Two Ships

O sea! O expanse spread out in blue and light and clarity... There, on your horizon, a huge ship plows along, swaying among your waves, striking your calm surface with recklessness and clamor, cleaving the heart of your waters in its madness, so that it fills your dreaming stillness with din, and makes light of your safety and your depth...

And on the surface of my soul there is a ship more terrible still, which has taken my heart for a captain; he sails her through seas charged with longing, passion, and mystery... He is content and serene: his whole being is drawn wherever he descries nobility and abundance, and out of his weakness he lavishes the strength to stand firm before the features of the storms, and in his bitter resignation he bestows the draught of rapture that the eagles sip in the breadth of their skies...

And he is faltering, artless in life; with the keen eye of his insight he wraps himself in the garment of song, and sees existence as a desolation coursing through a young spirit that has grown used to living, as living has grown used to her...

On the surface of my soul is a ship brimming with loads, heavy with burdens; and the shore is far from her — it stretches out no helping hand, and sends no throb of light. The loads of my ship are the sediment of whole generations, which made of the being panting after loftiness a rare stigma, fastened upon her whom nature brought forth to be female. If she speaks, they wonder: does she speak? If she hears, they stare into her face, making certain she has ears? And if she feels, their hands fly to her ribs, searching for the wellspring of feeling in her! Could it be a ruby heart that God set in the new being, who has begun to know that in the universe there is such a thing as feeling!!

The ship of my soul, O sea, roams the regions of pain, to kiss every wound, to moan with every choking grief, to sob in silence with the tormented, the despairing, and the weeping...

My ship sways with faith, to be gladdened by the rapture of revelation, sent forth by a worshipping eye in the prayer-niche of a mosque, or by a supplicating throat in the cloister of a church...

Your ship is a great conqueror, firm of build, adorned on every side; and the ship of my soul is her equal in conquest and firmness, but she has nothing of her terror. She melts with tenderness at a child's smile and an old man's glance; she well-nigh sinks under weakness at the tombs of the past, among the glories of history and its wailing sighs! And how often she strives across the centuries, embracing phantoms she has loved, so that every fiber in her trembles before the orphan nursling of the desert, and before the dark-skinned crucified one of Nazareth!

My ship strives between despair and its ebb-tides; a storm of surging, wretched feelings winnows her, driven on by a striving for a noble launching-forth, for a tempestuous loftiness, for a freedom clean of fetters.

And between the two ships, O sea, there is a captivating likeness!

Your ship moves with slow, measured steps, seeking the harbor's arm to enfold her and to lay down her burdens within its sides...

And the ship of my soul is drawn toward extinction, with an insistent inclination toward the sheltering sides of death, toward its tender touch upon the parting of my hair, toward the aching abandon upon its shoulders — which would rescue my soul from her meager hopes and from her false, misleading works!

In your ship, O sea, is all man's capability, his fine taste, and the beauty of his arrangement: in her, music is plaintive song and delight; the circles of amusement are gathered in the halls; and the travelers on her deck — the horizon floods them with blue dreams, and the stillness of the sky fills them with a plaintive intimacy...

And in the ship of my soul are lights more brilliant and more seizing: a smile of friendship comes to them as a guest and sharpens their glow; a honeyed word passes over her and she overflows with gladness; gentleness and courtesy enchant her, so that she kneels to every great and good soul, and bows down before the gratitude an orphan child brings, in a rose he gives on a winter morning!

In your ship are all shapes and hues of people: in her the joyful and the sorrowful, the departing and the hopeful, the sanguine and the yearning...

In her is the old man hoping for convalescence and safety, and the merchant whose dreams are sated with broad profit, and the children, all song and merriment, caring not whether they reach Africa or dawdle along a slow course that knows neither end nor purpose... And the dreamers at her rail — how sweet their wishes are, how many, how varied, how delicious!

Might there be among them some great writer, whose imaginings hold converse with the wondrous breadth of the deep, so that he plunges, a diver, into the abyss of the depths, drawing out pearls of thought splendid in their spirituality and their rarity!

Or perhaps there is a solitary girl, her heart and mind aflutter, sending all her dreams up to the stars and the clouds, to lose herself in the flood of far journeys and the rapture of gazing toward the cities that come into view and the new shores...

And in the ship of my soul are such hues of conscience and feeling as long to slip free of their horizon and look out upon a universe teeming with delicacy and authenticity, overflowing with poetic imagination and legend, welling with freshness and majesty — that my spirit may go clothed in health and goodness.

And in my ship one thought rises to kill another; one inclination gets up to blot out another; a youthful feeling is torn apart by an aged feeling; and hope is beaten down by every kind of despair and monotonous sorrow...

And in the fog of my imagination live a thousand cherished faces; and in my spirit blazes a huge flame of love, which gathers to itself the ethereal eyes of children, kisses the worn cheeks of old women, and applauds the dreams of youth that range through strong and healthy souls...!