Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LYDSTEP CAVERNS, by LEWIS MORRIS (1833-1907)


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LYDSTEP CAVERNS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Here in these fretted caverns whence the sea
Last Line: Better the droughts, the steeps, the glare of life!
Subject(s): Caves; Wales; Caverns; Welshmen; Welshwomen


HERE in these fretted caverns whence the sea
Ebbs only once in all the circling year,
Fresh from the deep I lie, and dreamily
Await the refluent current stealing near.
Not yet the furtive wavelets lip the shore,
Not yet Life's too brief interlude is o'er.

A child might play, where late the embattled deep
Hurled serried squadrons on the rock-fanged shore,
Where now the creaming filmy shallows creep,
White-horsed battalions dashed with ceaseless roar,
Stirred by no breath, the tiny rock-pools lie
Glassing in calm the blue September sky.

The shy sea bares her guarded treasures here,
Her delicate bosom open to the light,
Unclothed I lie, where never foot comes near,
Unshamed as 'twere in watches of the night.
Fine as a maiden veil of thinnest lawn,
From the white strand the creamy vesture drawn.

Here in the cool recesses of the cave,
Tho' sweet to lie, to dream, 'twere doom to sleep,
Lest sudden some impatient crested wave,
High-horsed, unbitted from the outer deep,
Shut fast the gate of life, and choked the breath,
And left me prisoned in the vaults of death.

To-day the many-hued anemone,
Waving expands within the rock-pools green,
And swift transparent creatures of the sea
Dart through the feathery sea-fronds, scarcely seen,
Here all to-day is peaceful, calm and still,
Here where in storm the thundering breakers fill.

Here where the charging ocean-squadrons rave,
And seethe and shatter on the sounding shore,
And smite this high-arched roof, and wave on wave
Fall baffled backward, with despairing roar,
Or fling against the sheer cliffs overhead,
And sow these vaults with wreckage and the dead;

Now all is still. Yet ere to-day is done,
Where now these fairy runnels thread the sand,
Five fathoms deep the swelling tides shall run
Round the blind cave, and swallow rock and strand,
And this discovered breast on which I lie
Shall clothe itself again with mystery.

Here through the rayless darkness of to-night,
Great fishes, fiery-eyed, with ravening jaw,
Hungering will sail, and gorge, and rend, and bite,
Obedient to the pitiless primal law,
And black eels, slimy, sinuous, haste to tear
The hapless swimmer drowned and drifting there.

And from their secret hollows in the deep,
Mailed things obscene, hooked claw and waving horn
Where now I lie, will thronging dart and creep
To batten on the violate limbs forlorn,
Great devil-fish with strangling arms will cling,
And sting-rays flap and slide on impish wing.

And then again the ebbing tide will spurn
The dank, dead thing which lived and thought to-day,
Or haply whirl it when its forces turn
To the lone plains of ocean, leagues away,
Sunk in its rayless depths for evermore,
Or flung dishonoured on some alien shore.

So full is Nature of unrest and change,
So wasteful of her work, so deaf, so blind,
So careful of her brute decretals strange,
So careless of the empery of mind.
To her the hearts that burn, the souls that soar,
Are as her humblest weed and nothing more.

Yet like the soul in this, her fullest tide
Ebbs furthest, and her inmost deeps lays bare!
Turn refluent wave and swiftly deepening hide,
These haunted rare-revealed abysses fair.
There is a calm more perilous than strife,
Better the droughts, the steeps, the glare of life!





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