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DOUGLAS, ISLE OF MAN
[First published 1849. Reprinted 1855.]
WHO taught this pleading to unpractis’d eyes? | |
| Who hid such import in an infant’s gloom? | |
| Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise? | |
| What clouds thy forehead, and fore-dates thy doom? 1 | |
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| Lo! sails that gleam a moment and are gone; | 5 |
| The swinging waters, and the cluster’d pier. | |
| Not idly Earth and Ocean labour on, | |
| Nor idly do these sea-birds hover near. | |
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| But thou, whom superfluity of joy | |
| Wafts not from thine own thoughts, nor longings vain, | 10 |
| Nor weariness, the full-fed soul’s annoy; | |
| Remaining in thy hunger and thy pain: | |
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| Thou, drugging pain by patience; half averse | |
| From thine own mother’s breast, that knows not thee; | |
| With eyes that sought thine eyes thou didst converse, | 15 |
| And that soul-searching vision fell on me. | |
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| Glooms that go deep as thine I have not known: | |
| Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth. | |
| Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own: | |
| Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth. | 20 |
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| What mood wears like complexion to thy woe?— | |
| His, who in mountain glens, at noon of day, | |
| Sits rapt, and hears the battle break below?— | |
| Ah! thine was not the shelter, but the fray. | |
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| What exile’s, changing bitter thoughts with glad? | 25 |
| What seraph’s, in some alien planet born?— | |
| No exile’s dream was ever half so sad, | |
| Nor any angel’s sorrow so forlorn. | |
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| Is the calm thine of stoic souls, who weigh | |
| Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore: | 30 |
| But in disdainful silence turn away, | |
| Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more? | |
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| Or do I wait, to hear some grey-hair’d king | |
| Unravel all his many-colour’d lore: | |
| Whose mind hath known all arts of governing, | 35 |
| Mus’d much, lov’d life a little, loath’d it more? | |
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| Down the pale cheek long lines of shadow slope | |
| Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give— | |
| Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope, | |
| Foreseen thy harvest—yet proceed’st to live. | 40 |
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| O meek anticipant of that sure pain | |
| Whose sureness grey-hair’d scholars hardly learn! | |
| What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain? | |
| What heavens, what earth, what suns shalt thou discern? | |
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| Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star, | 45 |
| Match that funereal aspect with her pall, | |
| I think, thou wilt have fathom’d life too far, | |
| Have known too much—or else forgotten all. | |
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| The Guide of our dark steps a triple veil | |
| Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps: | 50 |
| Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale | |
| Of grief, and eas’d us with a thousand sleeps. | |
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| Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use, | |
| Not daily labour’s dull, Lethaean spring, | |
| Oblivion in lost angels can infuse | 55 |
| Of the soil’d glory, and the trailing wing; | |
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| And though thou glean, what strenuous gleaners may, | |
| In the throng’d fields where winning comes by strife; | |
| And though the just sun gild, as all men pray, | |
| Some reaches of thy storm-vext stream of life; | 60 |
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| Though that blank sunshine blind thee: though the cloud | |
| That sever’d the world’s march and thine, is gone: | |
| Though ease dulls grace, and Wisdom be too proud | |
| To halve a lodging that was all her own: | |
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| Once, ere the day decline, thou shalt discern, | 65 |
| Oh once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain. | |
| Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return, | |
| And wear this majesty of grief again. | |
