1
How beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank.
Wordsworth, recorded by Hazlitt
Tired even of works I have learnt to love
And more so by the prospect of many years
Striving to get below the given form
And catch a glimpse of the original passion
In books still unread; longing, despite this,
For a power to make England’s past a pattern
Of present words, yet ready to resign the task,
I looked up, and was startled by the setting sun.
Then all that I could name in nature
Passed before me, refreshing my stale mind:
Alive at last I thought, I sought the words
I longed for—but got nothing, nothing at all.
Afraid now that I had asked no more than nature
For our soul’s story, I would resume my task.
2
Beyond my window a hawthorn tree
That last I remember seeing bare, knotted,
With black, awkward, prickly branches
Bent to themselves and their own thoughts
Despite the loud talk and bitter persuasion
Of winter winds, is now in full bloom.
Those once-sad boughs, where spring has laid
A wealth of green leaves and white flowers
Bend smoothly down, their stiffness gone,
And catch quite gently the summer breezes,
And sway, and whisper, giving and taking
Scents and suggestions brought by this day.
I should not complain; but what has made me
In all seasons, the winter image of this tree?
3
Far out from the land I imagine home,
My unsteady nature bound in on every side
By the sickening, desolate, uncontrollable sea,
Dreaming on the wide varieties of life
Which blossom behind the safety of the shore,
Supposing these dreams knowledge, thus mystifying
The long-wanted land, I watch the coastline
For some light to lead me from my distress.
And the twinkling lights of a coastal town
Which beckon me to make a direct course there,
Over rocks and sandbanks, are not those I search for;
But let your steady interest shine out to me,
An impartial beacon partial to my plight,
And I cannot fail to find the fairway home.
4
Since to love you is to make my still-young soul
Out of the accidents of what you are, and think, and do,
And since this love, whose end I cannot tell,
But finding its way in these rambling meditations,
Has overgrown any hope of modelling my life
Upon a story rid of chance, I would justify
So easy a resignation from so hard a task
And say what this love is, and what good it brings.
Then suppose I came as a man to a woman,
Pressed by desire; yet your quiet loveliness
And my strength to admire have so changed
Our natural beginning, that in wanting you
I want nothing but love for a world
I took once only for use.
5
Why does a darknesss often overwhelm my heart,
Devouring all that makes a self in me,
Sweeping away my daily purpose, mocking
Even the little I care for family and friends?
And worse, why does this darkness bring a vision
Describing the death of what hopes I have
Speaking of slight gifts, feeble powers, of years
Profitless and unpraised passing quickly away?
Helpless, I watch my life disintegrate;
And not my dying powers, nor ridiculed hopes,
Not the people of my life, none can let me live,
None support my soul. But when I remember you
Touched by your grace the darkness ebbs away
And my small world floats quietly back.
6
If you took more colour and definition from the world
And set your heart upon those sanctioned ends
Achieving which is too often the substance of our lives,
Could I, confronted by so finite a reality,
And inheriting so many attitudes I do not like,
Yet lacking still that rare kind of love
To rid me of encumbrances, could I then think of you
As I dare now, the soul and substance of my life?
To raise the question is enough to answer it:
Were you more the creature of common motives
More the blind cipher of distinguished hopes
So much less would you be to me, use-ridden
And hopeless as I am: who wanting to imagine
A state of grace, has only you to think of.
7
You may not remember, but when we first met, scorning
The aimless chatter of ordinary souls
We made a vigorous dance our conversation.
And how strong I grew in the refreshing sense
You flung out of old and formal figures.
Leaning lightly on my arm, and laughing
At any fall giddiness might cause, you dared,
And did, farther and faster flights.
We have met since, but we have not danced,
And how wretched our conversation has become:
Ignorant of the steps, stuttering, stumbling,
Either saying too much, or too little,
You want to go one way, I drive another…
What hopeless chatter. I’d rather dance.
8
Were my restless spirit settled to some action
And released from these fruitless dithering days,
Had I a journey to make, and good reason to go,
I could not regret putting off at last
These fluttering thoughts, for I was not made
To trace out the intricate patterns of love,
And need, more than ever now, some real work
To give my ill-fed heart life.
But I have yet to find some necessary end
To compel a journey. And if my happiest dream
Is of setting out, later to look on the world
With eyes of vision, never am I closer
To knowing what I must do, where I must go,
Than, other hopes failing, I turn to you.
