Sea Sorcery



Oh how I love the laughing sea,
     Sun lances splintering;
Or with a virile harmony
     In salty caves to sing;
Or mumbling pebbles on the shore,
     Or roused to monster might:
By day I love the sea, but more
     I love it in the night.

High over ocean hangs my home
     And when the moon is clear
I stare and stare till fairy foam
     Is music in my ear;
Till glamour dances to a tune
     No mortal man could make;
And there bewitched beneath the moon
     To beauty I awake.

Then though I seek my bed again
     And close the shutters tight,
Still, still I hear that wild refrain
     And see that mystic light . . .
Oh reckon me a crazy loon,
     But blesséd I will be
If my last seeing be the moon,
     My last sound--the Sea.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

41 sec read
69

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCDCD EXEXFGFG XDXDFAFA
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 727
Words 138
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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