Classic Poem

Came first, five hundred miles from port,
A perching bird of homely sort,
And next in tumbling waters gray
Nantucket's gallant lightship lay
Rocking, lonely, small and black,
A moment's friend upon the track.

And then at night from shores unseen
Shone sparsely scattered lights serene,
Sweet tokens after all the days
Shifting and void of the sea's ways:
We watched past midnight to divine
The incredible shore's uncertain line;

Then, very wakeful, went below
Thrilled a new continent to know,
Long talked about in commonplace,
Now a strange planet reached through space;
We drained the flask we dared not keep
And laughed and talked ourselves to sleep.

Chill dawn; and through the porthole's glass
Firm-circled by its rim of brass
A smoother sea, a warming fold
Of woods, browned with a year grown old:
The coast-line of an English shire
And in the midst a cosy spire.

Solent and Staten Island, these
Greet sisterly across the seas,
And in confederate kindness spread
For every stranger newly sped
From either to the other shore
Scenes he has known and loved before.

Anchored we waited. The ship stirred.
The shore went past. O dawning word
That filled our souls with silent awe!
Lovely things from heaven we saw,
Over the waters far up stream
Sublime companions of a dream:

A fair phantasmal company
Of goddesses in the morning sky,
Concourse serene of starry powers
Musing on other worlds than ours!
The water sparkled: the sun shone:
Mysteriously they were gone.

Gone: in their places fixt appearing
A mass of buildings, heightening, nearing,
A noble group fit for a great
New hemisphere's majestic gate,
Till as we slowly steamed ahead
In straggling line the cluster spread.

Each up its slice of skyway goes,
Windows in thousand chessboard rows;
Pointed and lean and broad and blunt
Behind the rusty water-front,
In random rivalry they climb
The oddest pinnacles of Time.