Elegiac Stanzas

Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm

I WAS thy neighbour once, thou rugged pile! Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee: I saw thee every day; and all the while Thy form was sleeping on a glassy sea.

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! So like, so very like, was day to day! Whene’er I looked, thy image still was there; It trembled, but it never passed away.

How perfect was the calm! It seemed no sleep, No mood, which season takes away or brings: I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.

Ah! then—if mine had been the painter’s hand To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet’s dream,—

I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile, Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine Of peaceful years: a chronicle of heaven;— Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A picture had it been of lasting ease, Elysian quiet, without toil or strife; No motion but the moving tide; a breeze; Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart, Such picture would I at that time have made; And seen the soul of truth in every part, A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been—’tis so no more; I have submitted to a new control: A power is gone which nothing can restore; A deep distress hath humanized my soul.

Not for a moment could I now behold A smiling sea, and be what I have been; The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old; This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the friend If he had lived, of him whom I deplore. This work of thine I blame not, but commend; This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

O ’tis a passionate work!—yet wise and well, Well chosen is the spirit that is here; That hulk which labours in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves,— Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time— The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind! Such happiness, wherever it be known, Is to be pitied, for ’tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne,— Such sights, or worse, as are before me here! Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

TO H. C.

(Hartley Coleridge; six years old.)

O THOU! whose fancies from afar are brought; Who of thy words dost make a mock apparel, And fittest to unutterable thought The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol; Thou fairy voyager! that dost float In such clear water that thy boat May rather seem To brood on air than on an earthly stream; Suspended in a stream as clear as sky, Where earth and heaven do make one imagery; O blessed vision! O happy child! That art so exquisitely wild, I think of thee with many fears For what may be thy lot in future years.

I thought of times when pain might be thy guest, Lord of thy house and hospitality; And grief, uneasy lover! never rest But when she sat within the touch of thee. O! too industrious folly! O! vain and causeless melancholy! Nature will either end thee quite; Or, lengthening out thy season of delight, Preserve for thee, by individual right, A young lamb’s heart among the full-grown flocks.

What hast thou to do with sorrow, Or the injuries of to-morrow? Thou art a dew-drop which the morn brings forth, Not framed to undergo unkindly shocks; Or to be trailed along the soiling earth; A gem that glitters while it lives, And no forewarning gives; But, at the touch of wrong, without a strife Slips in a moment out of life.