Classic Poem

I

Flee from London, good my Walter! boundless jail of bricks and gas,
Weary purgatorial flagstones, dreary parks of burnt-up grass,
Exhibitions, evening parties, dust and swelter, glare and crush,
Fashion's costly idle pomp, Mammon's furious race and rush;
Leave your hot tumultuous city for the breaker's rival roar,
Quit your small suburban garden for the rude hills by the shore,
Leagues of smoke for morning vapour lifted off a mountain-range,
Silk and lace for barefoot beauty, and for " something new and strange"
All your towny wit and gossip. You shall both in field and fair,
Paddy's cunning and politeness with the Cockney ways compare,
Catch those lilts and old-world tunes the maidens at their needle sing,
Peep at dancers, from an outskirt of the blithe applausive ring,
See our petty Court of Justice, where the swearing's very strong,
See our little plain St. Peter's with its kneeling peasant throng;
Hear the brogue and Gaelic round you; sketch a hundred Irish scenes,
(Not mere whiskey and shillelagh) — wedding banquets, funeral keenes;
Rove at pleasure, noon or midnight; change a word with all you meet;
Ten times safer than in England, far less trammell'd in your feet.
Here, the only danger known
Is walking where the land's your own.
Landscape-lords are left alone.

II

We are barren, I confess it; but our scope of view is fine;
Dignifying shapes of mountains wave on each horizon-line,
So withdrawn that never house-room utmost pomp of cloud may lack,
Dawn or sunset, moon or planet, or mysterious Zodiac;
Hills beneath run all a-wrinkle, rocky, moory, pleasant green;
From its Lough the Flood descending, flashes like a sword between,
Through our crags and woods and meadows, to the mounded harbour-sand,
To the Bay, calm blue, or sometimes, whose Titanic arms expand
Welcome to the mighty billow rolling in from Newfoundland.
Oats, potatoes, cling in patches round the rocks and boulder-stones,
Like a motley ragged garment for the lean Earth's jutting bones;
Moors extend, and bogs and furzes, where you seldom meet a soul,
But the Besom-man or woman, who to earn a stingy dole
Stoops beneath a nodding burden of the scented heather-plant,
Or a jolly gaiter'd Sportsman, striding near the grouse's haunt, —
Slow the anchoritic heron, musing by his voiceless pond,
Startled with the startled echo from the lonely cliff beyond,
Rising, flaps away. And now a summit shows us, wide and bare,
All the brown uneven country, lit with waters here and there;
Southward, mountains — northward, mountains — westward, golden mystery
Of coruscation, when the Daystar flings his largesse on the sea;
Peasant cots-with humble haggarts; mansions with obsequious groves;
A Spire, a Steeple, rival standards, which the liberal distance loves
To set in union. There the dear but dirty little Town abides,
And you and I come home to dinner after all our walks and rides.
You shall taste a cleanly pudding:
But, bring shoes to stand a mudding.

III

Painter, what is spread before you? 'Tis the great Atlantic Sea!
Many-colour'd floor of ocean, where the lights and shadows flee;
Waves and wavelets running landward with a sparkle and a song,
Crystal green with foam enwoven, bursting, brightly split along;
Thousand living shapes of wonder in the clear pools of the rock;
Lengths of strand, and seafowl armies rising like a puff of smoke;
Drift and tangle on the limit where the wandering water fails;
Level faintly-clear horizon, touch'd with clouds and phantom sails, —
O come hither! weeks together let us watch the big Atlantic,
Blue or purple, green or gurly, dark or shining, smooth or frantic.
Far across the tide, slow-heaving, rich autumnal day-light sets;
See our crowd of busy row-boats, hear us noisy with our nets,
Where the glittering sprats in millions from the rising mesh are stript,
Till there scarce is room for rowing, every gunwhale nearly dipt;
Gulls around us, flying, dropping, thick in air as flakes of snow,
Snatching luckless little fishes in their silvery overflow.
Now one streak of western scarlet lingers upon ocean's edge,
Now through ripples of the splendour of the moon we swiftly wedge
Our loaded bows; the fisher hamlet beacons with domestic light;
On the shore the carts and horses wait to travel through the night
To a distant city market, while the boatmen sup and sleep,
While the firmamental stillness arches o'er the dusky deep,
Ever muttering chants and dirges
Round its rocks and sandy verges.