Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood
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 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.
The rainbow comes and goes,
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;
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
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
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 blessàed 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 its coronal,
The fullness of your bliss, I
feel—I feel it all.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And
the children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys 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!
—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 its setting,
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;
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,
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 six years’ 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,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped
by himself with newly-learnàed 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,
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons
another part;
Filling from time to time his ‘humorous 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
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,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods
like the Day, a master o‘er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in
the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being‘s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The
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