Poison Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum, and blight Made the running rivulet thick and dumb, And at its outlet flags huge as stakes

Dammed it up with roots knotted like water snakes.

70

And hour by hour, when the air was still,
The vapours arose which have strength to kill:
At morn they were seen, at noon they were
felt,

At night they were darkness no star could
melt.

And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noon-day
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.

The Sensitive Plant like one forbid
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves which together grew
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.

80

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn ;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

For Winter came: the wind was his whip:
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles

90

His breath was a chain which without a sound
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne,
By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living
death

Fled from the frost to the earth beneath.
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air
And were caught in the branches naked and

bare.

First there came down a thawing rain

ΙΟΙ

And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steemed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and
stiff,

And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

When winter had gone and spring came back
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks,

and darnels,

III

Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

Winter

and death

Death a mockery

CONCLUSION

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that Lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that Lady fair,

And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:

IO

'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they. 20

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

A VISION OF THE SEA

'Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the A study

sail

Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale: From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven,

And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from heaven,

She sees the black trunks of the water-spouts spin,

And bend, as if heaven was ruining in,

Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible

mass

As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they

Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now

tossed

Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost

In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down

the sweep Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the

deep

It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale

Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by

the gale,

of storm

The ship Dim mirrors of ruin hang gleaming about; splits While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like a rout Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire-flowing

iron

With splendour and terror the black ship

environ,

20

Or like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of
pale fire

In fountains spout o'er it. In many a spire
The pyramid-billows with white points of brine
In the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine,
As piercing the sky from the floor to the sea.
The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree,
While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere
the blast

Of the whirlwind that stripped it of branches
has passed.

The intense thunder-balls which are raining from heaven

Have shattered its mast, and it stands black

and riven.

30

The chinks suck destruction. The heavy dead

hulk

On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk,

Like a corpse on the clay which is hungering to fold

Its corruption around it. Meanwhile, from the hold,

One deck is burst up by the waters below,

And it splits like the ice when the thaw-breezes

blow

O'er the lakes of the desert! Who sits on the

other?

Is that all the crew who lie burying each other,