An oak-splinter pierced through his breast and his back,
And hung out to the tempest, a wreck on the wreck. 65
No more?  At the helm sits a woman more fair
Than Heaven, when, unbinding its star-braided hair,
It sinks with the sun on the earth and the sea. 
She clasps a bright child on her upgathered knee;
It laughs at the lightning, it mocks the mixed thunder 70
Of the air and the sea, with desire and with wonder
It is beckoning the tigers to rise and come near,
It would play with those eyes where the radiance of fear
Is outshining the meteors; its bosom beats high,
The heart-fire of pleasure has kindled its eye, 75
While its mother’s is lustreless.  ’Smile not, my child,
But sleep deeply and sweetly, and so be beguiled
Of the pang that awaits us, whatever that be,
So dreadful since thou must divide it with me! 
Dream, sleep!  This pale bosom, thy cradle and bed, 80
Will it rock thee not, infant?  ’Tis beating with dread! 
Alas! what is life, what is death, what are we,
That when the ship sinks we no longer may be? 
What! to see thee no more, and to feel thee no more? 
To be after life what we have been before? 85
Not to touch those sweet hands?  Not to look on those eyes,
Those lips, and that hair,—­all the smiling disguise
Thou yet wearest, sweet Spirit, which I, day by day,
Have so long called my child, but which now fades away
Like a rainbow, and I the fallen shower?’—­Lo! the ship 90
Is settling, it topples, the leeward ports dip;
The tigers leap up when they feel the slow brine
Crawling inch by inch on them; hair, ears, limbs, and eyne,
Stand rigid with horror; a loud, long, hoarse cry
Bursts at once from their vitals tremendously, 95
And ’tis borne down the mountainous vale of the wave,
Rebounding, like thunder, from crag to cave,
Mixed with the clash of the lashing rain,
Hurried on by the might of the hurricane: 
The hurricane came from the west, and passed on 100
By the path of the gate of the eastern sun,
Transversely dividing the stream of the storm;
As an arrowy serpent, pursuing the form
Of an elephant, bursts through the brakes of the waste. 
Black as a cormorant the screaming blast, 105
Between Ocean and Heaven, like an ocean, passed,
Till it came to the clouds on the verge of the world
Which, based on the sea and to Heaven upcurled,
Like columns and walls did surround and sustain
The dome of the tempest; it rent them in twain, 110
As a flood rends its barriers of mountainous crag: 
And the dense clouds in many a ruin and rag,
Like the stones of a temple ere earthquake has passed,
Like the dust of its fall. on the whirlwind are cast;