Wherefore
BLACK sea, black sky! A ponderous steamship driving
Between them, laboring westward on her way,
And in her path a trap of Death’s contriving
Waiting remorseless for its easy prey.
Hundreds of souls within her frame lie dreaming,
Hoping and fearing, longing for the light:
With human life and thought and feeling teeming,
She struggles onward through the starless night.
Upon her furnace fires fresh fuel flinging,
The swarthy firemen grumble at the dust
Mixed with the coal —when suddenly upspringing,
Swift through the smoke-stack like a signal thrust,
Flares a red flame, a dread illumination!
A cry, —a tumult! Slowly to her helm
The vessel yields, 'mid shouts of acclamation,
And joy and terror all her crew o’erwelm;
For looming from the blackness drear before them
Discovered is the iceberg —hardly seen,
Its ghastly precipices hanging o’er them,
Its reddened peaks, with dreadful chasms between,
Ere darkness swallows it again! and veering
Out of its track the brave ship onward steers,
Just grazing ruin. Trembling still, and fearing,
Her grateful people melt in prayers and tears.
Is it a mockery, their profound thanksgiving?
Another ship goes shuddering to her doom
Unwarned, that very night, with hopes as living
With freight as precious, lost amid the gloom,
With not a ray to show the apparition
Waiting to slay her, none to cry “Beware!”
Rushing straight onward headlong to perdition,
And for her crew no time vouchsafed for prayer.
Could they have stormed Heaven’s gate with anguished praying,
It would not have availed a feather’s weight
Against their doom. Yet were they disobeying
No law of God, to beckon such a fate.
And do not tell me the Almighty Master
Would work a miracle to save the one,
And yield the other up to dire disaster,
By merely human justice thus outdone!
Vainly we weep and wrestle with our sorrow —
We cannot see his roads, they lie so broad:
But his eternal day knows no to-morrow,
And life and death are all the same with God.
