ARNLJOT'S YEARNING FOR THE SEA
For the sea, the sea, my spirit is yearning,
Where wide it heaves in its calm majestic.
Bearing its burden of mountainous fog-banks,
Eternally rolling in self-communion.
Though the heavens bend down, and the shores are calling,
It is restless ever, and knows no yielding.
In the nights of summer, the winter tempests,
It voices ever its plaint of longing.
For the sea, for the sea, my spirit is yearning,
Where wide it raises its frigid forehead!
Upon it the world casts its darksome shadow,
And all its murmuring sorrow mirrors.
But also the sun gives it light-warm greeting,
And blithely tells of the joy of living.
Yet moodily quiet, and ice-cold ever
In its depths are swallowed comfort and sorrow.
The full moon draws it, the hurricane stirs it,
But they lose their grasp, and on streams the water.
The lowlands are melted, the highlands crumble,
As even it
sweeps on its way eternal.
What it draws with it, its course must follow,
What sinks beneath, is submerged forever.
No
cry
is heard, and there comes no message,
And its own speech may none interpret.
Far out to the sea reaches forth my spirit,
The sea, that knows not an hour's appeasement!
For all who sigh, 't is the sure deliverer;
But bears its own riddle forever onward,
Keeping with death this pact mysterious,
That all it gives him, save itself only!
I am urged, O sea, by thy melancholy,
To cast aside all my weary scheming,
And let take flight all my anxious longings:
Thy cold waters shall lave my bosom.
Let death come, for his prey low-lurking:
A space is left us still for our playing!
Some hours I'll filch from thy covetous keeping
Cleaving onward in angry passion,
Thou shalt but fill my straining mainsail
With thy tempest-breath of destruction,
Thy raging billows shall bear more swiftly
My little craft into quiet waters.
What if I stand alone at the rudder,
Forsaken by all, and by death forgotten,
Watching stranger sails from the distance wafted,
And others gliding by in the night-time,
What if alone I list to the ground-swell,
—The sigh of the ocean, its breath deep-drawing—
To its waves as they ripple against the timbers
-In pastime relieving its melancholy!
Then shall be washed away my longings,
And merged in the sea-deep sorrows of nature,
Then the cold of the sea and the night-time
For the kingdom of death my soul shall strengthen.
Now dawns the day! Renewed my courage;
My heart leaps up to the light and the heavens.
My ship snuffs the breeze, and lays its broadside
Exultant against the foaming billows.
Singing the boy clambers up to the masthead,
To set the sail with the wind now swelling,
And my thoughts race ever like sea-birds weary
About spar and rigging, but find no foothold. . . .
To the sea, to the sea! thither fared Vikar!
Like him to sail, like him plunge downward
At the prow of my ship in the cause of Olaf!
My ice-cold mood with my sharp keel cleaving,
With the lightest zephyr my hope renewing!
Upon the helm death's clammy fingers,
And the light of heaven upon my pathway!
And then all at once in the final hour
To note the nails in my timbers yielding,
And death bearing down on the sundered planking
And the saving flood of the sea in-rushing!
Then to lie down in my clouts all dripping,
And be lowered amain to the silence eternal,
While my name to the shore will roll with the billows
In the silent nights made bright by the moonbeams.
IN THE MIST OF THE NORTHERN OCEAN
DEATH'S Coast is it that now looms before us?
Ne'er have I met with a darkness like this.
Night sinks upon us as though never to rise again;
For weeks in a circle we sail.
The roar of breakers against the cliffs
Wildly dashing we hear through the mist.
By the currents driven among ice-bound islands,
Fly we, but know not whither.
There are times when we who are sailing together Lose sight of each other, nothing hearing
Save the roar of the death-dealing reefs that below us lie lurking,
Or perchance a blowing whale.
Ne'er see we men, or sails, or house-roofs,
About the wild mountains sea-fowl screaming, Monsters of the sea around on the drifting ice-pack, All in a dim gray light.
Lights in the heaven like ranks of spears,
Seen when the fog clears away,-they tremble,
Flashing and flaming, they streak the sky, and they
dart,
Then gather into a sheaf.
Once again with their playing points
They cross one another from either side,
Stream and kindle, lighting the arch of heaven,
Divide, and flicker, and dart.
Darkness again, in the dark a death-cry.
Came it from us, or was it a warning?
The menace lies here by the side of the ship—
Fear knew ye not ere now.
See, a boat with but one man in it!
Madly he rows 'gainst the stormy current.
Row, my men, we are a hundred, he but one,
Row, we must see who he is!
Ho! now upsets he the boat
No, he is there, on the other quarter!
Again he chokes in the wave,-
Far away are we from Bretland's mead-horns,
Far from the church-bells in Irish steeples,
Is yonder a tempest, driving dark from the west?
Then is our doom made sure.
Who can say, who knows whither we're faring? Another gleaming ice-peak rises;
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