Classic and Contemporary Poetry
STORM ON SEACONNET, by GEORGE SHEPARD BURLEIGH Poet's Biography First Line: Round and red in a golden haze Last Line: Of the island cliff as they backward rolled. Subject(s): Seaconnet Point, Rhode Island; Storms | ||||||||
ROUND and red in a golden haze Had the sun gone up from his eastern bed For days and days, and as round and red The sun had gone down for days and days. The windless hills were bathed in the gold Of their own autumnal atmosphere, -- The thousand hues of the parting year In their banners of glory mixed, fold on fold. Round and red in the midnight sky The lone moon rode with never a star, -- The bronzed right wheel of her noiseless car With a broad tire girdling her throne on high. Then came the storm with its signal drum, All night we heard on the eastern shore The steady booming and muffled roar Of the great waves' tramp ere the winds had come! They came with the morning! the lurid glow Of the sunrise into black ashes burned; The torn clouds whirled, overturned and turned, Wrung till they streamed with a torrent's flow. With the measured march of a mighty host The ground-swell came, with wave upon wave, On the red Saugonnet rocks they drave, And scattered their foam over leagues of coast. Out of the Infinite, up from the smoke Of the watery Gehenna the wild waves rose, Lashed into wrath by invisible foes, On the crags of the headland their fury broke. Spectral and dim over sunk Cuttywow The white spray hung, but ye heard no shock, For the liquid thunder on red Wall Rock Crushed out all sound with its deafening blow. From the granite jaws of the Clump, the foam Of a maniac wrath was drifted, white, Snowed on the blast with the snowy flight Of the screaming gulls driven out from home. In the swirl of the Hopper the waves were ground To impalpable dust; the Ridge Rock roared To the crash of a new Niagara poured Right up the crags with a slippery bound! Over Brenton's Reef where the west hung black, O'er the cloudy bar of the Cormorant Rocks, The white seas hurried in huddling flocks With the wolf-winds howling along their track. They came and went in a wavering mist, The phantoms that hung on the skirts of the blast; While the nearer Cliff his defiance cast; Maddening the seas with his granite fist. Far inland the moan of the tempest told What war was waged on the crumbling crags, How the charging billows were torn on jags Of the Island Cliff as they backward rolled. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...STORM AT HOPTIME by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN THERE IS A SOLEMN WIND TONIGHT by KATHERINE MANSFIELD DEWEY AND DANCER by JOSEPHINE MILES MICHAEL IS AFRAID OF THE STORM by GWENDOLYN BROOKS BREACHING THE ROCK by MADELINE DEFREES THE CLOUDS ABOVE THE OCEAN by STEPHEN DOBYNS OF POLITICS, & ART by NORMAN DUBIE TREMENDOUS WIND AND RAIN by ANSELM HOLLO A PRAYER FOR LIFE by GEORGE SHEPARD BURLEIGH |
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