If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli;
Alone I did it.—Boy!”
Here is a self indeed, which no one can fail to feel, though he might be unable to describe it. What a ferocious scream of the outraged ego is that “I” at the end of the second line!
So much is written on this topic that ignores self-feeling and thus deprives “self” of all vivid and palpable meaning, that I feel it permissible to add a few more passages in which this feeling is forcibly expressed. Thus in Lowell’s poem, “A Glance Behind the Curtain,” Cromwell says:
“I, perchance,
Am one raised up by the Almighty arm
To witness some great truth to all the world.”
And his Columbus, on the bow of his vessel, soliloquizes: