Page:Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918.djvu/660

 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

My head hath its coronal, The fullness of your bliss, I feel — I feel it all. O evil day ! if I were sullen While Earth herself is adorning, This sweet May-morning, And the children are culling On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers, while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm — I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! — But there 's a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have look'd upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone· The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat Whither is fled the visionary gleam ? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy;

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