First printed in 1830.
After the title in 1830 ed. is “Written very
early in life”. The influence most perceptible
in this poem is plainly Coleridge, on whose ‘Songs
of the Pixies’ it seems to have been modelled.
Tennyson considered it, and no wonder, as one of the
very best of “his early and peculiarly concentrated
Nature-poems”. See ‘Life’, i.,
27. It is full of vivid and accurate pictures
of his Lincolnshire home and haunts. See ‘Life’,
i., 25-48, ‘passim’.
1
Thou who stealest fire,
From the fountains of the past,
To glorify the present; oh, haste,
Visit my low desire!
Strengthen me, enlighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory.
2
Come not as thou camest [1] of late,
Flinging the gloom of yesternight
On the white day; but robed in soften’d
light
Of orient state.
Whilome thou camest with the morning mist,
Even as a maid, whose stately brow
The dew-impearled winds of dawn have kiss’d,
[2]
When she, as thou,
Stays on her floating locks the lovely
freight
Of overflowing blooms, and earliest shoots
Of orient green, giving safe pledge of
fruits,
Which in wintertide shall star
The black earth with brilliance rare.
3
Whilome thou camest with the morning mist.
And with the evening cloud,
Showering thy gleaned wealth into my open
breast,
(Those peerless flowers which in the rudest
wind
Never grow sere,
When rooted in the garden of the mind,
Because they are the earliest of the year).
Nor was the night thy shroud.
In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest
Thou leddest by the hand thine infant
Hope.
The eddying of her garments caught from
thee
The light of thy great presence; and the
cope
Of the half-attain’d futurity,
Though deep not fathomless,
Was cloven with the million stars which
tremble
O’er the deep mind of dauntless
infancy.
Small thought was there of life’s
distress;
For sure she deem’d no mist of earth
could dull
Those spirit-thrilling eyes so keen and
beautiful:
Sure she was nigher to heaven’s
spheres,
Listening the lordly music flowing from
The illimitable years.[3]
O strengthen me, enlighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory.
4
Come forth I charge thee, arise,
Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes!
Thou comest not with shows of flaunting
vines
Unto mine inner eye,
Divinest Memory!
Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall
Which ever sounds and shines
A pillar of white light upon the wall
Of purple cliffs, aloof descried:
Come from the woods that belt the grey
hill-side,
The seven elms, the poplars [4] four
