Cale Young Rice

Haunted Seas

Summary

The poem paints a bleak, mournful coastal scene where a glassy, motionless sea beneath a grey sky evokes stillness and death; subtle movement—drifting seaweed, a wavering bird with a ghostly cry, and a fog that refuses to lift—only deepens the sense of stagnation and loss. A derelict vessel, once tossed and now at rest, suggests abandonment and finality, while the circling shark and the image of spent prey introduce predation and the inevitability of decay. Overall the poem uses spare, spectral imagery to meditate on loneliness, mortality, and nature’s indifferent continuation of life and death.

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A gleaming glassy ocean
Under a sky of grey;
A tide that dreams of motion,
Or moves, as the dead may;
A bird that dips and wavers
Over lone waters round,
Then with a cry that quavers
Is gone—a spectral sound.

The brown sad sea-weed drifting
Far from the land, and lost;
The faint warm fog unlifting,
The derelict long tossed,
But now at rest—though haunted
By the death-scenting shark,
Whose prey no more undaunted
Slips from it, spent and stark.

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