The Garden of the Sea

THE infinite garden of the sea is His
 To play in. Gravely smiling He resigns
 To man his choice—this rugged plot of earth,
 Watches man tear it with his deep canals,
 Wound it with iron rails, scar it with roads,
 And spot its pleasant freshness with the sore
 Of festering cities, oozing heavy smoke.  
  He sees and He forgives. Then gently takes
 His pliant sea into His yearning hands—
 As an old mother might caress a doll
 When all her sons are dead—and wistfully
 He moulds it. O, that He might so thrust man—
 That interloping soul of stubbornness—
 The solitary irreconcilable
 Of His subservient Universe—within
 The grim, unalterable grooves of law!  
  But, ah! the sea, the fecund woman-sea,
 Is His to fashion as He wills! He girds
 It round with whitely gleaming paths of beach;
 Then, at His word, the blossoms of the spray
 Rise on their swaying wave-stalks, bloom and break,
 And scatter desolate petals on the foam.  
  League-long His flower-bordered avenues
 In bending sward of blossom run. Lo, now
 A winter comes unwonted, heaping high
 
 His garden world with snow of wasted blooms.
 Or Spring sweeps in resistless, and the sea
 Shimmers—an orchard in her nuptial white!  
  And sometimes He will smooth His garden plot,
 And cover with trim tapestry of grass
 Its restless beauty, till there shyly break
 The daisies through, like pale hands timorous
 And fragile, groping blindly to the sun.  
  Sometimes he plans great curving pathways, where
 'Neath sullen shoulders of cool greenery
 The shadows crouch, and high above the sun
 Whispers his sunny secrets to the boughs
 That sway and ripple everlastingly.  
  And sometimes, hidden by a moving ridge
 From ships that flit like furtive white moths by,
 The Master of the garden gravely walks
 The cool green paths in reverie along:
 Ah, what if I could turn into that lane
 Of pulsing wave, and see Him pacing there,
 As once of old they saw Him, with that look
 Of wistful sadness on His old kind face!