The Sphinx of Purgatory

Where fashion led we walked that day, 
     The golden sunshine shimmering o'er us;
Before our feet the diamond spray, 
     And dance of shouting waves in chorus.
A headland o'er a curving beach,
     And swaths of white-caps ranked in order 
On one Illimitable reach
     Of seas that touch the sky's blue border,

Might seem a sea-god who had reapt
     That waving field, and dropped is sickle
‘Mid the long gavels while he slept,
     His brown beard moist with briny trickle
We hovered on the rocky verge—
     The sheer abyss of Purgatory—
And saw, below, the flashing surge
     Whiten its gloomy gate with glory

Our feet essayed the foot print made
     By the hot-sandled vaulting devil,
Or lingered where his broad-ax blade
     Had gashed the rock with glancing bevel.
Along that base we read the trace
     Of many an idler’s rude endeavor—
Carved names and years upon its face,
     Washed by the swelling tides forever.

But where above its southern bed
     The ragged cliff hangs darkly looming,
It shapes a giant Ethiop’s head,
     Against the very noon-day glooming.
The flattened nostrils curve with pain,
     The dull eye, from its orbit dismal,
Looks dumb accusing for the chain
     That binds him o’er the gulf abysmal.

Wild wind and hail and flood conspire
     To torture him with all their scourges;
The lightning with its whip of fire,
     The ocean with its lashing surges!
The black Prometheus of the rock,
     Gnawed by the sea’s remorseless vulture—
His woe the chattering cliff-birds mock,
     And the low laugh of grace and culture.

Dark Sphinx, whose desert is the deep,
     From stony lips the enigma trembles,
To thoughtful souls who watch and weep,
     As fate our coming doom dissembles.
The sea-song of this isle of balm
     Still quivers with a smothered wailing—
Her gloomy slave-ship’s horrid psalm
     With litanies of murder pealing.

This monumental rock shall keep
     The memory of that wrong forever,
And bid the Avenger wake or sleep,
     As fares the victim of the slaver!
The Ethiop Sphinx hath smilings bland,
     Or brutal fangs for all we cherish;
Heed well her riddle, O my Land,
     And as you read it, live or perish!