larryhammer | “with a gentle leap/The rill runs o'er—and round fern, flowers, and ivy creep/Fantastically tangled”

For Sea Poetry Monday, we dive below the surf again:

The Coral Grove, James Gates Percival

Deep in the wave is a coral grove,
Where the purple mullet, and gold-fish rove,
Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue,
That never are wet with falling dew,
But in bright and changeful beauty shine,
Far down in the green and glassy brine.
The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift,
And the pearl shells spangle the flinty snow;
From coral rocks the sea plants lift
Their boughs, where the tides and billows flow;
The water is calm and still below,
For the winds and waves are absent there,
And the sands are bright as the stars that glow
In the motionless fields of upper air:
There with its waving blade of green,
The sea-flag streams through the silent water,
And the crimson leaf of the dulse is seen
To blush, like a banner bathed in slaughter:
There with a light and easy motion,
The fan-coral sweeps through the clear deep sea;
And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean.
Are bending like corn on file upland lea:
And life, in rare and beautiful forms,
Is sporting amid those bowers of stone,
And is safe, when the wrathful spirit of storms,
Has made the top of the wave his own:
And when the ship from his fury flies,
Where the myriad voices of ocean roar,
When the wind-god frowns in the murky skies,
And demons are waiting the wreck on shore;
Then far below in the peaceful sea,
The purple mullet, and gold-fish rove,
Where the waters murmur tranquilly,
Through the bending twigs of the coral grove.

Percival (1795-1856) was, serially, a physician, newspaper editor, army surgeon, chemistry professor, lexicographer's assistant, and geologist, but now best, if barely, remembered as the leading American poet of the 1820s. His reputation was eclipsed by Bryant and Lowell -- deservedly, as a lot of his poems are Byronism watered down with sentimentality and a touch of Keats -- and he published only one collection after 1830. "The Coral Grove" was the one piece of his that continued being anthologized a century later.

---L.

Subject quote from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto IV, st 116-117, The Byron.