Part 1

ON OLD CAPE COD

_By Ferdinand C. Lane_

_Drawings by Rena V. Rockwell_

SECOND EDITION

To Emma - my Wife

Copyright 1961 by Ferdinand C. Lane

[Illustration]

ON OLD CAPE COD

How rich is life on old Cape Cod Where autumn smiles in golden rod, And marshes flame, though not with fire - A region blest of heart’s desire. In vain we’d roam the Seven Seas There are no quainter shores than these.

Here nature in indulgent mood Enfolds us with her solitude; And here her cleansing winds combine The tonic of the salt and pine, The while old ocean’s muffled swells Are chiming like cathedral bells.

The days drift by without a care As sweet fern odors scent the air, And watching wheeling gulls at play The world of strife seems far away. It must have been a kindly God Who shaped the sands of old Cape Cod.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

On Monomoy 5

The Song of the Sea Shell 6

Winds of the Cape 7

The Enchanted Marsh 8

The Fragrance of the Cape 9

Sea Lavender 10

The Final Rose 10

Fairy Rings 11

Beach Plums 12

On Truro Hills 13

My Drift Wood Fire 15

The Sand Piper 16

The Whistling Buoy off Nauset 17

Peaked Hill Bars 18

The Rime of the Three Captains 19

Storm Signals 20

Neptune’s Coursers 21

To a Spider Web wet with Dew 22

The Dunes 23

The Flight of the Wild Geese 25

Sweet Fern 26

White Sail 26

The Humming Bird 27

O Road that Winds Among the Hills 28

The Beach Grass Threnody 28

To a Rose Jar 29

Blue Berries 30

The Watcher 31

The Sea Shell Boat 32

Flotsam 33

The Ancient Log Book 34

The Dance of the Moon Beams 35

Marshes of Sandwich 37

The Smile of the Sea 37

Our Cape Cod Home 38

Thunder Storm Off Race Point 40

To a Scrimshawed Whale’s Tooth 41

Creeping Fog 42

Wooden Sailor 43

The Dreamer 44

The Chant of the Night Wind 45

Midnight 46

The Golden Rod 47

Wild Roses 48

The Coast Guard Station 49

Keeper of the Light 50

On Chatham Bars 51

The Old Timer’s Lament 52

Revery 53

The Old Hulk 54

The Modernists 55

When the Locusts are In Bloom 57

The Harvest of the Sea 58

Beach Grass 59

The Swamp Heron 61

The Throes of Creation 62

Hog’s Back Church 63

Beyond the Point 66

The Winds of Time 67

To an Aged Willow 68

The Old Woods Road 69

The Poverty Weed 70

The Sweep of the Tides 71

Lost Billingsgate 73

Transformed 74

Haunting Echoes 74

Lost at Sea 75

The Aspen 76

The Song of the Sea Gulls 77

Broken Fragments 78

Workers of Magic 79

My Golden Fleece 80

The Lone Lilac 81

Friendly Lights 82

To My Cherry Blossom 83

Grains of Sand 84

The Funeral Wreath 84

Memory 85

The Stoker 89

Imagination 91

In Wellfleet by the Sea 95

ON MONOMOY

Gigantic finger, joint by joint, Thrust out in warning from the land To lurking shoals, along your point We tread a skeleton of sand, Till at the end we seem to be Where all the world dissolves in sea On Monomoy.

O’er Stone Horse shoal and Pollock Rip The sullen tides sweep on apace Where many a gallant sailing ship Has found her final resting place; But of the dead - no man may say Till redly dawns the judgment day On Monomoy.

For fishermen tell ghastly tales Of wrecks and shuddering moons that mark Red murder done, and spectral hails Of Yo-Hoes keening from the dark! So in the night when breakers moan Fear trails his steps who walks alone On Monomoy.

Waif of the seas and old Cape Cod Where Gosnold voyaged long ago, Where bold Champlain in armor trod, What tales the muttering undertow Could Whisper - or the sea birds scream To brooding dune and marsh adream On Monomoy.

THE SONG OF THE SEA SHELL

Come press your coral lip against my ear Frail vagrant of the sea, And sing to me the songs I love to hear From ocean’s symphony.

Of tides that set in far off palmy isles Where ukuleles strum, And star eyed maidens wreathed in flowers and smiles Dance to your rhythmic hum.

