Address to Certain Golfishes

RESTLESS forms of living light

Quivering on your lucid wings,

Cheating still the curious sight

With a thousand shadowings;

Various as the tints of even,

Gorgeous as the hues of heaven,

Reflected on you native streams

In flitting, flashing, billowy gleams!

Harmless warriors, clad in mail

Of silver breastplate, golden scale; --

Mail of Nature's own bestowing,

With peaceful radiance, mildly glowing --

Fleet are ye as fleetest galley

Or pirate rover sent from Sallee;

Keener than the Tartar's arrow,

Sport ye in your sea so narrow.

Was the sun himself your sire?

Were ye born of vital fire?

Or of the shade of golden flowers,

Such as we fetch from Eastern bowers,

To mock this murky clime of ours?

Upwards, downwards, now ye glance,

Weaving many a mazy dance;

Seeming still to grow in size

When ye would elude our eyes --

Pretty creatures! we might deem

Ye were happy as ye seem --

As gay, as gamesome, and as blithe,

As light, as loving, and as lithe,

As gladly earnest in your play,

As when ye gleamed in far Cathay.

And yet, since on this hapless earth

There's small sincerity in mirth,

And laughter oft is but an art

To drown the outcry of the heart;

It may be that your ceaseless gambols,

Your wheelings, dartings, divings, rambles,

Your restless roving round and round,

The circuit of your crystal bound --

Is but the task of weary pain,

An endless labor, dull and vain;

And while your forms are gaily shining,

Your little lives are inly pining!

Nay -- but still I fain would dream

That ye are happy as ye seem.

Hartley Coleridge

November

THE mellow year is hasting to its close:

The little birds have almost sung their last,

Their small notes twitter in the dreary blast --

That shrill-piped harbinger of early snows; --

The patient beauty of the scentless rose,

Oft with the morn's hoar crystal quaintly glassed,

Hangs a pale mourner for the summer past,

And makes a little summer where it grows; --

In the chill sunbeam of the faint brief day

The dusky waters shudder as they shine;

The russet leaves obstruct the straggling way

Of oozy brooks, which no deep banks define,

And the gaunt woods, in ragged, scant array,

Wrap their old limbs with sombre ivy-twine.

Hartley Coleridge

She is not fair to outward view

SHE is not fair to outward view,

     As many maidens be,

Her loveliness I never knew

     Until she smiled on me:

O, then I saw her eye was bright, --

A well of love, a spring of light.

But now her looks are coy and cold;

     To mine they ne'er reply;

And yet I cease not to behold,

     The love-light in her eye:

Her very frowns are better far

Than smiles of other maidens are!

Hartley Coleridge

To Wordsworth

THERE have been poets that in verse display

The elemental forms of human passions;

Poets have been, to whom the fickle fashions

And all the willful humors of the day

Have furnished matter for a polished lay:

And many are the smooth elaborate tribe

Who, emulous of thee, the shape describe,

And fain would every shifting hue portray

Of restless Nature. But, thou mighty Seer!

'Tis thine to celebrate the thoughts that make

The life of souls, the truths for whose sweet sake

We to ourselves and to our God are dear.

Of Nature's inner shirine thou art the priest,

Where most she works when we perceive her least.

Hartley Coleridge

The Flight of Youth

YOUTH, thou art fled, -- but where are all the charms

Which, though with thee they came, and passed with thee,

Should leave a perfume and sweet memory

Of what they have been? All thy boons and harms

Have perished quite. Thy oft-revered alarms

Forsake the fluttering echo. Smiles and tears

Die on my cheek, or, petrified with years,

Show the dull woe which no compassion warms,

The mirth none shares. Yet could a wish, a thought,

Unravel all the complex web of age, --

Could all the characters that Time hath wrought

Be clean effaced from my memorial page

By one short word, the word I would not say; --

I thank my God because my hairs are gray.

Hartley Coleridge

"How long I sailed . . ."

HOW long I sailed, and never took a thought

To what port I was bound! Secure as sleep,

I dwelt upon the bosom of the deep

And perilous sea. And though my ship was fraught

With rare and precious fancies, jewels brought

From fairyland, no course I cared to keep,

Nor changeful wind nor tide I heeded ought,

But joyed to feel the merry billows leap,

And watch the sunbeams dallying with the waves;

Or haply dream what realms beneath may lie

Where the clear ocean is an emerald sky,

And mermaids warble in their coral caves,

Yet vainly woo to me their secret home; --

And sweet it were for ever so to roam.

Hartley Coleridge

No Life Vain

LET me not deem that I was made in vain,

Or that my being was an accident,

Which fate, in working its sublime intent,

Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.

Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain

Hath its own mission, and is duly sent

To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent

'Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.

The very shadow of an insect's wing,

For which the violet cared not while it stayed,

Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,

Proved that the sun was shining by its shade:

Then can a drop of the eternal spring,

Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?

Hartley Coleridge

"Long time a child . . . "

LONG time a child, and still a child, when years

Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I, --

For yet I lived like one not born to die;

A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,

No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.

But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking,

I waked to sleep no more, at once o'ertaking

The vanguard of my age, with all arrears

Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,

Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is gray,

For I have lost the race I never ran:

A rathe December blights my lagging May;

And still I am a child, though I be old,

Time is by debtor for by years untold.

Hartley Coleridge

"Full Well I Know . . . "

FULL well I know -- my friends -- ye look on me

A living specter of my Father dead --

Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed

On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,

A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy --

Yet have I sung of maidens newly wed

And I have wished that hearts too sharply bled

Should throb with less of pain, and heave more free

By my endeavor. Still alone I sit

Counting each thought as miser counts a penny,

Wishing to spend my pennyworth of wit

On antic wheel of fortune like a zany:

You love me for my sire, to you unknown,

Revere me for his sake, and love me for my own.

Hartley Coleridge

Written on the Anniversary of Our Father's Death

STILL for the world he lives, and lives in bliss,

For God and for himself. Ten years and three

Have now elapsed since he was dead to me

And all that were on earth intensely his.

Not in the dim domain of Gloomy Dis,

The death-god of the ever-guessing Greek,

Nor in the paradise of Houris sleep

I think of him whom I most sorely miss.

The sage, the poet, lives for all mankind,

As long as truth is true, or beauty fair.

The soul that ever sought its God to find

Has found Him now -- no matter how, or where.

Yet can I not but mourn because he died

That was my father, should have been my guide.

Hartley Coleridge

Christmas Day

WAS it a fancy, bred of vagrant guess,

Or well-remember'd fact, that He was born

When half the world was wintry and forlorn,

In Nature's utmost season of distress?

And did the simple earth indeed confess

Its destitution and its craving need,

Wearing the white and penitential weed,

Meet symbol of judicial barrenness?

So be it; for in truth 'tis ever so,

That when the winter of the soul is bare,

The seed of heaven at first begins to grow,

Peeping abroad in desert of despair.

Full many a floweret, good, and sweet, and fair,

Is kindly wrapp'd in coverlet of snow.

Hartley Coleridge

September

THE dark green Summer, with its massive hues,

Fades into Autumn's tincture manifold.

A gorgeous garniture of fire and gold

The high slope of the ferny hill indues.

The mists of morn in slumbering layers diffuse

O'er glimmering rock, smooth lake, and spiked array

Of hedge-row thorns, a unity of grey.

All things appear their tangible form to lose

In ghostly vastness. But anon the gloom

Melts, as the Sun puts off his muddy veil;

And now the birds their twittering songs resume,

All Summer silent in the leafy dale.

In Spring they piped of love on every tree,

But now they sing the song of memory.

Hartley Coleridge