With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

With husky-haughty lips, O sea! Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore, Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions, (I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,) Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal, Thy ample, smiling face, dash’d with the sparkling dimples of the sun, Thy brooding scowl and murk⁠—thy unloos’d hurricanes, Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness; Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears⁠—a lack from all eternity in thy content, (Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee greatest⁠—no less could make thee,) Thy lonely state⁠—something thou ever seek’st and seek’st, yet never gain’st, Surely some right withheld⁠—some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of freedom-lover pent, Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chafing in those breakers, By lengthen’d swell, and spasm, and panting breath, And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves, And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter, And undertones of distant lion roar,