THE BROOK.


 


 


I COME from haunts of coot and kern,


I make a sudden sally,


And sparkle out among the fern,


To bicker down the valley.


By thirty hills I hurry down,


Or slip between the ridges,


By twenty thorps, a little town,


And half a hundred bridges.


Till last by Philip's farm I flow,


To join the brimming river;


For men may come, and men may go,


But I go on forever.


I chatter over stony ways,


In little sharps and trebles;


I bubble into eddying bays,


I babble on the pebbles.


With many a curve my banks I fret,


By many a field and fallow,


And many a fairy foreland set


With willow-weed and mallow.


I chatter, chatter, as I flow


To join the brimming river;


For men may come, and men may go,


But I go on forever.


I wind about, and in and out,


With here a blossom sailing,


And here and there a lusty trout,


And here and there a grayling,


And here and there a foamy flake


Upon me, as I travel,


With many a silvery waterbreak


Above the golden gravel.


And draw them all along, and flow


To join the brimming river;


For men may come, and men may go,


But I go on forever.


I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,


Among my skimming swallows;


I make the netted sunbeam dance


Against my sandy shallows.


I murmur under moon and stars


In brambly wildernesses;


I linger by my shingly bars;


I loiter round my creases;


And out again I curve and flow


To join the brimming river;


For men may come, and men may go,


But I go on forever.


 


 


Tennyson