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With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

WITH HUSKY-HAUGHTY LIPS, O SEA!

With husky-haughty lips, O sea! Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore, Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions, (I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,) Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal, Thy ample, smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of the  
 sun,
Thy brooding scowl and murk—thy unloos'd hurricanes, Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness; Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears—a lack from all  
 eternity in thy content,
(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make  
 thee greatest—no less could make thee,)
Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek'st and seek'st, yet  
 never gain'st,
Surely some right withheld—some voice, in huge monotonous  
 rage, of freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those  
 breakers,
By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath, And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves, And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter, And undertones of distant lion roar, (Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear—but now, rapport for  
 once,
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,) The first and last confession of the globe, Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms, The tale of cosmic elemental passion, Thou tellest to a kindred soul.
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