To Night

by Percy Bysshe Shelley · Explore poems

TIME.
LINES: ‘FAR, FAR AWAY’.
FROM THE ARABIC: AN IMITATION.
TO EMILIA VIVIANI.
THE FUGITIVES.
TO —. ‘MUSIC, WHEN SOFT VOICES DIE’.
SONG: ‘RARELY, RARELY, COMEST THOU’.
MUTABILITY.
LINES WRITTEN ON HEARING THE NEWS OF THE DEATH OF NAPOLEON.
SONNET: POLITICAL GREATNESS.
THE AZIOLA.
A LAMENT.
REMEMBRANCE.
TO EDWARD WILLIAMS.
TO —. ‘ONE WORD IS TOO OFTEN PROFANED’.
TO —. ‘WHEN PASSION’S TRANCE IS OVERPAST’.
A BRIDAL SONG.
EPITHALAMIUM.
ANOTHER VERSION OF THE SAME.
LOVE, HOPE, DESIRE, AND FEAR.
FRAGMENTS WRITTEN FOR “HELLAS”.
FRAGMENT: ‘I WOULD NOT BE A KING’.
GINEVRA.
EVENING: PONTE AL MARE, PISA.
THE BOAT ON THE SERCHIO.
MUSIC.
SONNET TO BYRON.
FRAGMENT ON KEATS.
FRAGMENT: ‘METHOUGHT I WAS A BILLOW IN THE CROWD’.
TO-MORROW.
STANZA: ‘IF I WALK IN AUTUMN’S EVEN’.
FRAGMENTS:
A WANDERER.
LIFE ROUNDED WITH SLEEP.
‘I FAINT, I PERISH WITH MY LOVE’.
THE LADY OF THE SOUTH.
ZEPHYRUS THE AWAKENER.
RAIN.
‘WHEN SOFT WINDS AND SUNNY SKIES’.
‘AND THAT I WALK THUS PROUDLY CROWNED’.
‘THE RUDE WIND IS SINGING’.
‘GREAT SPIRIT’.
‘O THOU IMMORTAL DEITY’.
THE FALSE LAUREL AND THE TRUE.
MAY THE LIMNER.
BEAUTY’S HALO.
‘THE DEATH KNELL IS RINGING’.
‘I STOOD UPON A HEAVEN-CLEAVING TURRET’.
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1821, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1822:
THE ZUCCA.
THE MAGNETIC LADY TO HER PATIENT.
LINES: ‘WHEN THE LAMP IS SHATTERED’.
TO JANE: THE INVITATION.
TO JANE: THE RECOLLECTION.
THE PINE FOREST OF THE CASCINE NEAR PISA.
WITH A GUITAR, TO JANE.
TO JANE: ‘THE KEEN STARS WERE TWINKLING’.
A DIRGE.
LINES WRITTEN IN THE BAY OF LERICI.
LINES: ‘WE MEET NOT AS WE PARTED’.
THE ISLE.
FRAGMENT: TO THE MOON.
EPITAPH.
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1822, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
***
EARLY POEMS [1814, 1815].
[The poems which follow appeared, with a few exceptions, either in the
volumes published from time to time by Shelley himself, or in the
“Posthumous Poems” of 1824, or in the “Poetical Works” of 1839, of
which a second and enlarged edition was published by Mrs. Shelley in
the same year. A few made their first appearance in some fugitive
publication—such as Leigh Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”—and were
subsequently incorporated in the collective editions. In every case the
editio princeps and (where this is possible) the exact date of
composition are indicated below the title.]
***
STANZA, WRITTEN AT BRACKNELL.
[Composed March, 1814. Published in Hogg’s “Life of Shelley”, 1858.]
Thy dewy looks sink in my breast;
Thy gentle words stir poison there;
Thou hast disturbed the only rest
That was the portion of despair!
Subdued to Duty’s hard control, _5
I could have borne my wayward lot:
The chains that bind this ruined soul
Had cankered then—but crushed it not.
***
STANZAS.—APRIL, 1814.
[Composed at Bracknell, April, 1814. Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon,
Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.
Pause not! The time is past! Every voice cries, Away! _5
Tempt not with one last tear thy friend’s ungentle mood:
Thy lover’s eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay:
Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.
Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth; _10
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.
The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thine head:
The blooms of dewy spring shall gleam beneath thy feet:
But thy soul or this world must fade in the frost that binds the dead, _15
Ere midnight’s frown and morning’s smile, ere thou and peace may meet.
The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose,
For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in the deep:
Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows;
Whatever moves, or toils, or grieves, hath its appointed sleep. _20
Thou in the grave shalt rest—yet till the phantoms flee
Which that house and heath and garden made dear to thee erewhile,
Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings are not free
From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.
NOTE:
_6 tear 1816; glance 1839.
***
TO HARRIET.
[Composed May, 1814. Published (from the Esdaile manuscript) by Dowden,
“Life of Shelley”, 1887.]
Thy look of love has power to calm
The stormiest passion of my soul;
Thy gentle words are drops of balm
In life’s too bitter bowl;
No grief is mine, but that alone _5
These choicest blessings I have known.
Harriet! if all who long to live
In the warm sunshine of thine eye,
That price beyond all pain must give,—
Beneath thy scorn to die; _10
Then hear thy chosen own too late
His heart most worthy of thy hate.
Be thou, then, one among mankind
Whose heart is harder not for state,
Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, _15
Amid a world of hate;
And by a slight endurance seal
A fellow-being’s lasting weal.
For pale with anguish is his cheek,
His breath comes fast, his eyes are dim, _20
Thy name is struggling ere he speak,
Weak is each trembling limb;
In mercy let him not endure
The misery of a fatal cure.
Oh, trust for once no erring guide! _25
Bid the remorseless feeling flee;
’Tis malice, ’tis revenge, ’tis pride,
’Tis anything but thee;
Oh, deign a nobler pride to prove,
And pity if thou canst not love. _30
***
TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN.
[Composed June, 1814. Published in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;
Yes, I was firm—thus wert not thou;—
My baffled looks did fear yet dread
To meet thy looks—I could not know
How anxiously they sought to shine _5
With soothing pity upon mine.
2.
To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage
Which preys upon itself alone;
To curse the life which is the cage
Of fettered grief that dares not groan, _10
Hiding from many a careless eye
The scorned load of agony.
3.
Whilst thou alone, then not regarded,
The ... thou alone should be,
To spend years thus, and be rewarded, _15
As thou, sweet love, requited me
When none were near—Oh! I did wake
From torture for that moment’s sake.
4.
Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew _20
On flowers half dead;—thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw
Their soft persuasion on my brain,
Charming away its dream of pain.
5.
We are not happy, sweet! our state _25
Is strange and full of doubt and fear;
More need of words that ills abate;—
Reserve or censure come not near
Our sacred friendship, lest there be
No solace left for thee and me. _30
6.
Gentle and good and mild thou art,
Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart
Away from me, or stoop to wear
The mask of scorn, although it be _35
To hide the love thou feel’st for me.
NOTES:
_2 wert 1839; did 1824.
_3 fear 1824, 1839; yearn cj. Rossetti.
_23 Their 1839; thy 1824.
_30 thee]thou 1824, 1839.
_32 can I 1839; I can 1824.
_36 feel’st 1839; feel 1824.
***
TO —.
[Published in “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition. See Editor’s Note.]
Yet look on me—take not thine eyes away,
Which feed upon the love within mine own,
Which is indeed but the reflected ray
Of thine own beauty from my spirit thrown.
Yet speak to me—thy voice is as the tone _5
Of my heart’s echo, and I think I hear
That thou yet lovest me; yet thou alone
Like one before a mirror, without care
Of aught but thine own features, imaged there;
And yet I wear out life in watching thee; _10
A toil so sweet at times, and thou indeed
Art kind when I am sick, and pity me...
***
MUTABILITY.
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings _5
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day; _10
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; _15
Nought may endure but Mutability.
NOTES:
_15 may 1816; can Lodore, chapter 49, 1835 (Mrs. Shelley).
_16 Nought may endure but 1816;
Nor aught endure save Lodore, chapter 49, 1835 (Mrs. Shelley).
***
ON DEATH.
[For the date of composition see Editor’s Note.
Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
THERE IS NO WORK, NOR DEVICE, NOR KNOWLEDGE, NOR WISDOM,
IN THE GRAVE, WHITHER THOU GOEST.—Ecclesiastes.
The pale, the cold, and the moony smile
Which the meteor beam of a starless night
Sheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,
Ere the dawning of morn’s undoubted light,
Is the flame of life so fickle and wan
That flits round our steps till their strength is gone. _5
O man! hold thee on in courage of soul
Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way,
And the billows of cloud that around thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day, _10
Where Hell and Heaven shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.
This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel,
And the coming of death is a fearful blow _15
To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;
When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.
The secret things of the grave are there,
Where all but this frame must surely be, _20
Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear
No longer will live to hear or to see
All that is great and all that is strange
In the boundless realm of unending change.
Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death? _25
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?
Who painteth the shadows that are beneath
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?
Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be
With the fears and the love for that which we see? _30
***
A SUMMER EVENING CHURCHYARD.
LECHLADE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE.
[Composed September, 1815. Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere
Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men, _5
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
They breathe their spells towards the departing day,
Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
Responding to the charm with its own mystery. _10
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
Thou too, aereal Pile! whose pinnacles
Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells, _15
Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
Around whose lessening and invisible height
Gather among the stars the clouds of night.
The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:
And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound, _20
Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,
And mingling with the still night and mute sky
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.
Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild _25
And terrorless as this serenest night:
Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep. _30
***
TO —.
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816. See Editor’s Note.]
DAKRTSI DIOISO POTMON ‘APOTMON.
Oh! there are spirits of the air,
And genii of the evening breeze,
And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair
As star-beams among twilight trees:—
Such lovely ministers to meet _5
Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.
With mountain winds, and babbling springs,
And moonlight seas, that are the voice
Of these inexplicable things,
Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice _10
When they did answer thee; but they
Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.
And thou hast sought in starry eyes
Beams that were never meant for thine,
Another’s wealth:—tame sacrifice
To a fond faith! still dost thou pine? _15
Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,
Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?
Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope
On the false earth’s inconstancy? _20
Did thine own mind afford no scope
Of love, or moving thoughts to thee?
That natural scenes or human smiles
Could steal the power to wind thee in their wiles?
Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled _25
Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;
The glory of the moon is dead;
Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed;
Thine own soul still is true to thee,
But changed to a foul fiend through misery. _30
This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever
Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,
Dream not to chase;—the mad endeavour
Would scourge thee to severer pangs.
Be as thou art. Thy settled fate,
Dark as it is, all change would aggravate. _35
NOTES:
_1 of 1816; in 1839.
_8 moonlight 1816; mountain 1839.
***
TO WORDSWORTH.
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine _5
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude: _10
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
***
FEELINGS OF A REPUBLICAN ON THE FALL OF BONAPARTE.
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer _5
A frail and bloody pomp which Time has swept
In fragments towards Oblivion. Massacre,
For this I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,
And stifled thee, their minister. I know _10
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.
***
LINES.
[Published in Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823, where it is headed
“November, 1815”. Reprinted in the “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. See
Editor’s Note.]
1.
The cold earth slept below,
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around, with a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow,
The breath of night like death did flow _5
Beneath the sinking moon.
2.
The wintry hedge was black,
The green grass was not seen,
The birds did rest on the bare thorn’s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track, _10
Had bound their folds o’er many a crack
Which the frost had made between.
3.
Thine eyes glowed in the glare
Of the moon’s dying light;
As a fen-fire’s beam on a sluggish stream _15
Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there,
And it yellowed the strings of thy raven hair,
That shook in the wind of night.
4.
The moon made thy lips pale, beloved—
The wind made thy bosom chill— _20
The night did shed on thy dear head
Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie
Where the bitter breath of the naked sky
Might visit thee at will.
NOTE:
_17 raven 1823; tangled 1824.
***
NOTE ON THE EARLY POEMS, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
The remainder of Shelley’s Poems will be arranged in the order in which
they were written. Of course, mistakes will occur in placing some of
the shorter ones; for, as I have said, many of these were thrown aside,
and I never saw them till I had the misery of looking over his writings
after the hand that traced them was dust; and some were in the hands of
others, and I never saw them till now. The subjects of the poems are
often to me an unerring guide; but on other occasions I can only guess,
by finding them in the pages of the same manuscript book that contains
poems with the date of whose composition I am fully conversant. In the
present arrangement all his poetical translations will be placed
together at the end.
The loss of his early papers prevents my being able to give any of the
poetry of his boyhood. Of the few I give as “Early Poems”, the greater
part were published with “Alastor”; some of them were written
previously, some at the same period. The poem beginning ‘Oh, there are
spirits in the air’ was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom he never
knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through
his writings, and accounts he heard of him from some who knew him well.
He regarded his change of opinions as rather an act of will than
conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by
what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth.
The summer evening that suggested to him the poem written in the
churchyard of Lechlade occurred during his voyage up the Thames in
1815. He had been advised by a physician to live as much as possible in
the open air; and a fortnight of a bright warm July was spent in
tracing the Thames to its source. He never spent a season more
tranquilly than the summer of 1815. He had just recovered from a severe
pulmonary attack; the weather was warm and pleasant. He lived near
Windsor Forest; and his life was spent under its shades or on the
water, meditating subjects for verse. Hitherto, he had chiefly aimed at
extending his political doctrines, and attempted so to do by appeals in
prose essays to the people, exhorting them to claim their rights; but
he had now begun to feel that the time for action was not ripe in
England, and that the pen was the only instrument wherewith to prepare
the way for better things.
In the scanty journals kept during those years I find a record of the
books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814
and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod,
Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and Diogenes
Laertius. In Latin, Petronius, Suetonius, some of the works of Cicero,
a large proportion of those of Seneca and Livy. In English, Milton’s
poems, Wordsworth’s “Excursion”, Southey’s “Madoc” and “Thalaba”, Locke
“On the Human Understanding”, Bacon’s “Novum Organum”. In Italian,
Ariosto, Tasso, and Alfieri. In French, the “Reveries d’un Solitaire”
of Rousseau. To these may be added several modern books of travel. He
read few novels.
***
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1816.
THE SUNSET.
[Written at Bishopsgate, 1816 (spring). Published in full in the
“Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Lines 9-20, and 28-42, appeared in Hunt’s
“Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823, under the titles, respectively, of
“Sunset. From an Unpublished Poem”, And “Grief. A Fragment”.]
There late was One within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate cloud
That fades amid the blue noon’s burning sky,
Genius and death contended. None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath _5
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the Lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o’er, _10
But to the west was open to the sky.
There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers
And the old dandelion’s hoary beard, _15
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods—and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead.— _20
‘Is it not strange, Isabel,’ said the youth,
‘I never saw the sun? We will walk here
To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’
That night the youth and lady mingled lay
In love and sleep—but when the morning came _25
The lady found her lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on—in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles, _30
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,
If madness ’tis to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale
Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts _35
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;—
Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan:
Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,
Her lips and cheeks were like things dead—so pale;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins _40
And weak articulations might be seen
Day’s ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self
Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,
Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!
‘Inheritor of more than earth can give, _45
Passionless calm and silence unreproved,
Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were—Peace!’ _50
This was the only moan she ever made.
NOTES:
_4 death 1839; youth 1824.
_22 sun? We will walk 1824; sunrise? We will wake cj. Forman.
_37 Her eyes...wan Hunt, 1823; omitted 1824, 1839.
_38 worn 1824; torn 1839.
***
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.
[Composed, probably, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. Published
in Hunt’s “Examiner”, January 19, 1817, and with “Rosalind and Helen”,
1819.]
1.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, _5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,—
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
Like memory of music fled,— _10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
2.
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone? _15
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, _20
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,—why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
3.
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever _25
To sage or poet these responses given—
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven.
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see, _30
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream, _35
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.
4.
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, _40
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes—
Thou—that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame! _45
Depart not as thy shadow came
Depart not—lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
5.
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, _50
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard—I saw them not—
When musing deeply on the lot _55
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,—
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! _60
6.
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers _65
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night—
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, _70
That thou—O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.
7.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past—there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, _75
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply _80
Its calm—to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
NOTES:
_2 among 1819; amongst 1817.
_14 dost 1819; doth 1817.
_21 fear and dream 1819; care and pain Boscombe manuscript.
_37-_48 omitted Boscombe manuscript.
_44 art 1817; are 1819.
_76 or 1819; nor 1839.
***
MONT BLANC.
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.
[Composed in Switzerland, July, 1816 (see date below). Printed at the
end of the “History of a Six Weeks’ Tour” published by Shelley in 1817,
and reprinted with “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Amongst the Boscombe
manuscripts is a draft of this Ode, mainly in pencil, which has been
collated by Dr. Garnett.]
1.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings _5
Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river _10
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
2.
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—
Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, _15
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, _20
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
To hear—an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep _25
Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;—
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion, _30
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange _35
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around; _40
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by _45
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!
3.
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber, _50
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep _55
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, _60
Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene—
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread _65
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,
And the wolf tracts her there—how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, _70
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.—Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelope once this silent snow?
None can reply—all seems eternal now. _75
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal _80
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
4.
The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell _85
Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower;—the bound _90
With which from that detested trance they leap;
The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
And that of him and all that his may be;
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. _95
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And THIS, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep _100
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower _105
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil _110
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; _115
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known. Below, vast caves _120
Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, _125
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.
5.
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, _130
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them:—Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath _135
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome _140
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
July 23, 1816.
NOTES:
_15 cloud-shadows]cloud shadows 1817;
cloud, shadows 1824; clouds, shadows 1839.
_20 Thy 1824; The 1839.
_53 unfurled]upfurled cj. James Thomson (‘B.V.’).
_56 Spread 1824; Speed 1839.
_69 tracks her there 1824; watches her Boscombe manuscript.
_79 But for such 1824; In such a Boscombe manuscript.
_108 boundaries of the sky]boundary of the skies cj. Rossetti
(cf. lines 102, 106).
_121 torrents’]torrent’s 1817, 1824, 1839.
***
CANCELLED PASSAGE OF MONT BLANC.
[Published by Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
There is a voice, not understood by all,
Sent from these desert-caves. It is the roar
Of the rent ice-cliff which the sunbeams call,
Plunging into the vale—it is the blast
Descending on the pines—the torrents pour... _5
***
FRAGMENT: HOME.
[Published by Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Dear home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,
The least of which wronged Memory ever makes
Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.
***
FRAGMENT OF A GHOST STORY.
[Published by Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
A shovel of his ashes took
From the hearth’s obscurest nook,
Muttering mysteries as she went.
Helen and Henry knew that Granny
Was as much afraid of Ghosts as any, _5
And so they followed hard—
But Helen clung to her brother’s arm,
And her own spasm made her shake.
***
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1816, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
Shelley wrote little during this year. The poem entitled “The Sunset”
was written in the spring of the year, while still residing at
Bishopsgate. He spent the summer on the shores of the Lake of Geneva.
The “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” was conceived during his voyage round
the lake with Lord Byron. He occupied himself during this voyage by
reading the “Nouvelle Heloise” for the first time. The reading it on
the very spot where the scenes are laid added to the interest; and he
was at once surprised and charmed by the passionate eloquence and
earnest enthralling interest that pervade this work. There was
something in the character of Saint-Preux, in his abnegation of self,
and in the worship he paid to Love, that coincided with Shelley’s own
disposition; and, though differing in many of the views and shocked by
others, yet the effect of the whole was fascinating and delightful.
“Mont Blanc” was inspired by a view of that mountain and its
surrounding peaks and valleys, as he lingered on the Bridge of Arve on
his way through the Valley of Chamouni. Shelley makes the following
mention of this poem in his publication of the “History of a Six Weeks’
Tour, and Letters from Switzerland”: ‘The poem entitled “Mont Blanc” is
written by the author of the two letters from Chamouni and Vevai. It
was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful
feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as
an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to
approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and
inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang.’
This was an eventful year, and less time was given to study than usual.
In the list of his reading I find, in Greek, Theocritus, the
“Prometheus” of Aeschylus, several of Plutarch’s “Lives”, and the works
of Lucian. In Latin, Lucretius, Pliny’s “Letters”, the “Annals” and
“Germany” of Tacitus. In French, the “History of the French Revolution”
by Lacretelle. He read for the first time, this year, Montaigne’s
“Essays”, and regarded them ever after as one of the most delightful
and instructive books in the world. The list is scanty in English
works: Locke’s “Essay”, “Political Justice”, and Coleridge’s “Lay
Sermon”, form nearly the whole. It was his frequent habit to read aloud
to me in the evening; in this way we read, this year, the New
Testament, “Paradise Lost”, Spenser’s “Faery Queen”, and “Don Quixote”.
***
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1817.
MARIANNE’S DREAM.
[Composed at Marlow, 1817. Published in Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”,
1819, and reprinted in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
A pale Dream came to a Lady fair,
And said, A boon, a boon, I pray!
I know the secrets of the air,
And things are lost in the glare of day,
Which I can make the sleeping see, _5
If they will put their trust in me.
