For one, the youngest, hardly more than boy, Hurt in that night of sudden ruin and wreck, Lay lingering out a three years’ death-in-life. 565 They could not leave him. After he was gone, The two remaining found a fallen stem; And Enoch’s comrade, careless of himself, Fire-hollowing this in Indian fashion, fell Sun-stricken, and that other lived alone. 570 In those two deaths he read God’s warning ‘wait.’
The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, 575 The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen 580 He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’d 585 And blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail: 590 No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; 595 The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise—but no sail.
There often as he watch’d or seem’d to watch, 600 So still, the golden lizard on him paused, A phantom made of many phantoms moved Before him haunting him, or he himself Moved haunting people, things and places, known Far in a darker isle beyond the line; 605 The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house, The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes, The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall, The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill November dawns and dewy-glooming downs, 610 The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves, And the low moan of leaden-colour’d seas.
Once likewise, in the ringing of his ears, Tho’ faintly, merrily—far and far away— He heard the pealing of his parish bells; 615 Then, tho’ he knew not wherefore, started up Shuddering, and when the beauteous hateful isle Return’d upon him, had not his poor heart Spoken with That, which being everywhere Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, 620 Surely the man had died of solitude.