The Aeolian Harp

At The Surf Inn     List the harp in window wailing     Stirred by fitful gales from sea:     Shrieking up in mad crescendo--     Dying down in plaintive key!     Listen: less a strain ideal     Than Ariel's rendering of the Real.     What that Real is, let hint     A picture stamped in memory's mint.     Braced well up, with beams aslant,     Betwixt the continents sails the Phocion,     For Baltimore bound from Alicant.     Blue breezy skies white fleeces fleck     Over the chill blue white-capped ocean:     From yard-arm comes--"Wreck ho, a wreck!"     Dismasted and adrift,     Longtime a thing forsaken;     Overwashed by every wave     Like the slumbering kraken;     Heedless if the billow roar,     Oblivious of the lull,     Leagues and leagues from shoal or shore,     It swims--a levelled hull:     Bulwarks gone--a shaven wreck,     Nameless and a grass-green deck.     A lumberman: perchance, in hold     Prostrate pines with hemlocks rolled.     It has drifted, waterlogged,     Till by trailing weeds beclogged:     Drifted, drifted, day by day,     Pilotless on pathless way.     It has drifted till each plank     Is oozy as the oyster-bank:     Drifted, drifted, night by night,     Craft that never shows a light;     Nor ever, to prevent worse knell,     Tolls in fog the warning bell.     From collision never shrinking,     Drive what may through darksome smother;     Saturate, but never sinking,     Fatal only to the other!     Deadlier than the sunken reef     Since still the snare it shifteth,     Torpid in dumb ambuscade     Waylayingly it drifteth.     O, the sailors--O, the sails!     O, the lost crews never heard of!     Well the harp of Ariel wails     Thought that tongue can tell no word of!