Intimations Of Immortality In An Early Age Poem by Jan Struther

ON the first of spring, walking along the Embankment,
Light-footed, light-headed, eager in mind and heart,
I found my spirit keyed to a new pitch,
I felt a strange serenity and a strange excitement.

I saw a boy running, and felt the wind
Stream past his cheeks, his heart in ribs pounding;
I saw a nurse knitting, and my own fingers
Knew the coldness of the needles, warmth of the wool.

I saw, over the barges, gulls flying:
It was my own wings that tilted and soared,
With bone-deep skill gauging to a line's breadth
The unmapped hills of air, its unplumbed hollows.

I saw four men striking in magnificent canon
With long-hafted hammers on an iron spike:
And I, swinging with them, made no fifth
But was one with each, wielding a fourfold weapon.

I saw a woman with child: a second heart
Beat below mine. I saw two lovers kissing,
And felt her body dissolve, his harden
Under the irrational chemistry of desire.

And I, who had always said, in idle, friendly,
Fireside thrashings-out of enormous themes,
That anybody who liked could have my share
Of impersonal after-life, fusion with the infinite,
Suddenly thought-Here, perhaps, is a glimpse
Of the sages' vision, delight by me unimagined:
To feel without doing, to enjoy without possessing;
To bear no longer the burden of a separate self;
To live through others' senses; to be air, to be ether,
Soundlessly quivering with the music of a million lives.