Percy Bysshe Shelley - Delphi Poets Series
Page 121
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West,
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that Spirit 600
In which all live and are. Ominous signs
Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky:
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;
It has rained blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord. 605
The army encamped upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time
Cast on the mirror of the night. While yet 610
The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm
Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the Spirit of the Plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents;
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead. 615
The last news from the camp is, that a thousand
Have sickened, and —
[ENTER A FOURTH MESSENGER.]
MAHMUD:
And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumour, speak!
FOURTH MESSENGER:
One comes
Fainting with toil, covered with foam and blood:
He stood, he says, on Chelonites’ 620
Promontory, which o’erlooks the isles that groan
Under the Briton’s frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon,
When as the wandering clouds unveiled or hid
Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets 625
Stalk through the night in the horizon’s glimmer,
Mingling fierce thunders and sulphureous gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco 630
Awoke, and drove his flock of thunder-clouds
Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objects — save that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dreamed he saw, the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war, 635
With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorred cross —
620 on Chelonites’]on Chelonites “Errata”;
upon Clelonite’s edition 1822;
upon Clelonit’s editions 1839.
[ENTER AN ATTENDANT.]
ATTENDANT:
Your Sublime Highness,
The Jew, who —
MAHMUD:
Could not come more seasonably:
Bid him attend. I’ll hear no more! too long 640
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge 645
Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not in whose hand we are.
[EXEUNT.]
SEMICHORUS 1:
Would I were the winged cloud
Of a tempest swift and loud!
I would scorn 650
The smile of morn
And the wave where the moonrise is born!
I would leave
The spirits of eve
A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave 655
From other threads than mine!
Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
Who would? Not I.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Whither to fly?
SEMICHORUS 1:
Where the rocks that gird th’ Aegean 660
Echo to the battle paean
Of the free —
I would flee
A tempestuous herald of victory!
My golden rain
For the Grecian slain 665
Should mingle in tears with the bloody main,
And my solemn thunder-knell
Should ring to the world the passing-bell
Of Tyranny! 670
SEMICHORUS 2:
Ah king! wilt thou chain
The rack and the rain?
Wilt thou fetter the lightning and hurricane?
The storms are free,
But we — 675
CHORUS:
O Slavery! thou frost of the world’s prime,
Killing its flowers and leaving its thorns bare!
Thy touch has stamped these limbs with crime,
These brows thy branding garland bear,
But the free heart, the impassive soul 680
Scorn thy control!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose! — Around her born,
Shone like mountains in the morn 685
Glorious states; — and are they now
Ashes, wrecks, oblivion?
SEMICHORUS 2:
Go,
Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed
Persia, as the sand does foam:
Deluge upon deluge followed, 690
Discord, Macedon, and Rome:
And lastly thou!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Temples and towers,
Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
And may be thine, and must decay; 695
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits, 700
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Hear ye the blast,
Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls
From ruin her Titanian walls? 705
Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones
Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete
Hear, and from their mountain thrones
The daemons and the nymphs repeat
The harmony.
SEMICHORUS 1:
I hear! I hear! 710
SEMICHORUS 2:
The world’s eyeless charioteer,
Destiny, is hurrying by!
What faith is crushed, what empire bleeds
Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?
What eagle-winged victory sits 715
At her right hand? what shadow flits
Before? what splendour rolls behind?
Ruin and renovation cry
‘Who but We?’
SEMICHORUS 1:
I hear! I hear!
The hiss as of a rushing wind, 720
The roar as of an ocean foaming,
The thunder as of earthquake coming.
I hear! I hear!
The crash as of an empire falling,
The shrieks as of a people calling 725
‘Mercy! mercy!’ — How they thrill!
Then a shout of ‘kill! kill! kill!’
And then a small still voice, thus —
SEMICHORUS 2:
For
Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are, 730
Their den is in the guilty mind,
And Conscience feeds them with despair.
SEMICHORUS 1:
In sacred Athens, near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity’s altar stood:
Serve not the unknown God in vain. 735
But pay that broken shrine again,
Love for hate and tears for blood.
