Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together.

What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me.

From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw.

They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

It is thy very energy of thought Which keeps thee from thy God.

Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality!

’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased.

Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colors a suffusion from that light.

On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn.

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.

He holds him with his glittering eye— The Wedding Guest stood still, And listens like a three years’ child: The Mariner hath his will.

Be but organic harps diversely fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?

We feel that we are greater than we know.

And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine.

I thought of Chatterton, 4 the marvelous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him 5 who walked in glory and in joy Following his plow, along the mountainside: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All-in-all!

The harvest of a quiet eye.