Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, NEWARK ABBEY. AUGUST 1842, WITH REMINISCENCE OF AUGUST 1807, by THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NEWARK ABBEY. AUGUST 1842, WITH REMINISCENCE OF AUGUST 1807, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I gaze where august's sunbeam falls
Last Line: And hope was false, but love was true.


I gaze where August's sunbeam falls
Along these gray and lonely walls,
Till in its light absorbed appears
The lapse of five-and thirty years.
If change there be, I trace it not
In all this consecrated spot:
No new imprint of Ruin's march
On roofless wall and frameless arch:
The woods, the hills, the fields, the stream,
Are basking in the selfsame beam:
The fall, that turns the unseen mill,
As then it murmured, murmurs still.
It seems as if in one were cast
The present and the imaged past;
Spanning, as with a bridge sublime,
That fearful lapse of human time;
That gulf, unfathomably spread
Between the living and the dead.
For all too well my spirit feels
The only change this scene reveals.
The sunbeams play, the breezes stir,
Unseen, unfelt, unheard by her,
Who, on that long-past August day,
Beheld with me these ruins gray.
Whatever span the fates allow,
Ere I shall be as she is now,
Still, in my bosom's inmost cell,
Shall that deep-treasured memory dwell;
That, more than language can express,
Pure miracle of loveliness,
Whose voice so sweet, whose eyes so bright,
Were my soul's music, and its light,
In those blest days when life was new,
And hope was false, but love was true.






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