Scenes Of The Mind

I have run where festival was loud     With drum and brass among the crowd     Of panic revellers, whose cries     Affront the quiet of the skies;     Whose dancing lights contract the deep     Infinity of night and sleep     To a narrow turmoil of troubled fire.     And I have found my heart's desire     In beechen caverns that autumn fills     With the blue shadowiness of distant hills;     Whose luminous grey pillars bear     The stooping sky: calm is the air,     Nor any sound is heard to mar     That crystal silence - as from far,     Far off a man may see     The busy world all utterly     Hushed as an old memorial scene.     Long evenings I have sat and been     Strangely content, while in my hands     I held a wealth of coloured strands,     Shimmering plaits of silk and skeins     Of soft bright wool. Each colour drains     New life at the lamp's round pool of gold;     Each sinks again when I withhold     The quickening radiance, to a wan     And shadowy oblivion     Of what it was. And in my mind     Beauty or sudden love has shined     And wakened colour in what was dead     And turned to gold the sullen lead     Of mean desires and everyday's     Poor thoughts and customary ways.     Sometimes in lands where mountains throw     Their silent spell on all below,     Drawing a magic circle wide     About their feet on every side,     Robbed of all speech and thought and act,     I have seen God in the cataract.     In falling water and in flame,     Never at rest, yet still the same,     God shows himself. And I have known     The swift fire frozen into stone,     And water frozen changelessly     Into the death of gems. And I     Long sitting by the thunderous mill     Have seen the headlong wheel made still,     And in the silence that ensued     Have known the endless solitude     Of being dead and utterly nought.     Inhabitant of mine own thought,     I look abroad, and all I see     Is my creation, made for me:     Along my thread of life are pearled     The moments that make up the world.