Explore "The Salt Sea-Wind" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When Venus, mother and maker of blisses, / Rose out of the billows, large-limbed, and fair, / She stood on the sands and blew sweet kisses / To the salt sea-wind as she dried her hair.
And the salt sea-wind was the first to caress her / To praise her beauty and call her sweet, / The first of the whole wide world to possess her, / She, that creature of light and heat.
Though the sea is old with its sorrows and angers, / And the world has forgotten why love was born, / Yet the salt sea-wind is full of the languors / That Venus taught on her natal morn.
And now whoever dwells there by the ocean, / And feels the wind on his hair and face, / Is stirred by a subtle and keen emotion, / The lingering spell of that first embrace.