Page:Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, 1846).djvu/80

70 No effort from the haunted air

The ghastly scene could banish;

That hovering wave, arrested there,

Rolled—throbbed—but did not vanish.

If Gilbert upward turned his gaze,

He saw the ocean-shadow;

If he looked down, the endless seas

Lay green as summer meadow.

And straight before, the pale corpse lay,

Upborne by air or billow,

So near, he could have touched the spray

That churned around its pillow.

The hollow anguish of the face

Had moved a fiend to sorrow;

Not Death's fixed calm could rase the trace

Of suffering's deep-worn furrow.

All moved; a strong returning blast,

The mass of waters raising,

Bore wave and passive carcase past,

While Gilbert yet was gazing.

Deep in her isle-conceiving womb,

It seemed the Ocean thundered,

And soon, by realms of rushing gloom,

Were seer and phantom sundered.

Then swept some timbers from a wreck,

On following surges riding;

Then sea-weed, in the turbid rack

Uptorn, went slowly gliding.