Narcissus and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Here in the grass they laid me long ago,
Far from the tumult and the tears of men,
Soft in the summer grass, forlorn and low—
The face of all the world is changed since then.

Here, on my back, and scarce beneath the turf,
To lie and lie for many a summer day,
Hearing the faint far ocean-sweeping surf,
Seeing the blue midnoon and twilight grey.

Yea, though you seek and find me not at all
In these wide meadows and the shoreward plain,
Though in the ground and tangled grasses tall
No vestige of my mortal part remain.

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Yet, peradventure, where you plant your heel
And heedless start the lizard on the sand,
I am, and all day watch wild duck and teal
Fly northward in a blue-enamelled band.

Here, void of will, of action unaware,
And dwindled to a mere perceptive point,
Changeless I watch the light divide the air
And glitter on each reedy knot and joint.

Changeless I watch the changes of the sky,
Its liquid blue, its motionless light clouds,—
A solitary seagull sailing by,
A butterfly that him from sight enshrouds.

Now midway-down a thin mist thunder-driven
Moves on the air-built battlements beyond;
Still is the land, until the heights of heaven
Burst and break backward, detonant with sound.

And on the earth fire and a flood are spilled,
The air is no more sultry, but the wind
Drives forward in the grass. The moor-fowl, chilled,
Huddle and crouch in hollows water-lined.

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Then, all night long, grey spectres of the dark
Fly onward overhead in strange disguise,
With shriekings of the wind, and weird blue spark
Lighting their myriad white hail-like eyes.

But in the morning with a song the land
Resumes the primal harmony of dawn;
A lark, the latest of its tuneful band,
Into the heart of Paradise is drawn

To sing that sweet and slender hymn that I
Have heard so many ages ever new,
Never the same, yet, as the world goes by,
The same hymn steeped in sunlight and in dew.

And sometimes in the reeds a feathered thing
Will shyly peer about, as though it sought
Some old forgotten love of kindred wing
Amid the grass with last year's dead leaves fraught.

Sometimes a mouse will move, or spider thread
His amber beads betwixt the sky and me,
Sometimes a frozen swallow will fall dead,
Sometimes the southern winds will bring a bee.

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Or sometimes in the later autumn days
A red-fanged rough retriever will come nigh,
Threading the scent all through that reedy maze,
And anxious, earnest, panting, pass me by.

But oftenest the world is very still;
A light breeze o'er the land will break and shiver
With musical low melancholy thrill
Among the grasses and the reeds for ever.

I ask no more. The liquid summer light
About this poplar, when its leaves are green,
The change, when glitteringly bare and white
Its branches on the wintry blue are seen.

All are but changes of delight to me,
In each I lose myself, and live, and die,
And rise upon the next with equal glee,
Like one who feasts for ever with his eye.

I ask no more. The slender drooping grace
Of stem and blade seen thus obliquely clear
Suffice me while the moments interlace
To minutes and the minutes to a year.

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The centuries soon pass, and, while I live,
The world, which without me were but a dream,
Its changing image to my mind shall give,—
One image and one aspect of its scheme.