Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SEA DREAM, by FREDERICK RIDGELY TORRENCE


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SEA DREAM, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sometimes at night a song comes flying
Last Line: Singing of marvels in the body's dark.
Subject(s): Dreams; Sea; Nightmares; Ocean


Sometimes at night a song comes flying
Among the shadowy fields in sleepers
Who waken to its sweet careering
Through their bodies' colour and grace:
Magic pierces to their hearing
With sounds that are not heard by day;
Silence, breaking from its keepers,
Flies and music takes its place.
Those who waken and hear it crying
Find it beats with tidal motion;
It is the blood within their clay,
Remembering its ancient ocean.

To hear such wild and dreamy strains
Borne past the dim shores of the veins
The heart stops short -- then beats again,
So to keep the singing flowing
Through the lands that lie in men.
For in the song those thousand streams
Are telling of their ancient fountain.
The sea, with all its jewels glowing
And beauty running on the waves,
Or buried in the water-mountain
Where the sea Shape, snowy and old,
In deeps that mock the diver's wish,
Blood-blind with war and a hate untold,
Still dooms and tombs in his diamond caves
The silver navies of the fish;
And the cold sea-worm, all curled
About the bones of battle gleams.
"Long past," (the song runs), "left behind,
-- But we remember all in dreams, --
The battles in the water world
Till the landward gates were passed.
Long since, all dim, long left behind,
The foes, the fangs, the hates at last
Buried in the water-mountain
With the nations of the blind."

Then the song changes and is young
A new music leaps in birth,
Flying sweet in the veins of each,
Flooding through the body's earth,
Telling with the spirit's tongue
Of new seas lifting on another beach.
In the spirit, in the heart's deep places,
Those hidden seas increase:
The shining love from the eternal spaces
That beats on earth with surges soft as fleece
Fills them in silence from a tidal fountain.
Until the golden day shall gleam
When the red wells of hate are sealed,
Buried in the shining mountain
On the day of the heart's overflowing
When the earth is washed and healed,
And the lovers with the dream,
From ocean unto ocean going,
Shall lift at last into the living peace.

So the song tells, and much besides
Of glories in the blood's dim tides;
Much that no ear of dust can mark
Of marvels in the body's dark,
Singing of marvels in the body's dark.





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