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.