What reveries of far-off days
These withered plaques of duck-weed raise!
The creeping wretches, the crowded pond,
A death in life, no Culture, no Beyond.
Light and No-light in dull routine;
Thought and No-thought two shades of green.
The fair ideals all creatures need
Smothered beneath the inferior weed.
For highest aspirations stop
With breathing, at the water’s top.
O Fairy Metamorphosis
For Being to become What Is.
Here ceaseless radiance fills my sphere,
The Lamp my Moon, all night, bright, near.
And clustering on the crystal wall
Great strawberries iconistical.
No strife to propagate the kind
But leisure to improve the mind;
Till curious sensations range
About the tail and hint at change.
The weed with flowers stars the sky
And monstrous forms go dimly by.
Tail fades! The vestiges of gills
Swell with rare æther from the hills.
Now Time reared up in rocky crests
Where flaming fowl involve their nests,
Across the rippled Stream of Space
Throws shadows that obscure this place;
But in the valleys pipers play:
‘Over the hills and far away.’