood of brotherhood. It must be so;
So awfully doth the spirit of their powers—
The desolating winds, the trampling waves,
With their white manes, the storm-shower, and the sun—
Here, in this solitude, impress the mind.
Yet human hearts have beat in this abode,
All sullen and repulsive though it be—
The hearts of priests and princes; and full oft
Lone captive eyes, for many a joyless month,
Have marked the sun, that rose o'er eastward May,
Expire in glory o'er the summits dun
Of the far Grampians, in the golden west:
Yea, still some ruins, weather-stained, forlorn,
And mottled with the melancholy weeds
That love the salt breeze, tell of prisons grim,
Where, in an age as rude, though less remote,
Despotic Policy its victims held
In privacy immured; and where, apart,
The fearless champions of our faith reformed,
Shut up, and severed from the land they loved,
Breathed out their prayers—that day-spring from on high
Should visit us—to God's sole listening ear!

V.

A mighty mass majestic, from the roots
Of the old sea, thou risest to the sky,
In thy wild, bare sublimity alone.
All-glorious was the prospect from thy peak,
Thou thunder-cloven Island of the Forth!
Landward Tantallon lay, with ruined walls
Sepulchral—like a giant, in old age,
Smote by the blackening lightning-flash, and left
A prostrate corpse upon the sounding shore!
Behind arose your congregated woods,
Leuchie, Balgone, and Rockville—fairer none.
Remoter, mingling with the arch of heaven,
Blue Cheviot told where, stretching by his feet,
Bloomed the fair valleys of Northumberland.
Seaward, the Forth, a glowing, green expanse,
Studded with many a white and gliding sail,
Winded its serpent form—the Ochils rich
Down gazing in its mirror; while beyond,
The Grampians reared their bare untrodden scalps;
Fife showed her range of scattery coast-towns old—
Old as the days of Scotland's early kings—
Malcolm, and Alexander, and the Bruce—
From western Dysart, to the dwindling point
Of famed and far St Andrews: all beyond
Was ocean's billowy and unbounded waste,
Sole broken by the verdant islet May,
Whose fitful lights, amid surrounding gloom,
When midnight mantles earth, and sea, and sky,
From danger warns the home-bound mariner;
And one black speck—a distant sail—which told
Where mingled with its line the horizon blue.

VI.

Who were thy visitants, lone Rock, since Man
Shrank from thy sea-flower solitudes, and left
His crumbling ruins 'mid thy barren shelves?
Up came the cormorant, with dusky wing,
From northern Orkney, an adventurous flight,
Floating far o'er us in the liquid blue,
While many a hundred fathom in the sheer
Abyss below, where foamed the surge unheard,
Dwindled by distance, flocks of mighty fowl
Floated like feathery specks upon the wave.
The rower with his boat-hook struck the mast,
And lo! the myriad wings, that like a sheet
Of snow o'erspread the crannies—all were up!
The gannet, guillemot, and kittiwake,
Marrot and plover, snipe and eider-duck,
The puffin, and the falcon, and the gull—
Thousands on thousands, an innumerous throng,
Darkening the noontide with their winnowing plumes,
A cloud of animation! the wide air
Tempesting with their mingled cries uncouth!

VII.

Words cannot tell the sense of loneliness
Which then and there, cloud-like, across my soul
Fell, as our weary steps clomb that ascent.
Amid encompassing mountains I have paused,
At twilight, when alone the little stars,
Brightening amid the wilderness of blue,
Proclaimed a world not God-forsaken quite;
I've walked, at midnight, on the hollow shore,
In darkness, when the trampling of the waves,
The demon-featured clouds, and howling gales,
Seemed like returning chaos—all the fierce
Terrific elements in league with night—
Earth crouching underneath their tyrannous sway,
And the lone sea-bird shrieking from its rock;
And I have mused in churchyards far remote,
And long forsaken even by the dead,
To blank oblivion utterly given o'er,
Beneath the waning moon, whose mournful ray
Showed but the dim hawk sleeping on his stone:
But never, in its moods of phantasy,
Had to itself my spirit shaped a scene
Of sequestration more profound than thine,
Grim throne of solitude, stupendous Bass!
Oft in the populous city, 'mid the stir
And strife of hurrying thousands, each intent
On his own earnest purpose, to thy cliffs
Sea-girt, precipitous—the solan's home—
Wander my reveries; and thoughts of thee
(While scarcely stirs the ivy round the porch,
And all is silent as the sepulchre)
Oft make the hush of midnight more profound.





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