The Poet poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry

What instinct forces man to journey on,

Urged by a longing blind but dominant!

Nothing he sees can hold him, nothing daunt

His never failing eagerness. The sun

Setting in splendour every night has won

His vassalage; those towers flamboyant

Of airy cloudland palaces now haunt

His daylight wanderings. Forever done

With simple joys and quiet happiness

He guards the vision of the sunset sky;

Though faint with weariness he must possess

Some fragment of the sunset’s majesty;

He spurns life’s human friendships to profess

Life’s loneliness of dreaming ecstasy.