Up with me! up with me into the clouds! Up with me, up with me into the clouds! With clouds and sky about thee ringing, That spot which seems so to thy mind! I have walked through wildernesses dreary And to-day my heart is weary; Had I now the wings of a Faery, Up to thee would I fly. There is madness about thee, and joy divine In that song of thine; Lift me, guide me high and high To thy banqueting-place in the sky. Joyous as morning Thou art laughing and scorning; Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest. Happy, happy Liver, With a soul as strong as a mountain river Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver, Joy and jollity be with us both! 10 20 INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD* I There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. "To that dream-like vividness and splendour which invest objects of sight in childhood, every one, I believe, if he would look back. could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here; but having in the poem regarded it as presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion, which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as more than an element in our instincts of immortality. A pre-existent state has entered into the popular creeds of many nations; and, among all persons acquainted with classic literature, is known as an ingredient in Platonic philosophy."-Extract from Wordsworth's note. Compare Henry Vaughan's The Retreat, p. 223. II The Rainbow comes and goes, 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; 10 V Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: And cometh from afar: But trailing clouds of glory do we come That there hath past away a glory from the Heaven lies about us in our infancy! earth. 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; 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, VI 60 71 Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral; And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song: To dialogues of business, love, or strife; Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride That Life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation 1 humorsome 90 100 VIII Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy Soul's immensity; Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, 110 Hence in a season of calm weather Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 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, The thought of our past years in me doth breed For that which is most worthy to be blest- Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; 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 realized, High instincts before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised: 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, and have power to 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, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The Clouds that gather round the setting sun 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. COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER Earth has not anything to show more fair: 160 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: 200 This City now doth, like a garment, wear IT IS A BEAUTEOUS EVENING, It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea: LONDON, 1802+ Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour: sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life's common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay. THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee; Shade Of that which once was great, is passed away. 1 Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy. 2 See Luke xvi, 22. Venice threw off the yoke of the Eastern Empire as early as 809 and remained a republic or an oligarchy until conquered by Napoleon in 1797. At one time she had extensive possessions and colonies in the Levant. †The ancient Doges annually, on Ascension Day. threw a ring into the Adriatic in formal token of this espousal, or of perpetual dominion. The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; AFTER-THOUGHTS I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide, 20 A mighty fountain momently was forced: The shadow of the dome of pleasure It was a miracle of rare device, A damsel with a dulcimer 30 40 In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Coleridge says this poem was composed when he had fallen asleep just after reading from Marco Polo in Purchas's Pilgrimage how "In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately pal ace," etc. There were more lines which he failed to record. Charles Lamb spoke of the poem as "a vision which he [Coleridge] repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour when he sings or says it." 1 A region in Tartary. 2 Kubla the Cham, or Emperor. Singing of Mount Abora. To such a deep delight 'twould win me, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! 50 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER† IN SEVEN PARTS ARGUMENT How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole and how from thence she made her course to the Tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. PART I. It is an ancient Mariner, "By thy long gray beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me! 1-12. An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one. From the publication, in 1798, of the Lyrical Ballads, the joint production of Coleridge and Wordsworth, may be dated very definitely the recognition of the new spirit in English literature which is commonly spoken of as the Romantic Revival. See Eng. Lit.. pp. 232-235. Coleridge, in the fourteenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria, writes of the occasion of the Lyrical Ballads as follows: "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. the one, the incidents and agents were to be. in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations. supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from what. ever source of delusion, has at any time believed In |