Storm on Saugonnet

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 that 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.

But the terrible grandeur no soul could guess,
     As we, who were drenched in the pitiless spray, 
     Deafened and stunned by the maniac play 
Of a power sublime for its awfulness.

But the calm soul rose dilated and grand
     With the vasty war that could make no jar, 
     On the adamant shield of God's "Thus Far," 
For the Storm lay cradled in God's right hand!