High -mid the shelves of a grey cliff, that yet
Riseth in Babylonian mass above,
In a benched cleft, as in the mouldered chair
Of grey-beard Time himself, I sit alone,
And gaze with a keen wondering happiness
Out o-er the sea. Unto the circling bend
That verges Heaven, a vast luminous plain
It stretches, changeful as a lover-s dream-
Into great spaces mapped by light and shade
In constant interchange-either -neath clouds
The billows darken, or they shimmer bright
In sunny scopes of measureless expanse.
-Tis Ocean dreamless of a stormy hour,
Calm, or but gently heaving;-yet, O God!
What a blind fate-like mightiness lies coiled
In slumber, under that wide-shining face!
While o-er the watery gleam-there where its edge
Banks the dim vacancy, the topmost sails
Of some tall ship, whose hull is yet unseen,
Hang as if clinging to a cloud that still
Comes rising with them from the void beyond,
Like to a heavenly net, drawn from the deep
And carried upward by ethereal hands
A Coast View
Charles Harpur
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Poem topics: alone, cloud, dream, fate, god, happiness, heaven, light, ocean, sea, time, sunny, edge, deep, shade, wide, great, plain, bright, face, Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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