The Poem

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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 faery 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! happy child!
Thou 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 sate 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,
Ill fitted to sustain 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.
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1845
That ...1807

That ...

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[Variant 2:]

1827
Not doom'd to jostle with ... 1807
Not framed to undergo ... 1815

Not doom'd to jostle with ...

Not framed to undergo ...

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[Footnote A:]

See Carver's Description of his Situation upon one of the Lakes of America.—W. W. 1807.

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Note:

These stanzas were addressed to Hartley Coleridge. The lines,

'I think of thee with many fears
For what may be thy lot in future years,'

taken in connection with his subsequent career, suggest the similarly sad "presentiment" with which the Lines composed above Tintern Abbey conclude. The following is the postscript to a letter by his father, S. T. C., addressed to Sir Humphry Davy, Keswick, July 25, 1800:

"Hartley is a spirit that dances on an aspen leaf; the air that yonder sallow-faced and yawning tourist is breathing, is to my babe a perpetual nitrous oxide. Never was more joyous creature born. Pain with him is so wholly trans-substantiated by the joys that had rolled on before, and rushed on after, that oftentimes five minutes after his mother has whipt him he has gone up and asked her to whip him again."

(

Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific

, of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart., pp. 78, 79.)—Ed.

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