Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, [25]
Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake,
Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn.
Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale!
O struggling with the darkness all the night,[378:1] 30
And visited all night by troops of stars,
Or when they climb the sky or when they sink:
Companion of the morning-star at dawn,
Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald: wake, O wake, and utter praise! [35]
Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth?
Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?
And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad!
Who called you forth from night and utter death, [40]
From dark and icy caverns called you forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks,
For ever shattered and the same for ever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,
Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, [45]
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?
And who commanded (and the silence came),
Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?
Ye Ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain— [50]
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the Gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun [55]
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers[379:1]
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice! [60]
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!
Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost!
Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest! [65]
Ye eagles, play-mates of the mountain-storm!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
Ye signs and wonders of the element!
Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise!
Thou too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, [70]
Oft from whose feet the avalanche,[380:1] unheard,
Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene
Into the depth of clouds, that veil thy breast—
Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou
That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low [75]
In adoration, upward from thy base
Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud,
To rise before me—Rise, O ever rise,
Rise like a cloud of incense from the Earth! [80]
Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God. [85]
1802.
FOOTNOTES:
[376:2] First published in the Morning Post, Sept. 11, 1802: reprinted in the Poetical Register for 1802 (1803), ii. 308, 311, and in The Friend, No. XI, Oct. 26, 1809: included in Sibylline Leaves, 1817, 1828, 1829, and 1834. Three MSS. are extant: (1) MS. A, sent to Sir George Beaumont, Oct. 1803 (see Coleorton Letters, 1886, i. 26); (2) MS. B, the MS. of the version as printed in The Friend, Oct. 26, 1809 (now in the Forster Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum); (3) MS. C, presented to Mrs. Brabant in 1815 (now in the British Museum). The Hymn before Sunrise, &c., 'Hymn in the manner of the Psalms,' is an expansion, in part, of a translation of Friederika Brun's 'Ode to Chamouny', addressed to Klopstock, which numbers some twenty lines. The German original (see the Appendices of this edition) was first appended to Coleridge's Poetical Works in 1844 (p. 372). A translation was given in a footnote, P. W. (ed. by T. Ashe), 1885, ii. 86, 87. In the Morning Post and Poetical Register the following explanatory note preceded the poem:—