All day the Sun looked down
On England; heath and town,
Cornland and woodland, mountain and champaign,
And the bright tangled skein
Of Thames, Avon, Severn, Trent--
Everywhere his beams went.
They lightened upon ships far out to sea,
And sifted every tree.
And few, and dull, were they
Abroad in England that day,
But looking up at the blue heavens overhead,
‘Fine harvest weather,’ said.
Turning him to his rest
Within the patient West--
As though he kept the primal law in mind
To multiply his kind--
Throughout the land his rays
Set windows in a blaze;
But nowhere, save at Wells in Somerset,
Did a live Sun beget.
There, under cottage brows,
Glittered intact the spouse
Whose steadfast welcome the steadfast greeting could match,
And fired a neighbour’s thatch.
Strange chance! (Enough to undo
Man’s wit, might he look through
Seeing, and know the Sun an enormous spark
In caves of endless dark;
And, like ourselves, condemned
His little light to expend
By rote. But our imaginations deck
The heaven’s hideous black.)
Strange chance! meeting well-met!
Chance more wild-faring yet
I woo, that with long hope and true intent
My burning-glass present
To that unmeasured, un-
surmiseable incendiary of suns--
Life--that some beam of it, matched by my art,
May fire a stranger’s heart.