Classic Poem

… and I stood at the centre of the Universe
in the depths of space, grey-grown, abandon'd since old time,
in the vastness, the wilderness of space—yet methought
I had come by cover'd ways into some lonely-lying hollow,
beside a stagnant pond.

There was rest, & yet motion = stangnation & yet disquiet =
—as of some vast wheel in nightmare watch'd crawling,
crawling upwards till it poise & oppress the sense with
the agony of expectance: then seen to rush precipitately
down the void, whilst one fled before it thro' all eternity—
yet another motion reaching to distant spheres, a quivering
horizontal whirl.
Silence was there & yet unmeasured roaring;
a ticking, fainter & dying: then thunderous hammer-strokes
approaching, swelling.

That feeling held me, as when one stands alone in the
small hours of the night by some old & tall & weighted
clock & the clock seems to live:
as if a great face look'd at one & was itself invisible—
age-worn lineaments fading into the indistinct—idea of
an impersonal Soul
& everything, hoary, spoke of desertion and loneliness, & the
last feeling was of stagnation, loneliness unvisited, brooding,
decay, & unutterable age.