Here often, when a child, I lay reclined

Lines [‘Here often, when a child, I lay reclined’]
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Here often, when a child, I lay reclined:
I took delight in this fair strand and free:
Here stood the infant Ilion of my mind,
And here the Grecian ships did seem to be.
And here again I come and only find
The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea,
Gray sandbanks and pale sunsets, dreary wind,
Dim shores, dense rains and heavy-clouded sea.

Yet thro’ perchance no tract of earth have more
Unlikeness to the fair Ionian plain,
I love the place that I have loved before,
I love the rolling cloud, the flying rain,
The brown sea lapsing back with sullen roar
To travel leagues before he comes again,
The misty desert of the houseless shore,
The phantom-circle of the moaning main.

I love his invocation of the child's mind's capacity to create sun-drenched worlds of wondrous adventure from the dour inspiration of "dim shores, dense rains and heavy-clouded sea."