Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear! IV. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; The impulse of thy strength, only less free The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V. Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, TO A SKYLARK (1820) Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven, In the broad day-light Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see-we feel that it is there. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought 40 To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love,-which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aërial hue Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view: Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavywinged thieves: Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, All that ever was Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth sur pass. Teach us, Sprite or Bird, What sweet thoughts are thine; I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus Hymenæal, Or triumphal chaunt, Matched with thine, would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be; Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee; Thou lovest-but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep Thou of death must deem Than we mortals dream— Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. |