Peaked Hill Bars
On the dread bars at Peaked Hill
The sullen waves are strangely still;
And o’er that eerie sand dune’s crest
The winds, beguiling, seem at rest;
As the wild flare of Highland Light
Goes surging up into the night.
What sinister serenity
Pervades that graveyard of the sea,
Where sand bars, white as bone, submerge
Down where the tides intone a dirge
For houseless and unhallowed souls -
’Tis Death who broods among the shoals!
For hark, it comes, the thunderous gale
That makes those dunes and beaches quail,
As the wild winds and waves embroil
Those shoals until they seem to boil
And lift to heaven as loud a din
As though the fiends were caged within.
No mariners of old e’er sailed
More dangerous seas. Charybdis veiled
No starker terrors than those blue
And greenish shallows hide from view,
Where, crouched like tigers on the kill,
Lurk the dread bars at Peaked Hill!