The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 37: FAILURE TRIUMPHANT

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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

FAILURE TRIUMPHANT

How many a captain wave, since sea began,

Has lordly led the charge against the shore,

Whose crest a jewelled plume of rainbow bore,

As iris Hope arches the march of Man:

How many a wave, brave-glittering in the van,

Has melted as a cloud in spray and roar—

A flashing column prone, and next, no more!

So runs the tale, since Time’s first sand outran.

So ends the antique tale. Stay! ends it so?

Though every billow faint into a ghost,

The all-embracing ocean—that gives birth,

Receives, and recreates—in ebb and flow,

A vast sky-coupled Mystery round the coast,

Works out its will upon the face of earth.