2.
And thou shalt know of things unknown,
If thou wilt let me rest between
The veiny lids, whose fringe is thrown
Over thine eyes so dark and sheen: _10
And half in hope, and half in fright,
The Lady closed her eyes so bright.
3.
At first all deadly shapes were driven
Tumultuously across her sleep,
And o’er the vast cope of bending heaven _15
All ghastly-visaged clouds did sweep;
And the Lady ever looked to spy
If the golden sun shone forth on high.
4.
And as towards the east she turned,
She saw aloft in the morning air, _20
Which now with hues of sunrise burned,
A great black Anchor rising there;
And wherever the Lady turned her eyes,
It hung before her in the skies.
5.
The sky was blue as the summer sea, _25
The depths were cloudless overhead,
The air was calm as it could be,
There was no sight or sound of dread,
But that black Anchor floating still
Over the piny eastern hill. _30
6.
The Lady grew sick with a weight of fear
To see that Anchor ever hanging,
And veiled her eyes; she then did hear
The sound as of a dim low clanging,
And looked abroad if she might know _35
Was it aught else, or but the flow
Of the blood in her own veins, to and fro.
7.
There was a mist in the sunless air,
Which shook as it were with an earthquake’s shock,
But the very weeds that blossomed there _40
Were moveless, and each mighty rock
Stood on its basis steadfastly;
The Anchor was seen no more on high.
8.
But piled around, with summits hid
In lines of cloud at intervals, _45
Stood many a mountain pyramid
Among whose everlasting walls
Two mighty cities shone, and ever
Through the red mist their domes did quiver.
9.
On two dread mountains, from whose crest, _50
Might seem, the eagle, for her brood,
Would ne’er have hung her dizzy nest,
Those tower-encircled cities stood.
A vision strange such towers to see,
Sculptured and wrought so gorgeously, _55
Where human art could never be.
10.
And columns framed of marble white,
And giant fanes, dome over dome
Piled, and triumphant gates, all bright
With workmanship, which could not come _60
From touch of mortal instrument,
Shot o’er the vales, or lustre lent
From its own shapes magnificent.
11.
But still the Lady heard that clang
Filling the wide air far away; _65
And still the mist whose light did hang
Among the mountains shook alway,
So that the Lady’s heart beat fast,
As half in joy, and half aghast,
On those high domes her look she cast. _70
12.
Sudden, from out that city sprung
A light that made the earth grow red;
Two flames that each with quivering tongue
Licked its high domes, and overhead
Among those mighty towers and fanes _75
Dropped fire, as a volcano rains
Its sulphurous ruin on the plains.
13.
And hark! a rush as if the deep
Had burst its bonds; she looked behind
And saw over the western steep _80
A raging flood descend, and wind
Through that wide vale; she felt no fear,
But said within herself, ’Tis clear
These towers are Nature’s own, and she
To save them has sent forth the sea. _85
14.
And now those raging billows came
Where that fair Lady sate, and she
Was borne towards the showering flame
By the wild waves heaped tumultuously.
And, on a little plank, the flow _90
Of the whirlpool bore her to and fro.
15.
The flames were fiercely vomited
From every tower and every dome,
And dreary light did widely shed
O’er that vast flood’s suspended foam, _95
Beneath the smoke which hung its night
On the stained cope of heaven’s light.
16.
The plank whereon that Lady sate
Was driven through the chasms, about and about,
Between the peaks so desolate _100
Of the drowning mountains, in and out,
As the thistle-beard on a whirlwind sails—
While the flood was filling those hollow vales.
17.
At last her plank an eddy crossed,
And bore her to the city’s wall, _105
Which now the flood had reached almost;
It might the stoutest heart appal
To hear the fire roar and hiss
Through the domes of those mighty palaces.
18.
The eddy whirled her round and round _110
Before a gorgeous gate, which stood
Piercing the clouds of smoke which bound
Its aery arch with light like blood;
She looked on that gate of marble clear,
With wonder that extinguished fear. _115
19.
For it was filled with sculptures rarest,
Of forms most beautiful and strange,
Like nothing human, but the fairest
Of winged shapes, whose legions range
Throughout the sleep of those that are, _120
Like this same Lady, good and fair.
20.
And as she looked, still lovelier grew
Those marble forms;—the sculptor sure
Was a strong spirit, and the hue
Of his own mind did there endure _125
After the touch, whose power had braided
Such grace, was in some sad change faded.
21.
She looked, the flames were dim, the flood
Grew tranquil as a woodland river
Winding through hills in solitude; _130
Those marble shapes then seemed to quiver,
And their fair limbs to float in motion,
Like weeds unfolding in the ocean.
22.
And their lips moved; one seemed to speak,
When suddenly the mountains cracked, _135
And through the chasm the flood did break
With an earth-uplifting cataract:
The statues gave a joyous scream,
And on its wings the pale thin Dream
Lifted the Lady from the stream. _140
23.
The dizzy flight of that phantom pale
Waked the fair Lady from her sleep,
And she arose, while from the veil
Of her dark eyes the Dream did creep,
And she walked about as one who knew _145
That sleep has sights as clear and true
As any waking eyes can view.
NOTES:
_18 golden 1819; gold 1824, 1839.
_28 or 1824; nor 1839.
_62 or]a cj. Rossetti.
_63 its]their cj. Rossetti.
_92 flames cj. Rossetti; waves 1819, 1824, 1839.
_101 mountains 1819; mountain 1824, 1839.
_106 flood]flames cj. James Thomson (‘B.V.’).
_120 that 1819, 1824; who 1839.
_135 mountains 1819; mountain 1824, 1839.
***
TO CONSTANTIA, SINGING.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Amongst the
Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian is a chaotic first draft, from
which Mr. Locock [“Examination”, etc., 1903, pages 60-62] has, with
patient ingenuity, disengaged a first and a second stanza consistent
with the metrical scheme of stanzas 3 and 4. The two stanzas thus
recovered are printed here immediately below the poem as edited by Mrs.
Shelley. It need hardly be added that Mr. Locock’s restored version
cannot, any more than Mrs. Shelley’s obviously imperfect one, be
regarded in the light of a final recension.]
1.
Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die,
Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia, turn!
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,
Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn
Between thy lips, are laid to sleep; _5
Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour, it is yet,
And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet.
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!
2.
A breathless awe, like the swift change _10
Unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers,
Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,
Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers.
The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven
By the enchantment of thy strain, _15
And on my shoulders wings are woven,
To follow its sublime career
Beyond the mighty moons that wane
Upon the verge of Nature’s utmost sphere,
Till the world’s shadowy walls are past and disappear. _20
3.
Her voice is hovering o’er my soul—it lingers
O’ershadowing it with soft and lulling wings,
The blood and life within those snowy fingers
Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings.
My brain is wild, my breath comes quick— _25
The blood is listening in my frame,
And thronging shadows, fast and thick,
Fall on my overflowing eyes;
My heart is quivering like a flame;
As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies, _30
I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies.
4.
I have no life, Constantia, now, but thee,
Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song
Flows on, and fills all things with melody.—
Now is thy voice a tempest swift and strong, _35
On which, like one in trance upborne,
Secure o’er rocks and waves I sweep,
Rejoicing like a cloud of morn.
Now ’tis the breath of summer night,
Which when the starry waters sleep,
Round western isles, with incense-blossoms bright, _40
Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.
STANZAS 1 AND 2.
As restored by Mr. C.D. Locock.
1.
Cease, cease—for such wild lessons madmen learn
Thus to be lost, and thus to sink and die
Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia turn
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie
Even though the sounds its voice that were _5
Between [thy] lips are laid to sleep:
Within thy breath, and on thy hair
Like odour, it is [lingering] yet
And from thy touch like fire doth leap—
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet— _10
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed but not forget.
2.
[A deep and] breathless awe like the swift change
Of dreams unseen but felt in youthful slumbers
Wild sweet yet incommunicably strange
Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers... _15
***
TO CONSTANTIA.
[Dated 1817 by Mrs. Shelley, and printed by her in the “Poetical
Works”, 1839, 1st edition. A copy exists amongst the Shelley
manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc.,
1903, page 46.]
1.
The rose that drinks the fountain dew
In the pleasant air of noon,
Grows pale and blue with altered hue—
In the gaze of the nightly moon;
For the planet of frost, so cold and bright, _5
Makes it wan with her borrowed light.
2.
Such is my heart—roses are fair,
And that at best a withered blossom;
But thy false care did idly wear
Its withered leaves in a faithless bosom; _10
And fed with love, like air and dew,
Its growth—
NOTES:
_1 The rose]The red Rose B.
_2 pleasant]fragrant B.
_6 her omitted B.
***
FRAGMENT: TO ONE SINGING.
[Dated 1817 by Mrs. Shelley, and published in the “Poetical Works”,
1839, 1st edition. The manuscript original, by which Mr. Locock has
revised and (by one line) enlarged the text, is amongst the Shelley
manuscripts at the Bodleian. The metre, as Mr. Locock (“Examination”,
etc., 1903, page 63) points out, is terza rima.]
My spirit like a charmed bark doth swim
Upon the liquid waves of thy sweet singing,
Far far away into the regions dim
Of rapture—as a boat, with swift sails winging
Its way adown some many-winding river, _5
Speeds through dark forests o’er the waters swinging...
NOTES:
_3 Far far away B.; Far away 1839.
_6 Speeds...swinging B.; omitted 1839.
***
A FRAGMENT: TO MUSIC.
[Published in “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.
Dated 1817 (Mrs. Shelley).]
Silver key of the fountain of tears,
Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild;
Softest grave of a thousand fears,
Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child,
Is laid asleep in flowers. _5
***
ANOTHER FRAGMENT: TO MUSIC.
[Published in “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.
Dated 1817 (Mrs. Shelley).]
No, Music, thou art not the ‘food of Love.’
Unless Love feeds upon its own sweet self,
Till it becomes all Music murmurs of.
***
‘MIGHTY EAGLE’.
SUPPOSED TO BE ADDRESSED TO WILLIAM GODWIN.
[Published in 1882 (“Poetical Works of P. B. S.”) by Mr. H. Buxton
Forman, C.B., by whom it is dated 1817.]
Mighty eagle! thou that soarest
O’er the misty mountain forest,
And amid the light of morning
Like a cloud of glory hiest,
And when night descends defiest _5
The embattled tempests’ warning!
***
TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR.
[Published in part (5-9, 14) by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839,
1st edition (without title); in full 2nd edition (with title). Four
transcripts in Mrs. Shelley’s hand are extant: two—Leigh Hunt’s and
Ch. Cowden Clarke’s—described by Forman, and two belonging to Mr. C.W.
Frederickson of Brooklyn, described by Woodberry [“Poetical Works”,
Centenary Edition, 3 193-6]. One of the latter (here referred to as Fa)
is corrected in Shelley’s autograph. A much-corrected draft in
Shelley’s hand is in the Harvard manuscript book.]
1.
Thy country’s curse is on thee, darkest crest
Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm
Which rends our Mother’s bosom—Priestly Pest!
Masked Resurrection of a buried Form!
2.
Thy country’s curse is on thee! Justice sold, _5
Truth trampled, Nature’s landmarks overthrown,
And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,
Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction’s throne.
3.
And whilst that sure slow Angel which aye stands
Watching the beck of Mutability _10
Delays to execute her high commands,
And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee,
4.
Oh, let a father’s curse be on thy soul,
And let a daughter’s hope be on thy tomb;
Be both, on thy gray head, a leaden cowl _15
To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom.
5.
I curse thee by a parent’s outraged love,
By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,
By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed; _20
6.
By those infantine smiles of happy light,
Which were a fire within a stranger’s hearth,
Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night
Hiding the promise of a lovely birth:
7.
By those unpractised accents of young speech, _25
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teach—
THOU strike the lyre of mind!—oh, grief and shame!
8.
By all the happy see in children’s growth—
That undeveloped flower of budding years— _30
Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,
Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears-
9.
By all the days, under an hireling’s care,
Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,—
O wretched ye if ever any were,— _35
Sadder than orphans, yet not fatherless!
10.
By the false cant which on their innocent lips
Must hang like poison on an opening bloom,
By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse
Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb— _40
11.
By thy most impious Hell, and all its terror;
By all the grief, the madness, and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be their error—
That sand on which thy crumbling power is built—
12.
By thy complicity with lust and hate— _45
Thy thirst for tears—thy hunger after gold—
The ready frauds which ever on thee wait—
The servile arts in which thou hast grown old—
13.
By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile—
By all the arts and snares of thy black den, _50
And—for thou canst outweep the crocodile—
By thy false tears—those millstones braining men—
14.
By all the hate which checks a father’s love—
By all the scorn which kills a father’s care—
By those most impious hands which dared remove _55
Nature’s high bounds—by thee—and by despair—
15.
Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,
And cry, ‘My children are no longer mine—
The blood within those veins may be mine own,
But—Tyrant—their polluted souls are thine;— _60
16.
I curse thee—though I hate thee not.—O slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming Hell
Of which thou art a daemon, on thy grave
This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well!
NOTES:
_9 Angel which aye cancelled by Shelley for Fate which ever Fa.
_24 promise of a 1839, 2nd edition; promises of 1839, 1st edition.
_27 lore]love Fa.
_32 and saddest]the saddest Fa.
_36 yet not fatherless! cancelled by Shelley for why not fatherless? Fa.
_41-_44 By...built ‘crossed by Shelley and marked dele by Mrs. Shelley’
(Woodberry) Fa.
_50 arts and snares 1839, 1st edition;
snares and arts Harvard Coll. manuscript;
snares and nets Fa.;
acts and snares 1839, 2nd edition.
_59 those]their Fa.
***
TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley (1, 5, 6), “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st
edition; in full, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition. A transcript is
extant in Mrs. Shelley’s hand.]
1.
The billows on the beach are leaping around it,
The bark is weak and frail,
The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it
Darkly strew the gale.
Come with me, thou delightful child,
Come with me, though the wave is wild, _5
And the winds are loose, we must not stay,
Or the slaves of the law may rend thee away.
2.
They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee; _10
They have withered the smile and dried the tear
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly prime,
And they will curse my name and thee _15
Because we fearless are and free.
3.
Come thou, beloved as thou art;
Another sleepeth still
Near thy sweet mother’s anxious heart,
Which thou with joy shalt fill, _20
With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,
And which in distant lands will be
The dearest playmate unto thee.
4.
Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever, _25
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river,
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells; _30
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks on the surge of eternity.
5.
Rest, rest, and shriek not, thou gentle child!
The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?— _35
There, sit between us two, thou dearest—
Me and thy mother—well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves _40
Who hunt us o’er these sheltering waves.
6.
This hour will in thy memory
Be a dream of days forgotten long.
We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,
Or Greece, the Mother of the free; _45
And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon those heroes old
In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame
Of Grecian lore, that by such name _50
A patriot’s birthright thou mayst claim!
NOTES:
_1 on the beach omitted 1839, 1st edition.
_8 of the law 1839, 1st edition; of law 1839, 2nd edition.
_14 prime transcript; time editions 1839.
_16 fearless are editions 1839; are fearless transcript.
_20 shalt transcript; wilt editions 1839.
_25-_32 Fear...eternity omitted, transcript.
See “Rosalind and Helen”, lines 894-901.
_33 and transcript; omitted editions 1839.
_41 us transcript, 1839, 1st edition; thee 1839, 2nd edition.
_42 will in transcript, 1839, 2nd edition;
will sometime in 1839, 1st edition.
_43 long transcript; omitted editions 1839.
_48 those transcript, 1839, 1st edition; their 1839, 2nd edition.
***
FROM THE ORIGINAL DRAFT OF THE POEM TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.
[Published in Dr. Garnett’s “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
1.
The world is now our dwelling-place;
Where’er the earth one fading trace
Of what was great and free does keep,
That is our home!...
Mild thoughts of man’s ungentle race _5
Shall our contented exile reap;
For who that in some happy place
His own free thoughts can freely chase
By woods and waves can clothe his face
In cynic smiles? Child! we shall weep. _10
2.
This lament,
The memory of thy grievous wrong
Will fade...
But genius is omnipotent
To hallow... _15
***
ON FANNY GODWIN.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, among the poems of 1817, in “Poetical
Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery—O Misery, _5
This world is all too wide for thee.
***
LINES.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley with the date ‘November 5th, 1817,’ in
“Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
That time is dead for ever, child!
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!
We look on the past
And stare aghast
At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast, _5
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life’s dark river.
2.
The stream we gazed on then rolled by;
Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand _10
In a lone land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee
In the light of life’s dim morning.
***
DEATH.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
They die—the dead return not—Misery
Sits near an open grave and calls them over,
A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye—
They are the names of kindred, friend and lover,
Which he so feebly calls—they all are gone— _5
Fond wretch, all dead! those vacant names alone,
This most familiar scene, my pain—
These tombs—alone remain.
2.
Misery, my sweetest friend—oh, weep no more!
Thou wilt not be consoled—I wonder not! _10
For I have seen thee from thy dwelling’s door
Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot
Was even as bright and calm, but transitory,
And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary;
This most familiar scene, my pain— _15
These tombs—alone remain.
NOTE:
_5 calls editions 1839; called 1824.
***
OTHO.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
1.
Thou wert not, Cassius, and thou couldst not be,
Last of the Romans, though thy memory claim
From Brutus his own glory—and on thee
Rests the full splendour of his sacred fame:
Nor he who dared make the foul tyrant quail _5
Amid his cowering senate with thy name,
Though thou and he were great—it will avail
To thine own fame that Otho’s should not fail.
2.
‘Twill wrong thee not—thou wouldst, if thou couldst feel,
Abjure such envious fame—great Otho died _10
Like thee—he sanctified his country’s steel,
At once the tyrant and tyrannicide,
In his own blood—a deed it was to bring
Tears from all men—though full of gentle pride,
Such pride as from impetuous love may spring, _15
That will not be refused its offering.
NOTE:
_13 bring cj. Garnett; buy 1839, 1st edition; wring cj. Rossetti.
***
FRAGMENTS SUPPOSED TO BE PARTS OF OTHO.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862,—where, however,
only the fragment numbered 2 is assigned to “Otho”. Forman (1876)
connects all three fragments with that projected poem.]
1.
Those whom nor power, nor lying faith, nor toil,
Nor custom, queen of many slaves, makes blind,
Have ever grieved that man should be the spoil
Of his own weakness, and with earnest mind
Fed hopes of its redemption; these recur _5
Chastened by deathful victory now, and find
Foundations in this foulest age, and stir
Me whom they cheer to be their minister.
2.
Dark is the realm of grief: but human things
Those may not know who cannot weep for them. _10
...
3.
Once more descend
The shadows of my soul upon mankind,
For to those hearts with which they never blend,
Thoughts are but shadows which the flashing mind
From the swift clouds which track its flight of fire, _15
Casts on the gloomy world it leaves behind.
...
***
‘O THAT A CHARIOT OF CLOUD WERE MINE’.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
O that a chariot of cloud were mine!
Of cloud which the wild tempest weaves in air,
When the moon over the ocean’s line
Is spreading the locks of her bright gray hair.
O that a chariot of cloud were mine! _5
I would sail on the waves of the billowy wind
To the mountain peak and the rocky lake,
And the...
***
FRAGMENT: TO A FRIEND RELEASED FROM PRISON.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
For me, my friend, if not that tears did tremble
In my faint eyes, and that my heart beat fast
With feelings which make rapture pain resemble,
Yet, from thy voice that falsehood starts aghast,
I thank thee—let the tyrant keep _5
His chains and tears, yea, let him weep
With rage to see thee freshly risen,
Like strength from slumber, from the prison,
In which he vainly hoped the soul to bind
Which on the chains must prey that fetter humankind. _10
NOTE:
For the metre see Fragment: “A Gentle Story” (A.C. Bradley.)
***
FRAGMENT: SATAN BROKEN LOOSE.
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
A golden-winged Angel stood
Before the Eternal Judgement-seat:
His looks were wild, and Devils’ blood
Stained his dainty hands and feet.
The Father and the Son _5
Knew that strife was now begun.
They knew that Satan had broken his chain,
And with millions of daemons in his train,
Was ranging over the world again.
Before the Angel had told his tale, _10
A sweet and a creeping sound
Like the rushing of wings was heard around;
And suddenly the lamps grew pale—
The lamps, before the Archangels seven,
That burn continually in Heaven. _15
***
FRAGMENT: “IGNICULUS DESIDERII”.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. This
fragment is amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr.
C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 63.]
To thirst and find no fill—to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps—to pause and ponder—
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle;
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses _5
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half-created shadow, then all the night
Sick...
NOTES:
_2 unsteady B.; uneasy 1839, 1st edition.
_7, _8 then...Sick B.; wanting, 1839, 1st edition.
***
FRAGMENT: “AMOR AETERNUS”.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Wealth and dominion fade into the mass
Of the great sea of human right and wrong,
When once from our possession they must pass;
But love, though misdirected, is among
The things which are immortal, and surpass _5
All that frail stuff which will be—or which was.
