I was a spirit on the mountain-tops,--
A perfume in the valleys,--a simoom
On arid deserts,--a nomadic wind
Roaming the universe,--a tireless Voice.
I was ere Romulus and Remus were;
I was ere Nineveh and Babylon;
I was, and am, and evermore shall be,--
Progressing, never reaching to the end.
A hundred years I trembled in the grass,
The delicate trefoil that muffled warm
A slope on Ida; for a hundred years
Moved in the purple gyre of those dark flowers
The Grecian women strew upon the dead.
Under the earth, in fragrant glooms, I dwelt;
Then in the veins and sinews of a pine
On a lone isle, where, from the Cyclades,
A mighty wind, like a leviathan,
Ploughed through the brine, and from those solitudes
Sent Silence, frightened. To and fro I swayed,
Drawing the sunshine from the stooping clouds.
Suns came and went,--and many a mystic moon,
Orbing and waning,--and fierce meteor,
Leaving its lurid ghost to haunt the night
I heard loud voices by the sounding shore,
The stormy sea-gods,--and from ivory conchs
Wild music; and strange shadows floated by,
Some moaning and some singing. So the years
Clustered about me, till the hand of God
Let down the lightning from a sultry sky,
Splintered the pine and split the iron rock;
And from my odorous prison-house, a bird,
I in its bosom, darted: so we fled,
Turning the brittle edge of one high wave,--
Island and tree and sea-gods left behind!
Free as the air, from zone to zone I flew,
Far from the tumult to the quiet gates
Of daybreak; and beneath me I beheld
Vineyards, and rivers that like silver threads
Ran through the green, and gold of pasture-lands,--
And here and there a hamlet, a white rose,--
And here and there a city, whose slim spires
And palace-roofs and swollen domes uprose
Like scintillant stalagmites in the sun;
I saw huge navies battling with a storm
By ragged reefs along the desolate coasts,--
And lazy merchantmen, that crawled, like flies,
Over the blue enamel of the sea
To India or the icy Labradors.
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