The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, My ancient ship upon my ancient sea

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My ancient ship upon my ancient sea
Begins another voyage—nay, they're gone;
And whither wending? who is gone with thee?
Since parted from thee I am left alone,
Unknowing what my river's fate may be,
Into its native world of tempests thrown.
Lost like the spectres once my eye before,
Which wilder visions muster'd to my mind;
Lost and unnoticed far away the roar
Of southern waters breaking to the wind,
With thunder volleys rolling on before
As the wild gale sweeps wilder on behind,
And every vision of old Afric's shore
As much forgot and vanished out of mind
As the wild track thou makest so long ago
From those eternal waves that surge below.

Gone!—'tis a word which through life's troubled waste
Seems always coming, and the only one
Which can be called the present. Hope is past,
And hate and strife, and love and peace are gone
Before we think them, for their rapid haste
Scarce gives us time for one short smile or groan
Ere that thought dies and new ones come between
It, and our senses like to fleeting suns.

And yet there is—or seems at least to be—
A general scheme of thought that colours all;
So though each one be different, all agree
In the same melancholy shade-like pall;
Even as the shadows look the same to me,
Though cast, I know, from many a varying wall
In this vast city—hut and temple sharing
In the same light, and the same darkness wearing.

Not that I deem all life a course of shade,
Nor all the world a waste of streets like these:
From youth to age a mighty change is made
As from this city to the southern seas.
For years through youthful hope our course is laid,
For years in sloth a sea without a breeze,
For years within some silent, shapeless cave,
Changing, and still the same, yet swiftly passing.

'Tis here 'tis there, 'tis nowhere—oh! my soul,
Is there no rest from such a fruitless chasing
Of the wild dreams that ever round me roll?
Each as it comes the parting thought defacing,
Yet all still hurrying to the self-same goal.
Gone! Can I catch them? — but their path alone
Stretching afar toward one for ever gone!
What have I now? The star that brightly shone

Now seems as nothing in the single cloud
That shadows it and long has seemed to hover
O'er all the crossing thoughts that overflowed.
In this wrecked spirit, oh! my ocean,
Well may'st thou plough the deep so free and proud:
Thou bear'st the dim tie of ceaseless dreams,
The fount, the confluence of a thousand streams.

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