+- Sonett-Forum (https://sonett-archiv.com/forum)
+-- Forum: Sonett-Archiv (https://sonett-archiv.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=126)
+--- Forum: Sonette aus germanischen Sprachen (https://sonett-archiv.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=394)
+---- Forum: Englische Sonette (https://sonett-archiv.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=818)
+----- Forum: Autoren C (https://sonett-archiv.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=831)
+------ Forum: Coleridge, Hartley (https://sonett-archiv.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=1067)
+------ Thema: From Country to Town (2) (/showthread.php?tid=16630)
From Country to Town (2) - ZaunköniG - 15.07.2007
From Country to Town
Written in Leeds, July 1832
I left the land where men with Nature dwelling,
Know not how much they love her lovely forms, -
Nor heed the history of forgotten storms,
On the blank folds inscribed of drear Helvellyn;
I sought the town, where toiling, buying, selling –
Getting and splending, poising hope and fear,
Make but one season of the live-long year.
Now for the brook from moss-girt fountain welling,
I see the foul stream hot with sleepless trade
For the slow creeping vapours of the morn,
Black hurrying smoke, in opake mass up-borne,
O’er dinning engines hangs, a stifling shade: -
Yet Nature lives e’en here, and will not part
From her best home, the lowly-loving heart.
'T is strange to me, who long have seen no face,
That was not like a book, whose every page
I knew by heart, a kindly common-place,
And faithful record of progressive age -
To wander forth, and view an unknown race;
Of all that I have been, to find no trace,
No footstep of my by-gone pilgrimage.
Thousands I pass, and no one stays his pace
To tell me that the day is fair, or rainy;
Each one his object seeks with anxious chase,
And I have not a common hope with any:
Thus like one drop of oil upon a flood,
In uncommunicating solitude,
Single am I amid the countless many.