By the marge of restless oceans a myriad myriad waves hastening,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
Troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Lifting up their necks, tending in ceaseless flow.
Proudly the flood comes in, shouting, foaming, advancing,
That inbound urge and urge of waves, the mad pushes of waves upon the land,
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid, seeking the shores forever,
O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love.
Salty shore and breeze and brine,
Shore where ever gayly dash the coming, going, hurrying sea waves,
The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and land of the globe,
That suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid,
Fusion of ocean and land, where it is neither ground nor sea.
I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,
The measur’d sea-surf beating on the sand,
A stretch of interminable white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad,
With the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep,
With rustle and hiss and foam.
I heard the hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
The slapping waves, the rocking in the sand,
And rhythmic rasping of sands and waves,
And many a thump as of low bass drums.
With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
The first and last confession of the globe,
Outsurging, muttering from thy soul’s abysm,
Sounding, appealing to the sky’s deaf ear.
Some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chafing in those breakers,
Some vast soul like a planet stopt, arrested, tied—
Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek’st and seek’st, yet never gains’t,
Surely cosmic some right withheld,
Some mighty freedom pent, denied.
The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
Thou tellest to a kindred soul,
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once.
In the Words of Walt Whitman 