THE ATHEIST

Over a scurf of rocks the tide

Wanders inward far and wide,

Lifting the sea-weed's sloven hair,

Filling the pools and foaming there,

Sighing, sighing everywhere.

Merged are the marshes, merged the sands,

Save the dunes with pine-tree hands

Stretching upward toward the sky,

Where the sun, their god, moves high:

Would I too had a god — yea, I!

For, the sea is to me but sea,

And the sky but infinity.

Tides and times are but some chance

Born of a primal atom-dance.

All is a mesh of Circumstance.

In it there is no Heart — no Soul —

No illimitable Goal —

Only wild happenings, by wont

Made into laws no might can shunt

From the deep grooves in which they hunt.

Wings of the gull I watch or claws

Of the cold crab whose strangeness awes:

Faces of men that feel the force

Of a hid thing they call life's course:

It is their hoping or remorse.

Yet it may be that I have missed

Something that only they who tryst,

Not with the sequence of events

But with their viewless Immanence,

Find and acclaim with spirit-sense.