This excerpt from Wordsworth's
Prelude was revised several times, so other versions are available online, but this is my favorite. The move from simile ("like an untired horse") to metaphor about the skate-wearing children ("All shod with iron") has a lovely intensifying effect, I think. The use of "reflex" for "reflection" might simply be colloquial for Wordsworth, but it's unusual to me, and I like it very much--the idealistic young skater not just chasing a star, which is an impossible goal, but the reflection of one before him on the ice: also impossible to reach, but seemingly less so, being just a bit before him on the ice. And then there's the description of becoming the dizzy center of the universe around which the earth moves when he stops. Reminds me a bit of "earth's diurnal round" in
"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal."
Skating
by William Wordsworth
from
The Prelude, Book I
And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not their summons: happy time
It was indeed for all of us — for me
It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six — I wheeled about
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures,— the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din,
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the grassy plain. And oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me — even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.
~~
William Wordsworth
from
The Prelude; or, Growth of a poet's mind: An autobiographical poem, 1850
Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about Wordsworth's skates. Text and geographical commentary
here.