The Reverie of Poor Susan

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,

Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:

Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard

In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,

And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,

Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;

And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,

The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.

  She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,

  The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:

  The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,

  And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!

NOTESForm: aabb Composition Date:1798?1. Date of composition uncertain, perhaps in the late summer of 1798 when Wordsworth was in London. The streets mentioned are all in the City of London. A fifth quatrain, beginning "Poor Outcast! return" was in the poem as first published, but was omitted after 1800.