Classic Poem

O thou happy, happy Island-home,
So rich and green and fair,
Where I and my true-love used to roam
Without a thought of care

O thou many-peopled busy town
Upon the broad bay's marge;
Into whose full life we went down
And felt our life as large.

O the banks of the golden gorse and broom,
And the lanes that wind like a burn,
With the soft snowflakes of the apple-bloom
Shed thick on their hedgerow fern.

O the slant-stemmed orchards, ripe and old,
When the rich fruits everywhere,
Like flames of ruby and globes of gold,
Burn in the quivering air.

O the sleek and tethered kine that graze
The valley-bottoms sweet,
And look up with such long, slow, patient gaze
As you pass with lingering feet.

O the singing of the larks in the fields of air
Above the fields of grain,
When the sky is blue and the clouds are rare,
And the hedges laugh with rain.

Can it indeed, then, can it be,
That I so young in years
Must fade from the land and the air and the sea
And the heaven of shining spheres?

Must fade away to a joyless ghost,
Or moulder in the earth,
While all the world and the starry host
Live on in their glorious mirth?

From all the life and the beauty part
Without one loving tear
Of those eyes that lit the flame in my heart,
That burns my life out here?