***
FRAGMENT: THOUGHTS COME AND GO IN SOLITUDE.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,
The verse that would invest them melts away
Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day:
How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,
Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl! _5
***
A HATE-SONG.
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
A hater he came and sat by a ditch,
And he took an old cracked lute;
And he sang a song which was more of a screech
’Gainst a woman that was a brute.
***
LINES TO A CRITIC.
[Published by Hunt in “The Liberal”, No. 3, 1823. Reprinted in
“Posthumous Poems”, 1824, where it is dated December, 1817.]
1.
Honey from silkworms who can gather,
Or silk from the yellow bee?
The grass may grow in winter weather
As soon as hate in me.
2.
Hate men who cant, and men who pray, _5
And men who rail like thee;
An equal passion to repay
They are not coy like me.
3.
Or seek some slave of power and gold
To be thy dear heart’s mate; _10
Thy love will move that bigot cold
Sooner than me, thy hate.
4.
A passion like the one I prove
Cannot divided be;
I hate thy want of truth and love— _15
How should I then hate thee?
***
OZYMANDIAS.
[Published by Hunt in “The Examiner”, January, 1818. Reprinted with
“Rosalind and Helen”, 1819. There is a copy amongst the Shelley
manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s
“Examination”, etc., 1903, page 46.]
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, _5
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: _10
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
NOTE:
_9 these words appear]this legend clear B.
***
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1817, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
The very illness that oppressed, and the aspect of death which had
approached so near Shelley, appear to have kindled to yet keener life
the Spirit of Poetry in his heart. The restless thoughts kept awake by
pain clothed themselves in verse. Much was composed during this year.
The “Revolt of Islam”, written and printed, was a great
effort—“Rosalind and Helen” was begun—and the fragments and poems I
can trace to the same period show how full of passion and reflection
were his solitary hours.
In addition to such poems as have an intelligible aim and shape, many a
stray idea and transitory emotion found imperfect and abrupt
expression, and then again lost themselves in silence. As he never
wandered without a book and without implements of writing, I find many
such, in his manuscript books, that scarcely bear record; while some of
them, broken and vague as they are, will appear valuable to those who
love Shelley’s mind, and desire to trace its workings.
He projected also translating the “Hymns” of Homer; his version of
several of the shorter ones remains, as well as that to Mercury already
published in the “Posthumous Poems”. His readings this year were
chiefly Greek. Besides the “Hymns” of Homer and the “Iliad”, he read
the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the “Symposium” of Plato, and
Arrian’s “Historia Indica”. In Latin, Apuleius alone is named. In
English, the Bible was his constant study; he read a great portion of
it aloud in the evening. Among these evening readings I find also
mentioned the “Faerie Queen”; and other modern works, the production of
his contemporaries, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore and Byron.
His life was now spent more in thought than action—he had lost the
eager spirit which believed it could achieve what it projected for the
benefit of mankind. And yet in the converse of daily life Shelley was
far from being a melancholy man. He was eloquent when philosophy or
politics or taste were the subjects of conversation. He was playful;
and indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others—not in
bitterness, but in sport. The author of “Nightmare Abbey” seized on
some points of his character and some habits of his life when he
painted Scythrop. He was not addicted to ‘port or madeira,’ but in
youth he had read of ‘Illuminati and Eleutherarchs,’ and believed that
he possessed the power of operating an immediate change in the minds of
men and the state of society. These wild dreams had faded; sorrow and
adversity had struck home; but he struggled with despondency as he did
with physical pain. There are few who remember him sailing paper boats,
and watching the navigation of his tiny craft with eagerness—or
repeating with wild energy “The Ancient Mariner”, and Southey’s “Old
Woman of Berkeley”; but those who do will recollect that it was in
such, and in the creations of his own fancy when that was most daring
and ideal, that he sheltered himself from the storms and
disappointments, the pain and sorrow, that beset his life.
No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were
torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the
passing of the decree, he had written a curse, in which there breathes,
besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father’s love,
which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the
consequences.
At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had
said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be
permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared
that our infant son would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to
resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything,
and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas
addressed to this son, whom afterwards we lost at Rome, written under
the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to
preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not
written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the
spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded over his wrongs and woes,
and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the
uncontrollable emotions of his heart. I ought to observe that the
fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in “Rosalind and Helen”.
When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, a propos of the
English burying-ground in that city: ‘This spot is the repository of a
sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent’s heart are now
prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death.
My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than
the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one
can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections.’
***
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1818.
TO THE NILE.
[‘Found by Mr. Townshend Meyer among the papers of Leigh Hunt, [and]
published in the “St. James’s Magazine” for March, 1876.’ (Mr. H.
Buxton Forman, C.B.; “Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, Library Edition,
1876, volume 3 page 410.) First included among Shelley’s poetical works
in Mr. Forman’s Library Edition, where a facsimile of the manuscript is
given. Composed February 4, 1818. See “Complete Works of John Keats”,
edition H. Buxton Forman, Glasgow, 1901, volume 4 page 76.]
Month after month the gathered rains descend
Drenching yon secret Aethiopian dells,
And from the desert’s ice-girt pinnacles
Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend. _5
Girt there with blasts and meteors Tempest dwells
By Nile’s aereal urn, with rapid spells
Urging those waters to their mighty end.
O’er Egypt’s land of Memory floods are level
And they are thine, O Nile—and well thou knowest _10
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil
And fruits and poisons spring where’er thou flowest.
Beware, O Man—for knowledge must to thee,
Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.
***
PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.
[Composed May 4, 1818. Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”,
1824. There is a copy amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian
Library, which supplies the last word of the fragment.]
Listen, listen, Mary mine,
To the whisper of the Apennine,
It bursts on the roof like the thunder’s roar,
Or like the sea on a northern shore,
Heard in its raging ebb and flow _5
By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread _10
On the dim starlight then is spread,
And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,
Shrouding...
***
THE PAST.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Wilt thou forget the happy hours
Which we buried in Love’s sweet bowers,
Heaping over their corpses cold
Blossoms and leaves, instead of mould?
Blossoms which were the joys that fell, _5
And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.
2.
Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit’s gloom, _10
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain.
***
TO MARY —.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
O Mary dear, that you were here
With your brown eyes bright and clear.
And your sweet voice, like a bird
Singing love to its lone mate
In the ivy bower disconsolate; _5
Voice the sweetest ever heard!
And your brow more...
Than the ... sky
Of this azure Italy.
Mary dear, come to me soon, _10
I am not well whilst thou art far;
As sunset to the sphered moon,
As twilight to the western star,
Thou, beloved, art to me.
O Mary dear, that you were here; _15
The Castle echo whispers ‘Here!’
***
ON A FADED VIOLET.
[Published by Hunt, “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1821. Reprinted by Mrs.
Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Again reprinted, with several
variants, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. Our text is that of the
editio princeps, 1821. A transcript is extant in a letter from Shelley
to Sophia Stacey, dated March 7, 1820.]
1.
The odour from the flower is gone
Which like thy kisses breathed on me;
The colour from the flower is flown
Which glowed of thee and only thee!
2.
A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form, _5
It lies on my abandoned breast,
And mocks the heart which yet is warm,
With cold and silent rest.
3.
I weep,—my tears revive it not!
I sigh,—it breathes no more on me; _10
Its mute and uncomplaining lot
Is such as mine should be.
NOTES:
_1 odour]colour 1839.
_2 kisses breathed]sweet eyes smiled 1839.
_3 colour]odour 1839.
_4 glowed]breathed 1839.
_5 shrivelled]withered 1839.
_8 cold and silent all editions; its cold, silent Stacey manuscript.
***
LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS.
OCTOBER, 1818.
[Composed at Este, October, 1818. Published with “Rosalind and Helen”,
1819. Amongst the late Mr. Fredk. Locker-Lampson’s collections at
Rowfant there is a manuscript of the lines (167-205) on Byron,
interpolated after the completion of the poem.]
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of Misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on—
Day and night, and night and day, _5
Drifting on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel’s track:
Whilst above the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily, _10
And behind the tempest fleet
Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o’er-brimming deep; _15
And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore _20
Still recedes, as ever still
Longing with divided will,
But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever drifted on
O’er the unreposing wave _25
To the haven of the grave.
What, if there no friends will greet;
What, if there no heart will meet
His with love’s impatient beat;
Wander wheresoe’er he may, _30
Can he dream before that day
To find refuge from distress
In friendship’s smile, in love’s caress?
Then ‘twill wreak him little woe
Whether such there be or no: _35
Senseless is the breast, and cold,
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve _40
That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortured lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December’s bough.
On the beach of a northern sea _45
Which tempests shake eternally,
As once the wretch there lay to sleep,
Lies a solitary heap,
One white skull and seven dry bones,
On the margin of the stones, _50
Where a few gray rushes stand,
Boundaries of the sea and land:
Nor is heard one voice of wail
But the sea-mews, as they sail
O’er the billows of the gale; _55
Or the whirlwind up and down
Howling, like a slaughtered town,
When a king in glory rides
Through the pomp of fratricides:
Those unburied bones around _60
There is many a mournful sound;
There is no lament for him,
Like a sunless vapour, dim,
Who once clothed with life and thought
What now moves nor murmurs not. _65
Ay, many flowering islands lie
In the waters of wide Agony:
To such a one this morn was led,
My bark by soft winds piloted:
‘Mid the mountains Euganean _70
I stood listening to the paean
With which the legioned rooks did hail
The sun’s uprise majestical;
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar _75
Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,
Flecked with fire and azure, lie
In the unfathomable sky,
So their plumes of purple grain, _80
Starred with drops of golden rain,
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning’s fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail, _85
And the vapours cloven and gleaming
Follow, down the dark steep streaming,
Till all is bright, and clear, and still,
Round the solitary hill.
Beneath is spread like a green sea _90
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath Day’s azure eyes
Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies, _95
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite’s destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind, _100
Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright, _105
Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies; _110
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.
Sun-girt City, thou hast been _115
Ocean’s child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier. _120
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew _125
Flies, as once before it flew,
O’er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace gate _130
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of Ocean’s own,
Topples o’er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day, _135
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o’er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death _140
O’er the waters of his path.
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aereal gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were _145
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake _150
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch’s hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously, _155
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they!— _160
Clouds which stain truth’s rising day
By her sun consumed away—
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring _165
With more kindly blossoming.
Perish—let there only be
Floating o’er thy hearthless sea
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally, _170
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tattered pall of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;—
That a tempest-cleaving Swan
Of the songs of Albion, _175
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung _180
From his lips like music flung
O’er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror:—what though yet
Poesy’s unfailing River,
Which through Albion winds forever _185
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred Poet’s grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled?
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay _190
Aught thine own? oh, rather say
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander’s wasting springs; _195
As divinest Shakespeare’s might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power which he
Imaged ‘mid mortality;
As the love from Petrarch’s urn, _200
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp by which the heart
Sees things unearthly;—so thou art,
Mighty spirit—so shall be
The City that did refuge thee. _205
Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-winged Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread, _210
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that gray cloud
Many-domed Padua proud _215
Stands, a peopled solitude,
‘Mid the harvest-shining plain,
Where the peasant heaps his grain
In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow _220
With the purple vintage strain,
Heaped upon the creaking wain,
That the brutal Celt may swill
Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword _225
Lies unchanged, though many a lord,
Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region’s foison,
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction’s harvest-home: _230
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but ’tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge. _235
Padua, thou within whose walls
Those mute guests at festivals,
Son and Mother, Death and Sin,
Played at dice for Ezzelin,
Till Death cried, “I win, I win!” _240
And Sin cursed to lose the wager,
But Death promised, to assuage her,
That he would petition for
Her to be made Vice-Emperor,
When the destined years were o’er, _245
Over all between the Po
And the eastern Alpine snow,
Under the mighty Austrian.
Sin smiled so as Sin only can,
And since that time, ay, long before, _250
Both have ruled from shore to shore,—
That incestuous pair, who follow
Tyrants as the sun the swallow,
As Repentance follows Crime,
And as changes follow Time. _255
In thine halls the lamp of learning,
Padua, now no more is burning;
Like a meteor, whose wild way
Is lost over the grave of day,
It gleams betrayed and to betray: _260
Once remotest nations came
To adore that sacred flame,
When it lit not many a hearth
On this cold and gloomy earth:
Now new fires from antique light _265
Spring beneath the wide world’s might;
But their spark lies dead in thee,
Trampled out by Tyranny.
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depth of piny dells, _270
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn
By the fire thus lowly born:
The spark beneath his feet is dead, _275
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darkened sky
With a myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear: so thou,
O Tyranny, beholdest now _280
Light around thee, and thou hearest
The loud flames ascend, and fearest:
Grovel on the earth; ay, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!
Noon descends around me now: _285
’Tis the noon of autumn’s glow,
When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolved star
Mingling light and fragrance, far _290
From the curved horizon’s bound
To the point of Heaven’s profound,
Fills the overflowing sky;
And the plains that silent lie
Underneath, the leaves unsodden _295
Where the infant Frost has trodden
With his morning-winged feet,
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
And the red and golden vines,
Piercing with their trellised lines _300
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
The dun and bladed grass no less,
Pointing from this hoary tower
In the windless air; the flower
Glimmering at my feet; the line _305
Of the olive-sandalled Apennine
In the south dimly islanded;
And the Alps, whose snows are spread
High between the clouds and sun;
And of living things each one; _310
And my spirit which so long
Darkened this swift stream of song,—
Interpenetrated lie
By the glory of the sky:
Be it love, light, harmony, _315
Odour, or the soul of all
Which from Heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feeds this verse
Peopling the lone universe.
Noon descends, and after noon _320
Autumn’s evening meets me soon,
Leading the infantine moon,
And that one star, which to her
Almost seems to minister
Half the crimson light she brings _325
From the sunset’s radiant springs:
And the soft dreams of the morn
(Which like winged winds had borne
To that silent isle, which lies
Mid remembered agonies, _330
The frail bark of this lone being)
Pass, to other sufferers fleeing,
And its ancient pilot, Pain,
Sits beside the helm again.
Other flowering isles must be _335
In the sea of Life and Agony:
Other spirits float and flee
O’er that gulf: even now, perhaps,
On some rock the wild wave wraps,
With folded wings they waiting sit _340
For my bark, to pilot it
To some calm and blooming cove,
Where for me, and those I love,
May a windless bower be built,
Far from passion, pain, and guilt, _345
In a dell mid lawny hills,
Which the wild sea-murmur fills,
And soft sunshine, and the sound
Of old forests echoing round,
And the light and smell divine _350
Of all flowers that breathe and shine:
We may live so happy there,
That the Spirits of the Air,
Envying us, may even entice
To our healing Paradise _355
The polluting multitude;
But their rage would be subdued
By that clime divine and calm,
And the winds whose wings rain balm
On the uplifted soul, and leaves _360
Under which the bright sea heaves;
While each breathless interval
In their whisperings musical
The inspired soul supplies
With its own deep melodies; _365
And the love which heals all strife
Circling, like the breath of life,
All things in that sweet abode
With its own mild brotherhood,
They, not it, would change; and soon _370
Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again.
NOTES:
_54 seamews 1819; seamew’s Rossetti.
_115 Sun-girt]Sea-girt cj. Palgrave.
_165 From your dust new 1819;
From thy dust shall Rowfant manuscript (heading of lines 167-205).
_175 songs 1819; sons cj. Forman.
_278 a 1819; wanting, 1839.
***
SCENE FROM ‘TASSO’.
[Composed, 1818. Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
MADDALO, A COURTIER.
MALPIGLIO, A POET.
PIGNA, A MINISTER.
ALBANO, AN USHER.
MADDALO:
No access to the Duke! You have not said
That the Count Maddalo would speak with him?
PIGNA:
Did you inform his Grace that Signor Pigna
Waits with state papers for his signature?
MALPIGLIO:
The Lady Leonora cannot know _5
That I have written a sonnet to her fame,
In which I ... Venus and Adonis.
You should not take my gold and serve me not.
ALBANO:
In truth I told her, and she smiled and said,
‘If I am Venus, thou, coy Poesy, _10
Art the Adonis whom I love, and he
The Erymanthian boar that wounded him.’
O trust to me, Signor Malpiglio,
Those nods and smiles were favours worth the zechin.
MALPIGLIO:
The words are twisted in some double sense _15
That I reach not: the smiles fell not on me.
PIGNA:
How are the Duke and Duchess occupied?
ALBANO:
Buried in some strange talk. The Duke was leaning,
His finger on his brow, his lips unclosed.
The Princess sate within the window-seat, _20
And so her face was hid; but on her knee
Her hands were clasped, veined, and pale as snow,
And quivering—young Tasso, too, was there.
MADDALO:
Thou seest on whom from thine own worshipped heaven
Thou drawest down smiles—they did not rain on thee. _25
MALPIGLIO:
Would they were parching lightnings for his sake
On whom they fell!
***
SONG FOR ‘TASSO’.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
I loved—alas! our life is love;
But when we cease to breathe and move
I do suppose love ceases too.
I thought, but not as now I do,
Keen thoughts and bright of linked lore, _5
Of all that men had thought before.
And all that Nature shows, and more.
2.
And still I love and still I think,
But strangely, for my heart can drink
The dregs of such despair, and live, _10
And love;...
And if I think, my thoughts come fast,
I mix the present with the past,
And each seems uglier than the last.
3.
Sometimes I see before me flee _15
A silver spirit’s form, like thee,
O Leonora, and I sit
...still watching it,
Till by the grated casement’s ledge
It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge _20
Breathes o’er the breezy streamlet’s edge.
***
INVOCATION TO MISERY.
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, September 8, 1832. Reprinted (as
“Misery, a Fragment”) by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st
edition. Our text is that of 1839. A pencil copy of this poem is
amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D.
Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 38. The readings of this copy
are indicated by the letter B. in the footnotes.]
1.
Come, be happy!—sit near me,
Shadow-vested Misery:
Coy, unwilling, silent bride,
Mourning in thy robe of pride,
Desolation—deified! _5
2.
Come, be happy!—sit near me:
Sad as I may seem to thee,
I am happier far than thou,
Lady, whose imperial brow
Is endiademed with woe. _10
3.
Misery! we have known each other,
Like a sister and a brother
Living in the same lone home,
Many years—we must live some
Hours or ages yet to come. _15
4.
’Tis an evil lot, and yet
Let us make the best of it;
If love can live when pleasure dies,
We two will love, till in our eyes
This heart’s Hell seem Paradise. _20
5.
Come, be happy!—lie thee down
On the fresh grass newly mown,
Where the Grasshopper doth sing
Merrily—one joyous thing
In a world of sorrowing! _25
6.
There our tent shall be the willow,
And mine arm shall be thy pillow;
Sounds and odours, sorrowful
Because they once were sweet, shall lull
Us to slumber, deep and dull. _30
7.
Ha! thy frozen pulses flutter
With a love thou darest not utter.
Thou art murmuring—thou art weeping—
Is thine icy bosom leaping
While my burning heart lies sleeping? _35
8.
Kiss me;—oh! thy lips are cold:
Round my neck thine arms enfold—
They are soft, but chill and dead;
And thy tears upon my head
Burn like points of frozen lead. _40
9.
Hasten to the bridal bed—
Underneath the grave ’tis spread:
In darkness may our love be hid,
Oblivion be our coverlid—
We may rest, and none forbid. _45
10.
Clasp me till our hearts be grown
Like two shadows into one;
Till this dreadful transport may
Like a vapour fade away,
In the sleep that lasts alway. _50
11.
We may dream, in that long sleep,
That we are not those who weep;
E’en as Pleasure dreams of thee,
Life-deserting Misery,
Thou mayst dream of her with me. _55
12.
Let us laugh, and make our mirth,
At the shadows of the earth,
As dogs bay the moonlight clouds,
Which, like spectres wrapped in shrouds,
Pass o’er night in multitudes. _60
13.
All the wide world, beside us,
Show like multitudinous
Puppets passing from a scene;
What but mockery can they mean,
Where I am—where thou hast been? _65
NOTES:
_1 near B., 1839; by 1832.
_8 happier far]merrier yet B.
_15 Hours or]Years and 1832.
_17 best]most 1832.
_19 We two will]We will 1832.
_27 mine arm shall be thy B., 1839; thine arm shall be my 1832.
_33 represented by asterisks, 1832.
_34, _35 Thou art murmuring, thou art weeping,
Whilst my burning bosom’s leaping 1832;
Was thine icy bosom leaping
While my burning heart was sleeping B.
_40 frozen 1832, 1839, B.; molten cj. Forman.
_44 be]is B.
_47 shadows]lovers 1832, B.
_59 which B., 1839; that 1832.
_62 Show]Are 1832, B.
_63 Puppets passing]Shadows shifting 1832; Shadows passing B.
_64, _65 So B.: What but mockery may they mean?
Where am I?—Where thou hast been 1832.
