He Nears the Goal

How the red bells rang
As I neared the Chaos-shore!
As I flew across to the end of the West
The young bells rang and rang
Above the Chaos roar,
And the Wings of the Morning
Beat in tune
And bore me like a bird along -
And the nearing star turned to a moon -
Gray moon, with a brow of red -
Gray moon with a golden song.
Like a diver after pearls
I plunged to that stifling floor.
It was wide as a giant’s wheat-field
An icy, wind-washed shore.
O laughing, proud, but trembling star!
O wind that wounded sore!

Vachel Lindsay, ‘The Tree of Laughing Bells; or, The Wings of the Morning [A Poem for Aviators]‘ (1913), section only

The Sea-Diver

My way is on the bright blue sea,
My sleep upon its rocking tide;
And many an eye has followed me
Where billows clasp the worn seaside.

My plumage bears the crimson blush,
When ocean by the sun is kissed!
When fades the evening’s purple flush,
My dark wing cleaves the silver mist.

Full many a fathom down beneath
The bright arch of the splendid deep
My ear has heard the sea-shell breathe
O’er living myriads in their sleep.

They rested by the coral throne,
And by the pearly diadem;
Where the pale sea-grape had o’ergrown
The glorious dwellings made for them.

At night upon my storm-drench’d wing,
I poised above a helmless bark,
And soon I saw the shattered thing
Had passed away and left no mark.

And when the wind and storm were done,
a ship, that had rode out the gale,
Sunk down, without a signal-gun,
And none was left to tell the tale.

I saw the pomp of day depart -
The cloud resign its golden crown,
When to the ocean’s beating heart
The sailor’s wasted corse went down.

Peace be to those whose graves are made
Beneath the bright and silver sea!
Peace - that their relics there were laid
With no vain pride and pageantry.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Sea-Diver’ (18??) 

Pearl-diver in the Persian Gulf

Pearl-diver in the Persian Gulf, from The Youngfolk’s Book of Invention (1926), by T.C. Bridges

After-Dinner Conversation

Ah! To live life … that is what I want, to feel all that can be felt, to know all that can be known, to do all things possible … The months spent diving for pearls, not seeing the sand on the beaches and the sky and the greenish waves, breathing deep the salty steep of the sea …

José Asunción Silva, After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) (1896/1925), extract (translation by Kelly Washbourne).

José Asunción Silva (1865-1896) was a Colombian poet of morbid sensibility who killed himself after a succession of disappointments. La sobremesa was a novel he had been writing since 1887. It was lost among many other of his works-in-progress in a shipwreck in 1895. He reconstructed La sobremesa, but it was not published until 1925.