The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (5.1895)

Hymn to the Sea*

By William Watson

I

Grant, O regal in bounty, a subtle and delicate largess ;

Grant an ethereal alms, out of the wealth of thy soul:
Suffer a tarrying minstrel, who finds and not fashions his
numbers,—

Who, from the commune of air, cages the volatile
song,—

Here to capture and prison some fugitive breath of thy
descant,

Thine and his own as thy roar lisped on the lips of a
shell,

Now while the vernal impulsion makes lyrical all that hath
language,

While, through the veins of the Earth, riots the ichor
of Spring,

* Copyright in America by John Lane.

While,