For who can work, unwitting his work’s worth?
Better, meseems, to know the work for naught,
Turn my sick course back to the kindly earth,
And leave to ampler plumes the jetting tops of thought.
And visitations, that do often use,
Remote, unhappy, inauspicious sense
Of doom, and poets widowed of their muse,
And what dark ’gan, dark ended, in me did commence.
I thought of spirit wronged by mortal ills,
And my flesh rotting on my fate’s dull stake;
And how self-scornèd they the bounty fills
Of others, and the bread, even of their dearest, take.
I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song;
Of him that set, wrapt in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.
But I, exanimate of quick Poesy,—
O then, no more but even a soulless corse!
Nay, my Delight dies not; ’tis I should be
Her dead, a stringless harp on which she had no force.
Of my wild lot I thought; from place to place,
Apollo’s song-bowed Scythian, I go on;
Making in all my home, with pliant ways,
But, provident of change, putting forth root in none.
Now, with starved brain, sick body, patience galled
With fardels even to wincing; from fair sky
Fell sudden little rain, scarce to be called
A shower, which of the instant was gone wholly by.
What cloud thus died I saw not; heaven was fair.
Methinks my angel plucked my locks: I bowed
My spirit, shamed; and looking in the air:—
‘Even so,’ I said, ‘even so, my brother the good Cloud?’
It was a pilgrim of the fields of air,
Its home was allwheres the wind left it rest,
And in a little forth again did fare,
And in all places was a stranger and a guest.
It harked all breaths of heaven, and did obey
With sweet peace their uncomprehended wills;
It knew the eyes of stars which made no stay,
And with the thunder walked upon the lonely hills.