Poems (Tennyson, 1843)/Volume 1/"You Ask Me, Why, Though Ill at Ease"
You ask me, why, though ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits fail within the mist,
And languish for the purple seas?
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent:
Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.
Should banded unions persecute
Opinion, and induce a time
When single thought is civil crime,
And individual freedom mute;
Though Power should make from land to land
The name of Britain trebly great—
Though every channel of the State
Should almost choke with golden sand—
Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,
Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,
And I will see before I die
The palms and temples of the South.