Drifting

And now the sun in tinted splendor sank,
  The west was all aglow with crimson light;
The bay seemed like a sheet of burnished gold,
  Its waters glistened with such radiance bright.

At anchor lay the yachts with snow-white sails,
  Outlined against the glowing, rose-hued sky.
No ripple stirred the waters’ calm repose
  Save when a tiny craft sped lightly by.

Our boat was drifting slowly, gently round,
  To rest secure till evening shadows fell;
No sound disturbed the stillness of the air,
  Save the soft chiming of the vesper bell.

Yes, drifting, drifting; and I thought that life,
  When nearing death, is like the sunset sky:
And death is but the slow, sure drifting in
  To rest far more securely, by and by.

Then let me drift along the Bay of Time,
  Till my last sun shall set in glowing light;
Let me cast anchor where no shadows fall,
  Forever moored within Heaven’s harbor bright.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 19, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Drifting” first appeared in the ten-poem collection Original Poems (Louis A. Basinet, 1899), where it bears the note “Newport. June 12, 1898.” The poem later appeared in Bush-Banks’s full-length collection, Driftwood (Atlantic Printing Co., 1914), where it is accompanied by earlier praise from Paul Laurence Dunbar, who remarks that “[t]here is a high spiritual tone about it that is bound to please.” In the introduction to The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (Oxford University Press, 1991), editor Bernice F. Guillaume—the great-grand-daughter of Bush-Banks—writes that “Drifting,” along with the poems “Morning” and “Evening,” “underscores Bush-Banks’s technical and imaginative expertise. Using iambic pentameter, she makes each poem serve as a distinct chronological and philosophical stage in her perception of reality. [. . .] ‘Drifting’ concludes [the trilogy of poems] with the imagery of a brilliant sunset at Newport, Rhode Island. Bush-Banks shows she accepts both life and death, anticipating being ‘Full safely moored within Heaven’s harbor bright.’”