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[First published 1849. Not reprinted by the author.]
A REGION desolate and wild, | |
| Black, chafing water: and afloat, | |
| And lonely as a truant child | |
| In a waste wood, a single boat: | |
| No mast, no sails are set thereon; | 5 |
| It moves, but never moveth on: | |
| And welters like a human thing | |
| Amid the wild waves weltering. | |
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| Behind, a buried vale doth sleep, | |
| Far down the torrent cleaves its way: | 10 |
| In front the dumb rock rises steep, | |
| A fretted wall of blue and grey; | |
| Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone | |
| With many a wild weed overgrown: | |
| All else, black water: and afloat, | 15 |
| One rood from shore, that single boat. | |
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| Last night the wind was up and strong; | |
| The grey-streak’d waters labour still: | |
| The strong blast brought a pigmy throng | |
| From that mild hollow in the hill; | 20 |
| From those twin brooks, that beachèd strand | |
| So featly strewn with drifted sand; | |
| From those weird domes of mounded green | |
| That spot the solitary scene. | |
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| This boat they found against the shore: | 25 |
| The glossy rushes nodded by. | |
| One rood from land they push’d, no more; | |
| Then rested, listening silently. | |
| The loud rains lash’d the mountain’s crown, | |
| The grating shingle straggled down; | 30 |
| All night they sate; then stole away, | |
| And left it rocking in the bay. | |
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| Last night?—I look’d, the sky was clear. | |
| The boat was old, a batter’d boat. | |
| In sooth, it seems a hundred year | 35 |
| Since that strange crew did ride afloat. | |
| The boat hath drifted in the bay— | |
| The oars have moulder’d as they lay— | |
| The rudder swings—yet none doth steer. | |
| What living hand hath brought it here? | 40 |
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