POETRY.
MIDDAY AT ABOUKIR.
FROM a latticed cool verandah crowning a sun-kissed hill,
Or prone in the deep blue shadow that grey walls cast on the sand, I watch the sapphire bay of Aboukir, tideless and still, Dreamily silent with lips that whiten kissing the land.
Far off the Isle of Nelson fades in the quivering air, And one dim white felucca drifts in the windless heat,
No sound but the half-heard murmur of a Bedouin at prayer, And a rustle of dust-grey lizards astir in the thorns at my feet.
Sunlight and murmuring Silence; only a new-born breeze Toys with a date-palm's leaves as a babe with her mother's hair, Or a lover timidly wooing, but little heed the frees, And the voice of the child of the North-wind faints in the noonday glare.
Sunlight and calm unbroken, over a tideless main,
No plash of waves advancing, no cry of gulls that feed; But under a pall of sapphire they rest in silence, slain
When the roar of a thousand cannon rang out to far Rashid.
Sunlit and calm and golden the dunes to Eastward fall, Flecked with feathery date-palms, with gunless bastions crowned, Where the Turk at fiery sunrise saw the standards of the Gaul, And the sunset glowed on the trailing floating turbans of the drowned.
The sea hides deep in her bosom the stain of an ancient fight, And deep in the shifting sandhills the bones of warriors lie, And the sun for ever smiling beams with a tranquil light On forts grown grey and warless, on a peaceful land and sky.
And weary of calm Aboukir, of the cloudless blue o'erhead, Longing for storm and peril and the wild Atlantic air, The souls of the stranger seamen long since to tho North are fled, To the sounding cliffs of Devon and surging Finisterre.
PHILIP PERCEVAL GRAVES.
Previous page
