Poems (Hinxman)/The Fisherman's Return
THE FISHERMAN'S RETURN.
The night was closing in, and on the seaPressed with dark weight, from which the fretful tideBroke out, and dimly whitened down the shore,What time the fisherman ran up his keelUpon the grating beach, and lowered his mastWith practised speed that shamed his lusty sons:They stood with shouldered baskets on the shore,But he threw up a quick and.sidelong glanceWhere, like a hanging star upon the cliff;His cottage window gleamed. "Go on," he said,"I follow soon," and he stooped down, and feigned Some work upon his craft. But being left,The man sat down, and faced the sea, and proppedA rugged cheek upon his rugged hand,And groaned aloud. What was that groan, and whyDid be delay to take the homeward path?Six days ago his help-mate from his doorWas carried to the churchyard. She had beenA woman in the hardness of her life,Hardened, like him, in face and voice and ways,Perhaps in nature: sympathy and loveIn each, may be, surviving, long had ceasedTo put their tokens forth, even as the sapSleeps in the winter woods. And when this strokeSevered the long companionship of toilThe hardness melted not, to lookers on,In him who stayed behind.
But since her deathNow was his first return from wonted toil;Now first his door should open on the change,—A gulph in the old flow of fifty years.Another hand should take the damp sea-coat,And hang the nets and set the platters round.Therefore he lingered, gazing on the sea.Before him broke its dreary, drifting waste;As broken, and as drifting, and as drear,He saw his life around him: and that hourHe wished to lay his head beneath the waves,There with drowned eyes and ears and heart to lie,—To lie, and never see his home again.
Jan. 25. 1851,