Matthew Arnold (1822–88). The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840–1867. 1909.
Empedocles on Etna, and Other PoemsParting
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Who rush by, who shake
The window, and ruffle
The gleam-lighted lake;
Who cross to the hill-side
Thin-sprinkled with farms,
Where the high woods strip sadly
Their yellowing arms;—
Ye are bound for the mountains—
Ah, with you let me go
Where your cold distant barrier,
The vast range of snow,
Through the loose clouds lifts dimly
Its white peaks in air—
How deep is their stillness!
Ah! would I were there!
Buoyant as morning, and as morning clear?
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
Or was it from some sun-fleck’d mountain-brook
That the sweet voice its upland clearness took?
Ah! it comes nearer—
Sweet notes, this way!
The rushing winds go,
To the ice-cumber’d gorges,
The vast seas of snow.
There the torrents drive upward
Their rock-strangled hum,
There the avalanche thunders
The hoarse torrent dumb.
—I come, O ye mountains!
Ye torrents, I come!
Whose figure casts a shadow on the floor?
The sweet blue eyes—the soft, ash-colour’d hair—
The cheeks that still their gentle paleness wear—
The lovely lips, with their arch smile, that tells
The unconquer’d joy in which her spirit dwells—
Ah! they bend nearer—
Sweet lips, this way!
Ah! with that let me go
To the clear waning hill-side
Unspotted by snow,
There to watch, o’er the sunk vale,
The frore mountain wall,
Where the nich’d snow-bed sprays down
Its powdery fall.
There its dusky blue clusters
The aconite spreads;
There the pines slope, the cloud-strips
Hung soft in their heads.
No life but, at moments,
The mountain-bee’s hum.
—I come, O ye mountains!
Ye pine-woods, I come!
Ah, Marguerite, fain
Would these arms reach to clasp thee:—
But see! ’tis in vain.
My strain’d arms are cast.
But a sea rolls between us—
Our different past.
Those lips have been prest,
And others, ere I was,
Were clasp’d to that breast;
Our spirits have grown.
And what heart knows another?
Ah! who knows his own?
I come to the wild.
Fold closely, O Nature!
Thine arms round thy child.
A heart ever new:
To all always open;
To all always true.
And dry up my tears
On thy high mountain platforms,
Where Morn first appears,
Are spread and upfurl’d;
In the stir of the forces
Whence issued the world.