Sea Treasures
Moonstone
(c) by Roger Garland
Crystal Cards
O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note,
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears
Sing, siren, for thyself and I will dote.
~William Shakespeare
Teach me to hear mermaids singing...
~John Donne
In gulfs enchanted,
Where the siren sings
~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Like tides on a crescent sea-beach,
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in---
Come from thy mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod,
Some of us call it longing,
And others call it God
~William Carruth
But she, with astounding vigor,
emerged straight, from the sea as far as the waist
and put her arms around my neck,
enveloping me in a scent I had never smelled before,
then let herself slither into the boat:
beneath her groin, beneath her gluteal muscles,
her body was that of a fish,
covered in minute scales of blue and mother-of-pearl, ending in a forked tail which was slowly beating the bottom of the boat.
She was a mermaid.
~Guiseppe di Lampedusa
The seer said, "I saw a mermaid last night. You remember, there was a half-moon and a thin drifting mist. There was colour in the night, not like the black and gray and white of an ordinary night. Down at the end of the beach a shelf of rock reaches out, and the tide was low so that there was a smooth bed of kelp. She swam to the edge and then churned her tail, like a salmon leaping a rapid. And then she lay on the kelp bed and made dancing figures with her white arms and hands. She didn't go away until the rising tide covered the kelp bed."
"Was she a dream? Did you imagine her?"
"I don't know. But if I did I'm proud that I could imagine anything so beautiful."
~John Steinbeck- Sweet Thursday
Calm Sea by Arnold Böcklin
The Shell
And then I pressed the shell
Close to my ear
And listened well,
And straight away like a bell
Came low and clear
The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas,
Whipped by an icy breeze
Upon a shore
Wind-swept and desolate.
It was a sunless strand that never bore
Nor felt the weight
Since time began
Of any human quality or stir
Save what the dreary winds and waves incur
And in the hush of water was the sound
Of pebbles rolling round,
Forever rolling with a hollow sound.
And bubbling seaweeds as the waters go,
Swish to and fro
Their long, cold tentacles of slime gray.
There was no day
Nor ever came a night
Setting the stars alight
to wonder at a moon:
Was twilight only and the frightened croon,
Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind
And the waves that journeyed blind---
And then I lost my ear....O, it was sweet
To hear a cart go jolting down the street.
~James Stephens
Home
Next