***
STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, NEAR NAPLES.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, where it is dated
‘December, 1818.’ A draft of stanza 1 is amongst the Boscombe
manuscripts. (Garnett).]
1.
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon’s transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light, _5
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City’s voice itself, is soft like Solitude’s.
2.
I see the Deep’s untrampled floor _10
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,—
The lightning of the noontide ocean _15
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
3.
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around, _20
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned—
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround— _25
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;—
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
4.
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child, _30
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea _35
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
5.
Some might lament that I were cold,
As I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan; _40
They might lament—for I am one
Whom men love not,—and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet. _45
NOTES:
_4 might Boscombe manuscript, Medwin 1847; light 1824, 1839.
_5 The...light Boscombe manuscript, 1839, Medwin 1847;
omitted, 1824. moist earth Boscombe manuscript;
moist air 1839; west wind Medwin 1847.
_17 measured 1824; mingled 1847.
_18 did any heart now 1824; if any heart could Medwin 1847.
_31 the 1824; this Medwin 1847.
_36 dying 1824; outworn Medwin 1847.
***
THE WOODMAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE.
[Published in part (1-67) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824;
the remainder (68-70) by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune
(I think such hearts yet never came to good)
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,
One nightingale in an interfluous wood
Satiate the hungry dark with melody;— _5
And as a vale is watered by a flood,
Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness—as a tuberose
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie
Like clouds above the flower from which they rose, _10
The singing of that happy nightingale
In this sweet forest, from the golden close
Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,
Was interfused upon the silentness;
The folded roses and the violets pale _15
Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss
Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear
Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness
Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere
And every flower and beam and cloud and wave, _20
And every wind of the mute atmosphere,
And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,
And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,
And every silver moth fresh from the grave
Which is its cradle—ever from below _25
Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,
To be consumed within the purest glow
Of one serene and unapproached star,
As if it were a lamp of earthly light,
Unconscious, as some human lovers are, _30
Itself how low, how high beyond all height
The heaven where it would perish!—and every form
That worshipped in the temple of the night
Was awed into delight, and by the charm
Girt as with an interminable zone, _35
Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm
Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion
Out of their dreams; harmony became love
In every soul but one.
...
And so this man returned with axe and saw _40
At evening close from killing the tall treen,
The soul of whom by Nature’s gentle law
Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green
The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,
Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene _45
With jagged leaves,—and from the forest tops
Singing the winds to sleep—or weeping oft
Fast showers of aereal water-drops
Into their mother’s bosom, sweet and soft,
Nature’s pure tears which have no bitterness;— _50
Around the cradles of the birds aloft
They spread themselves into the loveliness
Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers
Hang like moist clouds:—or, where high branches kiss,
Make a green space among the silent bowers, _55
Like a vast fane in a metropolis,
Surrounded by the columns and the towers
All overwrought with branch-like traceries
In which there is religion—and the mute
Persuasion of unkindled melodies, _60
Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lute
Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast
Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,
Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passed
To such brief unison as on the brain _65
One tone, which never can recur, has cast,
One accent never to return again.
...
The world is full of Woodmen who expel
Love’s gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,
And vex the nightingales in every dell. _70
NOTE:
_8 —or as a tuberose cj. A.C. Bradley.
***
MARENGHI. (This fragment refers to an event told in Sismondi’s
“Histoire des Republiques Italiennes”, which occurred during the war
when Florence finally subdued Pisa, and reduced it to a
province.—[MRS. SHELLEY’S NOTE, 1824.])
[Published in part (stanzas 7-15.) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”,
1824; stanzas 1-28 by W.M. Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B.
S.”, 1870. The Boscombe manuscript—evidently a first draft—from which
(through Dr. Garnett) Rossetti derived the text of 1870 is now at the
Bodleian, and has recently been collated by Mr. C.D. Locock, to whom
the enlarged and amended text here printed is owing. The substitution,
in title and text, of “Marenghi” for “Mazenghi” (1824) is due to
Rossetti. Here as elsewhere in the footnotes B. = the Bodleian
manuscript.]
1.
Let those who pine in pride or in revenge,
Or think that ill for ill should be repaid,
Who barter wrong for wrong, until the exchange
Ruins the merchants of such thriftless trade,
Visit the tower of Vado, and unlearn _5
Such bitter faith beside Marenghi’s urn.
2.
A massy tower yet overhangs the town,
A scattered group of ruined dwellings now...
...
3.
Another scene are wise Etruria knew
Its second ruin through internal strife _10
And tyrants through the breach of discord threw
The chain which binds and kills. As death to life,
As winter to fair flowers (though some be poison)
So Monarchy succeeds to Freedom’s foison.
4.
In Pisa’s church a cup of sculptured gold _15
Was brimming with the blood of feuds forsworn:
A Sacrament more holy ne’er of old
Etrurians mingled mid the shades forlorn
Of moon-illumined forests, when...
5.
And reconciling factions wet their lips _20
With that dread wine, and swear to keep each spirit
Undarkened by their country’s last eclipse...
...
6.
Was Florence the liberticide? that band
Of free and glorious brothers who had planted,
Like a green isle mid Aethiopian sand, _25
A nation amid slaveries, disenchanted
Of many impious faiths—wise, just—do they,
Does Florence, gorge the sated tyrants’ prey?
7.
O foster-nurse of man’s abandoned glory,
Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour; _30
Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story,
As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender:—
The light-invested angel Poesy
Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee.
8.
And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught _35
By loftiest meditations; marble knew
The sculptor’s fearless soul—and as he wrought,
The grace of his own power and freedom grew.
And more than all, heroic, just, sublime,
Thou wart among the false...was this thy crime? _40
9.
Yes; and on Pisa’s marble walls the twine
Of direst weeds hangs garlanded—the snake
Inhabits its wrecked palaces;—in thine
A beast of subtler venom now doth make
Its lair, and sits amid their glories overthrown, _45
And thus thy victim’s fate is as thine own.
10.
The sweetest flowers are ever frail and rare,
And love and freedom blossom but to wither;
And good and ill like vines entangled are,
So that their grapes may oft be plucked together;— _50
Divide the vintage ere thou drink, then make
Thy heart rejoice for dead Marenghi’s sake.
10a.
[Albert] Marenghi was a Florentine;
If he had wealth, or children, or a wife
Or friends, [or farm] or cherished thoughts which twine _55
The sights and sounds of home with life’s own life
Of these he was despoiled and Florence sent...
...
11.
No record of his crime remains in story,
But if the morning bright as evening shone, _60
It was some high and holy deed, by glory
Pursued into forgetfulness, which won
From the blind crowd he made secure and free
The patriot’s meed, toil, death, and infamy.
12.
For when by sound of trumpet was declared
A price upon his life, and there was set _65
A penalty of blood on all who shared
So much of water with him as might wet
His lips, which speech divided not—he went
Alone, as you may guess, to banishment.
13.
Amid the mountains, like a hunted beast,
He hid himself, and hunger, toil, and cold, _70
Month after month endured; it was a feast
Whene’er he found those globes of deep-red gold
Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,
Suspended in their emerald atmosphere. _75
14.
And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,
Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,
All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,
And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,
And where the huge and speckled aloe made, _80
Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,—
15.
He housed himself. There is a point of strand
Near Vado’s tower and town; and on one side
The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,
Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide, _85
And on the other, creeps eternally,
Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea.
16.
Here the earth’s breath is pestilence, and few
But things whose nature is at war with life—
Snakes and ill worms—endure its mortal dew.
The trophies of the clime’s victorious strife— _90
And ringed horns which the buffalo did wear,
And the wolf’s dark gray scalp who tracked him there.
17.
And at the utmost point...stood there
The relics of a reed-inwoven cot, _95
Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer
Had lived seven days there: the pursuit was hot
When he was cold. The birds that were his grave
Fell dead after their feast in Vado’s wave.
18.
There must have burned within Marenghi’s breast _100
That fire, more warm and bright than life and hope,
(Which to the martyr makes his dungeon...
More joyous than free heaven’s majestic cope
To his oppressor), warring with decay,—
Or he could ne’er have lived years, day by day. _105
19.
Nor was his state so lone as you might think.
He had tamed every newt and snake and toad,
And every seagull which sailed down to drink
Those freshes ere the death-mist went abroad.
And each one, with peculiar talk and play, _110
Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.
20.
And the marsh-meteors, like tame beasts, at night
Came licking with blue tongues his veined feet;
And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright,
In many entangled figures quaint and sweet _115
To some enchanted music they would dance—
Until they vanished at the first moon-glance.
21.
He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed
The summer dew-globes in the golden dawn;
And, ere the hoar-frost languished, he could read _120
Its pictured path, as on bare spots of lawn
Its delicate brief touch in silver weaves
The likeness of the wood’s remembered leaves.
22.
And many a fresh Spring morn would he awaken—
While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron _125
Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken
Of mountains and blue isles which did environ
With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea,—
And feel ... liberty.
23.
And in the moonless nights when the dun ocean _130
Heaved underneath wide heaven, star-impearled,
Starting from dreams...
Communed with the immeasurable world;
And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated,
Till his mind grew like that it contemplated. _135
24.
His food was the wild fig and strawberry;
The milky pine-nuts which the autumn-blast
Shakes into the tall grass; or such small fry
As from the sea by winter-storms are cast;
And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found _140
Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.
25.
And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made
His solitude less dark. When memory came
(For years gone by leave each a deepening shade),
His spirit basked in its internal flame,— _145
As, when the black storm hurries round at night,
The fisher basks beside his red firelight.
26.
Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and errors,
Like billows unawakened by the wind,
Slept in Marenghi still; but that all terrors, _150
Weakness, and doubt, had withered in his mind.
His couch...
...
27.
And, when he saw beneath the sunset’s planet
A black ship walk over the crimson ocean,—
Its pennon streaming on the blasts that fan it, _155
Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,
Like the dark ghost of the unburied even
Striding athwart the orange-coloured heaven,—
28.
The thought of his own kind who made the soul
Which sped that winged shape through night and day,— _160
The thought of his own country...
...
NOTES:
_3 Who B.; Or 1870.
_6 Marenghi’s 1870; Mazenghi’s B.
_7 town 1870; sea B.
_8 ruined 1870; squalid B. (‘the whole line is cancelled,’ Locock).
_11 threw 1870; cancelled, B.
_17 A Sacrament more B.; At Sacrament: more 1870.
_18 mid B.; with 1870.
_19 forests when... B.; forests. 1870.
_23, _24 that band Of free and glorious brothers who had 1870; omitted, B.
_25 a 1870; one B.
_27 wise, just—do they 1870; omitted, B.
_28 Does 1870; Doth B. prey 1870; spoil B.
_33 angel 1824; Herald [?] B.
_34 to welcome thee 1824; cancelled for... by thee B.
_42 direst 1824; Desert B.
_45 sits amid 1824 amid cancelled for soils (?) B.
_53-_57 Albert...sent B.; omitted 1824, 1870. Albert cancelled B.:
Pietro is the correct name.
_53 Marenghi]Mazenghi B.
_55 farm doubtful: perh. fame (Locock).
_62 he 1824; thus B.
_70 Amid the mountains 1824; Mid desert mountains [?] B.
_71 toil, and cold]cold and toil editions 1824, 1839.
_92, _93 And... there B. (see Editor’s Note); White bones, and locks of
dun and yellow hair, And ringed horns which buffaloes did wear— 1870.
_94 at the utmost point 1870; cancelled for when (where?) B.
_95 reed B.; weed 1870.
_99 after B.; upon 1870.
_100 burned within Marenghi’s breast B.;
lived within Marenghi’s heart 1870.
_101 and B.; or 1870.
_103 free B.; the 1870.
_109 freshes B.; omitted, 1870.
_118 by 1870; with B.
_119 dew-globes B.; dewdrops 1870.
_120 languished B.; vanished 1870.
_121 path, as on [bare] B.; footprints, as on 1870.
_122 silver B.; silence 1870.
_130 And in the moonless nights 1870; cancelled, B. dun B.;
dim 1870.
_131 Heaved 1870; cancelled, B. wide B.;
the 1870. star-impearled B.; omitted, 1870.
_132 Starting from dreams 1870; cancelled for He B.
_137 autumn B.; autumnal 1870.
_138 or B.; and 1870.
_155 pennon B.; pennons 1870.
_158 athwart B.; across 1870.
***
SONNET.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.
Our text is that of the “Poetical Works”, 1839.]
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave _5
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve. _10
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
NOTES:
_6 Their...drear 1839;
The shadows, which the world calls substance, there 1824.
_7 who had lifted 1839; who lifted 1824.
***
FRAGMENT: TO BYRON.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age
Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,
Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?
***
FRAGMENT: APOSTROPHE TO SILENCE.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862. A transcript by
Mrs. Shelley, given to Charles Cowden Clarke, presents one or two
variants.]
Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou
Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged
Of one abyss, where life, and truth, and joy
Are swallowed up—yet spare me, Spirit, pity me,
Until the sounds I hear become my soul, _5
And it has left these faint and weary limbs,
To track along the lapses of the air
This wandering melody until it rests
Among lone mountains in some...
NOTES:
_4 Spirit 1862; O Spirit C.C.C. manuscript.
_8 This wandering melody 1862;
These wandering melodies... C.C.C. manuscript.
***
FRAGMENT: THE LAKE’S MARGIN.
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, 1870.]
The fierce beasts of the woods and wildernesses
Track not the steps of him who drinks of it;
For the light breezes, which for ever fleet
Around its margin, heap the sand thereon.
***
FRAGMENT: ‘MY HEAD IS WILD WITH WEEPING’.
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, 1870.]
My head is wild with weeping for a grief
Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.
I walk into the air (but no relief
To seek,—or haply, if I sought, to find;
It came unsought);—to wonder that a chief _5
Among men’s spirits should be cold and blind.
NOTE:
_4 find cj. A.C. Bradley.
***
FRAGMENT: THE VINE-SHROUD.
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, 1870.]
Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow
Beneath the autumnal sun, none taste of thee;
For thou dost shroud a ruin, and below
The rotting bones of dead antiquity.
***
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1818, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
We often hear of persons disappointed by a first visit to Italy. This
was not Shelley’s case. The aspect of its nature, its sunny sky, its
majestic storms, of the luxuriant vegetation of the country, and the
noble marble-built cities, enchanted him. The sight of the works of art
was full enjoyment and wonder. He had not studied pictures or statues
before; he now did so with the eye of taste, that referred not to the
rules of schools, but to those of Nature and truth. The first entrance
to Rome opened to him a scene of remains of antique grandeur that far
surpassed his expectations; and the unspeakable beauty of Naples and
its environs added to the impression he received of the transcendent
and glorious beauty of Italy.
Our winter was spent at Naples. Here he wrote the fragments of
“Marenghi” and “The Woodman and the Nightingale”, which he afterwards
threw aside. At this time, Shelley suffered greatly in health. He put
himself under the care of a medical man, who promised great things, and
made him endure severe bodily pain, without any good results. Constant
and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved
the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our
wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny
sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness,
became gloomy,—and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which
he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural
bursts of discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable
regret and gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been
more alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe
them, such would not have existed. And yet, enjoying as he appeared to
do every sight or influence of earth or sky, it was difficult to
imagine that any melancholy he showed was aught but the effect of the
constant pain to which he was a martyr.
We lived in utter solitude. And such is often not the nurse of
cheerfulness; for then, at least with those who have been exposed to
adversity, the mind broods over its sorrows too intently; while the
society of the enlightened, the witty, and the wise, enables us to
forget ourselves by making us the sharers of the thoughts of others,
which is a portion of the philosophy of happiness. Shelley never liked
society in numbers,—it harassed and wearied him; but neither did he
like loneliness, and usually, when alone, sheltered himself against
memory and reflection in a book. But, with one or two whom he loved, he
gave way to wild and joyous spirits, or in more serious conversation
expounded his opinions with vivacity and eloquence. If an argument
arose, no man ever argued better. He was clear, logical, and earnest,
in supporting his own views; attentive, patient, and impartial, while
listening to those on the adverse side. Had not a wall of prejudice
been raised at this time between him and his countrymen, how many would
have sought the acquaintance of one whom to know was to love and to
revere! How many of the more enlightened of his contemporaries have
since regretted that they did not seek him! how very few knew his worth
while he lived! and, of those few, several were withheld by timidity or
envy from declaring their sense of it. But no man was ever more
enthusiastically loved—more looked up to, as one superior to his
fellows in intellectual endowments and moral worth, by the few who knew
him well, and had sufficient nobleness of soul to appreciate his
superiority. His excellence is now acknowledged; but, even while
admitted, not duly appreciated. For who, except those who were
acquainted with him, can imagine his unwearied benevolence, his
generosity, his systematic forbearance? And still less is his vast
superiority in intellectual attainments sufficiently understood—his
sagacity, his clear understanding, his learning, his prodigious memory.
All these as displayed in conversation, were known to few while he
lived, and are now silent in the tomb:
‘Ahi orbo mondo ingrato!
Gran cagion hai di dever pianger meco;
Che quel ben ch’ era in te, perdut’ hai seco.’
***
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1819.
LINES WRITTEN DURING THE CASTLEREAGH ADMINISTRATION.
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, December 8, 1832; reprinted,
“Poetical Works”, 1839. There is a transcript amongst the Harvard
manuscripts, and another in the possession of Mr. C.W. Frederickson of
Brooklyn. Variants from these two sources are given by Professor
Woodberry, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, Centenary Edition,
1893, volume 3 pages 225, 226. The transcripts are referred to in our
footnotes as Harvard and Fred. respectively.]
1.
Corpses are cold in the tomb;
Stones on the pavement are dumb;
Abortions are dead in the womb,
And their mothers look pale—like the death-white shore
Of Albion, free no more. _5
2.
Her sons are as stones in the way—
They are masses of senseless clay—
They are trodden, and move not away,—
The abortion with which SHE travaileth
Is Liberty, smitten to death. _10
3.
Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor!
For thy victim is no redresser;
Thou art sole lord and possessor
Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions—they pave
Thy path to the grave. _15
4.
Hearest thou the festival din
Of Death, and Destruction, and Sin,
And Wealth crying “Havoc!” within?
’Tis the bacchanal triumph that makes Truth dumb,
Thine Epithalamium. _20
5.
Ay, marry thy ghastly wife!
Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife
Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life!
Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant! and Hell be thy guide
To the bed of the bride! _25
NOTES:
_4 death-white Harvard, Fred.; white 1832, 1839.
_16 festival Harvard, Fred., 1839; festal 1832.
_19 that Fred.; which Harvard 1832.
_22 Disquiet Harvard, Fred., 1839; Disgust 1832.
_24 Hell Fred.; God Harvard, 1832, 1839.
_25 the bride Harvard, Fred., 1839; thy bride 1832.
***
SONG TO THE MEN OF ENGLAND.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
1.
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
2.
Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save, _5
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?
3.
Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, _10
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?
4.
Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear _15
With your pain and with your fear?
5.
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge; another bears. _20
6.
Sow seed,—but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth,—let no impostor heap;
Weave robes,—let not the idle wear;
Forge arms,—in your defence to bear.
7.
Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells; _25
In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.
8.
With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb, _30
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre.
***
SIMILES FOR TWO POLITICAL CHARACTERS OF 1819.
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, August 25, 1832; reprinted by
Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839. Our title is that of 1839, 2nd
edition. The poem is found amongst the Harvard manuscripts, headed “To
S—th and O—gh”.]
1.
As from an ancestral oak
Two empty ravens sound their clarion,
Yell by yell, and croak by croak,
When they scent the noonday smoke
Of fresh human carrion:— _5
2.
As two gibbering night-birds flit
From their bowers of deadly yew
Through the night to frighten it,
When the moon is in a fit,
And the stars are none, or few:— _10
3.
As a shark and dog-fish wait
Under an Atlantic isle,
For the negro-ship, whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,
Wrinkling their red gills the while— _15
4.
Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,
Two vipers tangled into one. _20
NOTE:
_7 yew 1832; hue 1839.
**
FRAGMENT: TO THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
People of England, ye who toil and groan,
Who reap the harvests which are not your own,
Who weave the clothes which your oppressors wear,
And for your own take the inclement air;
Who build warm houses... _5
And are like gods who give them all they have,
And nurse them from the cradle to the grave...
...
***
FRAGMENT: ‘WHAT MEN GAIN FAIRLY’.
(Perhaps connected with that immediately preceding (Forman).—ED.)
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
What men gain fairly—that they should possess,
And children may inherit idleness,
From him who earns it—This is understood;
Private injustice may be general good.
But he who gains by base and armed wrong, _5
Or guilty fraud, or base compliances,
May be despoiled; even as a stolen dress
Is stripped from a convicted thief; and he
Left in the nakedness of infamy.
***
A NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
1.
God prosper, speed, and save,
God raise from England’s grave
Her murdered Queen!
Pave with swift victory
The steps of Liberty, _5
Whom Britons own to be
Immortal Queen.
2.
See, she comes throned on high,
On swift Eternity!
God save the Queen! _10
Millions on millions wait,
Firm, rapid, and elate,
On her majestic state!
