In many mortal forms I rashly sought
The shadow of that idol of my thought. 
And some were fair—­but beauty dies away: 
Others were wise—­but honeyed words betray:  270
And One was true—­oh! why not true to me? 
Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee,
I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay,
Wounded and weak and panting; the cold day
Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain. 275
When, like a noonday dawn, there shone again
Deliverance.  One stood on my path who seemed
As like the glorious shape which I had d reamed
As is the Moon, whose changes ever run
Into themselves, to the eternal Sun; 280
The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven’s bright isles,
Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,
That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And warms not but illumines.  Young and fair 285
As the descended Spirit of that sphere,
She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night
From its own darkness, until all was bright
Between the Heaven and Earth of my calm mind,
And, as a cloud charioted by the wind, 290
She led me to a cave in that wild place,
And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon
Waxing and waning o’er Endymion. 
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb, 295
And all my being became bright or dim
As the Moon’s image in a summer sea,
According as she smiled or frowned on me;
And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed: 
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead:—­ 300
For at her silver voice came Death and Life,
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew, 305
And cried ‘Away, he is not of our crew.’ 
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,
Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse;—­ 310
And how my soul was as a lampless sea,
And who was then its Tempest; and when She,
The Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost
Crept o’er those waters, till from coast to coast
The moving billows of my being fell 315
Into a death of ice, immovable;—­
And then—­what earthquakes made it gape and split,
The white Moon smiling all the while on it,
These words conceal:—­If not, each word would be
The key of staunchless tears.  Weep not for me! 320