Then in her green south fields, a poor man's child, Thou hadst thy short sweet fill of half‑blown joy, That ripens all of us for time to cloy With full‑blown pain and passion; ere the wild World caught thee by the fiery heart, and smiled To make so swift end of the godlike boy.
XVIII
For thou, if ever godlike foot there trod These fields of ours, wert surely like a god. Who knows what splendour of strange dreams was shed With sacred shadow and glimmer of gold and red From hallowed windows, over stone and sod, On thine unbowed bright insubmissive head?
XIX
The shadow stayed not, but the splendour stays, Our brother, till the last of English days. No day nor night on English earth shall be For ever, spring nor summer, Junes nor Mays, But somewhat as a sound or gleam of thee Shall come on us like morning from the sea.
XX
Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set, A light to lighten as from living eyes The cold unlit close lids of one that lies Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies To fire us living lest our lives forget.
XXI
For in that heaven what light of lights may be, What splendour of what stars, what spheres of flame Sounding, that none may number nor may name, We know not, even thy brethren; yea, not we Whose eyes desire the light that lightened thee, Whose ways and thine are one way and the same.
XXII
But if the riddles that in sleep we read, And trust them not, be flattering truth indeed, As he that rose our mightiest called them,—he, Much higher than thou as thou much higher than we— There, might we say, all flower of all our seed, All singing souls are as one sounding sea.
XXIII
All those that here were of thy kind and kin, Beside thee and below thee, full of love, Full‑souled for song,—and one alone above Whose only light folds all your glories in— With all birds' notes from nightingale to dove Fill the world whither we too fain would win.
XXIV
The world that sees in heaven the sovereign light Of sunlike Shakespeare, and the fiery night Whose stars were watched of Webster; and beneath, The twin‑souled brethren of the single wreath, Grown in kings' gardens, plucked from pastoral heath, Wrought with all flowers for all men's heart's delight.
XXV
And that fixed fervour, iron‑red like Mars, In the mid moving tide of tenderer stars, That burned on loves and deeds the darkest done, Athwart the incestuous prisoner's bride‑house bars; And thine, most highest of all their fires but one, Our morning star, sole risen before the sun.
XXVI
And one light risen since theirs to run such race Thou hast seen, O Phosphor, from thy pride of place. Thou hast seen Shelley, him that was to thee As light to fire or dawn to lightning; me, Me likewise, O our brother, shalt thou see, And I behold thee, face to glorious face?