The Giant Puff-Ball

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  From what sad star I know not, but I found
  Myself new-born below the coppice rail,
  No bigger than the dewdrops and as round,
  In a soft sward, no cattle might assail.

  And so I gathered mightiness and grew
  With this one dream kindling in me, that I
  Should never cease from conquering light and dew
  Till my white splendour touched the trembling sky.

  A century of blue and stilly light
  Bowed down before me, the dew came again,
  The moon my sibyl worshipped through the night,
  The sun returned and long abode; but then

  Hoarse drooping darkness hung me with a shroud
  And switched at me with shrivelled leaves in scorn.
  Red morning stole beneath a grinning cloud,
  And suddenly clambering over dike and thorn

  A half-moon host of churls with flags and sticks
  Hallooed and hurtled up the partridge brood,
  And Death clapped hands from all the echoing thicks,
  And trampling envy spied me where I stood;

  Who haled me tired and quaking, hid me by,
  And came again after an age of cold,
  And hung me in the prison-house adry
  From the great crossbeam. Here defiled and old

  I perish through unnumbered hours, I swoon,
  Hacked with harsh knives to staunch a child's torn hand;
  And all my hopes must with my body soon
  Be but as crouching dust and wind-blown sand.

© Edmund Blunden