9
After some not very fruitful years, spent
Pretending to a higher life, embarrassed by this,
Searching for the substance of vague dreams,
Trying, a futile task, to find words
To animate a cold, considered passion,
You have sprung me from that deadening solitude,
And again content with my being here and now
Gratefully I set down these lines for you.
And I would that the matter ended here:
For of good nothing should come but good.
Yet haunted by whispers from a neglected world
That I am revisiting a hope once renounced
And would shrug off the darkness of a better dream
I compromise my gift, and so again fall silent.
10
Woken by the brightness of the moon, I lie basking
Through the small hours. No cars rush by.
The street is still. Dogs and children sleep.
Wrapped in that steep and steady gaze –
The essential peace and silence of the night –
I think how perfect our love could have been
Had several doubts not clouded what is now,
When glimpsed, a weak and waning light.
I shiver, my dreams disrupted, and wonder
If I really want love like that—those beams,
Bright from a barren world, estranged
From life and growth: but it is a bitter thing
To be awake at night, finding no hope
In a kind of peace much dreamt of by day.
11
If you were not so often and so long away,
If our meetings were not the brief matter of an hour
But days or weeks; if those hasty moments
Were all happiness, and these long months
Empty of doubt; if I did not worry why
We still go on with this slow sad dance
Whose form, but not whose pace, belongs to love,
How much better could I employ my time.
But I can do nothing but think about you;
And because my thoughts are not all praise,
Because I feel that my time is being expended
Without the interest of an enabling vision,
That this is all distraction, I grow angry,
Wounding what little love is ours.
12
By no means master of the language I profess,
Nor of a world to give that language life,
And often waving aside the failing integrity
Of powers I have barely known or used;
Yet by moments rebelling, and looking to love
To order my thought, clarify my language
Revive jaded insights and fading hopes,
I turn my need of you into those ambitions.
And why, you ask, should the progenitor of a passion
So fiercely uncharitable, so unregarding of the person
To whom it clings, blind and limpet-like,
Complain the attachment fruitless? I will not.
For though the pangs of dying powers go unrelieved
The pain of your indifference consumes them all.
13
When I see how your life neglects all learning
And that our best men, and their finest works
(Which map out a common journey for our souls)
Are nothing to your proud private heart;
Or when for want of this vital knolwedge
(To you mere learning, a subject for study)
And hopelessy immured in trivial hopes
You express feeble sentiments of regret
Why should I wonder that none of my work
Draws your admiration? For what words I have,
Much of my thought, and my better hope,
Is but their music making itself in me:
Only humble before such men will you learn
The simple truths of my lighter voice.
14
You may rightly hold my genius in doubt
And at the expense of hard particular truths
Think I chase notions I can never capture;
And I suspect that fast-changing loyalties
Leave your heart lifeless; that age shall come
And deny your then cold assertions of delight:
It is quite possible that I am enthralled by dreams,
And you unwittingly the prisoner of your senses.
But too proud of our perceptions, we have rudely forced
These words on one another, and so stripped ourselves
Of all tenderness. What we want are milder words,
Words to defeat our judging selves, words
To temper those bad-tempered truths,
Words that from the real raise the ideal.
15
Alone, and so stranded on the desolate shore
Of my own nature, unable to find refuge
In well-ordered lives and well-built homes
Thinking too much on what I am, unable to ignore
The restless winds and growling waves,
Conscious of violent, aimless energies,
How much I need those distant friends
Whose kindness was my shelter from myself.
For untempered by urbane and modest hopes
I have used very harsh words on you,
And would call up witnesses to my gentler self;
But my friends are far away—even of those
Some I forget, by others am forgotten:
So unkind to you, unkind is what I am.
16
If I thought that tears could soften your heart
And that from a tenderness so renewed might flow
A conversation as delicate and delightful as was ours
When, months ago, it bore the traffic of our souls,
Then for all those mean and unjust sentiments
That I, in poverty of spirit, have lately borne,
Suffered and brought against you, I would sink as low
As to let you see the tears I still restrain.
But too conscious of your light and laughing heart
Which makes so little of what I make so much,
And too conscious that those narrow, ill-phrased feelings
Are still my soul, my sympathy is stifled,
And for what you are, and for what I would not be,
I vent no tears—but a kind of bitter laughter.
17
Why does an old convention dictate my thought?
