I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus hymeneal Or triumphal chaunt Match'd with thine, would be all But an empty vaunt A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? 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 Things more true and deep 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. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, The world should listen then, as I am listening now! 502 LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY THE fountains mingle with the river The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single, See the mountains kiss high heaven And the sunlight clasps the earth, 503 TO THE NIGHT SWIFTLY walk over the western wave, Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear Wrap thy form in a mantle gray Blind with thine hair the eyes of day, When I arose and saw the dawn, When light rode high, and the dew was gone, Thy brother Death came, and cried Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Death will come when thou art dead, Sleep will come when thou art fled; 504 ODE TO THE WEST WIND O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, Of some fierce Maenad, ev'n from the dim verge The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear! Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than Thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed Scarce seem'd a vision, I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd Make me thy lyre, ev'n as the forest is: Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, |