Through Bowscale-Tarn did wait on him,
The pair were Servants of his eye
In their immortality,
They moved about in open sight, 130
To and fro, for his delight.
He knew the Rocks which Angels haunt
On the Mountains visitant;
He hath kenn’d them taking wing:
And the Caves where Faeries sing
He hath entered; and been told
By Voices how Men liv’d of old.
Among the Heavens his eye can see
Face of thing that is to be;
And, if Men report him right, 140
He can whisper words of might.
— Now another day is come,
Fitter hope, and nobler doom:
He hath thrown aside his Crook,
And hath buried deep his Book;
Armour rusting in his Halls
On the blood of Clifford calls; —
”Quell the Scot,” exclaims the Lance,
”Bear me to the heart of France,
Is the longing of the Shield — 150
Tell thy name, thou trembling Field;
Field of death, where’er thou be,
Groan thou with our victory!
Happy day, and mighty hour,
When our Shepherd, in his power,
Mail’d and hors’d, with lance and sword,
To his Ancestors restored,
Like a reappearing Star,
Like a glory from afar,
First shall head the Flock of War!” 160
Alas! the fervent Harper did not know
That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
Who, long compell’d in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, sooth’d, and tamed.
Love had he found in huts where poor Men lie,
His daily Teachers had been Woods and Rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
In him the savage Virtue of the Race,
Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts were dead: 170
Nor did he change; but kept in lofty place
The wisdom which adversity had bred.
Glad were the Vales, and every cottage hearth;
The Shepherd Lord was honour’d more and more:
And, ages after he was laid in earth,
”The Good Lord Clifford” was the name he bore.
LINES, COMPOSED AT GRASMERE DURING A WALK, ONE EVENING, AFTER A STORMY DAY
THE AUTHOR HAVING JUST READ IN A NEWSPAPER THAT THE DISSOLUTION OF MR. FOX WAS HOURLY EXPECTED.
Loud is the Vale! the Voice is up
With which she speaks when storms are gone,
A mighty Unison of streams!
Of all her Voices, One!
Loud is the Vale; — this inland Depth
In peace is roaring like the Sea;
Yon Star upon the mountain-top
Is listening quietly.
Sad was I, ev’n to pain depress’d,
Importunate and heavy load! 10
The Comforter hath found me here,
Upon this lonely road;
And many thousands now are sad,
Wait the fulfilment of their fear;
For He must die who is their Stay,
Their Glory disappear.
A Power is passing from the earth
To breathless Nature’s dark abyss;
But when the Mighty pass away
What is it more than this, 20
That Man, who is from God sent forth,
Doth yet again to God return? —
Such ebb and flow must ever be,
Then wherefore should we mourn?
ELEGIAC STANZAS SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF PEELE CASTLE, IN A STORM, PAINTED BY SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT
I was thy Neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.
So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene’er I look’d, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never pass’d away.
How perfect was the calm! it seem’d no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away, or brings: 10
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things.
Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter’s hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream;
I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile!
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss: 20
Thou shouldst have seem’d a treasure-house, a mine
Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven: —
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.
A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life.
Such, in the fond delusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made: 30
And seen the soul of truth in every part;
A faith, a trust, that could not be betray’d.
So once it would have been, — ’tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new controul:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humaniz’d my Soul.
Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. 40
Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
This Work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.
Oh ‘tis a passionate Work! — yet wise and well;
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!
And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves, 50
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The light’ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
Farewell, farewell the Heart that lives alone,
Hous’d in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for ‘tis surely blind.
But welcome fortitude, and patient chear,
And frequent sights of what is to be born!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here. —
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. 60
ODE
Paulo majora canamus.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore; —
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The Rainbow comes and goes, 10
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
&n
bsp; But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.
Now, while the Birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young Lambs bound 20
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.
The Cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay,
Land and sea 30
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday,
Thou Child of Joy
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd Boy!
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath it’s coronal, 40
The fullness of your bliss, I feel — I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While the Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are pulling,
On every side,
In a thousand vallies far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his mother’s arm: —
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! 50
— But there’s a Tree, of many one,
A single Field which I have look’d upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere it’s setting, 60
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home;
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy; 70
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim, 80
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A four year’s Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his Mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his Father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, 90
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shap’d by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside, 100
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part,
Filling from time to time his “humourous stage”
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her Equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep 110
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind, —
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave 120
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of untam’d pleasures, on thy Being’s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The Years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight, 130
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether fluttering or at rest, 140
With new-born hope for ever in his breast: —
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realiz’d,
High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surpriz’d: 150
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish us, and make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, 160
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 170
Then, sing ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so
bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour 180
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, 190
Think not of any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish’d one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp’d lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye 200
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
THE EXCURSION
This long poem was first published in 1814 and was intended to be the second part of The Recluse, an unfinished larger work. The exact dates of its composition are unknown, but the first manuscript is generally dated from 1806 to 1809.
The Excursion is composed of nine books, with the first and second books introducing the characters of the Wanderer, a mysterious character that “loved to pace the public roads”, and the Solitary, a recluse that is plagued by the death of his wife and children, as well as by his disenchantment with the French Revolution. The third and fourth books consist of a conversation between the Wanderer and the Solitary regarding the truth of Religion and the virtue of Mankind. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth books introduce the character of the Pastor and mostly concern the Pastor explaining the life stories of many of the townspeople that lie buried in the churchyard. In the final two books, all of the characters travel to the Parsonage, where they are introduced to the family of the Pastor.
Blea Tarn House, believed to be a house described in the poem
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1814
BOOK FIRST
BOOK SECOND
BOOK THIRD
BOOK FOURTH
BOOK FIFTH
BOOK SIXTH
Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth Page 52
