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FIRST CYCLE OF LOVE POEMS: 4, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Then like the ship at rest in the bay
Last Line: Leaned down and kissed me.
Subject(s): God


Then like the ship at rest in the bay
I drop my sails and come home
To harbour in his arms and stay
For ever harboured from harm.

On his foot's beach my combers ride
The vaulted coral where he stands,
And spray against his rock of side
Showers that fill his hands.

O whirlwinds catching up the sea
And folding islands in your shawls,
Give him to me, give him to me,
And I will wrap him in my shallows.

O the Red Sea parted long ago
When the angel went whistling through,
My seas rise up in pride also
To let his chariots through.

The masculine cliff-face gazed out
At the smile of the horizon,
And disregards the sea that flaunts
Her beauties by the dozen.

So he looks out over my subjugation
Where the combers coil at his feet,
And sees, the far side of adulation,
My Hesperides rise singing, one moment, from the ocean,
And the next, sinking, weep.

But from the altitude of his domination
O sometimes, like waterfalls,
His hand comes down through a gravity of anticipation
And a constellation of nuptials.

Nightly to his archipelagoes where
Apples adorn the pillar,
My kiss of fishes moves in schools and bears
The body to him on a silver platter.

The syzygies, over our Balkan bed,
Shed silver on the peninsula,
Against whose shores my waters beat their head
Like rain on a red star.

The narwhal with a spike on its brow
Spins thrashing through the wave:
His love is mine, who lashes now
In the sweat of seas I gave.

Then morning, like a monument
Glittering in a tree,
Reminds me of a former moment
When the first star was immanent
And the mountain, dominant,
Leaned down and kissed me.




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