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I. YOUTH
I LOVE to watch the world from here, for all | |
| The numberless living portraits that are drawn | |
| Upon the mind. Far over is the sea, | |
| Fronting the sand, a few great yellow dunes, | |
| A salt marsh stumbling after, rank and green, | 5 |
| With brackish gullies wandering in between, | |
| All this from the hill. | |
| And more: a clump of dwarfed and twisted cedars, | |
| Sentinels over the marsh, and bright with the sun | |
| A field of daises wandering in the wind | 10 |
| As though a hidden serpent glided through, | |
| A broken wall, a new-plowed field, and then | |
| The dusty road and the abodes of men | |
| Surrounding the hill. | |
| How small the enclosure is wherein there lives | 15 |
| Each phase and passion of life, the distant sail | |
| Dips in the limpid bosom of the sea, | |
| From that far place to where in state the turf | |
| Raises a throne for me upon the hill, | |
| Each little love and lust of a living thing | 20 |
| Can thus be compassed in a rainbow ring | |
| And seen from the hill. | |
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II. AGE
Why did I build my cottage on a hill | |
| Facing the sea? | |
| Why did I plan each terraced lawn to slope | 25 |
| Down to the deep blue billowy breast of hope, | |
| Surging and sweeping, | |
| laughing and leaping, | |
| Tumbling its garments of foam upon the shore, | |
| Rustling the sands that know my step no more, | 30 |
| I should have found a valley, deep and still, | |
| To shelter me. | |
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| There flows the river, and it seems asleep | |
| So far away, | |
| Yet I remember whip of wave and roar | 35 |
| Of wind that rose and smote against the oar, | |
| Smote and retreated, | |
| Proud but defeated, | |
| While I rejoiced and rowed into the brine, | |
| Drawing on wet and heavy-straining line | 40 |
| The great cod quivering from the deep | |
| As counterplay. | |
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| What is the solace of these hills and vales | |
| That rise and fall? | |
| What is there glorious in the greenwood glen, | 45 |
| Or twittering thrush or wing of darting wren? | |
| Give me the gusty, | |
| Raucous and rusty | |
| Call of the sea gull in the echoing sky, | |
| The wild shriek of the winds that cannot die, | 50 |
| Give me the life that follows the bending sails, | |
| Or none at all! | |
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