No plaintive bird, full throated with the spring, Warbles a sweeter note Than those enchanting melodies that ring Within your pearly throat.

Sonorous chords that sound a minor key, Sea chanties hoarse and low, The echoes of the mermaid’s minstrelsy, And songs the sirens know.

But now a bit of flotsam on the beach Imprisoned in my hand, I listen to the mysteries you teach And strive to understand.

Your music leaves me in a brooding vein Sweet chantress of the deep, For in those elfin strains you wake again From death’s engulfing sleep

And when, like you, upon life’s farthest shore Time bears my empty shell, O may such songs as your immortal store Be mine as well!

WINDS OF THE CAPE

Winds of the Cape, go tearing by Down the wild canyons of the sky! When winter’s cold has stripped the trees, And fields are bare and waters freeze, We hear them in the dead of night Careering on their headlong flight - The formless horsemen of the blast In gales of darkness rushing past!

Winds of the Cape in gladness ring With all the lilting songs of spring! When fresh and clean the world awakes, And petals fall in snowy flakes From beach plum bush and apple tree There comes the haunting melody From sky land’s caravans once more - Wild geese in flight for Labrador!

Winds of the Cape in Summer days When shore and dune dissolve in haze, Come drifting down the heavenly leas From cloudland’s floating Hebrides, Caressing with your langorous calm, And coolness like a healing balm; And whispering tales of Araby Palm fringing some enchanted sea.

Winds of the Cape, what sadness blends In those wild gusts that Autumn sends Down empty hallways of the sky, To echo ever mournfully The footsteps of the dying year; To grieve o’er woods and meadows sere For things we loved so much - but lost Like blossoms withered by the frost.

THE ENCHANTED MARSH

O ripples in the marshland grass Like waves on an enchanted sea, The winds, with trailing garments pass Invisible adown the lea Each footprint, evanescent, pressed In shadowed highlight, trough and crest.

No spray upon those waves is seen To splash upon the marshy bank; Uncanny sea so strangely green! While lurking in those coverts dank What things of the abyss may dwell Only the fear hushed winds might tell.

Far off where dunes aspiring melt Into the sky, those currents flow In turmoil neither heard nor felt How furtively they come and go! Things yet undreamed of well might be Submerged beneath so weird a sea.

No surges break but in our ear An elfin murmuring seems to sound, So vague it is we scarce may hear. O can it be the far off pound Of foamless surf on sands unseen Beyond that shimmering waste of green?

And we who sail that eerie sea Go drifting on a tide of dreams To unknown isles in fantasy, Borne on the undulating beams Of sun, dim litten, or the moon That cringes o’er the farthest dune.

How timelessly it ebbs and flows, That sea of ever changing light, And whence it bears us no one knows To what wild chasms of the night Where fancy, yearning to explore Pauses, aghast, upon the shore.

THE FRAGRANCE OF THE CAPE

The sun, that sovereign alchemist, and winds That do his bidding, gleaning from the wilds Sweet essences and savory condiments Have mingled them in that vast crucible Of hill and hollow, swamp and circling sea, And like the witch’s cauldrons, from that brew Evoked a fragrance sweet as Araby. The honeyed breath of Mayflowers in the spring, The nectar lingering in the elfin cups Of purple lilacs, fairy scents distilled By pendant locust blossoms, essences That lade the air when the wild roses bloom In scarlet flames that beautify the hills; The resinous aroma of the pines In summer heats when crows call languidly To droning bumble bees and gulls float past Like wisps of snowy cloud; the musk of swamps Where swaying cat tails shimmer in the sun And the noon stillness echoes to the calls Of blackbirds clarion shrill; the pungent smell Of sage grass by the tidal pool, the spice Of sweet fern from the hillsides redolent With beachplum and the subtle frankincense Of waxen bayberry, and over all The faint, elusive permeating scent Of sand and salt and spray from shore and sea. The mace and cinnamon of far off isles Are in that odor intimate and quaint And lasting as the memories that cling To weathered houses, gardens colorful With hollyhocks and dahlias, rimmed with shells; Or stranded hulls that brood in lonely coves By crumbling piers where once proud vessels lay. The romance and adventure of those days When stanch descendants of the Pilgrim band Carved out from sand and wilderness their homes And wrung a hard subsistence from the deep, Still linger in the memories of that time, And in the perfume subtle, vague and strange That charm elusive as the whispering breeze, Sad as the setting sun athwart the dunes, Mysterious as the ever changing sea, The wild sweet, haunting fragrance of the Cape.

