Matthew Arnold (1822–88). The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840–1867. 1909.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other PoemsStanzas on a Gipsy Child by the Sea-shore
[First published 1849. Reprinted 1855.]
W
Who hid such import in an infant’s gloom?
Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?
What clouds thy forehead, and fore-dates thy doom?
The swinging waters, and the cluster’d pier.
Not idly Earth and Ocean labour on,
Nor idly do these sea-birds hover near.
Wafts not from thine own thoughts, nor longings vain,
Nor weariness, the full-fed soul’s annoy;
Remaining in thy hunger and thy pain:
From thine own mother’s breast, that knows not thee;
With eyes that sought thine eyes thou didst converse,
And that soul-searching vision fell on me.
Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth.
Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own:
Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth.
His, who in mountain glens, at noon of day,
Sits rapt, and hears the battle break below?—
Ah! thine was not the shelter, but the fray.
What seraph’s, in some alien planet born?—
No exile’s dream was ever half so sad,
Nor any angel’s sorrow so forlorn.
Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore:
But in disdainful silence turn away,
Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more?
Unravel all his many-colour’d lore:
Whose mind hath known all arts of governing,
Mus’d much, lov’d life a little, loath’d it more?
Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give—
Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope,
Foreseen thy harvest—yet proceed’st to live.
Whose sureness grey-hair’d scholars hardly learn!
What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain?
What heavens, what earth, what suns shalt thou discern?
Match that funereal aspect with her pall,
I think, thou wilt have fathom’d life too far,
Have known too much—or else forgotten all.
Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps:
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale
Of grief, and eas’d us with a thousand sleeps.
Not daily labour’s dull, Lethaean spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
Of the soil’d glory, and the trailing wing;
In the throng’d fields where winning comes by strife;
And though the just sun gild, as all men pray,
Some reaches of thy storm-vext stream of life;
That sever’d the world’s march and thine, is gone:
Though ease dulls grace, and Wisdom be too proud
To halve a lodging that was all her own:
Oh once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain.
Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,
And wear this majesty of grief again.