Sunlight And Sea

Give me the sunlight and the sea     And who shall take my heaven from me?     Light of the Sun, Life of the Sun,     O happy, bold companion,     Whose golden laughters round me run,     Making wine of the blue air     With wild-rose kisses everywhere,     Browning the limb, flushing the cheek,     Apple-fragrant, leopard-sleek,     Dancing from thy red-curtained East     Like a Nautch-girl to my feast,     Proud because her lord, the Spring,     Praised the way those anklets ring;     Or wandering like a white Greek maid     Leaf-dappled through the dancing shade,     Where many a green-veined leaf imprints     Breast and limb with emerald tints,     That softly net her silken shape     But let the splendour still escape,     While rosy ghosts of roses flow     Over the supple rose and snow.     But sweetest, fairest is thy face,     When we meet, when we embrace,     Where the white sand sleeps at noon     Round that lonely blue lagoon,     Fringed with one white reef of coral     Where the sea-birds faintly quarrel     And the breakers on the reef     Fade into a dream of grief,     And the palm-trees overhead     Whisper that all grief is dead.     Sister Sunlight, lead me then     Into thy healing seas again....     For when we swim out, side by side,     Like a lover with his bride,     When thy lips are salt with brine,     And thy wild eyes flash in mine,     The music of a mightier sea     Beats with my blood in harmony.     I breast the primal flood of being,     Too clear for speech, too near for seeing;     And to his heart, new reconciled,     The Eternal takes his earth-bound child.     Who the essential secret spells     In those gigantic syllables,--     Flowing, ebbing, ebbing, flowing,--     Gathers wisdom past all knowing.     Song of the Sea, I hear, I hear,     That deeper music of the sphere,     Catch the rhythm of sun and star,     And know what light and darkness are;     Ay, faint beginnings of a rhyme     That swells beyond the tides of time;     Beat with thy rhythm in blood and breath,     And make one song of life and death.     I hear, I hear, and rest content,     Merged in the primal element,     The old element whence life arose,     The fount of youth, to which it goes.     Give me the sunlight and the sea     And who shall take my heaven from me?