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From “The Pelican Island”
EVERY one, | |
| By instinct taught, performed its little task,— | |
| To build its dwelling and its sepulchre, | |
| From its own essence exquisitely modelled; | |
| There breed, and die, and leave a progeny, | 5 |
| Still multiplied beyond the reach of numbers, | |
| To frame new cells and tombs; then breed and die | |
| As all their ancestors had done,—and rest, | |
| Hermetically sealed, each in its shrine, | |
| A statue in this temple of oblivion! | 10 |
| Millions of millions thus, from age to age, | |
| With simplest skill and toil unweariable, | |
| No moment and no movement unimproved, | |
| Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread, | |
| To swell the heightening, brightening, gradual mound, | 15 |
| By marvellous structure climbing towards the day. * * * * * | |
| A point at first | |
| It peered above those waves; a point so small | |
| I just perceived it, fixed where all was floating; | |
| And when a bubble crossed it, the blue film | 20 |
| Expanded like a sky above the speck; | |
| That speck became a hand-breadth; day and night | |
| It spread, accumulated, and erelong | |
| Presented to my view a dazzling plain, | |
| White as the moon amid the sapphire sea; | 25 |
| Bare at low water, and as still as death, | |
| But when the tide came gurgling o’er the surface | |
| ’T was like a resurrection of the dead: | |
| From graves innumerable, punctures fine | |
| In the close coral, capillary swarms | 30 |
| Of reptiles, horrent as Medusa’s snakes, | |
| Covered the bald-pate reef; * * * * * | |
| Erelong the reef o’ertopt the spring-flood’s height, | |
| And mocked the billows when they leapt upon it, | |
| Unable to maintain their slippery hold, | 35 |
| And falling down in foam-wreaths round its verge. | |
| Steep were the flanks, with precipices sharp, | |
| Descending to their base in ocean gloom. | |
| Chasms few and narrow and irregular | |
| Formed harbors, safe at once and perilous,— | 40 |
| Safe for defence, but perilous to enter. | |
| A sea-lake shone amidst the fossil isle, | |
| Reflecting in a ring its cliffs and caverns, | |
| With heaven itself seen like a lake below. | |
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