Let him name it who can,

The beauty would be the same.

3.

The tiny cell is forlorn,

Void of the little living will

That made it stir on the shore.

Did he stand at the diamond door

Of his house in a rainbow frill?

Did he push, when he was uncurl'd,

A golden foot or a fairy horn

'Thro' his dim water-world?

4.

Slight, to be crush'd with a tap

Of my finger-nail on the sand,

Small, but a work divine,

Frail, but of force to withstand,

Year upon year, the shock

Of cataract seas that snap

The three-decker's oaken spine

Athwart the ledges of rock,

Here on the Breton strand!

5.

Breton, not Briton; here

Like a shipwreck'd man on a coast

Of ancient fable and fear

Plagued with a flitting to and fro,

A disease, a hard mechanic ghost

That never came from on high

Nor ever arose from below,

But only moves with the moving eye, Flying along the land and the main

Why should it look like Maud?

Am I to be overawed

By what I cannot but know

Is a juggle born of the brain?

6.

Back from the Breton coast,

Sick of a nameless fear,

Back to the dark sea-line

Looking, thinking of all I have lost;

An old song vexes my ear;

But that of Lamech is mine.

7.

For years, a measureless ill,

For years, for ever, to part

But she, she would love me still;

And as long, O God, as she

Have a grain of love for me,

So long, no doubt, no doubt,
Shall I nurse in my dark heart,
However weary, a spark of will
Not to be trampled out.

8.

Strange, that the mind, when fraught

With a passion so intense

One would think that it well

Might drown all life in the eye,

That it should, by being so overwrought, Suddenly strike on a sharper sense

For a shell, or a flower, little things

Which else would have been past by!

And now I remember, I,

When he lay dying there,

I noticed one of his many rings

(For he had many, poor worm) and thought

It his mother's hair.

9.

Who knows if he be dead?

Whether I need have fled?

Am I guilty of blood?

However this may be,

Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,

While I am over the sea!

Let me and my passionate love go by,

But speak to her all things holy and high,

Whatever happen to me!

Me and my harmful love go by ;

But come to her waking, find her asleep,

Powers of the height, Powers of the deep,

And comfort her tho' I die.