_At The Surf Inn_ <br /> <br />List the harp in window wailing <br />Stirred by fitful gales from sea: <br />Shrieking up in mad crescendo-- <br />Dying down in plaintive key! <br /> <br />Listen: less a strain ideal <br />Than Ariel's rendering of the Real. <br />What that Real is, let hint <br />A picture stamped in memory's mint. <br /> <br />Braced well up, with beams aslant, <br />Betwixt the continents sails the _Phocion,_ <br />For Baltimore bound from Alicant. <br />Blue breezy skies white fleeces fleck <br />Over the chill blue white-capped ocean: <br />From yard-arm comes--'Wreck ho, a <br />wreck!' <br /> <br />Dismasted and adrift, <br />Longtime a thing forsaken; <br />Overwashed by every wave <br />Like the slumbering kraken; <br />Heedless if the billow roar, <br />Oblivious of the lull, <br />Leagues and leagues from shoal or shore, <br />It swims--a levelled hull: <br />Bulwarks gone--a shaven wreck, <br />Nameless and a grass-green deck. <br />A lumberman: perchance, in hold <br />Prostrate pines with hemlocks rolled. <br /> <br />It has drifted, waterlogged, <br />Till by trailing weeds beclogged: <br />Drifted, drifted, day by day, <br />Pilotless on pathless way. <br />It has drifted till each plank <br />Is oozy as the oyster-bank: <br />Drifted, drifted, night by night, <br />Craft that never shows a light; <br />Nor ever, to prevent worse knell, <br />Tolls in fog the warning bell. <br /> <br />From collision never shrinking, <br />Drive what may through darksome smother; <br />Saturate, but never sinking, <br />Fatal only to the _other!_ <br />Deadlier than the sunken reef <br />Since still the snare it shifteth, <br />Torpid in dumb ambuscade <br />Waylayingly it drifteth. <br /> <br />O, the sailors--O, the sails! <br />O, the lost crews never heard of! <br />Well the harp of Ariel wails <br />Thought that tongue can tell no word of!<br /><br />Herman Melville<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-aeolian-harp-2/
