Canto XVI

What words are these have fall'n from me?

      Can calm despair and wild unrest

      Be tenants of a single breast,

Or sorrow such a changeling be?

Or doth she only seem to take

      The touch of change in calm or storm;

      But knows no more of transient form

In her deep self, than some dead lake

That holds the shadow of a lark

      Hung in the shadow of a heaven?

      Or has the shock, so harshly given,

Confus'd me like the unhappy bark

That strikes by night a craggy shelf,

      And staggers blindly ere she sink?

      And stunn'd me from my power to think

And all my knowledge of myself;

And made me that delirious man

      Whose fancy fuses old and new,

      And flashes into false and true,

And mingles all without a plan?