Canto XVI
What words are these have fall’n from me?Can calm despair and wild unrestBe tenants of a single breast,Or sorrow such a changeling be?
Or doth she only seem to takeThe touch of change in calm or storm;But knows no more of transient formIn her deep self, than some dead lake
That holds the shadow of a larkHung 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 thinkAnd all my knowledge of myself;
And made me that delirious manWhose fancy fuses old and new,And flashes into false and true,And mingles all without a plan?