POETRY.

THE DROWNED LOVER.*

L

HERE, by the lonely shore

I have pitched my tent ; Only a slant of shingle, and sometimes sand, Severs us, bed from bed ; And the waves that roar Over your resting head, With its dreams all spent, Hopeless, hollow with hunger, beat at the land.

Stone-cold, starved, shivering land, Where nothing wakes, Gaunt, and gutted by storm : above in the gloom, All one way come flying Dim flakes of spume, And menacing sea-mews, this way and that way crying, Stretch their Leeks And turn with a ghostly glide Down to the gleaming hollows—wraiths to the tomb 1 But here, in the door of my tent, a lamp stays lit ; And all night lonely I sit By a shore that shakes, Watching for wrecks, With a heart that aches and aches.

Say, what salls—what ranks upon ranks of oars, What battered hulls, and, within, what broken hearts Here lie sunk ! 0 ghosts which haunt these shores, Shall not one arise ere the darkness pales, Join, knit bone to bone of its shattered parts, And, lifting, bear foam-bright, to the foam above, Feet, and form, and face of the man I love ? Hark, in the storm-drunk night, how a sea-mew wails !

IL

Into the shade of my tent From the darkness without, Into my tent, like a blade

Of silver dividing the night—

Pale as a moonray peering thro' cloud to my sight, Slender, lonely, and proud, Here, to me waiting, with wonderful motion and light, My lover comes up from the sea.

Dark to my search is the face ; But, delivered of doubt, My lips with his lips grow one.

" Ah 1 where hest thou been, Under the rocks and the caves Where the blind things sleep, Away from the sight of the sun ?

Under the hurling of waves, And the toss of the storm, What, in thy dreams, halt thou seen ; And—without me—what form, That, sleeping, hath made thee content ? "

He turns, he looks : And out of the dreary length Of sea-dreams, heavy as lead, Lifts up the ghostly strength Of a drowning hand :

And up from his lips comes a whisper of sound I know—

The whisper of sea on sand : Then out of the gloom Thick, and swift, and sudden, dim flakes of spume Are flying ; And menacing sea-mews, wheeling and crying,

Stretch their necks, and turn with a ghostly glide

Back to the gleaming hollows—wraiths to the tomb 1 And I wake ! The tide Is down the grey-ribbed sand

Stretches away and away in a steely glare

Of thin salt water, straining, band upon band,

Draining back to the sea from a shore swept bare—

And sea-weed black on the sand Like a drowned man's hair !

LAURENCE HousmAN.