God save the Queen!
3.
She is Thine own pure soul _15
Moulding the mighty whole,—
God save the Queen!
She is Thine own deep love
Rained down from Heaven above,—
Wherever she rest or move, _20
God save our Queen!
4.
‘Wilder her enemies
In their own dark disguise,—
God save our Queen!
All earthly things that dare _25
Her sacred name to bear,
Strip them, as kings are, bare;
God save the Queen!
5.
Be her eternal throne
Built in our hearts alone— _30
God save the Queen!
Let the oppressor hold
Canopied seats of gold;
She sits enthroned of old
O’er our hearts Queen. _35
6.
Lips touched by seraphim
Breathe out the choral hymn
‘God save the Queen!’
Sweet as if angels sang,
Loud as that trumpet’s clang _40
Wakening the world’s dead gang,—
God save the Queen!
***
SONNET: ENGLAND IN 1819.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling, _5
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; _10
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate,—Time’s worst statute, unrepealed,—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
***
AN ODE, WRITTEN OCTOBER, 1819,
BEFORE THE SPANIARDS HAD RECOVERED THEIR LIBERTY.
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820.]
Arise, arise, arise!
There is blood on the earth that denies ye bread;
Be your wounds like eyes
To weep for the dead, the dead, the dead.
What other grief were it just to pay? _5
Your sons, your wives, your brethren, were they;
Who said they were slain on the battle day?
Awaken, awaken, awaken!
The slave and the tyrant are twin-born foes;
Be the cold chains shaken _10
To the dust where your kindred repose, repose:
Their bones in the grave will start and move,
When they hear the voices of those they love,
Most loud in the holy combat above.
Wave, wave high the banner! _15
When Freedom is riding to conquest by:
Though the slaves that fan her
Be Famine and Toil, giving sigh for sigh.
And ye who attend her imperial car,
Lift not your hands in the banded war, _20
But in her defence whose children ye are.
Glory, glory, glory,
To those who have greatly suffered and done!
Never name in story
Was greater than that which ye shall have won. _25
Conquerors have conquered their foes alone,
Whose revenge, pride, and power they have overthrown
Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.
Bind, bind every brow
With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine: _30
Hide the blood-stains now
With hues which sweet Nature has made divine:
Green strength, azure hope, and eternity:
But let not the pansy among them be;
Ye were injured, and that means memory. _35
***
CANCELLED STANZA.
[Published in “The Times” (Rossetti).]
Gather, O gather,
Foeman and friend in love and peace!
Waves sleep together
When the blasts that called them to battle, cease.
For fangless Power grown tame and mild _5
Is at play with Freedom’s fearless child—
The dove and the serpent reconciled!
***
ODE TO HEAVEN.
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820. Dated ‘Florence, December,
1819’ in Harvard manuscript (Woodberry). A transcript exists amongst
the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s
“Examination”, etc., page 39.]
CHORUS OF SPIRITS:
FIRST SPIRIT:
Palace-roof of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now, and which wert then
Of the Present and the Past, _5
Of the eternal Where and When,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever-canopying dome,
Of acts and ages yet to come!
Glorious shapes have life in thee, _10
Earth, and all earth’s company;
Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses; _15
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.
Even thy name is as a god,
Heaven! for thou art the abode _20
Of that Power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature sees.
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees.
Their unremaining gods and they _25
Like a river roll away:
Thou remainest such—alway!—
SECOND SPIRIT:
Thou art but the mind’s first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
Like weak insects in a cave, _30
Lighted up by stalactites;
But the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
But a dim and noonday gleam _35
From the shadow of a dream!
THIRD SPIRIT:
Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn
At your presumption, atom-born!
What is Heaven? and what are ye
Who its brief expanse inherit? _40
What are suns and spheres which flee
With the instinct of that Spirit
Of which ye are but a part?
Drops which Nature’s mighty heart
Drives through thinnest veins! Depart! _45
What is Heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new
Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world:
Constellated suns unshaken, _50
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.
***
CANCELLED FRAGMENTS OF THE ODE TO HEAVEN.
[Published by Mr. C.D. Locock, “Examination”, etc., 1903.]
The [living frame which sustains my soul]
Is [sinking beneath the fierce control]
Down through the lampless deep of song
I am drawn and driven along—
When a Nation screams aloud _5
Like an eagle from the cloud
When a...
...
When the night...
...
Watch the look askance and old—
See neglect, and falsehood fold... _10
***
ODE TO THE WEST WIND.
(This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the
Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose
temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours
which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset
with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent
thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.
The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well
known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of
rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change
of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce
it.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.])
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820.]
1.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, _5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill _10
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
2.
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, _15
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head _20
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, _25
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
3.
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, _30
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers _35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know _40
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!
4.
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share _45
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed _50
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed _55
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
5.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, _60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse, _65
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? _70
***
AN EXHORTATION.
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820. Dated ‘Pisa, April, 1820’
in Harvard manuscript (Woodberry), but assigned by Mrs. Shelley to
1819.]
Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets’ food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they, _5
Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a day?
Poets are on this cold earth, _10
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
in a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
Where love is not, poets do: _15
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.
Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet’s free and heavenly mind: _20
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star, _25
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh, refuse the boon!
***
THE INDIAN SERENADE.
[Published, with the title, “Song written for an Indian Air”, in “The
Liberal”, 2, 1822. Reprinted (“Lines to an Indian Air”) by Mrs.
Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. The poem is included in the Harvard
manuscript book, and there is a description by Robert Browning of an
autograph copy presenting some variations from the text of 1824. See
Leigh Hunt’s “Correspondence”, 2, pages 264-8.]
1.
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee, _5
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
2.
The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream— _10
The Champak odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart;—
As I must on thine, _15
Oh, beloved as thou art!
3.
Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale. _20
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;—
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.
NOTES:
_3 Harvard manuscript omits When.
_4 shining]burning Harvard manuscript, 1822.
_7 Hath led Browning manuscript, 1822;
Has borne Harvard manuscript; Has led 1824.
_11 The Champak Harvard manuscript, 1822, 1824;
And the Champak’s Browning manuscript.
_15 As I must on 1822, 1824;
As I must die on Harvard manuscript, 1839, 1st edition.
_16 Oh, beloved Browning manuscript, Harvard manuscript, 1839, 1st edition;
Beloved 1822, 1824.
_23 press it to thine own Browning manuscript;
press it close to thine Harvard manuscript, 1824, 1839, 1st edition;
press me to thine own, 1822.
***
CANCELLED PASSAGE.
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works”, 1870.]
O pillow cold and wet with tears!
Thou breathest sleep no more!
***
TO SOPHIA [MISS STACEY].
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works”, 1870.]
1.
Thou art fair, and few are fairer
Of the Nymphs of earth or ocean;
They are robes that fit the wearer—
Those soft limbs of thine, whose motion
Ever falls and shifts and glances _5
As the life within them dances.
2.
Thy deep eyes, a double Planet,
Gaze the wisest into madness
With soft clear fire,—the winds that fan it
Are those thoughts of tender gladness _10
Which, like zephyrs on the billow,
Make thy gentle soul their pillow.
3.
If, whatever face thou paintest
In those eyes, grows pale with pleasure,
If the fainting soul is faintest _15
When it hears thy harp’s wild measure,
Wonder not that when thou speakest
Of the weak my heart is weakest.
4.
As dew beneath the wind of morning,
As the sea which whirlwinds waken, _20
As the birds at thunder’s warning,
As aught mute yet deeply shaken,
As one who feels an unseen spirit
Is my heart when thine is near it.
***
TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.
The fragment included in the Harvard manuscript book.]
(With what truth may I say—
Roma! Roma! Roma!
Non e piu come era prima!)
1.
My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,—
Here its ashes find a tomb, _5
But beneath this pyramid
Thou art not—if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother’s grief and mine.
2.
Where art thou, my gentle child? _10
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild;—
Let me think that through low seeds _15
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion—
NOTE:
Motto _1 may I Harvard manuscript; I may 1824.
_12 With Harvard manuscript, Mrs. Shelley, 1847; Within 1824, 1839.
_16 Of sweet Harvard manuscript; Of the sweet 1824, 1839.
***
TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Thy little footsteps on the sands
Of a remote and lonely shore;
The twinkling of thine infant hands,
Where now the worm will feed no more;
Thy mingled look of love and glee _5
When we returned to gaze on thee—
***
TO MARY SHELLEY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode; _5
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
***
TO MARY SHELLEY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
The world is dreary,
And I am weary
Of wandering on without thee, Mary;
A joy was erewhile
In thy voice and thy smile, _5
And ’tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.
***
ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie _5
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
2.
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone, _10
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain. _15
3.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As ... grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock, _20
And with unending involutions show
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
4.
And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft _25
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies _30
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
5.
’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error, _35
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a ... and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there—
A woman’s countenance, with serpent-locks,
Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks. _40
NOTES:
_5 seems 1839; seem 1824.
_6 shine]shrine 1824, 1839.
_26 those 1824; these 1839.
***
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.
[Published by Leigh Hunt, “The Indicator”, December 22, 1819. Reprinted
by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Included in the Harvard
manuscript book, where it is headed “An Anacreontic”, and dated
‘January, 1820.’ Written by Shelley in a copy of Hunt’s “Literary
Pocket-Book”, 1819, and presented to Sophia Stacey, December 29, 1820.]
1.
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single; _5
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?—
2.
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another; _10
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth _15
If thou kiss not me?
NOTES:
_3 mix for ever 1819, Stacey manuscript;
meet together, Harvard manuscript.
_7 In one spirit meet and Stacey manuscript;
In one another’s being 1819, Harvard manuscript.
_11 No sister 1824, Harvard and Stacey manuscripts; No leaf or 1819.
_12 disdained its 1824, Harvard and Stacey manuscripts;
disdained to kiss its 1819.
_15 is all this sweet work Stacey manuscript;
were these examples Harvard manuscript;
are all these kissings 1819, 1824.
***
FRAGMENT: ‘FOLLOW TO THE DEEP WOOD’S WEEDS’.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Follow to the deep wood’s weeds,
Follow to the wild-briar dingle,
Where we seek to intermingle,
And the violet tells her tale
To the odour-scented gale, _5
For they two have enough to do
Of such work as I and you.
***
THE BIRTH OF PLEASURE.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
At the creation of the Earth
Pleasure, that divinest birth,
From the soil of Heaven did rise,
Wrapped in sweet wild melodies—
Like an exhalation wreathing _5
To the sound of air low-breathing
Through Aeolian pines, which make
A shade and shelter to the lake
Whence it rises soft and slow;
Her life-breathing [limbs] did flow _10
In the harmony divine
Of an ever-lengthening line
Which enwrapped her perfect form
With a beauty clear and warm.
***
FRAGMENT: LOVE THE UNIVERSE TO-DAY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
And who feels discord now or sorrow?
Love is the universe to-day—
These are the slaves of dim to-morrow,
Darkening Life’s labyrinthine way.
***
FRAGMENT: ‘A GENTLE STORY OF TWO LOVERS YOUNG’.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
A gentle story of two lovers young,
Who met in innocence and died in sorrow,
And of one selfish heart, whose rancour clung
Like curses on them; are ye slow to borrow
The lore of truth from such a tale? _5
Or in this world’s deserted vale,
Do ye not see a star of gladness
Pierce the shadows of its sadness,—
When ye are cold, that love is a light sent
From Heaven, which none shall quench, to cheer the innocent? _10
NOTE:
_9 cold]told cj. A.C. Bradley.
For the metre cp. Fragment: To a Friend Released from Prison.
***
FRAGMENT: LOVE’S TENDER ATMOSPHERE.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
There is a warm and gentle atmosphere
About the form of one we love, and thus
As in a tender mist our spirits are
Wrapped in the ... of that which is to us
The health of life’s own life— _5
***
FRAGMENT: WEDDED SOULS.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
I am as a spirit who has dwelt
Within his heart of hearts, and I have felt
His feelings, and have thought his thoughts, and known
The inmost converse of his soul, the tone
Unheard but in the silence of his blood, _5
When all the pulses in their multitude
Image the trembling calm of summer seas.
I have unlocked the golden melodies
Of his deep soul, as with a master-key,
And loosened them and bathed myself therein— _10
Even as an eagle in a thunder-mist
Clothing his wings with lightning.
***
FRAGMENT: ‘IS IT THAT IN SOME BRIGHTER SPHERE’.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Is it that in some brighter sphere
We part from friends we meet with here?
Or do we see the Future pass
Over the Present’s dusky glass?
Or what is that that makes us seem _5
To patch up fragments of a dream,
Part of which comes true, and part
Beats and trembles in the heart?
***
FRAGMENT: SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Is not to-day enough? Why do I peer
Into the darkness of the day to come?
Is not to-morrow even as yesterday?
And will the day that follows change thy doom?
Few flowers grow upon thy wintry way; _5
And who waits for thee in that cheerless home
Whence thou hast fled, whither thou must return
Charged with the load that makes thee faint and mourn?
***
FRAGMENT: ‘YE GENTLE VISITATIONS OF CALM THOUGHT’.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Ye gentle visitations of calm thought—
Moods like the memories of happier earth,
Which come arrayed in thoughts of little worth,
Like stars in clouds by the weak winds enwrought,—
But that the clouds depart and stars remain, _5
While they remain, and ye, alas, depart!
***
FRAGMENT: MUSIC AND SWEET POETRY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
How sweet it is to sit and read the tales
Of mighty poets and to hear the while
Sweet music, which when the attention fails
Fills the dim pause—
***
FRAGMENT: THE SEPULCHRE OF MEMORY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
And where is truth? On tombs? for such to thee
Has been my heart—and thy dead memory
Has lain from childhood, many a changeful year,
Unchangingly preserved and buried there.
***
FRAGMENT: ‘WHEN A LOVER CLASPS HIS FAIREST’.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
1.
When a lover clasps his fairest,
Then be our dread sport the rarest.
Their caresses were like the chaff
In the tempest, and be our laugh
His despair—her epitaph! _5
2.
When a mother clasps her child,
Watch till dusty Death has piled
His cold ashes on the clay;
She has loved it many a day—
She remains,—it fades away. _10
***
FRAGMENT: ‘WAKE THE SERPENT NOT’.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
Wake the serpent not—lest he
Should not know the way to go,—
Let him crawl which yet lies sleeping
Through the deep grass of the meadow!
Not a bee shall hear him creeping, _5
Not a may-fly shall awaken
From its cradling blue-bell shaken,
Not the starlight as he’s sliding
Through the grass with silent gliding.
***
FRAGMENT: RAIN.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
The fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.
***
FRAGMENT: A TALE UNTOLD.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
One sung of thee who left the tale untold,
Like the false dawns which perish in the bursting;
Like empty cups of wrought and daedal gold,
Which mock the lips with air, when they are thirsting.
***
FRAGMENT: TO ITALY.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
As the sunrise to the night,
As the north wind to the clouds,
As the earthquake’s fiery flight,
Ruining mountain solitudes,
Everlasting Italy, _5
Be those hopes and fears on thee.
***
FRAGMENT: WINE OF THE FAIRIES.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
I am drunk with the honey wine
Of the moon-unfolded eglantine,
Which fairies catch in hyacinth bowls.
The bats, the dormice, and the moles
Sleep in the walls or under the sward _5
Of the desolate castle yard;
And when ’tis spilt on the summer earth
Or its fumes arise among the dew,
Their jocund dreams are full of mirth,
They gibber their joy in sleep; for few _10
Of the fairies bear those bowls so new!
***
FRAGMENT: A ROMAN’S CHAMBER.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
1.
In the cave which wild weeds cover
Wait for thine aethereal lover;
For the pallid moon is waning,
O’er the spiral cypress hanging
And the moon no cloud is staining. _5
2.
It was once a Roman’s chamber,
Where he kept his darkest revels,
And the wild weeds twine and clamber;
It was then a chasm for devils.
***
FRAGMENT: ROME AND NATURE.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
Rome has fallen, ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying.
***
VARIATION OF THE SONG OF THE MOON.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
(“PROMETHEUS UNBOUND”, ACT 4.)
As a violet’s gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds;
As a gray and empty mist
Lies like solid amethyst _5
Over the western mountain it enfolds,
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow;
As a strain of sweetest sound
Wraps itself the wind around _10
Until the voiceless wind be music too;
As aught dark, vain, and dull,
Basking in what is beautiful,
Is full of light and love—
***
CANCELLED STANZA OF THE MASK OF ANARCHY.
[Published by H. Buxton Forman, “The Mask of Anarchy” (“Facsimile of
Shelley’s manuscript”), 1887.]
(FOR WHICH STANZAS 68, 69 HAVE BEEN SUBSTITUTED.)
From the cities where from caves,
Like the dead from putrid graves,
Troops of starvelings gliding come,
Living Tenants of a tomb.
***
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1819, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
Shelley loved the People; and respected them as often more virtuous, as
always more suffering, and therefore more deserving of sympathy, than
the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society
was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side. He
had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to
commemorate their circumstances and wrongs. He wrote a few; but, in
those days of prosecution for libel, they could not be printed. They
are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always
shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those
who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they
show his earnestness, and with what heart-felt compassion he went home
to the direct point of injury—that oppression is detestable as being
the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these
outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the
cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph: such is the
scope of the “Ode to the Assertors of Liberty”. He sketched also a new
version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty.
***
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1820.
THE SENSITIVE PLANT.
[Composed at Pisa, early in 1820 (dated ‘March, 1820,’ in Harvard
manuscript), and published, with “Prometheus Unbound”, the same year:
included in the Harvard College manuscript book. Reprinted in the
“Poetical Works”, 1839, both editions.]
PART 1.
A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.
And the Spring arose on the garden fair, _5
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness, _10
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
The snowdrop, and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent _15
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.
Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream’s recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness; _20
And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;
And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue, _25
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addressed,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, _30
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:
And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky; _35
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime. _40
And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was pranked, under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,
Broad water-lilies lay tremulously, _45
And starry river-buds glimmered by,
And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.
And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
Which led through the garden along and across, _50
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,
Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flow’rets which, drooping as day drooped too, _55
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers (as an infant’s awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet _60
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),
When Heaven’s blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one _65
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;
For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit _70
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all, it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver,—
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower; _75
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!
The light winds which from unsustaining wings
Shed the music of many murmurings;
The beams which dart from many a star _80
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
The plumed insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour, which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass; _85
The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
The quivering vapours of dim noontide, _90
Which like a sea o’er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound, and odour, and beam,
Move, as reeds in a single stream;
Each and all like ministering angels were
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear, _95
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by
Like windless clouds o’er a tender sky.
And when evening descended from Heaven above,
And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love,
And delight, though less bright, was far more deep, _100
And the day’s veil fell from the world of sleep,
And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound;
Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress
The light sand which paves it, consciousness; _105
(Only overhead the sweet nightingale
Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant);—
The Sensitive Plant was the earliest _110
Upgathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite,
Cradled within the embrace of Night.
NOTES:
_6 Like the Spirit of Love felt 1820;
And the Spirit of Love felt 1839, 1st edition;
And the Spirit of Love fell 1839, 2nd edition.
_49 and of moss]and moss Harvard manuscript.
_82 The]And the Harvard manuscript.
PART 2.
There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling Grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.
A Lady, the wonder of her kind, _5
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,
Tended the garden from morn to even:
And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven, _10
Like the lamps of the air when Night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!
She had no companion of mortal race,
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes, _15
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:
As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted Heaven while the stars were awake,
As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her. _20
Her step seemed to pity the grass it pressed;
You might hear by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.
And wherever her aery footstep trod, _25
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep.
I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet; _30
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame.
She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers _35
She emptied the rain of the thunder-showers.
She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly. _40
And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,—
In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full, _45
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.
But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris
Whose path is the lightning’s, and soft moths that kiss _50
The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she
Make her attendant angels be.
And many an antenatal tomb,
Where butterflies dream of the life to come,
She left clinging round the smooth and dark _55
Edge of the odorous cedar bark.
This fairest creature from earliest Spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
Mid the sweet season of Summertide,
And ere the first leaf looked brown—she died! _60
NOTES:
_15 morn Harvard manuscript, 1839; moon 1820.
_23 and going 1820; and the going Harvard manuscript, 1839.
_59 All 1820, 1839; Through all Harvard manuscript.
PART 3.
Three days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,
Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.
And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant _5
Felt the sound of the funeral chant,
And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners, deep and low;
The weary sound and the heavy breath,
And the silent motions of passing death, _10
And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,
Sent through the pores of the coffin-plank;
The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone, _15
And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.
The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap _20
To make men tremble who never weep.
Swift Summer into the Autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,
Mocking the spoil of the secret night. _25
The rose-leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,
Paved the turf and the moss below.
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man.
And Indian plants, of scent and hue _30
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
Leaf by leaf, day after day,
Were massed into the common clay.
And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red,
And white with the whiteness of what is dead, _35
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind passed;
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.
