The Sea Had Jeeringly Kept

It Is Only When Caught In The Swift, Sudden Turn Of Death, That Mortals Realise The Silent, Subtle, Ever-present Perils Of Life.

In Glades They Meet Skull After Skull Where Pine Cones Lay-the Rusted Gun, Green Shoes Full Of Bones, The Mouldering Coat And Cuddled Up Skeleton; And Scores Of Such. Some Start As In Dreams, And Comrades Lost Bemoan; By The Edge Of Those Wilds Stonewall Had Charged- But The Year And The Man Were Gone.

Erie, And Ontario, And Huron, And Superior, And Michigan Possess An Ocean-like Expansiveness, With Many Of The Ocean's Noblest Traits... They Are Swept By Borean And Dismasting Blasts As Direful As Any That Lash The Salted Wave; They Know What Shipwrecks Are, For Out Of Sight Of Land, However Inland, They Have Drowned Full Many A Midnight Ship With All Its Shrieking Crew.

Methinks We Have Hugely Mistaken This Matter Of Life And Death. Methinks That What They Call My Shadow Here On Earth Is My True Substance. Methinks That In Looking At Things Spiritual, We Are Too Much Like Oysters Observing The Sun Through The Water, And Thinking That Thick Water The Thinnest Of Air. Me Thinks My Body Is But The Lees Of My Better Being. In Fact Take My Body Who Will, Take It I Say, It Is Not Me.

Thou Saw'st The Locked Lovers When Leaping From Their Flaming Ship; Heart To Heart They Sank Beneath The Exulting Wave; True To Each Other, When Heaven Seemed False To Them.