Poems by Hartley Coleridge With a Memoir of his Life by his Brother. In Two Volumes |
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FAIRY LAND. |
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 | Poems by Hartley Coleridge |  |
173
FAIRY LAND.
Yes, I am old, and older yet must be,Drifting along the everlasting sea;
And yet, through puzzling light and perilous dark,
I bear with me, as in a lonely ark,
A precious cargo of dear memory;
For, though I never was a citizen,
Enroll'd in Faith's municipality,
And ne'er believed the phantom of the few
To be a tangible reality,
Yet I have loved sweet things, that are not now,
In frosty starlight, or the cold moonbeam.
I never thought they were; and therefore now
No doubt obscures the memory of my dream.
My Fairy Land was never upon earth,
Nor in the heaven to which I hoped to go;
For it was always by the glimmering hearth,
When the last fagot gave its reddest glow,
And voice of eld wax'd tremulous and low,
And the sole taper's intermittent light,
Like a slow-tolling bell, declared good night.
Then could I think of Peri and of Fay,
174
I felt the wee maid in her scarlet hood
Real as the babes that wander'd in the wood,
And could as well believe a wolf could talk
As that a man beside the babes could stalk,
With gloomy thoughts of murder in his brain;
And then I thought how long the lovely twain
Threaded the paths that wound among the trees,
And how at last they sunk upon their knees,
And said their little prayers, as prettily
As e'er they said them at their mother's knee,
And went to sleep. I deem'd them still asleep
Clasp'd in each other's arms, beside a heap
Of fragrant leaves;—so little then knew I
Of bare-bone Famine's ghastly misery.
Yet I could weep and cry, and sob amain,
Because they never were to wake again;
But if 'twas said, “They'll wake at the last day!”
Then all the vision melted quite away;
As from the steel the passing stain of breath,
So quickly parts the fancy from the faith.
And I thought the dear babes in the wood no more true
Than Red Riding Hood,—aye, or the grim loup-garou,
That the poor little maid for her granny mistook;
I knew they were both only tales in a book.
| Poems by Hartley Coleridge | |