Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies, It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I'd looked in the face What I had hoped 'twould be To write for my own race And the reality; The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved, And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down-turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream; A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, 'Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.' | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...RECOLLECTIONS OF LOVE by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME by ROBERT HERRICK A DIRGE FOR MCPHERSON; KILLED IN FRONT OF ATLANTA by HERMAN MELVILLE TO ONE IN PARADISE by EDGAR ALLAN POE LITTLE GIFFEN by FRANCIS ORRERY TICKNOR THE SCHOOL GIRL by WILLIAM HENRY VENABLE STANZAS COMPOSED AT CARNAC by MATTHEW ARNOLD CHARACTERS: SUSANNAH BARBAULD MARISSAL by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD THE EMANCIPATION OF HIS MISTRESS' PERFECTIONS by FRANCIS BEAUMONT |