William Bell Scott

1811-1890 / Scotland

Seeking Forgetfulness

And yet I am as one who looks behind,
A traveller in a shadowed land astray,
Passing and lost upon the boundary
Of actual things, who turns against the wind,
An hundred simulacral ghosts to find
Close following, an hundred pairs of eyes
Shining around like phosphorescent flies,—
And all of them himself, yet changed in kind.

Those once I was, which of them now am I?
Not one, all alien, long-abandoned masks,
That in some witches' sabbath, long since past,
Did dance awhile in my life's panoply,
And drank with me from out of the same flasks;
And I not rid of these, not even at last?
79 Total read