The Winter Storm

                                        I.

How the great storm-wave dwarf the rocks that frown
    Huge and defiant when the waters sleep;
    In feebler tumults the insurgent deep
Smites their untrembling bastions and reels down
Mad-white with baffled rage, to where the brown 
    Reef-bases yawn terrifically steep!
    Now rolls the onflow with resistless sweep,
Vast and unbroken o’er their prostrate crown.
O grand! majestic as a slumbering soul
    Too long subdued by many a pretty wrong,
Aroused and maddened into self-control
    More terrible than rage, and trebly strong.
    Its utter wrath for very grandeur, shows
Less of fierce frenzy’s mood than of sublime repose.

                                   II.
No sudden impulse from the Austral scourge,
    No faint resentment at the insulting East.
    Chafes the vexed waters like a goaded beast,
But all Atlantic’s confluent pulses urge
The sea-deep movement of his mountain surge.
    The monstrous python rears his flaming crest,
    His folds voluminous the far isles invest,
Convolsed and writhing to the horizon’s verge.
Like shreds of tattered sails the cormorants
    Drift on the tempest, in the thunder smoke,
And chide the invader of their ancient haunts
    With shrieks that cleave the uproar, to invoke 
Deliverance from a Mightier whose comand
Holds the devouring deep back from the shuddering land.

                                   III.
Woe to the seamen off the loud lee-shore!
    Whose hugest bottoms are as tossing skiffs;
    Woe to the dwellers on the wave-washed cliffs,
And lowly isles where summer breakers pour
A clash of emeralds on their gray sea-floor,
    Or shoot clear diamonds in the sudden whiffs
    Of laughing southwind where stone hyppogriffs
Are crouched to guard an inlet’s narrow door!
The stout barque drives, keel upward, plunging down
    And leaping out, with a wild groan, unheard,
In her dark bosom: the white toy-house town,
    Nest of the merry-making summer bird,
Is chaff before the storm. No rock nor bar
Shields him who sits between the gulfs and God’s “Thus Far!”