To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, Thanks to the human heart by which we live, That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality Īnother race hath been, and other palms are won. The clouds that gather round the setting sun The innocent brightness of a new-born day I love the brooks which down their channels fretĮven more than when I tripp’d lightly as they Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might In years that bring the philosophic mind.Īnd 0, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower What though the radiance which was once so bright Then, sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song! Our souls have sight of that immortal seaĪnd see the children sport upon the shore,Īnd hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, Our noisy years seem moments in the being High instincts, before which our mortal natureĭid tremble like a guilty thing surprised:Īre yet the fountain-light of all our day,Īre yet a master-light of all our seeing With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:. The thought of our past years in me doth breedįor that which is most worthy to be blest, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?įull soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height, Thou little child, yet glorious in the might Is but a lonely bed, without the sense of sightĪ place of thoughts where we in waiting lie In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave īroods like the day, a master o’er a slave, Which we are toiling all our lives to find, That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep, Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie That life brings with her in her equipage With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, To dialogues of business, love, or strife įilling from time to time his ‘humorous stage’ Shaped by himself with newly-learned art Some fragment from his dream of human life, See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, With light upon him from his father’s eyes! See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies,įretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses, To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man,īehold the Child among his new-born blisses, Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,Īnd, even with something of a mother’s mind, The Youth, who daily farther from the eastĮarth fills her lap with pleasures of her own Shades of the prison-house begin to closeīut he beholds the light, and whence it flows, The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting Where is it now, the glory and the dream? The fulness of your bliss, I feel-I feel it all.įresh flowers while the sun shines warm,Īnd the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:-īoth of them speak of something that is gone: The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy The winds come to me from the fields of sleep, I hear the echoes through the mountains throng. No more shall grief of mine the season wrong: The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,. To me alone there came a thought of grief:Ī timely utterance gave that thought relief, Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, That there hath past away a glory from the earth. Look round her when the heavens are bare The things which I have seen I now can see no more. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

Wordsworth odes