dots-menu
×

Home  »  The World’s Best Poetry  »  Youth

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

Poems of Home: IV. Youth

Youth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

From “Youth and Age

VERSE, a breeze ’mid blossoms straying,

Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee—

Both were mine! Life went a-maying

With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,

When I was young!

When I was young?—Ah, woful when!

Ah! for the change ’twixt Now and Then!

This breathing house not built with hands,

This body that does me grievous wrong,

O’er aery cliffs and glittering sands

How lightly then it flashed along:

Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,

On winding lakes and rivers wide,

That ask no aid of sail or oar,

That fear no spite of wind or tide!

Nought cared this body for wind or weather

When Youth and I lived in ’t together.