Inhospitable, with its lords, is gone:
The champaign is one pyre; here embers rough
And black, here ash-heaps with hoar mould, mark out
The conflagration’s course: evanished
180 Is all that old fertility which Lot,
Seeing outspread before him,…
No ploughman spends his fruitless toil on glebes
Pitchy with soot: or if some acres there,
But half consumed, still strive to emulate
185 Autumn’s glad wealth, pears, peaches, and all fruits
Promise themselves full easely to the eye
In fairest bloom, until the plucker’s hand
Is on them: then forthwith the seeming fruit
Crumbles to dust ’neath the bewraying touch,
190 And turns to embers vain.
Thus, therefore (sky
And earth entombed alike), not e’en the sea
Lives there: the quiet of that quiet sea
Is death!—a sea which no wave animates
Through its anhealant volumes; which beneath
195 Its native Auster sighs not anywhere;
Which cannot from its depths one scaly race,
Or with smooth skin or cork-like fence encased,
Produce, or curled shell in single valve
Or double fold enclosed. Bitumen there
200 (The sooty reek of sea exust) alone,
With its own crop, a spurious harvest yields;
Which ’neath the stagnant surface vivid heat
From seething mass of sulphur and of brine
Maturing tempers, making earth cohere
205 Into a pitch marine. At season due
The heated water’s fatty ooze is borne
Up to the surface; and with foamy flakes
Over the level top a tawny skin
Is woven. They whose function is to catch
210 That ware put to, tilting their smooth skin down
With balance of their sides, to teach the film,
Once o’er the gunnel, to float in: for, lo!
Raising itself spontaneous, it will swim
Up to the edge of the unmoving craft;
215 And will, when pressed, for guerdon large, ensure
Immunity from the defiling touch
Of weft which female monthly efflux clothes.
Behold another portent notable,
Fruit of that sea’s disaster: all things cast