And then I looked on man and knew Him still intent on death--still proud; Whereat into a rage I flew And turned my body to a cloud: In the dark shower of my soul The star of earth was swallowed whole.
Rivers I have seen which were beautiful, Slow rivers winding in the flat fens, With bands of reeds like thronged green swords Guarding the mirrored sky; And streams down-tumbling from the chalk hills To valleys of meadows and watercress-beds, And bridges whereunder, dark weed-coloured shadows, Trout flit or lie,
I know those rivers that peacefully glide Past old towers and shaven gardens, Where mottled walls rise from the water And mills all streaked with flour; And rivers with wharves and rusty shipping, That flow with a stately tidal motion Towards their destined estuaries Full of the pride of power;
Noble great rivers, Thames and Severn, Tweed with his gateway of many grey arches, Clyde, dying at sunset westward In a sea as red as blood; Rhine and his hills in close procession, Placid Elbe, Seine slaty and swirling, And Isar, son of the Alpine snows, A furious turquoise flood.
All these I have known, and with slow eyes I have walked on their shores and watched them, And softened to their beauty and loved them Wherever my feet have been;
And a hundred others also Whose names long since grew into me, That, dreaming in light or darkness, I have seen, though I have not seen.
Those rivers of thought: cold Ebro, And blue racing Guadiana, Passing white houses, high-balconied That ache in a sun-baked land, Congo, and Nile and Colorado, Niger, Indus, Zambesi, And the Yellow River, and the Oxus, And the river that dies in sand.
What splendours are theirs, what continents, What tribes of men, what basking plains, Forests and lion-hided deserts, Marshes, ravines and falls: All hues and shapes and tempers Wandering they take as they wander From those far springs that endlessly The far sea calls.
O in reverie I know the Volga That turns his back upon Europe, And the two great cities on his banks, Novgorod and Astrakhan; Where the world is a few soft colours, And under the dove-like evening The boatmen chant ancient songs, The tenderest known to man.
And the holy river Ganges, His fretted cities veiled in moonlight, Arches and buttresses silver-shadowy In the high moon, And palms grouped in the moonlight And fanes girdled with cypresses, Their domes of marble softly shining To the high silver moon.