Were life but a dream, can death be, then, awakening?

Time’s sea hath been twice eight years

Since I was born to suffer each

Of its ebb and flow, combating, lest

The faery land be for aye out of my ken.

All beauty and glory are gone: the dull brain

And the abandoned breast being not mine;

Now too late for filmy-eyed repentance,

Too, too late for those antique rocky vows;

Now I lament, droop-headed, o’er another self of yore, —

A child’s beloved corse watched by a father.

Regret, or almost Remorse,

Wheresoe’er I conch, cometh around me

Like the ghost of a betrayed comrade dead,

Telling in voice plaintive and deep

His misery of grievance; disturbing

The darkness of tacit midnight;

Anguished, I turn my consciousness

Into a shield, behind which I will stay,

But my consciousness suffers still.

My thought aches, and my ambition blinds;

’Tis upon no land must I worship the sapphire Heaven;

’Tis from no height will I e’er woo Aurora’s beam.

O the wildest one, ’tis now in the secluded smoke

Of some piny mountain, where, in a wintry shroud,

An orphan owlet cries on the pale purple eve,

And to the Eternity forlorn each north-wind yields his sighs.

I faint! I sink! I die!

Poesy! God of Far-away!

Thou, knight-in- arms, seest me,

That from the tower of guilt I will flee,

And with thee, float far, far away

Athwart that ocean of Time unfathomable,

For I breathe like the air thine Apollonian vision’

For I feed deep, deep upon thine eyes divine

As aliment mine;

For to me the lakeside’s emerald willow

Is far surpassed by the lofty sway of thy frame,

For beneath thy heavenly paradise,

How true, how sweet the angels dwelling.

And icy must be mine eye, and tears, and throat,

When, my dearest one, Poesy! thou turnst cold on me!