Classic and Contemporary Poetry
IN THE GREAT FLUX, by CALE YOUNG RICE Poet's Biography First Line: Two gulls, a gray and a brown, veterans both Last Line: May fold them from all food and flight forever. Subject(s): Birds; Death; Gulls; Life; Sea; Dead, The; Seagulls; Ocean | ||||||||
Two gulls, a gray and a brown, veterans both At tide-fishing, dived to the sea for the same minnow And struck fierce heads together in the high surf-foam. The gray sheered away screaming; the brown beaked the prey And fed one of the three hungers that trouble flesh. The sea, that neither heeds nor knows such hungers, Pushed in, purple-streaked and multitudinous, On the red brawn of the granite. Its heaving undervoice Huge and primevally hoarse, had no word to say Of life and the mind-and-body-hungering breed of men, Strangely emerged out of the marshy shore-slime, But rather with sweeping cosmic sway disowned them. For what has infinite surging to do with trivial selves That gather together in brief brains and clamor "I!"; With little winged minds that dive desperately For minnows of knowledge in star-deeps and clash together And sheer off crying unsatedly because all knowledge Begets but greater hunger? Thought, the measurer, May chart seas, or starry abysses above them; May even stride infinity and find it fused Irrefutably with a Life and Being that alone Can give worth to any width however vast. But no foothold in the great flux is fixed thereby For fearful men; the space-terror still will abide; And still troubled they will continue to quest and cry Like hungry gulls, -- knowing that death, the folder of wings, May fold them from all food and flight forever. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HALL OF OCEAN LIFE by JOHN HOLLANDER JULY FOURTH BY THE OCEAN by ROBINSON JEFFERS BOATS IN A FOG by ROBINSON JEFFERS CONTINENT'S END by ROBINSON JEFFERS THE FIGUREHEAD by LEONIE ADAMS A CHARM TO BRING CHILDREN (EGYPT, A.D. 100) by CALE YOUNG RICE |
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