Why, now that spoken doubts have not hurt us,
And I know that you are not a function of my soul,
That you are separate, different, yet marvellous too,
And you know that I will not be merely an escort
To private adventures; why, now that day by day
We grow in friendship, tender in each other’s mind,
Cherishing the little that we know we share,
Aware of the delicate, difficult nature of our task,
Amazed, and a little worried by the wonder of it all,
Warming to worlds strange to our experience,
Delighting in the difference of things, wanting
To bless we hardly know what, why,
O why must these lines closing record a loss?
18
No, though as you guess, I want to say something,
Have no fear of impassioned, impossible demands.
Those issued once from the coupled, conflicting forces
Of desire and love: I have dissolved that marriage
And am now too taken by our re-established calm
To stir up storms again. All I ask is this:
That you in the greater steadiness of your nature
Have compassion upon my lost and wandering soul.
That, I hear, is all one needs to start…
You cannot. O you cannot, I know, I know.
The boasted dissolution of desire and love
Is too much for you and me, flesh and blood:
Such kindness comes at the end of a journey
That we here hardly know how to begin.
19
That I lead a stale fruitless life on your account
Is not quite true: for though you neither love
Nor respect, nor pity, nor perhaps know
What I am, and though there seems in you
A dearth of tenderness, a want of warmth
For those seeking some greatness in their circumstance,
Or for those who have had to relinquish the effort
And lost, can only be reached by compassion,
Though indeed my life is poor when it might be rich,
And though you have made it so, I am at fault:
For I know too well that these dry, loveless lines
Are the bitter fruit of a fidelity sworn,
Your soul unknown, to your apparent loveliness –
A fidelity so necessary, and so hard to break.
20
As often as we are apart, too often, I go over
Some remembered moment, trying to determine
What your nature is, whether charitable or not,
Whether deeply reserved or in fact indifferent,
And too often I discover things I would not see.
Then unsteadied by your calm and lovely looks
My dejection brings me close to not wanting
Not admiring, to not even respecting you.
And because my soul, though strangely made,
Is most alert and cheerful when it can adore,
What I feel then destroys the life
I would get from knowing you: if you are kind
Think on what I say: for whenever re-assured
I will renew my life in praise of you.
21
As a river works its way towards the sea
Here deep flowing, wide and rapid there,
Growing in strength and purpose as it receives
The tribute of less and subtler streams;
Or as a single note that breaks into a tune,
Which then richly varied, tense with promise,
And rising to a triumphant orchestral song,
Imitate the complex substance of our souls
So had I hoped the course of our conversation
Some months back. And though we struck a note,
Discovered a spring, no tune flowed out
Nor did we contribute to a time-rich story.
The one note fades now, the spring sinks back,
And the undiscovered river rolls on without us.
22
A hoped-for glory now appears my grave,
For I have been much too careless in this building
And heaping together old undeciphered thought
Vague ideals and unkempt passions
Have tried to raise a debased language
Too quickly, and so have laid upon my heart
The clutter of ages, darkening and entombing
The good creating mystery of my love.
Could I find a vision in our language,
Then confident of my purpose and sure of my design
I would thrust off this disordered pile
And by praising you re-edify my heart:
But dark beneath these heavy heaped-up words
My untold love scorns this chattering facade.
23
Unvisited by a deep or singular passion
And finding it too easy to place my affections
Here for one reason, there for another,
So letting my soul, uncemented by consistent
Thought and feeling, crumble slowly away,
I contrived, to shore up my failing integrity,
An intensity of emotion – the clumsy scaffold
Propping up a half-built, half-broken house.
So I centred all my thought on you,
And gave all my energies to magnifying us;
But this unceremonious world and your indifference
Make these creations and my fidelity ridiculous.
Carelessly then, I resign my affections to the wind
And let my life, this unfinished house, decay.
24
When I look around and see that all the world
(Except some now dead, and some I do not know)
Act not from kinds of belief, but impulsively,
Satisfying momentary desires, enjoying today
What they may well repudiate tomorrow, I wonder,
Since I too suffer this common touch,
Why I should pretend there is a truth in us
Whose vicar is the passion I contrived for you.
For that old pretence has produced no words,
No vows of faith, no supernatural power
To reject the common failings of the world:
Finding so few symptoms of a soul in us,
And no warmth in you, I shrug my shoulders,
Falling to those who bring me their desire.
25
Since no god, no faith, no hopes, since nothing
But you and your beauty let me create
Out of the chaos of random thought and feeling
Lines to construct the nature of my soul,
How should I break faith and cease to care
When to be faithless and laugh at infidelity
Is to destroy what I have so carefully made
And fall back lost into my heart’s chaos?
How could I break faith? And yet I have.
