This intense account of a lonely winter journey owes much to Milton and German Romanticism
From The Wanderer
The land I came thro’ last was dumb with night,
a limbo of defeated glory, a ghost:
for wreck of constellations flicker’d perishing
scarce sustained in the mortuary air,
and on the ground and out of livid pools
wreck of old swords and crowns glimmer’d at whiles;
I seem’d at home in some old dream of kingship:
now it is clear grey day and the road is plain,
I am the wanderer of many years
who cannot tell if ever he was king
or if ever kingdoms were: I know I am
the wanderer of the ways of all the worlds,
to whom the sunshine and the rain are one
and one to stay or hasten, because he knows
no ending of the way, no home, no goal,
and phantom night and the grey day alike
withhold the heart where all my dreams and days
might faint in soft fire and delicious death:
and saying this to myself as a simple thing
I feel a peace fall in the heart of the winds
and a clear dusk settle, somewhere, far in me.
