Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE FISHERMAN'S BETHROTHED, by AUGUSTA DAVIES WEBSTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE FISHERMAN'S BETHROTHED, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The crimson sun glared on her as she sat
Last Line: Return to the victorian women writers project library
Alternate Author Name(s): Home, Cecil; Webster, Mrs. Julia Augusta
Subject(s): Disasters; Fish & Fishing; Shipwrecks


THE crimson sun glared on her as she sat
Gazing far out upon the glassy sea,
The ebbing waves along the flaky sands
Fringed their wide smoothness with small tufted weeds,
And plashed on the long ledge of jutting rocks
Low-ridged beneath her feet She did not heed
The fiery sunset-kiss upon her brow,
She did not hear the gurgle of the tide,
But bent her head to catch some far-off sound,
And strained wild eyes with weary watchfulness
To pierce into the nothingness of space,
Where the blue sky was one with the blue sea.

Above the merged horizon rose a speck
That seemed to hang a while in middle air,
Then, heightening into shape, came smoothly on,
Its brown sails rounded with the drowsy wind
Whose lazy life-beat breathed it to the land,
And as it neared there swelled through the still eve
The cheery sound of rough men's voices, glad
With the good meed of honest-handed toil,
And thought of thankful homes and coming rest
For healthy weariness of nervous limbs.
Then, when she saw the heavy-laden boat,
Not seeking other hamlet on the coast,
Pass steadily into the narrow bay
High-cragged, where she sat watching from her rock,
She scared the sea-birds with shrill welcomings,
And laughed wild triumphings aloud to those
Who were not there to hear her, since she wept
And angered always when they broke her law
Of exile from the loneness of her haunt.
"Ah! see," she laughed, "you would have had me think
The waves, grown mad with spite, had whelmed my love
Down to their hateful caves, and held him there,
A festering corpse among the whitened bones
Far in the cruel depths of the dull deep,
The prey of creeping sea-snakes, reptile shapes,
All slimy horror and limp shapelessness
Ah! but I knew it false--see, the still sea
Curling so lovingly along the shore,
The gentle sea is calm as when he left
In the bright morn--
Who whispered, 'Years ago'?
'Long years ago'? Yes, years. Ah! so they said,
So voices, mocking voices, oft have come
And whispered in my ears through the long day
Till they half maddened me. But eve is come,
The happy eve, and he is coming now;
He promised, when he left me with the morn,
His boat should skim the first back to our bay,
First land its netted spoil upon the sands,
And the dear evening hours should all be mine:
And now he comes! Aye, look now, you who said
He would not come again, look now, and hear
How I will call, and he will answer me."

And so she stood on her rock-seat, and called
Wild greetings all delirious with joy,
Until the dark-sailed boat, low with the weight
Of scaly plunder, had drawn very near,
And down the cliffs there hurried gossip groups
And merry children shouting, clapping hands,
And knotted round the beachèd landing-place,
While the loud keel groaned on the meeting shore:
But she remained where she had watched it come,
Thinking, "He knows that I am waiting here,
And he loves best to find me thus alone;
I will not seek him in the jeering crowd,
In truth, I would not have him fully know
How eagerly I longed for his return;
But I will wait him here--he will come soon."

She saw the fishers pass along the cliffs,
Girt with the loving concourse from their homes,
But saw him not: she saw the stranded boat
Untenanted, and knew the talking knots
Of waiters for the coming fisher fleet,
And knew him not among them; then she sank
In patient weariness on her lone rock,
And sighed amid the ebbing waters' sighs,
"He said he would be first:--well, 'twill be soon."




Into the bay there thronged the swarming skiffs,
Pressing wide-winged along their homeward course;
And, one by one, she saw them touch the land,
And heard them grating harshly on the beach,
Till all had come, and all lay high and void
And glooming darkly in the growing dusk,
And stillness brooded o'er the blackening shore
Vague with the evening mist. On the wide plain
Of cold grey-glimmering waters nothing stirred,
Save the first ripple of the waking waves,
The wild birds roosted in their silent clefts.
She waited weeping, "Ah! he has not come!
Yet he will come.--Bid the wild voices cease,
Dear Lord, the voices full of bitter words
That fill my brain with fire. How, dead long years!
Dead in the arms of the all-grasping waves!
How should he die, since they have come in peace
That left with him at morn? Nay, he will come,
He has but tarried, tempted by the shoals
That lie in myriads round some far-off point,
A while behind the rest. He shuns no toil.
Yet he is wrong to break his faith with me,
And scare me so with absence. He must come
Soon, very soon, for the dark night draws nigh.

The wild wind shrieking wakened with the night,
And lashed the high crest of the full tide's flow,
And whirled the writhing surges round her feet,
And dashed the drenching flakes of briny foam
On her dark tresses flapping with the gusts,
The maddened clouds raced frantic through the sky
The hazed stars peering through their changing gaps;
"Oh! God," she cried, "great God, watch over him,
And bring him safely through the howling storm.
Alas! why did he loiter from the rest?
Could he not hear among the first shrill winds
The nearing sound of the fierce hurricane?
But he will come--there is no danger yet--
And he must needs be very near at hand:
Yes he will come."--
But when they forced her home,
She wakened for a moment from her hope
Into a frenzied tumult of despair,
Despair soul-maddening, as on that dread eve,
Seven summers since, when with the sunset glow
The fisher barks thronged home with saddened crews,
And he, whelmed by a sudden short-lived squall,
Slept with his brother underneath the waves.
And with such agony as when she heard
That which had wrung her heart from that sad hour
To wild forgetfulness even of its cause,
She knew it suddenly, his drowning death,
And shrieked, "Dead, dead!--they were true voices, dead!
He dead!--then let me die!"
And then indeed
It was as though she died, faint in the trance
That ever wrought by such brief anguished bursts
Lulled them to rest.
But with the next day's fall
She watched again for him that never came,
But slept unwakened by the plash of the waves:
And thus from eve to eve she watched for him,
And thus, because she would not be withheld,
Waiting for him one summer eve, she died.




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