Against the granite of our harbour wall,
to smash destructively its surging strength,
it's headed here! See, out there, rolling in,
that seventh wave, the highest, sweeping down.
Wherever was that foaming monster born,
that's curved its way across Atlantic depths?
Perhaps engendered way out there at sea,
beneath some deep depression's cyclone curled,
by Newfoundland's far, fog-filled fishing banks.
The power in that roller's pictured plain
as, rushing on, its crest, high-soaring, cracks;
such weight of wave, invincible and yet
the breaker broke; our harbour wall unharmed,
protecting well those craft lain in its lee;
To windward, shattered metamorphosis,
from solid green to dazzling white explodes,
providing fodder for photographers.
Forever captured in a shutter's click,
yet vanished, sucked back by the undertow
that hollows out a space for subsequence;
Full many, in this equinoctial gale
spectacular, yet none in majesty
exceeded that one wave, whipped up by wind,
into a maritime escarpment, sped
by ocean currents, till the spring tide's flood
secured its hold, then, powered by the moon,
It smashed inconsequentially its surge
Against the granite of our harbour wall.
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Author Notes
From the calm of the ebbing tide, described in the previous chapter, we move on here to the ravages of an equinoctial gale, with wind over a flooding tide making conditions extremely hazardous. This too is a spring tide, when the new moon ensures the greatest variation between high and low tides.
This time, I have chosen blank verse as the form. No rhyme just the steady beat of the iambic pentameter's waves, pounding against the page's breakwater. I felt that the verse style used by Shakespeare throughout most of his dramatic texts (he occasionally let some of his less exalted characters, like Macbeth's porter, lapse into prose) was a good style to use when the sea, as described here, is at its most dramatic.
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