I would that my actions did not interfere
With what I think. But of course they do:
I care much less for you now, and think
Much less, caring only that I cannot think
Or feel, or speak, or count myself alive.
26
Cassio too, who loved Othello well,
Knew of heroes, and had he made a story of his life
Might have gained his soul a nobler image;
But drunk he drowned his power of spending
The dark demon-ridden hours alone,
And he too brought to bed what chance provided
Wasting himself, in the darkness, far from himself,
Upon a person far from his brightest hopes.
Nor have I a story now. I had used to tell
The foolish heroism of my fidelity to you,
But threw that away tonight on this—this
Sad mockery of my soul’s ambitions.
My love adulterated, all sense of you lost,
What shall I do with the coming day?
27
Sure once of what I was, sure
That in my heart, hidden, I held
Some truth which discovered would invigorate
My life and those whom my life met;
Sure, oh so pitiably and blindly sure
That I had nothing to do with evil,
Your warm love was the confident sun
Drawing a flower from that darkened seed.
But having hated where I intended love,
Destroyed when I wanted to create, and so
Broken and scattered the germ of my life,
Not knowing now what I am, or why,
I can find no flower, no finer world
For you to draw from my dark self-darkening self.
28
As I have not been exalted by extraordinary powers
I may abuse what small gifts I have
And misspend my life as I have foolishly misspent
These last nights, leaving what I should praise
Unpraised, what I should love cast aside
Unloved, sleeping through this my only life
As I preferred to sleep, fitfully, with her
Than talk to, or write to, or think about you.
And if those nights are to epitomise my life
The day must come when alone, unconsoled
By the remembrance of honourable years well spent
I shall have to make an impossible peace with death:
Now neither you in my thoughts nor her in my bed,
Alone, entirely alone, I study that hour.
29
She could, because quite skilled in certain arts,
And by making a friend of my treacherous desires,
Dissolve this sustaining anger—which she has felt,
Fears, and would defeat; then at her mercy
Force me to embrace those trivial virtues
Which her small soul thinks profound,
And like a barbarian through a decadent city
Lead me captive through a tedious life.
What could I do then? Nothing but boast
That I was glorious once. I was, I was,
And look back now, imprisoned in peacefulness,
On those hard difficult lonely days
When venturing far beyond lands my own
I led out hoards of thought in search of you.
30
When with more grace than clothes she came
Laughing to my bed, where waiting I lay warm
And smiling with desire, I knew, but her kisses
Smothered my distracted knowledge, I knew
But her hands melted my cold caring,
I knew that I had resigned love to desire
And surrendered our one soul-making strength
To a dark moment of unprofitable peace.
Well, as you’d expect, she has gone now,
But still I feel the ghost of her body
Lingering in my limbs, teazing my desires,
Realizing so bitterly that rejected knowledge:
For where I would praise, I have no power,
And where I gave the power, I cannot praise.
31
Were the survival of this nation threatened again,
And I a soldier, not needing to imagine death
As human life bled out on wounded fields,
Discovering amidst the waste and shame of war
The desolation of my soul—its mortal hopes
Shot down on every side—to whom, during my exile,
Could I entrust that seed, shut in my heart,
Whose flower would endure all kinds of death?
Not to her who might be sorry that I had gone;
For she has discovered what sooner or later
Must die in me, and cannot return. I would leave
A heart which mingled a vision with its love,
And saw that a nation lives in every soul,
To you, for whom my devotion ruled desire.
32
Though I have abused that natural power
Which may alone explain our now-dead communion,
And have sought to satisfy myself with a woman
Who, had she not loved me, might have been loved
With all the tenderness and compassion of her dreams;
Though of a potential good I have thus made
A definite evil—at every word and gesture
Shrouding her passion with cold responses,
Though consenting where I do not, cannot, love
I desecrate the forces vital to my soul,
And though I doubt the reality of that garden
Where I still walk among dreams of you,
My heart is not dead to our romance,
For you appear still a light in my darkness.
33
Should any dawn break through this darkness
Where I am chained, wasting away my life
In the insoluble fetters of wanting and having,
Shut from truths I desire more, much more
Than fame or wealth; obscure, and unvisited
By the grace of bright self-wording thoughts,
Allowing corruption to creep into my acts,
Unable to disperse this sun-blocking world,
I would that happy, dreamt-of, prayed-for morning
In easy command of all powers uniting me
To that light from which I am now divided,
My eyes no longer barred, my vision fresh,
And with better words than these, praise you,
Thinking of whom makes that day possible.