And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds,
Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,
Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s stem, _40
Which rotted into the earth with them.
The water-blooms under the rivulet
Fell from the stalks on which they were set;
And the eddies drove them here and there,
As the winds did those of the upper air. _45
Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks
Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless network of parasite bowers
Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.
Between the time of the wind and the snow _50
All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,
Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.
And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank, _55
Stretched out its long and hollow shank,
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.
And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue, _60
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated! _65
Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.
And hour by hour, when the air was still, _70
The vapours arose which have strength to kill;
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.
And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noonday _75
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.
The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves, which together grew, _80
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.
For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore
As blood to a heart that will beat no more. _85
For Winter came: the wind was his whip:
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;
His breath was a chain which without a sound _90
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.
Then the weeds which were forms of living death
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath. _95
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!
And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air _100
And were caught in the branches naked and bare.
First there came down a thawing rain
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew; _105
And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy, and stiff,
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.
When Winter had gone and Spring came back _110
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.
CONCLUSION.
Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat, _115
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.
Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light, _120
Found sadness, where it left delight,
I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream, _125
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair, _130
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might _135
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
NOTES:
_19 lovely Harvard manuscript, 1839; lively 1820.
_23 of the morning 1820, 1839; of morning Harvard manuscript.
_26 snow Harvard manuscript, 1839; now 1820.
_28 And lilies were drooping, white and wan Harvard manuscript.
_32 Leaf by leaf, day after day Harvard manuscript;
Leaf after leaf, day after day 1820;
Leaf after leaf, day by day 1839.
_63 mist]mists Harvard manuscript.
_96 and sudden flight]and their sudden flight the Harvard manuscript.
_98 And under]Under Harvard manuscript.
_114 Whether]And if Harvard manuscript.
_118 Whether]Or if Harvard manuscript.
***
CANCELLED PASSAGE.
[This stanza followed 3, 62-65 in the editio princeps, 1820, but was
omitted by Mrs. Shelley from all editions from 1839 onwards. It is
cancelled in the Harvard manuscript.]
Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake,
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s stake,
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
Infecting the winds that wander by.
***
A VISION OF THE SEA.
[Composed at Pisa early in 1820, and published with “Prometheus
Unbound” in the same year. A transcript in Mrs. Shelley’s handwriting
is included in the Harvard manuscript book, where it is dated ‘April,
1820.’]
’Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail
Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale:
From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven,
And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from Heaven,
She sees the black trunks of the waterspouts spin _5
And bend, as if Heaven was ruining in,
Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible mass
As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they pass
To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound,
And the waves and the thunders, made silent around, _10
Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now tossed
Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost
In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down the sweep
Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep
It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale _15
Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by the gale,
Dim mirrors of ruin, hang gleaming about;
While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like a rout
Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire-flowing iron,
With splendour and terror the black ship environ, _20
Or like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of pale fire
In fountains spout o’er it. In many a spire
The pyramid-billows with white points of brine
In the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine,
As piercing the sky from the floor of the sea. _25
The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree,
While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere the blast
Of the whirlwind that stripped it of branches has passed.
The intense thunder-balls which are raining from Heaven
Have shattered its mast, and it stands black and riven. _30
The chinks suck destruction. The heavy dead hulk
On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk,
Like a corpse on the clay which is hungering to fold
Its corruption around it. Meanwhile, from the hold,
One deck is burst up by the waters below, _35
And it splits like the ice when the thaw-breezes blow
O’er the lakes of the desert! Who sit on the other?
Is that all the crew that lie burying each other,
Like the dead in a breach, round the foremast? Are those
Twin tigers, who burst, when the waters arose, _40
In the agony of terror, their chains in the hold;
(What now makes them tame, is what then made them bold;)
Who crouch, side by side, and have driven, like a crank,
The deep grip of their claws through the vibrating plank
Are these all? Nine weeks the tall vessel had lain _45
On the windless expanse of the watery plain,
Where the death-darting sun cast no shadow at noon,
And there seemed to be fire in the beams of the moon,
Till a lead-coloured fog gathered up from the deep,
Whose breath was quick pestilence; then, the cold sleep _50
Crept, like blight through the ears of a thick field of corn,
O’er the populous vessel. And even and morn,
With their hammocks for coffins the seamen aghast
Like dead men the dead limbs of their comrades cast
Down the deep, which closed on them above and around, _55
And the sharks and the dogfish their grave-clothes unbound,
And were glutted like Jews with this manna rained down
From God on their wilderness. One after one
The mariners died; on the eve of this day,
When the tempest was gathering in cloudy array, _60
But seven remained. Six the thunder has smitten,
And they lie black as mummies on which Time has written
His scorn of the embalmer; the seventh, from the deck
An oak-splinter pierced through his breast and his back,
And hung out to the tempest, a wreck on the wreck. _65
No more? At the helm sits a woman more fair
Than Heaven, when, unbinding its star-braided hair,
It sinks with the sun on the earth and the sea.
She clasps a bright child on her upgathered knee;
It laughs at the lightning, it mocks the mixed thunder _70
Of the air and the sea, with desire and with wonder
It is beckoning the tigers to rise and come near,
It would play with those eyes where the radiance of fear
Is outshining the meteors; its bosom beats high,
The heart-fire of pleasure has kindled its eye, _75
While its mother’s is lustreless. ‘Smile not, my child,
But sleep deeply and sweetly, and so be beguiled
Of the pang that awaits us, whatever that be,
So dreadful since thou must divide it with me!
Dream, sleep! This pale bosom, thy cradle and bed, _80
Will it rock thee not, infant? ’Tis beating with dread!
Alas! what is life, what is death, what are we,
That when the ship sinks we no longer may be?
What! to see thee no more, and to feel thee no more?
To be after life what we have been before? _85
Not to touch those sweet hands? Not to look on those eyes,
Those lips, and that hair,—all the smiling disguise
Thou yet wearest, sweet Spirit, which I, day by day,
Have so long called my child, but which now fades away
Like a rainbow, and I the fallen shower?’—Lo! the ship _90
Is settling, it topples, the leeward ports dip;
The tigers leap up when they feel the slow brine
Crawling inch by inch on them; hair, ears, limbs, and eyne,
Stand rigid with horror; a loud, long, hoarse cry
Bursts at once from their vitals tremendously, _95
And ’tis borne down the mountainous vale of the wave,
Rebounding, like thunder, from crag to cave,
Mixed with the clash of the lashing rain,
Hurried on by the might of the hurricane:
The hurricane came from the west, and passed on _100
By the path of the gate of the eastern sun,
Transversely dividing the stream of the storm;
As an arrowy serpent, pursuing the form
Of an elephant, bursts through the brakes of the waste.
Black as a cormorant the screaming blast, _105
Between Ocean and Heaven, like an ocean, passed,
Till it came to the clouds on the verge of the world
Which, based on the sea and to Heaven upcurled,
Like columns and walls did surround and sustain
The dome of the tempest; it rent them in twain, _110
As a flood rends its barriers of mountainous crag:
And the dense clouds in many a ruin and rag,
Like the stones of a temple ere earthquake has passed,
Like the dust of its fall, on the whirlwind are cast;
They are scattered like foam on the torrent; and where _115
The wind has burst out through the chasm, from the air
Of clear morning the beams of the sunrise flow in,
Unimpeded, keen, golden, and crystalline,
Banded armies of light and of air; at one gate
They encounter, but interpenetrate. _120
And that breach in the tempest is widening away,
And the caverns of cloud are torn up by the day,
And the fierce winds are sinking with weary wings,
Lulled by the motion and murmurings
And the long glassy heave of the rocking sea, _125
And overhead glorious, but dreadful to see,
The wrecks of the tempest, like vapours of gold,
Are consuming in sunrise. The heaped waves behold
The deep calm of blue Heaven dilating above,
And, like passions made still by the presence of Love, _130
Beneath the clear surface reflecting it slide
Tremulous with soft influence; extending its tide
From the Andes to Atlas, round mountain and isle,
Round sea-birds and wrecks, paved with Heaven’s azure smile,
The wide world of waters is vibrating. Where _135
Is the ship? On the verge of the wave where it lay
One tiger is mingled in ghastly affray
With a sea-snake. The foam and the smoke of the battle
Stain the clear air with sunbows; the jar, and the rattle
Of solid bones crushed by the infinite stress _140
Of the snake’s adamantine voluminousness;
And the hum of the hot blood that spouts and rains
Where the gripe of the tiger has wounded the veins
Swollen with rage, strength, and effort; the whirl and the splash
As of some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash _145
The thin winds and soft waves into thunder; the screams
And hissings crawl fast o’er the smooth ocean-streams,
Each sound like a centipede. Near this commotion,
A blue shark is hanging within the blue ocean,
The fin-winged tomb of the victor. The other _150
Is winning his way from the fate of his brother
To his own with the speed of despair. Lo! a boat
Advances; twelve rowers with the impulse of thought
Urge on the keen keel,—the brine foams. At the stern
Three marksmen stand levelling. Hot bullets burn _155
In the breast of the tiger, which yet bears him on
To his refuge and ruin. One fragment alone,—
’Tis dwindling and sinking, ’tis now almost gone,—
Of the wreck of the vessel peers out of the sea.
With her left hand she grasps it impetuously. _160
With her right she sustains her fair infant. Death, Fear,
Love, Beauty, are mixed in the atmosphere,
Which trembles and burns with the fervour of dread
Around her wild eyes, her bright hand, and her head,
Like a meteor of light o’er the waters! her child _165
Is yet smiling, and playing, and murmuring; so smiled
The false deep ere the storm. Like a sister and brother
The child and the ocean still smile on each other,
Whilst—
NOTES:
_6 ruining Harvard manuscript, 1839; raining 1820.
_8 sunk Harvard manuscript, 1839; sank 1820.
_35 by Harvard manuscript; from 1820, 1839.
_61 has 1820; had 1839.
_87 all the Harvard manuscript; all that 1820, 1839.
_116 through Harvard manuscript; from 1820, 1839.
_121 away]alway cj. A.C. Bradley.
_122 cloud Harvard manuscript, 1839; clouds 1820.
_160 impetuously 1820, 1839; convulsively Harvard manuscript.
***
THE CLOUD.
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820.]
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken _5
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under, _10
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night ’tis my pillow white, _15
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning my pilot sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits; _20
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills. _25
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven’s blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains. _30
The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag, _35
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love, _40
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above.
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden, _45
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear, _50
May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof.
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees.
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, _55
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.
I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl; _60
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hand like a roof,— _65
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow; _70
The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; _75
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air, _80
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
NOTES:
_3 shade 1820; shades 1839.
_6 buds 1839; birds 1820.
_59 with a 1820; with the 1830.
***
TO A SKYLARK.
[Composed at Leghorn, 1820, and published with “Prometheus Unbound” in
the same year. There is a transcript in the Harvard manuscript.]
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. _5
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. _10
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning.
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. _15
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, _20
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there. _25
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed. _30
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. _35
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: _40
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: _45
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aereal hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view! _50
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves: _55
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass: _60
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. _65
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. _70
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? _75
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest—but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety. _80
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? _85
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. _90
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. _95
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! _100
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then—as I am listening now. _105
NOTE:
_55 those Harvard manuscript: these 1820, 1839.
***
ODE TO LIBERTY.
[Composed early in 1820, and published, with “Prometheus Unbound”, in
the same year. A transcript in Shelley’s hand of lines 1-21 is included
in the Harvard manuscript book, and amongst the Boscombe manuscripts
there is a fragment of a rough draft (Garnett). For further particulars
concerning the text see Editor’s Notes.]
Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,
Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind.—BYRON.
1.
A glorious people vibrated again
The lightning of the nations: Liberty
From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o’er Spain,
Scattering contagious fire into the sky,
Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay, _5
And in the rapid plumes of song
Clothed itself, sublime and strong;
As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,
Hovering inverse o’er its accustomed prey;
Till from its station in the Heaven of fame _10
The Spirit’s whirlwind rapped it, and the ray
Of the remotest sphere of living flame
Which paves the void was from behind it flung,
As foam from a ship’s swiftness, when there came
A voice out of the deep: I will record the same. _15
2.
The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth:
The burning stars of the abyss were hurled
Into the depths of Heaven. The daedal earth,
That island in the ocean of the world,
Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air: _20
But this divinest universe
Was yet a chaos and a curse,
For thou wert not: but, power from worst producing worse,
The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,
And of the birds, and of the watery forms, _25
And there was war among them, and despair
Within them, raging without truce or terms:
The bosom of their violated nurse
Groaned, for beasts warred on beasts, and worms on worms,
And men on men; each heart was as a hell of storms. _30
3.
Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied
His generations under the pavilion
Of the Sun’s throne: palace and pyramid,
Temple and prison, to many a swarming million
Were, as to mountain-wolves their ragged caves. _35
This human living multitude
Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude,
For thou wert not; but o’er the populous solitude,
Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves,
Hung Tyranny; beneath, sate deified _40
The sister-pest, congregator of slaves;
Into the shadow of her pinions wide
Anarchs and priests, who feed on gold and blood
Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed,
Drove the astonished herds of men from every side. _45
4.
The nodding promontories, and blue isles,
And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves
Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles
Of favouring Heaven: from their enchanted caves
Prophetic echoes flung dim melody. _50
On the unapprehensive wild
The vine, the corn, the olive mild,
Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled;
And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,
Like the man’s thought dark in the infant’s brain, _55
Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,
Art’s deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein
Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child,
Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain
Her lidless eyes for thee; when o’er the Aegean main _60
5.
Athens arose: a city such as vision
Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision
Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it; _65
Its portals are inhabited
By thunder-zoned winds, each head
Within its cloudy wings with sun-fire garlanded,—
A divine work! Athens, diviner yet,
Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will _70
Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;
For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill
Peopled, with forms that mock the eternal dead
In marble immortality, that hill
Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle. _75
6.
Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river
Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay
Immovably unquiet, and for ever
It trembles, but it cannot pass away!
The voices of thy bards and sages thunder _80
With an earth-awakening blast
Through the caverns of the past:
(Religion veils her eyes; Oppression shrinks aghast:)
A winged sound of joy, and love, and wonder,
Which soars where Expectation never flew, _85
Rending the veil of space and time asunder!
One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew;
One Sun illumines Heaven; one Spirit vast
With life and love makes chaos ever new,
As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew. _90
7.
Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest,
Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmaean Maenad,
She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest
From that Elysian food was yet unweaned;
And many a deed of terrible uprightness _95
By thy sweet love was sanctified;
And in thy smile, and by thy side,
Saintly Camillus lived, and firm Atilius died.
But when tears stained thy robe of vestal-whiteness,
And gold profaned thy Capitolian throne, _100
Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness,
The senate of the tyrants: they sunk prone
Slaves of one tyrant: Palatinus sighed
Faint echoes of Ionian song; that tone
Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown _105
8.
From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
Or utmost islet inaccessible,
Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,
Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks, _110
And every Naiad’s ice-cold urn,
To talk in echoes sad and stern
Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?
For neither didst thou watch the wizard flocks
Of the Scald’s dreams, nor haunt the Druid’s sleep. _115
What if the tears rained through thy shattered locks
Were quickly dried? for thou didst groan, not weep,
When from its sea of death, to kill and burn,
The Galilean serpent forth did creep,
And made thy world an undistinguishable heap. _120
9.
A thousand years the Earth cried, ‘Where art thou?’
And then the shadow of thy coming fell
On Saxon Alfred’s olive-cinctured brow:
And many a warrior-peopled citadel.
Like rocks which fire lifts out of the flat deep, _125
Arose in sacred Italy,
Frowning o’er the tempestuous sea
Of kings, and priests, and slaves, in tower-crowned majesty;
That multitudinous anarchy did sweep
And burst around their walls, like idle foam, _130
Whilst from the human spirit’s deepest deep
Strange melody with love and awe struck dumb
Dissonant arms; and Art, which cannot die,
With divine wand traced on our earthly home
Fit imagery to pave Heaven’s everlasting dome. _135
10.
Thou huntress swifter than the Moon! thou terror
Of the world’s wolves! thou bearer of the quiver,
Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-winged Error,
As light may pierce the clouds when they dissever
In the calm regions of the orient day! _140
Luther caught thy wakening glance;
Like lightning, from his leaden lance
Reflected, it dissolved the visions of the trance
In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay;
And England’s prophets hailed thee as their queen, _145
In songs whose music cannot pass away,
Though it must flow forever: not unseen
Before the spirit-sighted countenance
Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene
Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien. _150
11.
The eager hours and unreluctant years
As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood.
Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,
Darkening each other with their multitude,
And cried aloud, ‘Liberty!’ Indignation _155
Answered Pity from her cave;
Death grew pale within the grave,
And Desolation howled to the destroyer, Save!
When like Heaven’s Sun girt by the exhalation
Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise. _160
Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation
Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies
At dreaming midnight o’er the western wave,
Men started, staggering with a glad surprise,
Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes. _165
12.
Thou Heaven of earth! what spells could pall thee then
In ominous eclipse? a thousand years
Bred from the slime of deep Oppression’s den.
Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears.
Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away; _170
How like Bacchanals of blood
Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood
Destruction’s sceptred slaves, and Folly’s mitred brood!
When one, like them, but mightier far than they,
The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers, _175
Rose: armies mingled in obscure array,
Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred bowers
Of serene Heaven. He, by the past pursued,
Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers. _180
13.
England yet sleeps: was she not called of old?
Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder
Vesuvius wakens Aetna, and the cold
Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder:
O’er the lit waves every Aeolian isle _185
From Pithecusa to Pelorus
Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus:
They cry, ‘Be dim; ye lamps of Heaven suspended o’er us!’
Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile
And they dissolve; but Spain’s were links of steel, _190
Till bit to dust by virtue’s keenest file.
Twins of a single destiny! appeal
To the eternal years enthroned before us
In the dim West; impress us from a seal,
All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal. _195
14.
Tomb of Arminius! render up thy dead
Till, like a standard from a watch-tower’s staff,
His soul may stream over the tyrant’s head;
Thy victory shall be his epitaph,
Wild Bacchanal of truth’s mysterious wine, _200
King-deluded Germany,
His dead spirit lives in thee.
Why do we fear or hope? thou art already free!
And thou, lost Paradise of this divine
And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness! _205
Thou island of eternity! thou shrine
Where Desolation, clothed with loveliness,
Worships the thing thou wert! O Italy,
Gather thy blood into thy heart; repress
The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces. _210
15.
Oh, that the free would stamp the impious name
Of KING into the dust! or write it there,
So that this blot upon the page of fame
Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air
Erases, and the flat sands close behind! _215
Ye the oracle have heard:
Lift the victory-flashing sword.
And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word,
Which, weak itself as stubble, yet can bind
Into a mass, irrefragably firm, _220
The axes and the rods which awe mankind;
The sound has poison in it, ’tis the sperm
Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred;
Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term,
To set thine armed heel on this reluctant worm. _225
16.
Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,
That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle
Into the hell from which it first was hurled,
A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure; _230
Till human thoughts might kneel alone,
Each before the judgement-throne
Of its own aweless soul, or of the Power unknown!
Oh, that the words which make the thoughts obscure
From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew _235
From a white lake blot Heaven’s blue portraiture,
Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue
And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own,
Till in the nakedness of false and true
They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due! _240
17.
He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever
Can be between the cradle and the grave
Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavour!
If on his own high will, a willing slave,
He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor _245
What if earth can clothe and feed
Amplest millions at their need,
And power in thought be as the tree within the seed?
Or what if Art, an ardent intercessor,
Driving on fiery wings to Nature’s throne, _250
Checks the great mother stooping to caress her,
And cries: ‘Give me, thy child, dominion
Over all height and depth’? if Life can breed
New wants, and wealth from those who toil and groan,
Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousandfold for one! _255
18.
Come thou, but lead out of the inmost cave
Of man’s deep spirit, as the morning-star
Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,
Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car
Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame; _260
Comes she not, and come ye not,
Rulers of eternal thought,
To judge, with solemn truth, life’s ill-apportioned lot?
Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame
Of what has been, the Hope of what will be? _265
O Liberty! if such could be thy name
Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:
If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought
By blood or tears, have not the wise and free
Wept tears, and blood like tears?—The solemn harmony _270
19.
Paused, and the Spirit of that mighty singing
To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn;
Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aereal golden light _275
On the heavy-sounding plain,
When the bolt has pierced its brain;
As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain;
As a far taper fades with fading night,
As a brief insect dies with dying day,— _280
My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,
Drooped; o’er it closed the echoes far away
Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,
As waves which lately paved his watery way
Hiss round a drowner’s head in their tempestuous play. _285
NOTES:
_4 into]unto Harvard manuscript.
_9 inverse cj. Rossetti; in verse 1820.
_92 See the Bacchae of Euripides—[SHELLEY’S NOTE].
_113 lore 1839; love 1820.
_116 shattered]scattered cj. Rossetti.
_134 wand 1820; want 1830.
_194 us]as cj. Forman.
