5
Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplished years
Be large and lucid round thy brow. When summer's hourly-mellowing change
io May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat That ripple round the lowly grange,0 outlying farmhouse
Come; not in watches of the night,
But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
is Come, beauteous in thine after form,
And like a finer light in light.
93
I shall not see thee. Dare I say
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land
Where first he walked when clasped in clay?1 5 No visual shade of someone lost,
But he, the Spirit himself, may come
Where all the nerve of sense is numb,
Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.
Oh, therefore from thy sightless0 range invisible io With gods in unconjectured bliss,
Oh, from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold-complicated change, Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
The wish too strong for words to name,
15 That in this blindness of the frame0 human bodyMy Ghost may feel that thine is near.
94
How pure at heart and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold
Should be the man whose thought would hold
An hour's communion with the dead. 5 In vain shalt thou, or any, call
The spirits from their golden day,
1. I.e., when he was alive and in fleshly form.
.
1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Except, like them, thou too canst say, My spirit is at peace with all.
They haunt the silence of the breast, 10
Imaginations calm and fair, The memory like a cloudless air, The conscience as a sea at rest;
But when the heart is full of din, And doubt beside the portal waits, 15 They can but listen at the gates, And hear the household jar? within. noise
95
By night we lingered on the lawn, For underfoot the herb was dry; And genial warmth; and o'er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn;
5 And calm that let the tapers burn Unwavering: not a cricket chirred; The brook alone far off was heard,
And on the board the fluttering urn.2
And bats went round in fragrant skies, io And wheeled or lit the filmy shapes3 That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;
While now we sang old songs that pealed From knoll to knoll, where, couched at ease, 15 The white kine? glimmered, and the trees cows Laid their dark arms4 about the field.
But when those others, one by one, Withdrew themselves from me and night, And in the house light after light
20 Went out, and I was all alone,
A hunger seized my heart; I read Of that glad year which once had been, In those fallen leaves which kept their green,
