Alone · Stanzas · To ——

Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by—
From the thunder and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Stanzas

How often we forget all time, when lone
Admiring Nature’s universal throne;
Her woods—her wilds—her mountains—the intense
Reply of Hers to Our intelligence!
Byron.

I
In youth I have known one with whom the Earth
  In secret communing held—as he with it,
In daylight, and in beauty, from his birth:
  Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit
From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth
  A passionate light such for his spirit was fit—
And yet that spirit knew not, in the hour
Of its own fervour, what had o’er it power.

II
Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought
  To a fever by the moonbeam that hangs o’er,
But I will half believe that wild light fraught
  With more of sovereignty than ancient lore
Hath ever told—or is it of a thought
  The unembodied essence, and no more
That with a quickening spell doth o’er us pass
As dew of the night-time o’er the summer grass?

III
Doth o’er us pass, when, as th’ expanding eye
  To the loved object—so the tear to the lid
Will start, which lately slept in apathy?
  And yet it need not be—that object—hid
From us in life, but common—which doth lie
  Each hour before us—but then only bid
With a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken,
To awake us—’Tis a symbol and a token

IV
Of what in other worlds shall be—and given
  In beauty by our God, to those alone
Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven,
  Drawn by their heart’s passion, and that tone,
That high tone of the spirit, which hath striven
  Though not with Faith—with godliness—whose throne
With desperate energy ’t hath beaten down;
Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.

To ——

The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see
  The wantonest singing birds,
Are lips—and all thy melody
  Of lip-begotten words—

Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined
  Then desolately fall,
O God! on my funereal mind
  Like starlight on a pall—

Thy heart—thy heart!—I wake and sigh,
  And sleep to dream till day
Of the truth that gold can never buy—
  Of the baubles that it may.