From Jordan's Delight

    Redwing

    What is that island, say you, stark and black —
    A Cythera in northern exile? sung
    Only by sailors on the darkward tack
    Or till the channel buoy give safety tongue?
      Here is no Eldorado on the wane:
      New Sirens draw us in, in silent seine.

    Men do not come to live here, but to spend
    Memory, time, and the long sense of flight,
    And find by spendthrift each one image friend
    That might outlast him and himself benight:
      In spending tides, spent winds, and unspent seas
      Find out the flowering desert dark, soul's ease.

    Redwing was driven so and so drawn in,
    A bearded fisher in his own annoy
    Hearing without all hallowed within,
    The hermit prison-crying in the boy,
      The broken promise cutting the inward grain,
      The heart throstling the sweet-tormented brain.

    Redwing was jilted forty years ago;
    What wilted waits for water still, what winced
    Still tenders when his fingers free and fro
    The mooring-buoy, and he, each fair tide since,
      Full-bearded, full awry, takes second sight
      Of exile in the black isle, Jordan's Delight.

    (Once I was with him, he within me yet,
    When while the ash of dawn was colding through
    And the ashen tiller stick was creaking wet
    He sang of Oh, the foggy, foggy dew! —
      Then felt, and lost, the long, low-running swell
      That buoyed his words up, voice that made them spell.)

    All broken ground and ledges to the east
    Awash and breaking, this island has a loom
    Never to be forgotten from the west
    And never to be left without sea-room.
      O Redwing, by your ruddied beard I swear
      Jordan shall wreck you yet, and wrecking spare.

    This stony garden crossed by souring cries —
    Gull bleat, hawk shriek, mouse and eagle screams —
    Retrieves, O Redwing, silence in your eyes:
    It is excruciation that redeems;
      Redeems, O Redwing, by your blood I swear,
      The still brain from anhungered sirens there.


    ii

    The Foggy Foggy Dew

    O Jordan young Jordan O sailoring friend,
    I'm sailing for ye that sailor no more;
    Though the moon's shut in and sun shut out
    And all the sea's a drif ting shore,
    Though tide-rips clout and put me about
    And the lather of cross-slops crab my oar,
    I'll sail her true and 'cordin' to;
    — And oh, the foggy foggy dew!

    Where were your eyes that day, young Jordan,
    For the rocking rise, the glimming land-loom?
    Where your ears, my gooding boy,
    For the smalling seas that shift the shingle?
    Where was your feel for a shoaling keel,
    The shiver and shawling, yawing of doom?
    Your grandfather knew, and so now you;
    — And oh, the foggy foggy dew!

    Your first grandfather first, young Jordan,
    Old he that in his shipwrecked thirst
    Sucked sea-fog off his aching lips
    And sucked but caking salt — and slaking
    Followed voices on the sea.
    As then came you, now I askew;
    — And oh, the foggy foggy dew!

    Hear now, young Jordan, salt that you are,
    Where was your dread and where now mine?
    The trough and the surge, the urge of the dead,
    These are our manna, salt for wine.
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