You Ask Me, Why, Tho' Ill at Ease
You Ask Me, Why, Tho' Ill at Ease
Original Text
Alfred lord Tennyson, Poems, 2 vols. (Boston: W. D. Ticknor, 1842). PR 5550 E42a VUTE.
1 You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
2 Within this region I subsist,
3 Whose spirits falter in the mist,
4And languish for the purple seas.
5 It is the land that freemen till,
6 That sober-suited Freedom chose,
7 The land, where girt with friends or foes
8A man may speak the thing he will;
9 A land of settled government,
10 A land of just and old renown,
11 Where Freedom slowly broadens down
12From precedent to precedent:
13 Where faction seldom gathers head,
14 But by degrees to fullness wrought,
15 The strength of some diffusive thought
16Hath time and space to work and spread.
17 Should banded unions persecute
18 Opinion, and induce a time
19 When single thought is civil crime,
20And individual freedom mute;
21 Tho' Power should make from land to land
22 The name of Britain trebly great--
23 Tho' every channel of the State
24Should fill and choke with golden sand--
25 Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,
26 Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,
27 And I will see before I die
28The palms and temples of the South.
Publication Start Year
1842
RPO poem Editors
J. D. Robins
RPO Edition
2RP 2.378.
Rhyme