_212 KING Boscombe manuscript; **** 1820, 1839; CHRIST cj. Swinburne.
_249 Or 1839; O, 1820.
_250 Driving 1820; Diving 1839.
***
CANCELLED PASSAGE OF THE ODE TO LIBERTY.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Within a cavern of man’s trackless spirit
Is throned an Image, so intensely fair
That the adventurous thoughts that wander near it
Worship, and as they kneel, tremble and wear
The splendour of its presence, and the light _5
Penetrates their dreamlike frame
Till they become charged with the strength of flame.
***
TO —.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,
Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burthen thine.
2.
I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion, _5
Thou needest not fear mine;
Innocent is the heart’s devotion
With which I worship thine.
***
ARETHUSA.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and dated by her
‘Pisa, 1820.’ There is a fair draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at
the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903,
page 24.]
1.
Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,—
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag, _5
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;—
Her steps paved with green _10
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep; _15
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.
2.
Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold, _20
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks—with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind _25
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below. _30
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph’s flight _35
To the brink of the Dorian deep.
3.
‘Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!’
The loud Ocean heard, _40
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth’s white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam; _45
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:—
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main _50
Alpheus rushed behind,—
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
4.
Under the bowers _55
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearled thrones;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones; _60
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves _65
Are as green as the forest’s night:—
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean’s foam,
And up through the rifts _70
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.
5.
And now from their fountains
In Enna’s mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks, _75
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep _80
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
And at night they sleep _85
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;—
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more. _90
NOTES:
_6 unsealed B.; concealed 1824.
_31 And the B.; The 1824.
_69 Ocean’s B.; ocean 1824.
***
SONG OF PROSERPINE WHILE GATHERING FLOWERS ON THE PLAIN OF ENNA.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. There
is a fair draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian
Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination,” etc., 1903, page 24.]
1.
Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,
Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine _5
On thine own child, Proserpine.
2.
If with mists of evening dew
Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow, in scent and hue,
Fairest children of the Hours, _10
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
***
HYMN OF APOLLO.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a fair
draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr. C.D.
Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 25.]
1.
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries
From the broad moonlight of the sky,
Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,—
Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn, _5
Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.
2.
Then I arise, and climbing Heaven’s blue dome,
I walk over the mountains and the waves,
Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;
My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves _10
Are filled with my bright presence, and the air
Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.
3.
The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill
Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;
All men who do or even imagine ill _15
Fly me, and from the glory of my ray
Good minds and open actions take new might,
Until diminished by the reign of Night.
4.
I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers
With their aethereal colours; the moon’s globe _20
And the pure stars in their eternal bowers
Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;
Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine
Are portions of one power, which is mine.
5.
I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven, _25
Then with unwilling steps I wander down
Into the clouds of the Atlantic even;
For grief that I depart they weep and frown:
What look is more delightful than the smile
With which I soothe them from the western isle? _30
6.
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine is mine,
All light of art or nature;—to my song _35
Victory and praise in its own right belong.
NOTES:
_32 itself divine]it is divine B.
_34 is B.; are 1824.
_36 its cj. Rossetti, 1870, B.; their 1824.
***
HYMN OF PAN.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a fair
draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr. C.D.
Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 25.]
1.
From the forests and highlands
We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings. _5
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,
The cicale above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass, _10
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,
Listening to my sweet pipings.
2.
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing _15
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,
And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns, _20
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend and follow,
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.
3.
I sang of the dancing stars, _25
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven—and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth,—
And then I changed my pipings,—
Singing how down the vale of Maenalus _30
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood, _35
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
NOTE:
_5, _12 Listening to]Listening B.
***
THE QUESTION.
[Published by Leigh Hunt (with the signature Sigma) in “The Literary
Pocket-Book”, 1822. Reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”,
1824. Copies exist in the Harvard manuscript book, amongst the Boscombe
manuscripts, and amongst Ollier manuscripts.]
1.
I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay _5
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.
2.
There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth, _10
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxslips; tender bluebells, at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets—
Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth—
Its mother’s face with Heaven’s collected tears, _15
When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.
3.
And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,
And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day; _20
And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,
With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray;
And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold,
Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.
4.
And nearer to the river’s trembling edge _25
There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white.
And starry river buds among the sedge,
And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,
Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge
With moonlight beams of their own watery light; _30
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green
As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.
5.
Methought that of these visionary flowers
I made a nosegay, bound in such a way
That the same hues, which in their natural bowers _35
Were mingled or opposed, the like array
Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours
Within my hand,—and then, elate and gay,
I hastened to the spot whence I had come,
That I might there present it!—Oh! to whom? _40
NOTES:
_14 Like...mirth Harvard manuscript, Boscombe manuscript;
wanting in Ollier manuscript, 1822, 1824, 1839.
_15 Heaven’s collected Harvard manuscript, Ollier manuscript, 1822;
Heaven-collected 1824, 1839.
***
THE TWO SPIRITS: AN ALLEGORY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
FIRST SPIRIT:
O thou, who plumed with strong desire
Wouldst float above the earth, beware!
A Shadow tracks thy flight of fire—
Night is coming!
Bright are the regions of the air, _5
And among the winds and beams
It were delight to wander there—
Night is coming!
SECOND SPIRIT:
The deathless stars are bright above;
If I would cross the shade of night, _10
Within my heart is the lamp of love,
And that is day!
And the moon will smile with gentle light
On my golden plumes where’er they move;
The meteors will linger round my flight, _15
And make night day.
FIRST SPIRIT:
But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken
Hail, and lightning, and stormy rain;
See, the bounds of the air are shaken—
Night is coming! _20
The red swift clouds of the hurricane
Yon declining sun have overtaken,
The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain—
Night is coming!
SECOND SPIRIT:
I see the light, and I hear the sound; _25
I’ll sail on the flood of the tempest dark
With the calm within and the light around
Which makes night day:
And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark,
Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound, _30
My moon-like flight thou then mayst mark
On high, far away.
...
Some say there is a precipice
Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin
O’er piles of snow and chasms of ice _35
Mid Alpine mountains;
And that the languid storm pursuing
That winged shape, for ever flies
Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
Its aery fountains. _40
Some say when nights are dry and clear,
And the death-dews sleep on the morass,
Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller,
Which make night day:
And a silver shape like his early love doth pass _45
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,
He finds night day.
NOTES:
_2 Wouldst 1839; Would 1824.
_31 moon-like 1824; moonlight 1839.
_44 make]makes 1824, 1839.
***
ODE TO NAPLES.
(The Author has connected many recollections of his visit to Pompeii
and Baiae with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the
proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples. This has given a
tinge of picturesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory Epodes
which depicture these scenes, and some of the majestic feelings
permanently connected with the scene of this animating
event.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.])
[Composed at San Juliano di Pisa, August 17-25, 1820; published in
“Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a copy, ‘for the most part neat and
legible,’ amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See
Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, pages 14-18.]
EPODE 1a.
I stood within the City disinterred;
And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls
Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals
Thrill through those roofless halls; _5
The oracular thunder penetrating shook
The listening soul in my suspended blood;
I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke—
I felt, but heard not:—through white columns glowed
The isle-sustaining ocean-flood, _10
A plane of light between two heavens of azure!
Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre
Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure
Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;
But every living lineament was clear _15
As in the sculptor’s thought; and there
The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy, and pine,
Like winter leaves o’ergrown by moulded snow,
Seemed only not to move and grow
Because the crystal silence of the air _20
Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.
NOTE:
_1 Pompeii.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]
EPODE 2a.
Then gentle winds arose
With many a mingled close
Of wild Aeolian sound, and mountain-odours keen; _25
And where the Baian ocean
Welters with airlike motion,
Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves,
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere _30
Floats o’er the Elysian realm,
It bore me, like an Angel, o’er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air
No storm can overwhelm.
I sailed, where ever flows _35
Under the calm Serene
A spirit of deep emotion
From the unknown graves
Of the dead Kings of Melody.
Shadowy Aornos darkened o’er the helm _40
The horizontal aether; Heaven stripped bare
Its depth over Elysium, where the prow
Made the invisible water white as snow;
From that Typhaean mount, Inarime,
There streamed a sunbright vapour, like the standard _45
Of some aethereal host;
Whilst from all the coast,
Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea
Prophesyings which grew articulate—
They seize me—I must speak them!—be they fate! _50
NOTES:
_25 odours B.; odour 1824.
_42 depth B.; depths 1824.
_45 sun-bright B.; sunlit 1824.
_39 Homer and Virgil.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]
STROPHE 1.
Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!
Elysian City, which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even _55
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!
Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice
Which armed Victory offers up unstained _60
To Love, the flower-enchained!
Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,—
Hail, hail, all hail! _65
STROPHE 2.
Thou youngest giant birth
Which from the groaning earth
Leap’st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!
Last of the Intercessors!
Who ’gainst the Crowned Transgressors _70
Pleadest before God’s love! Arrayed in Wisdom’s mail,
Wave thy lightning lance in mirth
Nor let thy high heart fail,
Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors
With hurried legions move! _75
Hail, hail, all hail!
ANTISTROPHE 1a.
What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror
To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam
To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer; _80
A new Actaeon’s error
Shall theirs have been—devoured by their own hounds!
Be thou like the imperial Basilisk
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on Oppression, till at that dread risk _85
Aghast she pass from the Earth’s disk:
Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier grow,
And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe:—
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great—All hail! _90
ANTISTROPHE 2a.
From Freedom’s form divine,
From Nature’s inmost shrine,
Strip every impious gawd, rend
Error veil by veil;
O’er Ruin desolate,
O’er Falsehood’s fallen state, _95
Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!
And equal laws be thine,
And winged words let sail,
Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:
That wealth, surviving fate, _100
Be thine.—All hail!
NOTE:
_100 wealth-surviving cj. A.C. Bradley.
ANTISTROPHE 1b.
Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling paean
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Aeaean
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy _105
Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs
In light, and music; widowed Genoa wan
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, ‘Where is Doria?’ fair Milan, _110
Within whose veins long ran
The viper’s palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
Art thou of all these hopes.—O hail! _115
NOTES:
_104 Aeaea, the island of Circe.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]
_112 The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti,
tyrants of Milan.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]
ANTISTROPHE 2b.
Florence! beneath the sun,
Of cities fairest one,
Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation:
From eyes of quenchless hope
Rome tears the priestly cope, _120
As ruling once by power, so now by admiration,—
An athlete stripped to run
From a remoter station
For the high prize lost on Philippi’s shore:—
As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail, _125
So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!
EPODE 1b.
Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes _130
Of crags and thunder-clouds?
See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?
Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,
The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide _135
With iron light is dyed;
The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions
Like Chaos o’er creation, uncreating;
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions
And lawless slaveries,—down the aereal regions _140
Of the white Alps, desolating,
Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,
Their dull and savage lust _145
On Beauty’s corse to sickness satiating—
They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary
With fire—from their red feet the streams run gory!
EPODE 2b.
Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move _150
All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;
Who spreadest Heaven around it,
Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;
Who sittest in thy star, o’er Ocean’s western floor;
Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command _155
The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison
From the Earth’s bosom chill;
Oh, bid those beams be each a blinding brand
Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!
Bid the Earth’s plenty kill! _160
Bid thy bright Heaven above,
Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned
To make it ours and thine!
Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill _165
And raise thy sons, as o’er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire—
Be man’s high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine!
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards, _170
And frowns and fears from thee,
Would not more swiftly flee
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.—
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh, let be _175
This city of thy worship ever free!
NOTES:
_143 old 1824; lost B.
_147 black 1824; blue B.
***
AUTUMN: A DIRGE.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying. _5
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year, _10
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
2.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone _15
To his dwelling;
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play—
Ye, follow the bier _20
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.
***
THE WANING MOON.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East, _5
A white and shapeless mass—
***
TO THE MOON.
[Published (1) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, (2) by W.M.
Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works”, 1870.]
1.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever changing, like a joyless eye _5
That finds no object worth its constancy?
2.
Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,
That grazes on thee till in thee it pities...
***
DEATH.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Death is here and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death—and we are death.
2.
Death has set his mark and seal _5
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,
...
3.
First our pleasures die—and then
Our hopes, and then our fears—and when
These are dead, the debt is due, _10
Dust claims dust—and we die too.
4.
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot—
Love itself would, did they not. _15
***
LIBERTY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
The fiery mountains answer each other;
Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone;
The tempestuous oceans awake one another,
And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter’s throne,
When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown. _5
2.
From a single cloud the lightening flashes,
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,
Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound
Is bellowing underground. _10
3.
But keener thy gaze than the lightening’s glare,
And swifter thy step than the earthquake’s tramp;
Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare
Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun’s bright lamp
To thine is a fen-fire damp. _15
4.
From billow and mountain and exhalation
The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;
From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,
From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,—
And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night _20
In the van of the morning light.
NOTE:
_4 zone editions 1824, 1839; throne later editions.
***
SUMMER AND WINTER.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley in “The Keepsake”, 1829. Mr. C.W.
Frederickson of Brooklyn possesses a transcript in Mrs. Shelley’s
handwriting.]
It was a bright and cheerful afternoon,
Towards the end of the sunny month of June,
When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon—and the stainless sky _5
Opens beyond them like eternity.
All things rejoiced beneath the sun; the weeds,
The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds;
The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze,
And the firm foliage of the larger trees. _10
It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when, _15
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold:
Alas, then, for the homeless beggar old!
NOTE:
_11 birds die 1839; birds do die 1829.
***
THE TOWER OF FAMINE.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley in “The Keepsake”, 1829. Mr. C.W.
Frederickson of Brooklyn possesses a transcript in Mrs. Shelley’s
handwriting.]
Amid the desolation of a city,
Which was the cradle, and is now the grave
Of an extinguished people,—so that Pity
Weeps o’er the shipwrecks of Oblivion’s wave,
There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built _5
Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave
For bread, and gold, and blood: Pain, linked to Guilt,
Agitates the light flame of their hours,
Until its vital oil is spent or spilt.
There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers _10
And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof,
The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers
Of solitary wealth,—the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air,—
Are by its presence dimmed—they stand aloof, _15
And are withdrawn—so that the world is bare;
As if a spectre wrapped in shapeless terror
Amid a company of ladies fair
Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror
Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue, _20
The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,
Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.
NOTE:
_7 For]With 1829.
***
AN ALLEGORY.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
A portal as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the life
Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;
Around it rages an unceasing strife
Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt _5
The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.
2.
And many pass it by with careless tread,
Not knowing that a shadowy ...
Tracks every traveller even to where the dead _10
Wait peacefully for their companion new;
But others, by more curious humour led,
Pause to examine;—these are very few,
And they learn little there, except to know
That shadows follow them where’er they go. _15
NOTE:
_8 pass Rossetti; passed editions 1824, 1839.
***
THE WORLD’S WANDERERS.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Tell me, thou Star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
Will thy pinions close now?
2.
Tell me, Moon, thou pale and gray _5
Pilgrim of Heaven’s homeless way,
In what depth of night or day
Seekest thou repose now?
3.
Weary Wind, who wanderest
Like the world’s rejected guest, _10
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow?
***
SONNET.
[Published by Leigh Hunt, “The Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823. There is a
transcript amongst the Ollier manuscripts, and another in the Harvard
manuscript book.]
Ye hasten to the grave! What seek ye there,
Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes
Of the idle brain, which the world’s livery wear?
O thou quick heart, which pantest to possess
All that pale Expectation feigneth fair! _5
Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess
Whence thou didst come, and whither thou must go,
And all that never yet was known would know—
Oh, whither hasten ye, that thus ye press,
With such swift feet life’s green and pleasant path, _10
Seeking, alike from happiness and woe,
A refuge in the cavern of gray death?
O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you
Hope to inherit in the grave below?
NOTE:
_1 grave Ollier manuscript;
dead Harvard manuscript, 1823, editions 1824, 1839.
_5 pale Expectation Ollier manuscript;
anticipation Harvard manuscript, 1823, editions 1824, 1839.
_7 must Harvard manuscript, 1823; mayst 1824; mayest editions 1839.
_8 all that Harvard manuscript, 1823; that which editions 1824, 1839.
would Harvard manuscript, 1823; wouldst editions 1839.
***
LINES TO A REVIEWER.
[Published by Leigh Hunt, “The Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823. These
lines, and the “Sonnet” immediately preceding, are signed Sigma in the
“Literary Pocket-Book”.]
Alas, good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate where all the rage
Is on one side: in vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile, _5
In which not even contempt lurks to beguile
Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh, conquer what you cannot satiate!
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy _10
In winter noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.
NOTE:
_3 where editions 1824, 1839; when 1823.
***
FRAGMENT OF A SATIRE ON SATIRE.
[Published by Edward Dowden, “Correspondence of Robert Southey and
Caroline Bowles”, 1880.]
If gibbets, axes, confiscations, chains,
And racks of subtle torture, if the pains
Of shame, of fiery Hell’s tempestuous wave,
Seen through the caverns of the shadowy grave,
Hurling the damned into the murky air _5
While the meek blest sit smiling; if Despair
And Hate, the rapid bloodhounds with which Terror
Hunts through the world the homeless steps of Error,
Are the true secrets of the commonweal
To make men wise and just;... _10
And not the sophisms of revenge and fear,
Bloodier than is revenge...
Then send the priests to every hearth and home
To preach the burning wrath which is to come,
In words like flakes of sulphur, such as thaw _15
The frozen tears...
If Satire’s scourge could wake the slumbering hounds
Of Conscience, or erase the deeper wounds,
The leprous scars of callous Infamy;
If it could make the present not to be, _20
Or charm the dark past never to have been,
Or turn regret to hope; who that has seen
What Southey is and was, would not exclaim,
‘Lash on!’ ... be the keen verse dipped in flame;
Follow his flight with winged words, and urge _25
The strokes of the inexorable scourge
Until the heart be naked, till his soul
See the contagion’s spots ... foul;
And from the mirror of Truth’s sunlike shield,
From which his Parthian arrow... _30
Flash on his sight the spectres of the past,
Until his mind’s eye paint thereon—
Let scorn like ... yawn below,
And rain on him like flakes of fiery snow.
This cannot be, it ought not, evil still— _35
Suffering makes suffering, ill must follow ill.
Rough words beget sad thoughts, ... and, beside,
Men take a sullen and a stupid pride
In being all they hate in others’ shame,
By a perverse antipathy of fame. _40
’Tis not worth while to prove, as I could, how
From the sweet fountains of our Nature flow
These bitter waters; I will only say,
If any friend would take Southey some day,
And tell him, in a country walk alone, _45
Softening harsh words with friendship’s gentle tone,
How incorrect his public conduct is,
And what men think of it, ’twere not amiss.
Far better than to make innocent ink—
***
GOOD-NIGHT.
[Published by Leigh Hunt over the signature Sigma, “The Literary
Pocket-Book”, 1822. It is included in the Harvard manuscript book, and
there is a transcript by Shelley in a copy of “The Literary
Pocket-Book”, 1819, presented by him to Miss Sophia Stacey, December
29, 1820. (See “Love’s Philosophy” and “Time Long Past”.) Our text is
that of the editio princeps, 1822, with which the Harvard manuscript
and “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, agree. The variants of the Stacey
manuscript, 1820, are given in the footnotes.]
1.
Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be GOOD night.
2.
How can I call the lone night good, _5
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood—
Then it will be—GOOD night.
3.
To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light, _10
The night is good; because, my love,
They never SAY good-night.
NOTES:
_1 Good-night? no, love! the night is ill Stacey manuscript.
_5 How were the night without thee good Stacey manuscript.
_9 The hearts that on each other beat Stacey manuscript.
_11 Have nights as good as they are sweet Stacey manuscript.
_12 But never SAY good night Stacey manuscript.
***
BUONA NOTTE.
[Published by Medwin, “The Angler in Wales, or Days and Nights of
Sportsmen”, 1834. The text is revised by Rossetti from the Boscombe
manuscript.]
1.
‘Buona notte, buona notte!’—Come mai
La notte sara buona senza te?
Non dirmi buona notte,—che tu sai,
La notte sa star buona da per se.
2.
Solinga, scura, cupa, senza speme, _5
La notte quando Lilla m’abbandona;
Pei cuori chi si batton insieme
Ogni notte, senza dirla, sara buona.
3.
Come male buona notte ci suona
Con sospiri e parole interrotte!— _10
Il modo di aver la notte buona
E mai non di dir la buona notte.
NOTES:
_2 sara]sia 1834.
_4 buona]bene 1834.
_9 Come]Quanto 1834.
***
ORPHEUS.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862; revised and
enlarged by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
A:
Not far from hence. From yonder pointed hill,
Crowned with a ring of oaks, you may behold
A dark and barren field, through which there flows,
Sluggish and black, a deep but narrow stream,
Which the wind ripples not, and the fair moon _5
Gazes in vain, and finds no mirror there.
