A hundred years I trembled in the grass, The delicate trefoil that muffled warm A slope on Ida; for a hundred years Moved in the purple gyre of those dark flowers The Grecian women strew upon the dead. Under the earth, in fragrant glooms, I dwelt; Then in the veins and sinews of a pine On a lone isle, where, from the Cyclades, A mighty wind, like a leviathan, Ploughed through the brine, and from those solitudes Sent Silence, frightened. To and fro I swayed, Drawing the sunshine from the stooping clouds. Suns came and went,--and many a mystic moon, Orbing and waning,--and fierce meteor, Leaving its lurid ghost to haunt the night I heard loud voices by the sounding shore, The stormy sea-gods,--and from ivory conchs Wild music; and strange shadows floated by, Some moaning and some singing. So the years Clustered about me, till the hand of God Let down the lightning from a sultry sky, Splintered the pine and split the iron rock; And from my odorous prison-house, a bird, I in its bosom, darted: so we fled, Turning the brittle edge of one high wave,-- Island and tree and sea-gods left behind! Free as the air, from zone to zone I flew, Far from the tumult to the quiet gates Of daybreak; and beneath me I beheld Vineyards, and rivers that like silver threads Ran through the green, and gold of pasture-lands,-- And here and there a hamlet, a white rose,-- And here and there a city, whose slim spires And palace-roofs and swollen domes uprose Like scintillant stalagmites in the sun; I saw huge navies battling with a storm By ragged reefs along the desolate coasts,-- And lazy merchantmen, that crawled, like flies, Over the blue enamel of the sea To India or the icy Labradors.