(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)

Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.

I

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket--  
The sea was still breaking violently and night  
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,  
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net.  Light  
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,  
He grappled at the net  
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:  
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,  
Its open, staring eyes  
Were lustreless dead-lights  
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk  
Heavy with sand.  We weight the body, close  
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,  
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks it nose  
On Ahab's void and forehead; and the name  
Is blocked in yellow chalk.  
Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea  
Where dreadnaughts shall confess  
Its heel-bent deity,  
When you are powerless  
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced  
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste  
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute  
To pluck life back.  The guns of the steeled fleet  
Recoil and then repeat  
The hoarse salute.      
        
        

 

II

Whenever winds are moving and their breath  
Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,  
The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death  
In these home waters.  Sailor, can you hear  
The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall  
Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall  
Off 'Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash  
The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,  
As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears  
The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash  
The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids  
For blue-fish?  Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids  
Seaward.  The winds' wings beat upon the stones,  
Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush  
At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush  
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones  
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast  
Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East.

 

III

All you recovered from Poseidon died  
With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine  
Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,  
Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,  
Nantucket's westward haven.  To Cape Cod  
Guns, cradled on the tide,  
Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock  
Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand  
Lashing earth's scaffold, rock  
Our warships in the hand  
Of the great God, where time's contrition blues  
Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost  
In the mad scramble of their lives.  They died  
When time was open-eyed,  
Wooden and childish; only bones abide  
There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed  
Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news  
Of IS, the whited monster.  What it cost  
Them is their secret.  In the sperm-whale's slick  
I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:  
"If God himself had not been on our side,  
If God himself had not been on our side,  
When the Atlantic rose against us, why,  
Then it had swallowed us up quick."

 

IV

This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale  
Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell  
And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools  
To send the Pequod packing off to hell:  
This is the end of them, three-quarters fools,  
Snatching at straws to sail  
Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,  
Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,  
Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:  
Clamavimus, O depths.  Let the sea-gulls wail  
  
For water, for the deep where the high tide  
Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.  
Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,  
Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,  
The beach increasing, its enormous snout  
Sucking the ocean's side.  
This is the end of running on the waves;  
We are poured out like water.  Who will dance  
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans  
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?

 

V

When the whale's viscera go and the roll  
Of its corruption overruns this world  
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Hole  
And Martha's Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword  
Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?  
In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat  
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,  
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,  
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears  
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,  
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags  
And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,  
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,  
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers  
Where the morning stars sing out together  
And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers  
The red flag hammered in the mast-head.  Hide,  
Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.