我从冰川了,d一千英里ue north Beyond Cape Chidley; And the spawning, When my vast, wallowing bulk went under, Emerged and heaved aloft, Shaking down cataracts from its rocking sides, With mountainous surge and thunder Outraged the silence of the Arctic sea. Before I was thrust forth A thousand years I crept, Crawling, crawling, crawling irresistibly, Hid in the blue womb of the eternal ice, While under me the tortured rock Groaned, And over me the immeasurable desolation slept. Under the pallid dawning Of the lidless Arctic day Forever no life stirred. No wing of bird -- Of ghostly owl low winnowing Or fleet-winged ptarmigan fleeing the pounce of death, -- No foot of backward-glancing fox Half glimpsed, and vanishing like a breath, -- No lean and gauntly stalking bear, Stalking his prey. Only the white sun, circling the white sky. Only the wind screaming perpetually. And then the night -- The long night, naked, high over the roof of the world, Where time seemed frozen in the cold of space, -- Now black, and torn with cry Of unseen voices where the storm raged by, Now radiant with spectral light As the vault of heaven split wide To let the flaming Polar cohorts through, And close ranked spears of gold and blue, Thin scarlet and thin green, Hurtled and clashed across the sphere And hissed in sibilant whisperings, And died. And then the stark moon, swinging low, Silver, indifferent, serene, Over the sheeted snow. But now, an Alp afloat, In seizure of the surreptitious tide, Began my long drift south to a remote And unimagined doom. Scornful of storm, Unjarred by thunderous buffetting of seas, Shearing the giant floes aside, Ploughing the wide-flung ice-fields in a spume That smoked far up my ponderous flanks, Onward I fared, My ice-blue pinnacles rendering back the sun In darts of sharp radiance; My bases fathoms deep in the dark profound. And now around me Life and the frigid waters all aswarm. The smooth wave creamed With tiny capelin and the small pale squid, -- So pale the light struck through them. Gulls and gannets screamed Over the feast, and gorged themselves, and rose, A clamour of weaving wings, and hid Momently my face. The great bull whales With cavernous jaws agape, Scooped in the spoil, and slept, Their humped forms just awash, and rocking softly, -- Or sounded down, down to the deeps, and nosed Along my ribbed and sunken roots, And in the green gloom scattered the pasturing cod. And so I voyaged on, down the dim parallels, Convoyed by fields Of countless calving seals Mild-featured, innocent-eyed, and unforeknowing The doom of the red flenching knives. I passed the storm-racked gate Of Hudson Strait, And savage Chidley where the warring tides In white wrath seethe forever. Down along the sounding shore Of iron-fanged, many-watered Labrador Slow weeks I shaped my course, and saw Dark Mokkowic and dark Napiskawa, And came at last off lone Belle Isle, the bane Of ships and snare of bergs. Here, by the deep conflicting currents drawn, I hung, And swung, The inland voices Gulfward calling me To ground amid my peers on the alien strand And roam no more. But then an off-shore wind, A great wind fraught with fate, Caught me and pressed me back, And I resumed my solitary way. Slowly I bore South-east by bastioned Bauld, And passed the sentinel light far-beaming late Along the liners' track, And slanted out Atlanticwards, until Above the treacherous swaths of fog Faded from the view the loom of Newfoundland. Beautiful, ethereal In the blue sparkle of the gleaming day, A soaring miracle Of white immensity, I was the cynosure of passing ships That wondered and were gone, Their wreathed smoke trailing them beyonf the verge. And when in the night they passed -- The night of stars and calm, Forged up and passed, with churning surge And throb of huge propellers, and long-drawn Luminous wake behind, And sharp, small lights in rows, I lay a ghost of menace chill and still, A shape pearl-pale and monstrous, off to leeward, Blurring the thin horizon line. Day dragged on day, And then came fog, By noon, blind-white, And in the night Black-thick and smothering the sight. Folded therein I waited, Waited I knew not what And heeded not, Greatly incurious and unconcerned. I heard the small waves lapping along my base, Lipping and whispering, lisping with bated breath A casual expectancy of death. I heard remote The deep,