| |
| TWELVE years ago, when I could face | |
| High heaven’s dome with different eyes, | |
| In days full-flowered with hours of grace, | |
| And nights not sad with sighs, | |
| I wrote a song in which I strove | 5 |
| To shadow forth thy strain of woe, | |
| Dark widowed sister of the grove— | |
| Twelve wasted years ago. | |
| |
| But youth was then too young to find | |
| Those high authentic syllables | 10 |
| Whose voice is like the wintering wind | |
| By sunless mountain fells; | |
| Nor had I sinned and suffered then | |
| To that superlative degree | |
| That I would rather seek, than men, | 15 |
| Wild fellowship with thee. | |
| |
| But he who hears this autumn day | |
| Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme, | |
| Is one whose hair was shot with gray | |
| By grief instead of time. | 20 |
| He has no need, like many a bard, | |
| To sing imaginary pain, | |
| Because he bears, and finds it hard, | |
| The punishment of Cain. | |
| |
| No more he sees the affluence | 25 |
| Which makes the heart of Nature glad; | |
| For he has lost the fine first sense | |
| Of beauty that he had. | |
| The old delight God’s happy breeze | |
| Was wont to give, to grief has grown; | 30 |
| And therefore, Niobe of trees, | |
| His song is like thine own. | |
| |
| But I, who am that perished soul, | |
| Have wasted so these powers of mine, | |
| That I can never write that whole, | 35 |
| Pure, perfect speech of thine. | |
| Some lord of words august, supreme, | |
| The grave, grand melody demands; | |
| The dark translation of thy theme | |
| I leave to other hands. | 40 |
| |
| Yet here, where plovers nightly call | |
| Across dim melancholy leas— | |
| Where comes by whistling fen and fall | |
| The moan of far-off seas— | |
| A gray old Fancy often sits | 45 |
| Beneath thy shade with tired wings, | |
| And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits | |
| With awful utterings. | |
| |
| Then times there are when all the words | |
| Are like the sentences of one | 50 |
| Shut in by fate from wind and birds | |
| And light of stars and sun! | |
| No dazzling dryad, but a dark | |
| Dream-haunted spirit, doomed to be | |
| Imprisoned, cramped in bands of bark, | 55 |
| For all eternity. | |
| |
| Yea, like the speech of one aghast | |
| At Immortality in chains, | |
| What time the lordly storm rides past | |
| With flames and arrowy rains: | 60 |
| Some wan Tithonus of the wood, | |
| White with immeasurable years— | |
| An awful ghost, in solitude | |
| With moaning moors and meres! | |
| |
| And when high thunder smites the hill | 65 |
| And hunts the wild dog to his den, | |
| Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill | |
| And shriek from glen to glen, | |
| As if a frightful memory whipped | |
| Thy soul for some infernal crime | 70 |
| That left it blasted, blind, and stripped— | |
| A dread to Death and Time! | |
| |
| But when the fair-haired August dies, | |
| And flowers wax strong and beautiful, | |
| Thy songs are stately harmonies | 75 |
| By wood-lights green and cool, | |
| Most like the voice of one who shows | |
| Through sufferings fierce, in fine relief, | |
| A noble patience and repose— | |
| A dignity in grief. | 80 |
| |
| But, ah! conceptions fade away, | |
| And still the life that lives in thee, | |
| The soul of thy majestic lay, | |
| Remains a mystery! | |
| And he must speak the speech divine, | 85 |
| The language of the high-throned lords, | |
| Who ’d give that grand old theme of thine | |
| Its sense in faultless words. | |
| |
| By hollow lands and sea-tracts harsh, | |
| With ruin of the fourfold gale, | 90 |
| Where sighs the sedge and sobs the marsh, | |
| Still wail thy lonely wail; | |
| And, year by year, one step will break | |
| The sleep of far hill-folded streams, | |
| And seek, if only for thy sake, | 95 |
| Thy home of many dreams. | |
| |