SEA LAVENDER

Upon the marsh a filmy blur As delicate as gossamer; A wraith of fog, a vaporous wisp With stem and leaves and branches crisp, Their fibre toughened by the gale, Can plant so hardy seem so frail?

Half hidden mid its stalks of green The flowerets are scarcely seen As dainty specks of ocean’s blue, Or bits of sky that filtered through, To melt in tints of amethyst As evanescent as the mist.

And now through many a lacey line That fairy fingers intertwine Upon my mantelpiece at last You shed the fragrance of the past; A wraith of marshland witchery - A floral memory of the sea.

THE FINAL ROSE

From an ember bud that glows, In September flames a rose.

Bursting prison doors of bark, Blithely risen like a lark.

Sweetly winging to my room, Ever singing in perfume.

Tardy comer, woodsprite blest, Dying summer’s last and best!

[Illustration]

FAIRY RINGS

Far and near on every hand Fairy rings bedeck the sand, Footprints of the sportive elves Dancing gaily with themselves; Hand in hand and round and round Treading circles on the ground Nightly, by the glow worm’s ray To the cricket’s roundelay.

Ardently each woodland gnome Clasps a fairy from the foam, Waltzing till the wondering moon Sees each circle as a rune In a maze of mystery For the puzzled stars to see, While the revellers at dawn Leave a myriad circles drawn.

Or perchance the compass grass Whirled by wandering airs that pass Has engraved those strange designs In its circumscribed confines. Archimedes never drew Circles more exact or true Than each needle pointed blade Razor edged and green as jade. Can we delve the cryptic sense From each grooved circumference? In the grass that etched those rings What immortal spirit springs? Or what inspirations stir The bewitched geometer To such elfin tracery On the sands beside the sea?

BEACH PLUMS

How daintily your blossoms cling Like memories of winter snows; The maiden promises of spring That Nature, wakening, bestows; White as a bridal veil of gauze O’er branches gnarled like eagle’s claws.

How richly ripe and purple hued You lure the eager appetite When autumn yields in kindliest mood Those luscious globules of delight! The sylvan elves must brew that taste From sea and dune and scented waste.

For only skill like theirs could blend From woodland wild and rolling brine Such flavors. Or perchance they lend Their elven powers to those divine So that the tang of earth and sky Is mingled in their alchemy.

Or were some darker rites invoked Some ritual of the churchman’s hell; Malignant imps and beldams cloaked In blackness capering neath the spell Of gibbous moons obscure and lone - Such witchcraft we might yet condone.

Yes, though we know not whence you came Your sweet caresses to the tongue Would still delight us just the same Whether from day or darkness sprung; Content and carefree, from the stems To pluck such epicurean gems.

ON TRURO HILLS

Upon those dome like hills of sand A wonderous carpet has been laid, Rich as the rugs of Samarkand And gorgeous as some rare brocade Wrought on the looms of far Cathay Or by the shrines of Mandalay.

It covers well those hills of sand That glaciers rounded long ago, Nor can the dyes of Samarkand Display a stranger, deeper glow Such tints of red and gray and green With gold and amber in between.

To rolling slopes the lichens cling And tufts of bunch grass russet sere, Through them the murmurous breezes sing While clustering sweet fern, far and near Wafts spicy smells like incense o’er Those lonely hills from wood to shore

The wild bearberry shyly twines Its sinuous length through grass and moss, How glossy are its clinging vines From green to rusty red. Across Its sheen the sunbeams dreamily Play like the waves upon the sea.

Blueberry clumps in curving lines Mingle with waxen bayberry To trace their arabesque designs On richly wrought embroidery, With borders in the marshy sedge And fringing beach grass for the edge.

A treeless waste it seems, but no The scrub oak, lichen crusted, cowers And dwarf pines, gnarled and twisted, grow By beach plum thickets, white with flowers A waste that blooms with rarer dyes Than jungles turn to tropic skies.

And there are thread bare patches too That add more color to the heath For where the texture is worn through It shows the golden sands beneath, While in the afternoon’s slant rays All outlines blur in purple haze.

