Here am I; for what end God knows, not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul: Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea, The beating heart of this great enterprise, Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death; This have I mused on, since mine eye could first Among the stars distinguish and with joy Rest on that God-fed Pharos of the north, 110 On some blue promontory of heaven lighted That juts far out into the upper sea; To this one hope my heart hath clung for years, As would a foundling to the talisman Hung round his neck by hands he knew not whose; A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside, Yet he therein can feel a virtue left By the sad pressure of a mother's hand, And unto him it still is tremulous With palpitating haste and wet with tears, 120 The key to him of hope and humanness, The coarse shell of life's pearl, Expectancy. This hope hath been to me for love and fame, Hath made me wholly lonely on the earth, Building me up as in a thick-ribbed tower, Wherewith enwalled my watching spirit burned, Conquering its little island from the Dark, Sole as a scholar's lamp, and heard men's steps, In the far hurry of the outward world, Pass dimly forth and back, sounds heard in dream, 130 As Ganymede by the eagle was snatched up From the gross sod to be Jove's cup-bearer, So was I lifted by my great design: And who hath trod Olympus, from his eye Fades not that broader outlook of the gods; His life's low valleys overbrow earth's clouds, And that Olympian spectre of the past Looms towering up in sovereign memory, Beckoning his soul from meaner heights of doom. Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird, 140 Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede, Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low ends; Great days have ever such a morning-red, On such a base great futures are built up, And aspiration, though not put in act, Comes back to ask its plighted troth again, Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak 150 As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying moon. While other youths perplexed their mandolins, Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine In the loose glories of her lover's hair, And wile another kiss to keep back day, I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laocoön, Did of my hope a dryad mistress make, Whom I would woo to meet me privily, 160 Or underneath the stars, or when the moon Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls. O days whose memory tames to fawning down The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck!