The labourer looks up to see our shallop speed away. When shall the sandy bar be crossed? When shall we
Now are the clouds like fiery shrouds; the sun, superbly
Slow as an oak to woodman's stroke sinks flaming at their
The waves are bright with mirrored light as jacinths on
When shall the sandy bar be crossed? When shall we find the bay?
The moon is high up in the sky, and now no more we see The spreading river's either bank, and surging distantly There booms a sullen thunder as of breakers far away. Now shall the sandy bar be crossed, now shall we find the bay!
The seagull shrieks high overhead, and dimly to our sight The moonlit crests of foaming waves gleam towering through the night.
We'll steal upon the mermaid soon, and start her from her lay,
When once the sandy bar is crossed, and we are in the bay.
What rises white and awful as a shroud-enfolded ghost? What roar of rampant tumult bursts in clangour on the coast?
Pull back! pull back! The raging flood sweeps every
O stream, is this thy bar of sand? O boat, is this the
COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE.
Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration :-feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened :—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft
Lines Written on revisiting the Banks of the Wye. 379
In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee !
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again : While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, And all its aching joys are
now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as on the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,-both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.
O be, or not to be that is the question : Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all ; And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.
« AnteriorContinuar » |