Uncanny moorland, desolate And in the dusk how weirdly still, A landscape one can ne’er forget. O’er ghostly hollow wraithlike hill What timid moonsprites nightly flee The muttering demons of the sea!

The ebbing seasons merely change That coverlet from day to day, By shifting, in their varied range From sober hues to some more gay, While from the sea and sky and air Fresh color splashes everywhere.

That turf rough seeded by the wind And nurtured by the pensive sun, Is richer than the shawls of Ind, Or that famed carpet once begun By Jinns and Peris, known of yore, That through the air the Genii bore.

Perhaps on some enchanted breeze From Kurdistan or Araby Those Genii over unknown seas Have borne this priceless tapestry, This fabric wrought in Faery land To beautify a barren strand.

’Tis woven on the loom of time Spun from the filaments of dreams, This magic carpet. Age nor clime Can match its pattern, or the streams Of color lavish Nature spills O’er Truro’s ancient, windswept hills

MY DRIFT WOOD FIRE

Heap high the wood on my rusty grate As I sit enthroned like a potentate In my old arm chair, while the crackling blaze Unbars the gates, to my dazzled gaze, Of a flame bright world that my fancy weaves Though the storm may batter the creaking eaves.

There is Norway pine from the Arctic’s chill From wrecks that splintered off Peaked Hill; There is stout oak fashioned by broad axe blows, And stranger wood that the jungle grows; For such is the tribute I levy, - these Are the far flung gifts of the seven seas.

The surf that claws at the wind swept beach Like skeleton fingers seems to reach For my lonely shelter; but staunch it stands Though its walls resound to the rattling sands In volleys hurled by the howling blasts; - Pile on those staves and that stump of mast!

Up the roaring chimney the black smoke goes But O the glory that ebbs and flows On the heat warped ceiling and buckled floor, In green and purple; with ruddy ore That glints in gold where the salt burns through Mid flames that dance in an elfin blue!

My home may seem but a weathered shack Where the cold creeps in through many a crack; But my fire’s bright magic has changed all these To a castle hall where I take my ease, With the window flaunting in sparkling lines My royal crest that the frost designs.

Yes, I am a king carefree and bold And I laugh at the gale and the winter’s cold. My grate? ’Tis a jewel vault of Ind. That music wild? - It is not the wind But my minstrel’s songs, for my heart’s desire I have found at last in my drift wood fire!

THE SAND PIPER

Quaint manikin, what bids you keep Such formal distance with your droll Divertisements, the while I stroll In solitude beside the deep?

Your mannerisms first suggest A Puritan sedate and prim; Then change you by capricious whim Into a gnome with hooded crest,

Or bit of animated foam, Or e’en a cloud wisp drifting by, - What region in the sea or sky Or lonely dune can you call home?

Your footsteps mincing gleefully Thread in and out along the verge Embroidering the creamy surge, - Strange little old man of the sea!

But in your antic frolicking, Your beak grotesque and solemn eye, Your stilt-like legs, your piping cry, And sudden ecstasies of wing,

There is a kinship with the spray Wind driven, and the restless sand, A mingling of the sea and land, The hither and the far away.

Blithe atomy, bold Nature’s child Within you pulses glad and free With joyous spontaneity The tameless spirit of the wild!

THE WHISTLING BUOY OFF NAUSET

Voice of unutterable woe Wailing alone at sea! Borne on the shuddering winds that blow Out of the dark to me. Now far - now near To the frightened ear Comes that monody wild and free. Mingled of menace and grief and fear With a maniac chuckle of glee - O hear! That note of demoniac glee!

Prophet of peril and storm, Harbinger, Triton and brute, Mariners peering to glimpse your form Cheer at your hoarse salute - That gurgling sound Of a sob half drowned That is vague as the muttering foam! Staggering drunkenly to and fro, You buffet the tide rips and undertow, A fettered gnome In the grip of the shoals below.

Hark to that ominous roar Freezing the blood with dread! Vampire waves on a spectral shore Ravening over the dead. O-oo, O-oo! Is your wild adieu To the souls that the winds have sped! Breakers are howling like wolves on the trail, Foaming and gnashing and leaping the rail, Where a shrieking crew Are lost in the maddened gale.

