| |
| SAD, broken, and scarred, with a careworn look, | |
| It is never a place that a fay might haunt, | |
| This brown old wharf, where the murky waves | |
| Forever in idle monotone chant | |
| A story which seems but nothing sometimes, | 5 |
| Save a babble of foolish and quaint old rhymes; | |
| Like the broken fragments of winds that fell | |
| With sweet spring, swept to her flowery dell, | |
| Or yet to their deep-toned caves, | |
| Whose soft blue gloom hath defied the sun, | 10 |
| But the love-warm rays of the moonlight won. | |
| |
| Sad, broken, and scarred, with its careworn look,— | |
| And no one thinks it can ever be more | |
| Than the brown old wharf by the idle waves, | |
| With hurrying cloudlets passing o’er; | 15 |
| But I often think if these could speak, | |
| How its mummied secrets would crumbling break, | |
| And tell of the thousand steps that passed | |
| (In a day near by, in a far-off day, | |
| Which may never return, or may be the last), | 20 |
| And whisper of farewells again, | |
| That divided true hearts and severed true hands, | |
| When over the South and its sweet summer-lands | |
| Hung the fiery Cross of Pain. | |
| |
| On the grim, gory mount of war it gleamed, | 25 |
| And woman, the weeper, was mourning there, | |
| One farewell cleaving brave hearts and brave hands, | |
| And fate seemed bound in the bands of prayer,— | |
| But only seemed; and the same waves tell, | |
| By the old wharf brown, whatever befell, | 30 |
| When their barks drew near, and others sailed out, | |
| Far off in the far-away! | |
| Eyes there are, yet gazing through time’s dim gray, | |
| That is flecked with the gold of that dawning day. | |
| |
| Four times and three, at the old wharf brown, | 35 |
| With a cloven heart have I said good by, | |
| And my secret left, and dreamed it the last, | |
| While the slow, sad waves passed on with a sigh. | |
| But once they bore off a form enshrined | |
| In death’s dim dusk; and once they chimed | 40 |
| To a marriage-bell, on a blue June day; | |
| That, too, passed out in the far-away. | |
| And I sometimes fear that a welcome more | |
| Will never come back from the brown old shore, | |
| Though an army with banners of joy stood there, | 45 |
| Where the phantoms of hundred farewells are. | |
| |
