Poem by Robert Seymour Bridges

Shorter Poems. Book II. 7. The Downs

    O bold majestic downs, smooth, fair and lonely;
    O still solitude, only matched in the skies:
        Perilous in steep places,
        Soft in the level races,
    Where sweeping in phantom silence the cloudland flies;
    With lovely undulation of fall and rise;
        Entrenched with thickets thorned,
    By delicate miniature dainty flowers adorned!

    I climb your crown, and lo! a sight surprising
    Of sea in front uprising, steep and wide:
        And scattered ships ascending
        To heaven, lost in the blending
    Of distant blues, where water and sky divide,
    Urging their engines against wind and tide,
        And all so small and slow
    They seem to be wearily pointing the way they would go.

    The accumulated murmur of soft plashing,
    Of waves on rocks dashing and searching the sands,
        Takes my ear, in the veering
        Baffled wind, as rearing
    Upright at the cliff, to the gullies and rifts he stands;
    And his conquering surges scour out over the lands;
        While again at the foot of the downs
    He masses his strength to recover the topmost crowns.

1. Shorter Poems. Book IV. 13. The Windmill
2. Shorter Poems. Book IV. 7. “Gáy Róbin Is Seen No More”
3. Shorter Poems. Book IV. 23. “The storm is over, the land hushes to rest”
4. Shorter Poems. Book IV. 4. “The Clouds Have Left the Sky”
5. Shorter Poems. Book IV. 10. “O Love, my muse, how was’t for me”

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