A Coast (Poem by Edwin John Dove Pratt)

A Coast

By Edwin John Dove Pratt

Scaling where a hundred crags

    Disclose their high, precipitous walls,

Up hidden clefts and burnished jags,

    The shore-line like a python crawls.

Along a league of ridges overspread

    With the dead trunks of pine and oak, it drags

A roughening path; around the head

    Of the last bluff it climbs, then falls,

Spilling its folds on spur and boulder,

    Down a deep gulch where it rears and sprawls

Upon the Cape's lean shoulder.

Rolling dusks and vapors pour

A turgid silence on the shore,

Broken by a curlew screaming,

    And a low, regurgitant note

    Borne in from the laboring throat

Of a wave along a line of basalt streaming;

And, further off, where denser gloom

    The headland and a reef-curve hides,

Falls the ground-swell's muttered boom

    From the belfries of the tides.

Under a tattered curtain of fog

    A flaw of wind makes the waters start;

They drift and scud and whirl;

    And, held a moment near the heart

Of the eddy, a waterspout, — 

Or some wild thing with twisted shape,

    Compact of mist and wind and surge — 

Hangs like a felon off the Cape.