The Reverie of Poor Susan

Poems (1815), 1815

At the corner of Wood-street, when day-light appears,There's a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heardIn the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She seesA mountain ascending, a vision of trees;Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,The one only Dwelling on earth that she loves.

She looks, and her Heart is in heaven: but they fade,The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.

From Poems (1815), via the English Wikisource transcription.

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