Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven,6
70 Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud?
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud?
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
75 All colours a suffusion from that light.
6
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
SO For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
But oh! each visitation' i.e., of affliction
85 Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
90 From my own nature all the natural man?
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
7
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
95 Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream
Of agony by torture lengthened out
That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that ravest without, 100 Bare crag, or mountain-tairn,7 or blasted tree,
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,? climbed
Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,
Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers,
105 Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
Mak'st Devils' yule,8 with worse than wintry song,
The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.
Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!
Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold!
6. The sense becomes clearer if line 68 is punc-dowry, 'a new Earth and a new Heaven,' a phrase tuated in the way that Coleridge punctuated it echoing Revelation 21.1.
when quoting the passage in one of his essays: 7. Tarn, or mountain pool.
'Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower.' 8. Christmas as, in a perverted form, it is cele
I.e., Joy marries us to Nature and gives us, for our brated by devils.
.
THE PAINS OF SLEEP / 469
