English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
William Wordsworth
395. Lucy
S
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befell.
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And, as we climb’d the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near and nearer still.
Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
He raised, and never stopp’d:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropp’d.
Into a lover’s head!
‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried,
‘If Lucy should be dead!’
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove;
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.
Half-hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, O!
The difference to me!
I travell’d among unknown men
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.
Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time, for still I seem
To love thee more and more.
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherish’d turn’d her wheel
Beside an English fire.
The bowers where Lucy play’d;
And thine too is the last green field
That Lucy’s eyes survey’d.
Three years she grew in sun and shower;
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown:
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
Both law and impulse: and with me
The girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And her’s shall be the breathing balm,
And her’s the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
E’en in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
By silent sympathy.
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
Where she and I together live
Here in this happy dell.’
How soon my Lucy’s race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.