Wessex Heights
There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly handFor thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.
In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend—Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.
In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways—Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things—Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.
Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass causeCan have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.
I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon,Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passedFor everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.
There’s a ghost at Yell’ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,There’s a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.
As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.
So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.
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