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The Poet

by Amy Lowell, 1912

What instinct forces man to journey on,
 Urged by a longing blind but dominant!
 Nothing he sees can hold him, nothing daunt
His never failing eagerness.  The sun
Setting in splendour every night has won
 His vassalage; those towers flamboyant
 Of airy cloudland palaces now haunt
His daylight wanderings.  Forever done
With simple joys and quiet happiness
 He guards the vision of the sunset sky;
Though faint with weariness he must possess
 Some fragment of the sunset's majesty;
He spurns life's human friendships to profess
 Life's loneliness of dreaming ecstasy.

Published in A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass
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