University of Virginia Library

LAKELAND ONCE MORE

Region separate, sacred, of mere, and of ghyll, and of mountain,
Garrulous, petulant beck, sinister, laughterless tarn;
Haunt of the vagabond feet of my fancy for ever reverting,
Haunt and home of my heart, Cumbrian valleys and fells;
Yours of old was the beauty that rounded my hours with a nimbus,
Touched my youth with bloom, tender and magical light;
You were my earliest passion, and when shall my fealty falter?
Ah, when Helvellyn is low! ah, when Winander is dry!
For had I not dwelt where Nature but prattled familiar language,
Trite the theme and the word, prose of the hedges and lanes?
Here she spake to my spirit in lofty and resonant numbers,
Rhythms of epical mood, silences great as her song.
Time hath scattered his gifts; and Death, he hath taken his tribute:
East and west have I fared, hitherward, thitherward blown;
Watched in jewelled midnight the Mediterranean twinkling;
Watched, from Como's wave, pinnacled summits on fire;
Heard the tempest beleaguer the bases of savage Tantallon;
Heard the thundering tide crash on Devonian shores:
And fair and stormy fortune my life's little pinnace hath weathered,
Shattering onsets of joy, shocks of calamity, borne;
Mine hath been good unstinted, nor niggard my portion of evil;
Friendships mine and hates, love and a whisper of fame:
But ever to you I return, O land in the dusk of whose portals
Rustles my Past like leaves, memories brush me as wings,
Meets me my alien phantom, the self that is dead, that is vanished,
Echoes meet me and dreams, shadows that sigh and depart;
And ever, O meres and valleys, an aureole haunts you of roselight,
Glamour of luminous hours, wraith of my passion of old,
And the brows of eternal Helvellyn are flushed with a virginal rapture,
Lit with the glow of my youth, crimsoned with dawn of my day.