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(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
THERE is a dungeon, in whose dim, drear light | |
| What do I gaze on? Nothing; look again! | |
| Two forms are slowly shadowed on my sight,— | |
| Two insulated phantoms of the brain: | |
| It is not so; I see them full and plain,— | 5 |
| An old man, and a female young and fair, | |
| Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein | |
| The blood is nectar;—but what doth she there, | |
| With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare? | |
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| Full swells the deep pure fountain of young life, | 10 |
| Where on the heart and from the heart we took | |
| Our first and sweetest nurture, when the wife, | |
| Blest into mother, in the innocent look, | |
| Or even the piping cry of lips that brook | |
| No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives | 15 |
| Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook | |
| She sees her little bud put forth its leaves— | |
| What may the fruit be yet?—I know not—Cain was Eve’s. | |
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| But here youth offers to old age the food, | |
| The milk of his own gift: it is her sire | 20 |
| To whom she renders back the debt of blood | |
| Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire | |
| While in those warm and lovely veins the fire | |
| Of health and holy feeling can provide | |
| Great Nature’s Nile, whose deep stream rises higher | 25 |
| Than Egypt’s river: from that gentle side | |
| Drink, drink and live, old man! heaven’s realm holds no such tide. | |
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| The starry fable of the milky way | |
| Has not thy story’s purity; it is | |
| A constellation of a sweeter ray, | 30 |
| And sacred Nature triumphs more in this | |
| Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss | |
| Where sparkle distant worlds: O holiest nurse! | |
| No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss | |
| To thy sire’s heart replenishing its source | 35 |
| With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe. | |
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