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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air<br>and the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I<br>A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,-<br>The sea was still breaking violently and night<br>Had steamed into our north Atlantic Fleet,<br>when the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light<br>Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,<br>He grappled at the net<br>With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs;<br>The corpse was bloodless, a botch of red and whites,<br>It's open, starring eyes<br>Were lusterless dead-lights<br>Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk<br>Heavy with sand. we weight the body, close<br>Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,<br>Where the heel-headed dogfish barks at its nose<br>On Ahab's void and forehead; and the name<br>Is blocked in yellow chalk.<br>Sailors, who pitch this at the portent at the sea<br>Where dreadnoughts shall confess<br>It's hell-bent deity<br>When you are powerless<br>To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced<br>By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste<br>In his steel scales; ask for no Orphean lute<br>To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet<br>Recoiled and then repeat<br>The hoarse salute</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">II.<br>Whenever winds are moving and their breath<br>Heaved at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,<br>Then terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death<br>In these waters. Sailor, can you hear<br>The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall<br>Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Off 'Sconset, where the yawing S-boats-splash<br>The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,<br>As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears<br>The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash<br>The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids<br>For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids<br>Seaward. The winds' wings beat upon the stones,<br>Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush<br>At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush<br>Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones<br>Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast<br>Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">III<br>All you recovered from Poseidon died<br>With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine<br>Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,<br>Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,<br>Nantucket's westward haven. To Cape Cod<br>Guns, cradled on the tide,<br>Blast, the eelgrass about a waterclock<br>Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and the sand<br>Lashing earth's scaffold, rock<br>Our warships in the hand<br>Of the great God, where time's contrition blues<br>Whatever it was these Quaker sailor's lost<br>In the mad scramble of their lives. They died<br>When time was open-eyed,<br>Wooden and childish; only bones abide<br>There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed<br>Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news<br>Of IS, the whited monster. what it cost<br>Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale's slick<br>I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:<br>"If God himself had not been by our side,<br>If God himself had not been on our side,<br>When the Atlantic rose against us, why,<br>Then it had swallowed us up quick."</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">IV<br>This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale <br>Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell<br>And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools<br>To send the Pequod packing off to hell:<br>This is the end of them, three quarters fools,<br>Snatching at straws to sail<br>Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,<br>Spouting out blood and water as it rolls</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:<br>Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">For water, for the deep where the high tide<br>Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.<br>Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out, <br>Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,<br>The beach increasing, its enormous snout<br>Sucking the ocean's side.<br>This is the end of running on the waves;<br>We are poured out like water. who will dance<br>The mast-lashed master of Leviathans<br>Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">V<br>When the whales viscera go and the roll<br>Of its corruption overruns this world<br>Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Hole<br>whistle and fall and sink into the fat?<br>In the great ash-pit of Jehoshapat<br>The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,<br>The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,<br>The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears<br>The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,<br>And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags<br>And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,<br>Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,<br>Sailor and gulls go round the stoven timbers<br>Where the morning stars sing out together<br>And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers<br>The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide<br>Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">VI<br>Our Lady of Walsingham<br>There once the penitents took off their shoes<br>and then walked barefoot the remaining mile;<br>And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file<br>Slowly along the munching English lane,</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose<br>Track of your dragging pain.<br>The stream flows down under the druid tree,<br>Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make you glad<br>And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Our Lady, too small for her canopy,<br>Sits near the altar. There's no comeliness<br>At all or charm in that expressionless<br>Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,<br>This face, for centuries a memory,<br>Non est species, neque décor<br>Expressionless expresses God: it goes<br>Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows, <br>Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at Bethlehem<br>Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">VII<br>The empty winds are creaking and the oak<br>Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,<br>The boughs are trembling and a gaff<br>Bobs on the untimely stroke<br>Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell<br>In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It's well;<br>Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,<br>Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:<br>Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh<br>Mart once of supercilious, winged clippers,<br>Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil<br>You could cut the brackish winds with a knife<br>Here in Nantucket and cast up the time<br>When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime<br>And breathed into his face the breath of life,<br>And the blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.<br>The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Robert+Lowell">Robert Lowell</a></strong></div>