Arthur Henry Adams - The Garden of the Sea lyrics

THE infinite garden of the sea is His To play in. Gravely smiling He resigns To man his choice—this rugged plot of earth, Watches man tear it with his deep can*ls, Wound it with iron rails, scar it with roads, And spot its pleasant freshness with the sore Of festering cities, oozing heavy smoke. He sees and He forgives. Then gently takes His pliant sea into His yearning hands— As an old mother might caress a doll When all her sons are dead—and wistfully He moulds it. O, that He might so thrust man— That interloping soul of stubbornness— The solitary irreconcilable Of His subservient Universe—within The grim, unalterable grooves of law! But, ah! the sea, the fecund woman-sea, Is His to fashion as He wills! He girds It round with whitely gleaming paths of beach; Then, at His word, the blossoms of the spray Rise on their swaying wave-stalks, bloom and break, And scatter desolate petals on the foam. League-long His flower-bordered avenues In bending sward of blossom run. Lo, now A winter comes unwonted, heaping high His garden world with snow of wasted blooms. Or Spring sweeps in resistless, and the sea Shimmers—an orchard in her nuptial white! And sometimes He will smooth His garden plot, And cover with trim tapestry of gra** Its restless beauty, till there shyly break The daisies through, like pale hands timorous And fragile, groping blindly to the sun. Sometimes he plans great curving pathways, where 'Neath sullen shoulders of cool greenery The shadows crouch, and high above the sun Whispers his sunny secrets to the boughs That sway and ripple everlastingly. And sometimes, hidden by a moving ridge From ships that flit like furtive white moths by, The Master of the garden gravely walks The cool green paths in reverie along: Ah, what if I could turn into that lane Of pulsing wave, and see Him pacing there, As once of old they saw Him, with that look Of wistful sadness on His old kind face!