[ENTER MAHMUD AND AHASUERUS.]
M
AHMUD:
Thou art a man, thou sayest, even as we.
AHASUERUS:
No more!
MAHMUD:
But raised above thy fellow-men
By thought, as I by power.
AHASUERUS:
Thou sayest so. 740
MAHMUD:
Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the Past, and sees 745
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness,
And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circles — it is much — 750
I honour thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehended not 755
What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the Future present — let it come!
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours; 760
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.
AHASUERUS:
Disdain thee? — not the worm beneath thy feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem 765
That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;
But look on that which cannot change — the One,
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem 770
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them 775
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds — this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision; — all that it inherits 780
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The Future and the Past are idle shadows
Of thought’s eternal flight — they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be. 785
MAHMUD:
What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest
Of dazzling mist within my brain — they shake
The earth on which I stand, and hang like night
On Heaven above me. What can they avail?
They cast on all things surest, brightest, best, 790
Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.
AHASUERUS:
Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is — the absent to the present. Thought 795
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms, 800
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the Future? — ask and have!
Knock and it shall be opened — look, and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the Past 805
As on a glass.
MAHMUD:
Wild, wilder thoughts convulse
My spirit — Did not Mahomet the Second
Win Stamboul?
AHASUERUS:
Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit
The written fortunes of thy house and faith.
Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell 810
How what was born in blood must die.
MAHMUD:
Thy words
Have power on me! I see —
AHASUERUS:
What hearest thou?
MAHMUD:
A far whisper —
Terrible silence.
AHASUERUS:
What succeeds?
MAHMUD:
The sound
As of the assault of an imperial city, 815
The hiss of inextinguishable fire,
The roar of giant cannon; the earthquaking
Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,
The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,
The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs, 820
And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck
Of adamantine mountains — the mad blast
Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,
The shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,
And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear, 825
As of a joyous infant waked and playing
With its dead mother’s breast, and now more loud
The mingled battle-cry, — ha! hear I not
‘En touto nike!’ ‘Allah-illa-Allah!’?
AHASUERUS:
The sulphurous mist is raised — thou seest —
MAHMUD:
A chasm, 830
As of two mountains in the wall of Stamboul;
And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,
Like giants on the ruins of a world,
Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust
Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one 835
Of regal port has cast himself beneath
The stream of war. Another proudly clad
In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb
Into the gap, and with his iron mace
Directs the torrent of that tide of men, 840
And seems — he is — Mahomet!
AHASUERUS:
What thou seest
Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.
A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that
Thou call’st reality. Thou mayst behold
How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned, 845
Bow their towered crests to mutability.
Poised by the flood, e’en on the height thou holdest,
Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths. — Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished 850
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou 855
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,
Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which called it from the uncreated deep,
Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will 860
The imperial shade hither.
[EXIT AHASUERUS.]
[THE PHANTOM OF MAHOMET THE SECOND APPEARS.]
MAHMUD:
Approach!
PHANTOM:
I come
Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living than give up the dead;
Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.
The
heavy fragments of the power which fell 865
When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,
Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return. —
A later Empire nods in its decay: 870
The autumn of a greener faith is come,
And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip
The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built
Her aerie, while Dominion whelped below.
The storm is in its branches, and the frost 875
Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects
Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil,
Ruin on ruin: — Thou art slow, my son;
The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep
A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies 880
Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou,
Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,
The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now —
Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,
And hopes that sate themselves on dust, and die! — 885
Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.
Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death: —
And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
Unfold itself even in the shape of that 890
Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!
To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.
MAHMUD:
Spirit, woe to all!
Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe
To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed! 895
Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!
Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor!
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;
Those who are born and those who die! but say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am, 900
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation!
PHANTOM:
Ask the cold pale Hour,
Rich in reversion of impending death,
When HE shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs
Sit Care, and Sorrow, and Infirmity — 905
The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!
He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years 910
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and —
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory!
[THE PHANTOM VANISHES.]
MAHMUD:
What sound of the importunate earth has broken
My mighty trance?
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory!
MAHMUD:
Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile 915
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response