Classic Poem

I have seen lightning walking upon the water,
While thunder shook my head like a sieve of corn:
I have felt cold-handed Winter touch me in the dark,
And Atlas-like have borne the burning weighty sun.

I have seen mountains and forests and beautiful cities
Growing empty as a deserted garden:
Mountains, and broken castles: desolate forests,
Where by a hundred paths
The singing Danube giddies through the plain:
I have felt by night its pulse on the boat's shell,
While fishes leapt like hoops in the dim light:
Seen sunrise delicately tread the uneven water.

Then for a while I sat in stranger places,
Dicing with Hunger to pass away the time;
I cut my fingers on the reins of State,
I knew the wicked eye of half-drawn steel
Outstare my own, and reached my hand for help
To my sole comrade, hidden-footed Fear.
So came at length to climb on alien hills,
Where pine trees sang like the fifty-fluted sea,
And Snow let down her hair among the crocuses;
Where I saw men upon that roof of the world
Battle like cats, and utter their terrible notes.

I have walked with the sun shut into my tight head,
And my hands jewelled with flies till my hands bled,
At noon with bared feet in the hot sand;
The span-deep forest sand, where cedars stretch for ever,
And orchids suck weak breath over coloured swamp-water.
Where hot cicalas trill and bright bird never sings
I have seen the glassy wind warp in the hot sun:
The beautiful curved wind where the locusts tread:
Seen leaves of bushes like myriad green eyes,
And big butterflies like heavy voiceless birds.
And in mid-ocean I have seen green tigers
Endlessly burst through pale dense leaves of fog:
Deep in the under-parts of a ship have seen
Men, the innumerable nations of the world,
Like lights, dancing: looked in strange fleckt eyes.

I know the prick of turf, the scent of warm trees,
The taste of cheese, the sound of an old clock,
A fire of green ash logs in a stone house,
The lovely cooling touch of driven rain,
The perfect unrepeated shape of the Welsh hills.
— But I have seen smooth familiar things
So thorny grow with criss-cross memories,
It pained to touch them.

Once, when a boy, I saw an old man die
So slowly scarce you knew which way the battle went
Till Pallor came on his cold horse
With certain rumour of defeat:
And the next day I saw men leap from life
Like salmon leap a weir.
At times, I have got drunk on brimming eyes;
Wrestled alone with him who comes by night,
And with a drop of scalding oil have lost him:
At times, fused night with day in fervent thinking
Till the skull sweated;
Or tumbled with rhythms on a pile of hay
For half a honey-suckled summer.

But all these things I don't mistake for living,
Nor bombast about them for creative writing,
— Romantics, largely spun from my own stomach,
Samples snipped from an enormous fabric:
Though greatly moving me — part of my substance.
Now, coming to manhood, I know I have plunged no deeper
Into thought or doing than a kitten
Trying to dare to pat an electric fan.
And like that kitten, most I do is prompted
By uneasy twitchings in my tail's tip.
Surely it's now high time that something happened,
Something snapped somewhere, and I entered in;
— Ceased to be like the man who painted in the dark,
Then called for a light to see what he had painted?