Dim sadness?and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name. 5
I heard the sky-lark warbling in the sky;
so And I bethought me of the playful hare:
Even such a happy Child of earth am I;
Even as these blissful creatures do I fare;
Far from the world I walk, and from all care;
But there may come another day to me?
35 Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty.
1. For the meeting with the old leech gatherer, see the foot of Ullswater, towards Askam. The image Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, October of the hare I then observed on the ridge of the
3, 1800 (p. 393). Wordsworth himself tells us, in Fell.' He wrote the poem eighteen months after
a note of 1843, that 'I was in the state of feeling this event (see Grasmere Journals, May 4 and 7,
described in the beginning of the poem, while 1802; pp. 398 and 400).
crossing over Barton Fell from Mr. Clarkson's, at
.
RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE / 303
6
My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought To genial0 faith, still rich in genial good; creative
40 But how can He expect that others should
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all? 7
I thought of Chatterton,2 the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;
45 Of Him3 who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain-side:
By our own spirits are we deified:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
8
50 Now, whether it were by peculiar grace,
A leading from above, a something given,
Yet it befel, that, in this lonely place,
When I with these untoward thoughts had striven,
Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven
55 I saw a Man before me unawares: The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.
9
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
60 By what means it could thither come, and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sense:
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;
10
Such seemed this Man,4 not all alive nor dead,
65 Nor all asleep?in his extreme old age:
His body was bent double, feet and head
Coming together in life's pilgrimage;
2. After his early death through drug overdose, a Keats participated. death believed by many to have been a suicide, the 3. Robert Burns, here considered, as Chatterton