Wraith of the dangerous seas, Haunting the skeleton sands, Creature of iron and billow and breeze Wrought by a mortal’s hands. Your eerie moan So weird - so lone Is a medley of boding and rapture and groan. Roisterer, mourner and demon I wis Strangest of beings in ocean’s abyss Your elfin cry Is a note of its infinite mystery.

PEAKED HILL BARS

On the dread bars at Peaked Hill The sullen waves are strangely still; And o’er that eerie sand dune’s crest The winds, beguiling, seem at rest; As the wild flare of Highland Light Goes surging up into the night.

What sinister serenity Pervades that graveyard of the sea, Where sand bars, white as bone, submerge Down where the tides intone a dirge For houseless and unhallowed souls - ’Tis Death who broods among the shoals!

For hark, it comes, the thunderous gale That makes those dunes and beaches quail, As the wild winds and waves embroil Those shoals until they seem to boil And lift to heaven as loud a din As though the fiends were caged within.

No mariners of old e’er sailed More dangerous seas. Charybdis veiled No starker terrors than those blue And greenish shallows hide from view, Where, crouched like tigers on the kill, Lurk the dread bars at Peaked Hill!

THE RIME OF THE THREE CAPTAINS

Three captains lounged before the blaze Of drift wood burning cheerily, And they warmed to ventures of other days In salty tales of the sea.

Tarred were the ropes coiled under the eaves, Tar had dripped on the warping floor, Beach sand fluttered like withered leaves And sifted under the door.

The salt that crusted the chimney wide Had tinged the flames with yellows and reds; Salt were the wavelets that lapped outside, And white as the salt were their heads.

Visions of many a tropic clime In the firelight seemed to come and go; Till friends they had known in their youthful prime Took form in the radiant glow.

As time cracked voices droned away Through strange adventures in days gone by, One voyaged with them to far Cathay And spice swept Araby.

Quaint were the islands they knew so well Zanzibar, Pitcairn, and Celebes; Isles enchanted where reigned the spell Of other and lonelier seas.

Seas that cringed at the typhoon’s wrath When his thunderous roar was heard; Silent seas in the calm of death Where never a whisper stirred.

And the pulses quickened to hear their tales of voices hailing from spectral sands; Of dead men’s ships with their ghastly sails Unfurled by skeleton hands!

Legends weird of an unplumbed deep Where galleons foundered in days of yore; And sightless monsters that grope and creep In the slime of the ocean floor.

Sagas of shipwreck in days long gone, Of pirate treasure and revelry, Of clashing cutlass and fights hard won In some blood stained mutiny.

On decks awash how they held their own When faced by the knives of a cursing crew. And they spoke of shoals and of ledges lone Which only the sea birds knew.

Youth flushed once more on withered cheeks, Bent shoulders squared defiantly, At such deeds as fired the warlike Greeks In their legended Odyssey.

And the murmuring tide ebbed once again, And the fire burned low e’re the captains three Recalled with a sigh they were old, old men Who were done with their toil on the sea.

STORM SIGNALS

Red blur against the western sky A banner flutters threateningly The sport of every treacherous air It flaunts its warning note - “Beware” Each wrinkle in its protean form A portent of impending storm.

The darkening smudge where sank the sun In bloody embers smoulders on With brooding wrath. But angrier red Invests that standard with the dread Of unseen terrors. For it holds Death’s shadow in its writhing folds!

NEPTUNE’S COURSERS

Horses of Neptune that bound and dash Maddened with fear at the tempest’s lash, Pawing the sand with their thudding feet In a crashing rhythm of thunderous beat, Swift as the startled winds they race, Straining ever at fleeter pace; Forms that curve where the billows comb, Breasting a welter of seething foam, What unseen riders spur them on In a fierce stampede to be up and gone? Out of the hoary deep they come, Surging on with a booming roar, Pounding ever along the shore, Till the senses whirl and the ear grows numb.

Manes that stream in the wind swept spume, Necks that arch in the breakers’ crest, Hoofs resounding like drums of doom, Rearing forward with frantic zest, Wild are the steeds of the storm scarred deep! Trident driven, they plunge and leap, With nostrils spread and their eyes aglow, And fetlocks gripped by the undertow, Boisterous, raging, uncanny steeds Out of an ocean waste that breeds Chargers fit for a sea god’s needs - Neptune’s coursers, untamed and free, Fleeing the wrath of the unknown sea!