The Atheist

Over a scurf of rocks the tide
Wanders inward far and wide,
Lifting the seaweed'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—yes, 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.