Seraphim/The Sea

by Barry Cornwall

For other versions of this work, see The Sea (Cornwall).

THE SEA

The Sea! the Sea! the open Sea;
The blue, the fresh, the ever free;
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth's wide regions round.
It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies,
Or like a craddled creature lies.
I'm on the sea, I'm on the sea,
I am where I would ever be;
With the blue above, and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe'er I go.
If a storm should come and awake the deep
What matter, what matter, I shall ride and sleep.

I love--O how I love to ride,
On the fierce, foaming, bursting tide.
When every mad wave drowns the moon,
Or whistles aloft his tempest tune,
And tells how goeth the world below,
And why the sou'-west blast doth blow !
I never was on the dull tame shore,
But I loved the great Sea more and more :
And backward flew to her billowy birmant,
Like a bird that seeketh its mother's nest,
And a mother she was and is to me,
For I was born on the open Sea.

The waves were white, and red the morn,
In the noisy hour when I was born ;
And the whale it whistled, the porpoise rolled,
And the Dolphins bared their backs of gold;
And never heard such an outcry wild,
As welcome to life the Ocean child,
I have lived, since then, in calm and strife,
Full fifty summers a rover's life,
With wealth to spend, and a power to range,
But never have sought or sighed for change:
And death, whenever he comes to me,
Shall come on the wide unbounded Sea.

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