Not had a poem here for a while. Looking over a few photos taken off the Moray Coast (the day we saw the pod of dolphins), they made me wistful with inward hard to name longing. The sea does that to me. Maybe it's the rhythm of the waves, the play of light, my own smallness gazing at immensity.
Keats was a Romantic poet – I'm not sure how much credible currency he carries in a culture that can be crudely unromantic about the natural world. But his words place me in front of the sea, insist that I look and listen, and be startled back into a deeper perception of who I am, what life is really for, and why being a human being capable of such reflective thought and self knowing humility in front of a vast gentleness of dangerous power, is a reminder of the truth at the centre of all existence, including my own – "Fear not, I have called you by name, you are mine….when you walk through the waters they shall not overwhelm you…… ".
On
the Sea John Keats
It keeps
eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ’tis in such gentle temper found
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved
for days from whence it sometime fell
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude
Or fed too much with cloying melody –
Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!
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