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
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.
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,
Liste
ning 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.
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
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.
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.)
(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.
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
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,
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Delphi Poets Series Page 35