The Rock Pool

I

Bright as a fallen fragment of the sky,

Mid shell-encrusted rocks the sea-pool shone,

Glassing the sunset-clouds in its clear heart,

A small enchanted world enwalled apart

In diamond mystery,

Content with its own dreams, its own strict zone

Of urchin woods, its fairy bights and bars,

Its daisy-disked anemones and rose-feathered stars.

II

Forsaken for awhile by that deep roar

Which works in storm and calm the eternal will,

Drags down the cliffs, bids the great hills go by

And shepherds their multitudinous pageantry,—

Here, on this ebb-tide shore

A jewelled bath of beauty, sparkling still,

The little sea-pool smiled away the sea,

And slept on its own plane of bright tranquillity.

III

A self-sufficing soul, a pool in trance,

Un-stirred by all the spirit-winds that blow

From o'er the gulfs of change, content, ere yet

On its own crags, which rough peaked limpets fret

The last rich colours glance,

Content to mirror the sea-bird's wings of snow,

Or feel in some small creek, ere sunset fails,

A tiny Nautilus hoist its lovely purple sails;

IV

And, furrowing into pearl that rosy bar,

Sail its own soul from fairy fringe to fringe,

Lured by the twinkling prey 'twas born to reach

In its own pool, by many an elfin beach

Of jewels, adventuring far

Through the last mirrored cloud and sunset-tinge

And past the rainbow-dripping cave where lies

The dark green pirate-crab at watch with beaded eyes,

V

Or fringed Medusa floats like light in light,

Medusa, with the loveliest of all fays

Pent in its irised bubble of jellied sheen,

Trailing long ferns of moonlight, shot with green

And crimson rays and white,

Waving ethereal tendrils, ghostly sprays,

Daring the deep, dissolving in the sun,

The vanishing point of life, the light whence life begun.

VI

Poised between me, light, time, eternity,

So tinged with all, that in its delicate brain

Kindling it as a lamp with her bright wings

Day-long, night-long, young Ariel sits and sings

Echoing the lucid sea,

Listening it echo her own unearthly strain,

Watching through lucid walls the world's rich tide,

One light, one substance with her own, rise and subside.

VII

And over soft brown woods, limpid, serene,

Puffing its fans the Nautilus went its way,

And from a hundred salt and weedy shelves

Peered little hornèd faces of sea-elves:

The prawn darted, half-seen,

Thro' watery sunlight, like a pale green ray,

And all around, from soft green waving bowers,

Creatures like fruit out-crept from fluted shells like flowers.

VIII

And, over all, that glowing mirror spread

The splendour of its heaven-reflecting gleams,

A level wealth of tints, calm as the sky

That broods above our own mortality:

The temporal seas had fled,

And ah, what hopes, what fears, what mystic dreams

Could ruffle it now from any deeper deep?

Content in its own bounds it slept a changeless sleep.

IX

Suddenly, from that heaven beyond belief,

Suddenly, from that world beyond its ken,

Dashing great billows o'er its rosy bars,

Shivering its dreams into a thousand stars,

Flooding each sun-dried reef

With waves of colour, (as once, for mortal men

Bethesda's angel) with blue eyes, wide and wild,

Naked into the pool there stepped a little child.

X

Her red-gold hair against the far green sea

Blew thickly out: her slender golden form

Shone dark against the richly waning West

As with one hand she splashed her glistening breast,

Then waded up to her knee

And frothed the whole pool into a fairy storm! . . .

So, stooping through our skies, of old, there came

Angels that once could set this world's dark pool a-flame,

XI

From which the seas of faith have ebbed away,

Leaving the lonely shore too bright, too bare,

While mirrored softly in the smooth wet sand

A deeper sunset sees its blooms expand

But all too phantom-fair,

Between the dark brown rocks and sparkling spray

Where the low ripples pleaded, shrank and sighed,

And tossed a moment's rainbow heavenward ere they died.

XII

Stoop, starry souls, incline to this dark coast,

Where all too long, too faithlessly, we dream.

Stoop to the world's dark pool, its crags and scars,

Its yellow sands, its rosy harbour-bars,

And soft green wastes that gleam

But with some glorious drifting god-like ghost

Of cloud, some vaguely passionate crimson stain:

Rend the blue waves of heaven, shatter our sleep again!