Contemplation
THIS morning saw I, fled the shower,The earth reclining in a lull of power:The heavens, pursuing not their path,Lay stretched out naked after bath,Or so it seemed; field, water, tree, were still,Nor was there any purpose on the calm-browed hill.
The hill, which sometimes visibly isWrought with unresting energies,Looked idly; from the musing wood,And every rock, a life renewedExhaled like an unconscious thoughtWhen poets, dreaming unperplexed,Dream that they dream of nought.Nature one hour appears a thing unsexed,Or to such serene balance broughtThat her twin natures cease their sweet alarms,And sleep in one another’s arms.The sun with resting pulses seems to brood,And slacken its command upon my unurged blood.
The river has not any careIts passionless water to the sea to bear;The leaves have brown content;The wall to me has freshness like a scent,And takes half animate the air,Making one life with its green moss and stain;And life with all things seems too perfect blentFor anything of life to be aware.The very shades on hill, and tree, and plain,Where they have fallen doze, and where they doze remain.
No hill can idler be than I;No stone its inter-particled vibrationInvesteth with a stiller lie;No heaven with a more urgent rest betraysThe eyes that on it gaze.We are too near akin that thou shouldst cheatMe, Nature, with thy fair deceit.
In poets floating like a water-flowerUpon the bosom of the glassy hour,In skies that no man sees to move,Lurk untumultuous vortices of power,For joy too native, and for agitationToo instant, too entire for sense thereof,Motion like gnats when autumn suns are low,Perpetual as the prisoned feet of loveOn the heart’s floors with painèd pace that go.From stones and poets you may know,Nothing so active is, as that which least seems so.
For he, that conduit running wine of song,Then to himself does most belong,When he his mortal house unbarsTo the importunate and thronging feetThat round our corporal walls unheeded beat;Till, all containing, he exaltHis stature to the stars, or starsNarrow their heaven to his fleshly vault:When, like a city under ocean,To human things he grows a desolation,And is made a habitationFor the fluctuous universeTo lave with unimpeded motion.He scarcely frets the atmosphereWith breathing, and his body sharesThe immobility of rocks;His heart’s a drop-well of tranquillity;His mind more still is than the limbs of fear,And yet its unperturbed velocityThe spirit of the simoom mocks.He round the solemn centre of his soulWheels like a dervish, while his being isStreamed with the set of the world’s harmonies,In the long draft of whatsoever sphereHe lists the sweet and clearClangour of his high orbit on to roll,So gracious is his heavenly grace;And the bold stars does hear,Every one in his airy soar,For evermoreShout to each other from the peaks of space,As thwart ravines of azure shouts the mountaineer.