by Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848)
A vision
Language: English
I saw a spirit standing, Man, Where thou dost stand an hour ago, And round his feet three rivers ran Of equal depth and equal flow A Golden Stream, and one like blood And one like sapphire, seemed to be But where they joined their triple flood It tumbled in [an inky]1 sea The spirit bent his dazzling gaze Down on that ocean's gloomy night, Then kindling all with sudden blaze, The glad deep sparkled wide and bright White as the sun, and far more fair That their divided sources were! And for that spirit Seer, I've watched and sought my lifetime long Sought him in Heaven, Hell, Earth and Air An endless search and always wrong! Had I but seen his glorious eye Once light the cloud surrounding me, I ne'er had raised this coward cry To cease to think and cease to me.
View original text (without footnotes)
1 Mitchell: "a blackened"
Researcher for this page: Victoria Brago
1 Mitchell: "a blackened"
Authorship:
- by Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848) [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]
Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):
- by John Mitchell (b. 1941), "A vision", op. 17 no. 1 (1976), from Visions from the Earth, no. 1. [text verified 1 time]
Researcher for this page: Victoria Brago
This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 22
Word count: 145