Poems by Hartley Coleridge With a Memoir of his Life by his Brother. In Two Volumes |
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THE FIRST BIRTH DAY. |
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 | Poems by Hartley Coleridge |  |
23
XIX. THE FIRST BIRTH DAY.
The Sun, sweet girl, hath run his year-long raceThrough the vast nothing of the eternal sky—
Since the glad hearing of the first faint cry
Announc'd a stranger from the unknown place
Of unborn souls. How blank was then the face,
How uninform'd the weak light-shunning eye,
That wept and saw not. Poor mortality
Begins to mourn before it knows its case,
Prophetic in its ignorance.
Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air
We waule and cry.
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
We waule and cry.
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
Shakspeare: King Lear, Act 4.
The thought, which is obvious enough indeed, occurs in an older writer than Shakspeare, and might probably be traced to some of the fathers, or to Seneca. Robert Greene reproaches Shakspeare with reading Seneca done into English.
The hospitalities of earth
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.
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.
—Wordsworth.
The banish'd spirit in its new exile—
Pass some few changes of the fickle Moon,
The merry babe has learn'd its Mother's smile,
Its Father's frown, its Nurse's mimic rage.
| Poems by Hartley Coleridge | |