Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/108

Rh From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse Would shudder along the purple-veined wrist Like a shot bird. Youth’s stern, set face to face With youth’s ideal: and when people came And said, ‘You work too much, you are looking ill,’ I smiled for pity of them who pitied me, And thought I should be better soon perhaps For those ill looks. Observe—‘I,’ means in youth Just I. . the conscious and eternal soul With all its ends,—and not the outside life, The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh, The so much liver, lung, integument, Which make the sum of ‘I’ hereafter, when World-talkers talk of doing well or ill. I prosper, if I gain a step, although A nail then pierced my foot: although my brain Embracing any truth, froze paralysed, I prosper. I but change my instrument; I break the spade off, digging deep for gold, And catch the mattock up. I worked on, on. Through all the bristling fence of nights and days Which hedges time in from the eternities, I struggled,. . never stopped to note the stakes Which hurt me in my course. The midnight oil Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs: I had to live, that therefore I might work, And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life, To work with one hand for the booksellers,