I miss that place
If I left this place, I would go there. To that place. To the wildness and wet. Let them be left, O let them be left. Sometimes I am suffocated.
Alchemist in the City by Gerard Manley Hopkins
My window shows the traveling clouds,
Leaves spent, new seasons, altered sky,
The making and melting crowds:
The whole world passes; I stand by.
They do not waste their meted hours,
But men and masters plan and build:
I see the crowning of their towers,
And happy promises fulfilled.
And I perhaps if my intent
Could count on prediluvian age,
The labors I should then have spent
Might so attain their heritage,
But before the pot can glow
With not to be discovered gold,
At length the bellows shall not blow,
The furnace shall at last be cold.
Yet it is now too late to heal
The incapable and cumbrous shame
Which makes me when with men I deal
More powerless than the blind or lame.
No, I should love the city less
Even than this my thankless lore;
But I desire the wilderness
Or weeded landslips of the shore.
I walk my breezy belvedere
To watch the low or levant sun,
I see the city pigeons veer,
I mark the tower swallows run
Between the tower-top and the ground
Below me in the bearing air;
Then find in the horizon-round
One spot and hunger to be there.
And then I hate the most that lore
That holds no promise of success;
Then sweetest seems the houseless shore,
Then free and kind the wilderness.
Or ancient mounds that cover bones,
Or rocks where rockdoves do repair
And trees of terebinth and stones
And silence and a gulf of air.
There on a long and squared height
After the sunset I would lie,
And pierce the yellow waxen light
With free long looking, ere I die.
Indeed, a prisoner here, I am gall. I am heartburn. I do not trust.
I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Alchemist in the City by Gerard Manley Hopkins
My window shows the traveling clouds,
Leaves spent, new seasons, altered sky,
The making and melting crowds:
The whole world passes; I stand by.
They do not waste their meted hours,
But men and masters plan and build:
I see the crowning of their towers,
And happy promises fulfilled.
And I perhaps if my intent
Could count on prediluvian age,
The labors I should then have spent
Might so attain their heritage,
But before the pot can glow
With not to be discovered gold,
At length the bellows shall not blow,
The furnace shall at last be cold.
Yet it is now too late to heal
The incapable and cumbrous shame
Which makes me when with men I deal
More powerless than the blind or lame.
No, I should love the city less
Even than this my thankless lore;
But I desire the wilderness
Or weeded landslips of the shore.
I walk my breezy belvedere
To watch the low or levant sun,
I see the city pigeons veer,
I mark the tower swallows run
Between the tower-top and the ground
Below me in the bearing air;
Then find in the horizon-round
One spot and hunger to be there.
And then I hate the most that lore
That holds no promise of success;
Then sweetest seems the houseless shore,
Then free and kind the wilderness.
Or ancient mounds that cover bones,
Or rocks where rockdoves do repair
And trees of terebinth and stones
And silence and a gulf of air.
There on a long and squared height
After the sunset I would lie,
And pierce the yellow waxen light
With free long looking, ere I die.
Indeed, a prisoner here, I am gall. I am heartburn. I do not trust.
I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.