Follow the herbless banks of that strange brook
Until you pause beside a darksome pond,
The fountain of this rivulet, whose gush
Cannot be seen, hid by a rayless night _10
That lives beneath the overhanging rock
That shades the pool—an endless spring of gloom,
Upon whose edge hovers the tender light,
Trembling to mingle with its paramour,—
But, as Syrinx fled Pan, so night flies day, _15
Or, with most sullen and regardless hate,
Refuses stern her heaven-born embrace.
On one side of this jagged and shapeless hill
There is a cave, from which there eddies up
A pale mist, like aereal gossamer, _20
Whose breath destroys all life—awhile it veils
The rock—then, scattered by the wind, it flies
Along the stream, or lingers on the clefts,
Killing the sleepy worms, if aught bide there.
Upon the beetling edge of that dark rock _25
There stands a group of cypresses; not such
As, with a graceful spire and stirring life,
Pierce the pure heaven of your native vale,
Whose branches the air plays among, but not
Disturbs, fearing to spoil their solemn grace; _30
But blasted and all wearily they stand,
One to another clinging; their weak boughs
Sigh as the wind buffets them, and they shake
Beneath its blasts—a weatherbeaten crew!
CHORUS:
What wondrous sound is that, mournful and faint, _35
But more melodious than the murmuring wind
Which through the columns of a temple glides?
A:
It is the wandering voice of Orpheus’ lyre,
Borne by the winds, who sigh that their rude king
Hurries them fast from these air-feeding notes; _40
But in their speed they bear along with them
The waning sound, scattering it like dew
Upon the startled sense.
CHORUS:
Does he still sing?
Methought he rashly cast away his harp
When he had lost Eurydice.
A:
Ah, no! _45
Awhile he paused. As a poor hunted stag
A moment shudders on the fearful brink
Of a swift stream—the cruel hounds press on
With deafening yell, the arrows glance and wound,—
He plunges in: so Orpheus, seized and torn _50
By the sharp fangs of an insatiate grief,
Maenad-like waved his lyre in the bright air,
And wildly shrieked ‘Where she is, it is dark!’
And then he struck from forth the strings a sound
Of deep and fearful melody. Alas! _55
In times long past, when fair Eurydice
With her bright eyes sat listening by his side,
He gently sang of high and heavenly themes.
As in a brook, fretted with little waves
By the light airs of spring—each riplet makes _60
A many-sided mirror for the sun,
While it flows musically through green banks,
Ceaseless and pauseless, ever clear and fresh,
So flowed his song, reflecting the deep joy
And tender love that fed those sweetest notes, _65
The heavenly offspring of ambrosial food.
But that is past. Returning from drear Hell,
He chose a lonely seat of unhewn stone,
Blackened with lichens, on a herbless plain.
Then from the deep and overflowing spring _70
Of his eternal ever-moving grief
There rose to Heaven a sound of angry song.
’Tis as a mighty cataract that parts
Two sister rocks with waters swift and strong, _75
And casts itself with horrid roar and din
Adown a steep; from a perennial source
It ever flows and falls, and breaks the air
With loud and fierce, but most harmonious roar,
And as it falls casts up a vaporous spray
Which the sun clothes in hues of Iris light. _80
Thus the tempestuous torrent of his grief
Is clothed in sweetest sounds and varying words
Of poesy. Unlike all human works,
It never slackens, and through every change
Wisdom and beauty and the power divine _85
Of mighty poesy together dwell,
Mingling in sweet accord. As I have seen
A fierce south blast tear through the darkened sky,
Driving along a rack of winged clouds,
Which may not pause, but ever hurry on, _90
As their wild shepherd wills them, while the stars,
Twinkling and dim, peep from between the plumes.
Anon the sky is cleared, and the high dome
Of serene Heaven, starred with fiery flowers,
Shuts in the shaken earth; or the still moon _95
Swiftly, yet gracefully, begins her walk,
Rising all bright behind the eastern hills.
I talk of moon, and wind, and stars, and not
Of song; but, would I echo his high song,
Nature must lend me words ne’er used before, _100
Or I must borrow from her perfect works,
To picture forth his perfect attributes.
He does no longer sit upon his throne
Of rock upon a desert herbless plain,
For the evergreen and knotted ilexes, _105
And cypresses that seldom wave their boughs,
And sea-green olives with their grateful fruit,
And elms dragging along the twisted vines,
Which drop their berries as they follow fast,
And blackthorn bushes with their infant race _110
Of blushing rose-blooms; beeches, to lovers dear,
And weeping willow trees; all swift or slow,
As their huge boughs or lighter dress permit,
Have circled in his throne, and Earth herself
Has sent from her maternal breast a growth _115
Of starlike flowers and herbs of odour sweet,
To pave the temple that his poesy
Has framed, while near his feet grim lions couch,
And kids, fearless from love, creep near his lair.
Even the blind worms seem to feel the sound. _120
The birds are silent, hanging down their heads,
Perched on the lowest branches of the trees;
Not even the nightingale intrudes a note
In rivalry, but all entranced she listens.
NOTES:
_16, _17, _24 1870 only.
_45-_55 Ah, no!... melody 1870 only.
_66 1870 only.
_112 trees 1870; too 1862.
_113 huge 1870; long 1862.
_116 starlike 1870; starry 1862. odour 1862; odours 1870.
***
FIORDISPINA.
[Published in part (lines 11-30) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”,
1824; in full (from the Boscombe manuscript) by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of
Shelley”, 1862.]
The season was the childhood of sweet June,
Whose sunny hours from morning until noon
Went creeping through the day with silent feet,
Each with its load of pleasure; slow yet sweet;
Like the long years of blest Eternity _5
Never to be developed. Joy to thee,
Fiordispina and thy Cosimo,
For thou the wonders of the depth canst know
Of this unfathomable flood of hours,
Sparkling beneath the heaven which embowers— _10
...
They were two cousins, almost like to twins,
Except that from the catalogue of sins
Nature had rased their love—which could not be
But by dissevering their nativity.
And so they grew together like two flowers _15
Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers
Lull or awaken in their purple prime,
Which the same hand will gather—the same clime
Shake with decay. This fair day smiles to see
All those who love—and who e’er loved like thee, _20
Fiordispina? Scarcely Cosimo,
Within whose bosom and whose brain now glow
The ardours of a vision which obscure
The very idol of its portraiture.
He faints, dissolved into a sea of love; _25
But thou art as a planet sphered above;
But thou art Love itself—ruling the motion
Of his subjected spirit: such emotion
Must end in sin and sorrow, if sweet May
Had not brought forth this morn—your wedding-day. _30
...
‘Lie there; sleep awhile in your own dew,
Ye faint-eyed children of the ... Hours,’
Fiordispina said, and threw the flowers
Which she had from the breathing—
...
A table near of polished porphyry. _35
They seemed to wear a beauty from the eye
That looked on them—a fragrance from the touch
Whose warmth ... checked their life; a light such
As sleepers wear, lulled by the voice they love, which did reprove _40
The childish pity that she felt for them,
And a ... remorse that from their stem
She had divided such fair shapes ... made
A feeling in the ... which was a shade
Of gentle beauty on the flowers: there lay _45
All gems that make the earth’s dark bosom gay.
... rods of myrtle-buds and lemon-blooms,
And that leaf tinted lightly which assumes
The livery of unremembered snow—
Violets whose eyes have drunk— _50
...
Fiordispina and her nurse are now
Upon the steps of the high portico,
Under the withered arm of Media
She flings her glowing arm
...
... step by step and stair by stair, _55
That withered woman, gray and white and brown—
More like a trunk by lichens overgrown
Than anything which once could have been human.
And ever as she goes the palsied woman
...
‘How slow and painfully you seem to walk, _60
Poor Media! you tire yourself with talk.’
‘And well it may,
Fiordispina, dearest—well-a-day!
You are hastening to a marriage-bed;
I to the grave!’—‘And if my love were dead, _65
Unless my heart deceives me, I would lie
Beside him in my shroud as willingly
As now in the gay night-dress Lilla wrought.’
‘Fie, child! Let that unseasonable thought
Not be remembered till it snows in June; _70
Such fancies are a music out of tune
With the sweet dance your heart must keep to-night.
What! would you take all beauty and delight
Back to the Paradise from which you sprung,
And leave to grosser mortals?— _75
And say, sweet lamb, would you not learn the sweet
And subtle mystery by which spirits meet?
Who knows whether the loving game is played,
When, once of mortal [vesture] disarrayed,
The naked soul goes wandering here and there _80
Through the wide deserts of Elysian air?
The violet dies not till it’—
NOTES:
_11 to 1824; two editions 1839.
_20 e’er 1862; ever editions 1824, 1839.
_25 sea edition 1862; sense editions 1824, 1839.
***
TIME LONG PAST.
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.
This is one of three poems (cf. “Love’s Philosophy” and “Good-Night”)
transcribed by Shelley in a copy of Leigh Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”
for 1819 presented by him to Miss Sophia Stacey, December 29, 1820.]
1.
Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past.
A tone which is now forever fled,
A hope which is now forever past,
A love so sweet it could not last, _5
Was Time long past.
2.
There were sweet dreams in the night
Of Time long past:
And, was it sadness or delight,
Each day a shadow onward cast _10
Which made us wish it yet might last—
That Time long past.
3.
There is regret, almost remorse,
For Time long past.
’Tis like a child’s beloved corse _15
A father watches, till at last
Beauty is like remembrance, cast
From Time long past.
***
FRAGMENT: THE DESERTS OF DIM SLEEP.
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
I went into the deserts of dim sleep—
That world which, like an unknown wilderness,
Bounds this with its recesses wide and deep—
***
FRAGMENT: ‘THE VIEWLESS AND INVISIBLE CONSEQUENCE’.
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
The viewless and invisible Consequence
Watches thy goings-out, and comings-in,
And...hovers o’er thy guilty sleep,
Unveiling every new-born deed, and thoughts
More ghastly than those deeds— _5
***
FRAGMENT: A SERPENT-FACE.
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
His face was like a snake’s—wrinkled and loose
And withered—
***
FRAGMENT: DEATH IN LIFE.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,
And it is not life that makes me move.
***
FRAGMENT: ‘SUCH HOPE, AS IS THE SICK DESPAIR OF GOOD’.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Such hope, as is the sick despair of good,
Such fear, as is the certainty of ill,
Such doubt, as is pale Expectation’s food
Turned while she tastes to poison, when the will
Is powerless, and the spirit... _5
***
FRAGMENT: ‘ALAS! THIS IS NOT WHAT I THOUGHT LIFE WAS’.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. This
fragment is joined by Forman with that immediately preceding.]
Alas! this is not what I thought life was.
I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
Untouched by suffering, through the rugged glen.
In mine own heart I saw as in a glass _5
The hearts of others ... And when
I went among my kind, with triple brass
Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woful mass!
***
FRAGMENT: MILTON’S SPIRIT.
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
I dreamed that Milton’s spirit rose, and took
From life’s green tree his Uranian lute;
And from his touch sweet thunder flowed, and shook
All human things built in contempt of man,—
And sanguine thrones and impious altars quaked, _5
Prisons and citadels...
NOTE:
_2 lute Uranian cj. A.C. Bradley.
***
FRAGMENT: ‘UNRISEN SPLENDOUR OF THE BRIGHTEST SUN’.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Unrisen splendour of the brightest sun,
To rise upon our darkness, if the star
Now beckoning thee out of thy misty throne
Could thaw the clouds which wage an obscure war
With thy young brightness! _5
***
FRAGMENT: PATER OMNIPOTENS.
[Edited from manuscript Shelley E 4 in the Bodleian Library, and
published by Mr. C.D. Locock, “Examination” etc., Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1903. Here placed conjecturally amongst the compositions of
1820, but of uncertain date, and belonging possibly to 1819 or a still
earlier year.]
Serene in his unconquerable might
Endued[,] the Almighty King, his steadfast throne
Encompassed unapproachably with power
And darkness and deep solitude an awe
Stood like a black cloud on some aery cliff _5
Embosoming its lightning—in his sight
Unnumbered glorious spirits trembling stood
Like slaves before their Lord—prostrate around
Heaven’s multitudes hymned everlasting praise.
***
FRAGMENT: TO THE MIND OF MAN.
[Edited, published and here placed as the preceding.]
Thou living light that in thy rainbow hues
Clothest this naked world; and over Sea
And Earth and air, and all the shapes that be
In peopled darkness of this wondrous world
The Spirit of thy glory dost diffuse _5
... truth ... thou Vital Flame
Mysterious thought that in this mortal frame
Of things, with unextinguished lustre burnest
Now pale and faint now high to Heaven upcurled
That eer as thou dost languish still returnest _10
And ever
Before the ... before the Pyramids
So soon as from the Earth formless and rude
One living step had chased drear Solitude
Thou wert, Thought; thy brightness charmed the lids _15
Of the vast snake Eternity, who kept
The tree of good and evil.—
***
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1820, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
We spent the latter part of the year 1819 in Florence, where Shelley
passed several hours daily in the Gallery, and made various notes on
its ancient works of art. His thoughts were a good deal taken up also
by the project of a steamboat, undertaken by a friend, an engineer, to
ply between Leghorn and Marseilles, for which he supplied a sum of
money. This was a sort of plan to delight Shelley, and he was greatly
disappointed when it was thrown aside.
There was something in Florence that disagreed excessively with his
health, and he suffered far more pain than usual; so much so that we
left it sooner than we intended, and removed to Pisa, where we had some
friends, and, above all, where we could consult the celebrated Vacca as
to the cause of Shelley’s sufferings. He, like every other medical man,
could only guess at that, and gave little hope of immediate relief; he
enjoined him to abstain from all physicians and medicine, and to leave
his complaint to Nature. As he had vainly consulted medical men of the
highest repute in England, he was easily persuaded to adopt this
advice. Pain and ill-health followed him to the end; but the residence
at Pisa agreed with him better than any other, and there in consequence
we remained.
In the Spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house
of some friends who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a
beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes whose
myrtle-hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the
carolling of the skylark which inspired one of the most beautiful of
his poems. He addressed the letter to Mrs. Gisborne from this house,
which was hers: he had made his study of the workshop of her son, who
was an engineer. Mrs. Gisborne had been a friend of my father in her
younger days. She was a lady of great accomplishments, and charming
from her frank and affectionate nature. She had the most intense love
of knowledge, a delicate and trembling sensibility, and preserved
freshness of mind after a life of considerable adversity. As a
favourite friend of my father, we had sought her with eagerness; and
the most open and cordial friendship was established between us.
Our stay at the Baths of San Giuliano was shortened by an accident. At
the foot of our garden ran the canal that communicated between the
Serchio and the Arno. The Serchio overflowed its banks, and, breaking
its bounds, this canal also overflowed; all this part of the country is
below the level of its rivers, and the consequence was that it was
speedily flooded. The rising waters filled the Square of the Baths, in
the lower part of which our house was situated. The canal overflowed in
the garden behind; the rising waters on either side at last burst open
the doors, and, meeting in the house, rose to the height of six feet.
It was a picturesque sight at night to see the peasants driving the
cattle from the plains below to the hills above the Baths. A fire was
kept up to guide them across the ford; and the forms of the men and the
animals showed in dark relief against the red glare of the flame, which
was reflected again in the waters that filled the Square.
We then removed to Pisa, and took up our abode there for the winter.
The extreme mildness of the climate suited Shelley, and his solitude
was enlivened by an intercourse with several intimate friends. Chance
cast us strangely enough on this quiet half-unpeopled town; but its
very peace suited Shelley. Its river, the near mountains, and not
distant sea, added to its attractions, and were the objects of many
delightful excursions. We feared the south of Italy, and a hotter
climate, on account of our child; our former bereavement inspiring us
with terror. We seemed to take root here, and moved little afterwards;
often, indeed, entertaining projects for visiting other parts of Italy,
but still delaying. But for our fears on account of our child, I
believe we should have wandered over the world, both being passionately
fond of travelling. But human life, besides its great unalterable
necessities, is ruled by a thousand lilliputian ties that shackle at
the time, although it is difficult to account afterwards for their
influence over our destiny.
***
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1821.
DIRGE FOR THE YEAR.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and dated
January 1, 1821.]
1.
Orphan Hours, the Year is dead,
Come and sigh, come and weep!
Merry Hours, smile instead,
For the Year is but asleep.
See, it smiles as it is sleeping, _5
Mocking your untimely weeping.
2.
As an earthquake rocks a corse
In its coffin in the clay,
So White Winter, that rough nurse,
Rocks the death-cold Year to-day; _10
Solemn Hours! wail aloud
For your mother in her shroud.
3.
As the wild air stirs and sways
The tree-swung cradle of a child,
So the breath of these rude days _15
Rocks the Year:—be calm and mild,
Trembling Hours, she will arise
With new love within her eyes.
4.
January gray is here,
Like a sexton by her grave; _20
February bears the bier,
March with grief doth howl and rave,
And April weeps—but, O ye Hours!
Follow with May’s fairest flowers.
***
TO NIGHT.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.
There is a transcript in the Harvard manuscript book.]
1.
Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, _5
‘Which make thee terrible and dear,—
Swift be thy flight!
2.
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; _10
Kiss her until she be wearied out,
Then wander o’er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand—
Come, long-sought!
3.
When I arose and saw the dawn, _15
I sighed for thee;
When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest, I sighed for thee. _20
4.
Thy brother Death came, and cried,
Wouldst thou me?
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noontide bee, _25
Shall I nestle near thy side?
Wouldst thou me?—And I replied,
No, not thee!
5.
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon— _30
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night—
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon! _35
NOTE:
_1 o’er Harvard manuscript; over editions 1824, 1839.
***
TIME.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality, _5
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea? _10
***
LINES.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Far, far away, O ye
Halcyons of Memory,
Seek some far calmer nest
Than this abandoned breast!
No news of your false spring _5
To my heart’s winter bring,
Once having gone, in vain
Ye come again.
2.
Vultures, who build your bowers
High in the Future’s towers, _10
Withered hopes on hopes are spread!
Dying joys, choked by the dead,
Will serve your beaks for prey
Many a day.
***
FROM THE ARABIC: AN IMITATION.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is an
intermediate draft amongst the Bodleian manuscripts. See Locock,
“Examination”, etc., 1903, page 13.]
1.
My faint spirit was sitting in the light
Of thy looks, my love;
It panted for thee like the hind at noon
For the brooks, my love.
Thy barb whose hoofs outspeed the tempest’s flight _5
Bore thee far from me;
My heart, for my weak feet were weary soon,
Did companion thee.
2.
Ah! fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed
Or the death they bear, _10
The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove
With the wings of care;
In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,
Shall mine cling to thee,
Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love, _15
It may bring to thee.
NOTES:
_3 hoofs]feet B.
_7 were]grew B.
_9 Ah!]O B.
***
TO EMILIA VIVIANI.
[Published, (1) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; (2, 1) by
Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862; (2, 2 and 3) by H. Buxton
Forman, “Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1876.]
1.
Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me
Sweet-basil and mignonette?
Embleming love and health, which never yet
In the same wreath might be.
Alas, and they are wet! _5
Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?
For never rain or dew
Such fragrance drew
From plant or flower—the very doubt endears
My sadness ever new, _10
The sighs I breathe, the tears I shed for thee.
2.
Send the stars light, but send not love to me,
In whom love ever made
Health like a heap of embers soon to fade—
***
THE FUGITIVES.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”. 1824.]
1.
The waters are flashing,
The white hail is dashing,
The lightnings are glancing,
The hoar-spray is dancing—
Away! _5
The whirlwind is rolling,
The thunder is tolling,
The forest is swinging,
The minster bells ringing—
Come away! _10
The Earth is like Ocean,
Wreck-strewn and in motion:
Bird, beast, man and worm
Have crept out of the storm—
Come away! _15
2.
‘Our boat has one sail
And the helmsman is pale;—
A bold pilot I trow,
Who should follow us now,’—
Shouted he— _20
And she cried: ‘Ply the oar!
Put off gaily from shore!’—
As she spoke, bolts of death
Mixed with hail, specked their path
O’er the sea. _25
And from isle, tower and rock,
The blue beacon-cloud broke,
And though dumb in the blast,
The red cannon flashed fast
From the lee. _30
3.
And ‘Fear’st thou?’ and ‘Fear’st thou?’
And Seest thou?’ and ‘Hear’st thou?’
And ‘Drive we not free
O’er the terrible sea,
I and thou?’ _35
One boat-cloak did cover
The loved and the lover—
Their blood beats one measure,
They murmur proud pleasure
Soft and low;— _40
While around the lashed Ocean,
Like mountains in motion,
Is withdrawn and uplifted,
Sunk, shattered and shifted
To and fro. _45
4.
In the court of the fortress
Beside the pale portress,
Like a bloodhound well beaten
The bridegroom stands, eaten
By shame; _50
On the topmost watch-turret,
As a death-boding spirit
Stands the gray tyrant father,
To his voice the mad weather
Seems tame; _55
And with curses as wild
As e’er clung to child,
He devotes to the blast,
The best, loveliest and last
Of his name! _60
NOTES:
_28 And though]Though editions 1839.
_57 clung]cling editions 1839.
***
TO —.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]