THE CATHEDRAL. FAR through the memory shines a happy | Can overtake the rapture of the sense, day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every Ere yet the child had loudened to the boy, And I, recluse from playmates, found perforce Companionship in things that not denied Who, safe in uncontaminate reserve, These first sweet frauds upon our consciousness, That blend the sensual with its imaged world, These virginal cognitions, gifts of morn, Ere life grow noisy, and slower-footed thought To thrust between ourselves and what we feel, Have something in them secretly divine. Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain, With pains deliberate studies to renew The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose; For beauty's acme hath a term as brief As the wave's poise before it break in pearl. Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, Looking too long and closely at a flash We snatch the essential grace of meaning out, And that first passion beggars all be- Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. To shores inhospitable of eldest time, Pitiless seignories in the elements, Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, Perplex the eye with pictures from with in. This hath made poets dream of lives fore gone In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours; So Memory cheats us, glimpsing halfrevealed. Even as I write she tries her wonted spell In that continuous redbreast boding rain : The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm ; But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill That threads my undivided life and steals A pathos from the years and graves be tween. I know not how it is with other men, Whom I but guess, deciphering myself; For me, once felt is so felt nevermore. The fleeting relish at sensation's brim Had in it the best ferment of the wine. One spring I knew as never any since: All night the surges of the warm south west Boomed intermittent through the shuddering elms, And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm Startled with crocuses the sullen turf And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song: One summer hour abides, what time I perched, Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves, And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled, Denouncing me an alien and a thief: One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest, When in the lane I watched the ashleaves fall, Balancing softly earthward without wind, Or twirling with directer impulse down On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost, While grew pensive with the pensive That made familiar fields seem far and strange As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly In ghastly solitude about the pole, sun: Instant the candid chambers of my brain Were painted with these sovran images ; And later visions seem but copies pale From those unfading frescos of the past, Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me Parted from Nature by the joy in her That doubtfully revealed me to myself. Thenceforward I must stand outside the gate; And paradise was paradise the more, Known once and barred against satiety. What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, Is but our own conceit of what we see, Our own reaction upon what we feel; The world's a woman to our shifting mood, Feeling with us, or making due pretence; And therefore we the more persuade ourselves To make all things our thought's con federates, Conniving with us in whate'er we dream. So when our Fancy seeks analogies, Though she have hidden what she after finds, She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise. I find my own complexion everywhere: No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the first, A marvel to the bush it dawned upon, No falcon ever felt delight of wings To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind; And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy |