My mansion is; where I have lived insphered
From the beginning, and around my sleep
Have woven all the wondrous imagery
Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world;
Infinite depths of unknown elements 20
Massed into one impenetrable mask;
Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins
Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron.
And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven
I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and clouds, 25
And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns
In the dark space of interstellar air.
[A good Spirit, who watches over the Pirate’s fate, leads, in a mysterious manner, the lady of his love to the Enchanted Isle. She is accompanied by a Youth, who loves the lady, but whose passion she returns only with a sisterly affection. The ensuing scene takes place between them on their arrival at the Isle. [MRS. SHELLEY’S NOTE, 1839.]]
ANOTHER SCENE.
INDIAN YOUTH AND LADY.
INDIAN:
And, if my grief should still be dearer to me
Than all the pleasures in the world beside,
Why would you lighten it? —
LADY:
I offer only 30
That which I seek, some human sympathy
In this mysterious island.
INDIAN:
Oh! my friend,
My sister, my beloved! — What do I say?
My brain is dizzy, and I scarce know whether
I speak to thee or her.
LADY:
Peace, perturbed heart! 35
I am to thee only as thou to mine,
The passing wind which heals the brow at noon,
And may strike cold into the breast at night,
Yet cannot linger where it soothes the most,
Or long soothe could it linger.
INDIAN:
But you said 40
You also loved?
LADY:
Loved! Oh, I love. Methinks
This word of love is fit for all the world,
And that for gentle hearts another name
Would speak of gentler thoughts than the world owns.
I have loved.
INDIAN:
And thou lovest not? if so, 45
Young as thou art thou canst afford to weep.
LADY:
Oh! would that I could claim exemption
From all the bitterness of that sweet name.
I loved, I love, and when I love no more
Let joys and grief perish, and leave despair 50
To ring the knell of youth. He stood beside me,
The embodied vision of the brightest dream,
Which like a dawn heralds the day of life;
The shadow of his presence made my world
A Paradise. All familiar things he touched, 55
All common words he spoke, became to me
Like forms and sounds of a diviner world.
He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest;
He came, and went, and left me what I am. 60
Alas! Why must I think how oft we two
Have sate together near the river springs,
Under the green pavilion which the willow
Spreads on the floor of the unbroken fountain,
Strewn, by the nurslings that linger there, 65
Over that islet paved with flowers and moss,
While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,
Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine,
Sad prophetess of sorrows not her own?
The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt, 70
And the false cuckoo bade the spray good morn;
And on a wintry bough the widowed bird,
Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves,
Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow.
I, left like her, and leaving one like her, 75
Alike abandoned and abandoning
(Oh! unlike her in this!) the gentlest youth,
Whose love had made my sorrows dear to him,
Even as my sorrow made his love to me!
INDIAN:
One curse of Nature stamps in the same mould 80
The features of the wretched; and they are
As like as violet to violet,
When memory, the ghost, their odours keeps
Mid the cold relics of abandoned joy. —
Proceed.
LADY:
He was a simple innocent boy. 85
I loved him well, but not as he desired;
Yet even thus he was content to be: —
A short content, for I was —
INDIAN [ASIDE]:
God of Heaven!
From such an islet, such a river-spring — !
I dare not ask her if there stood upon it 90
A pleasure-dome surmounted by a crescent,
With steps to the blue water.
[ALOUD.]
It may be
That Nature masks in life several copies
Of the same lot, so that the sufferers
May feel another’s sorrow as their own, 95
And find in friendship what they lost in love.
That cannot be: yet it is strange that we,
From the same scene, by the same path to this
Realm of abandonment — But speak! your breath —
Your breath is like soft music, your words are 100
The echoes of a voice which on my heart
Sleeps like a melody of early days.
But as you said —
LADY:
He was so awful, yet
So beautiful in mystery and terror,
Calming me as the loveliness of heaven 105
Soothes the unquiet sea: — and yet not so,
For he seemed stormy, and would often seem
A quenchless sun masked in portentous clouds;
For such his thoughts, and even his actions were;
But he was not of them, nor they of him, 110
But as they hid his splendour from the earth.
Some said he was a man of blood and peril,
And steeped in bitter infamy to the lips.
More need was there I should be innocent,
More need that I should be most true and kind, 115
And much more need that there should be found one
To share remorse and scorn and solitude,
And all the ills that wait on those who do
The tasks of ruin in the world of life.
He fled, and I have followed him.
INDIAN:
Such a one 120
Is he who was the winter of my peace.
But, fairest stranger, when didst thou depart
From the far hills where rise the springs of India?
How didst thou pass the intervening sea?
LADY:
If I be sure I am not dreaming now, 125
I should not doubt to say it was a dream.
Methought a star came down from heaven,
And rested mid the plants of India,
Which I had given a shelter from the frost
Within my chamber. There the meteor lay, 130
Panting forth light among the leaves and flowers,
As if it lived, and was outworn with speed;
Or that it loved, and passion made the pulse
Of its bright life throb like an anxious heart,
Till it diffused itself; and all the chamber 135
And walls seemed melted into emerald fire
That burned not; in the midst of which appeared
A spirit like a child, and laughed aloud
A thrilling peal of such sweet merriment
As made the blood tingle in my warm feet: 140
Then bent over a vase, and murmuring
Low, unintelligible melodies,
Placed
something in the mould like melon-seeds,
And slowly faded, and in place of it
A soft hand issued from the veil of fire, 145
Holding a cup like a magnolia flower,
And poured upon the earth within the vase
The element with which it overflowed,
Brighter than morning light, and purer than
The water of the springs of Himalah. 150
INDIAN:
You waked not?
LADY:
Not until my dream became
Like a child’s legend on the tideless sand.
Which the first foam erases half, and half
Leaves legible. At length I rose, and went,
Visiting my flowers from pot to pot, and thought 155
To set new cuttings in the empty urns,
And when I came to that beside the lattice,
I saw two little dark-green leaves
Lifting the light mould at their birth, and then
I half-remembered my forgotten dream. 160
And day by day, green as a gourd in June,
The plant grew fresh and thick, yet no one knew
What plant it was; its stem and tendrils seemed
Like emerald snakes, mottled and diamonded
With azure mail and streaks of woven silver; 165
And all the sheaths that folded the dark buds
Rose like the crest of cobra-di-capel,
Until the golden eye of the bright flower,
Through the dark lashes of those veined lids,
…disencumbered of their silent sleep, 170
Gazed like a star into the morning light.
Its leaves were delicate, you almost saw
The pulses
With which the purple velvet flower was fed
To overflow, and like a poet’s heart 175
Changing bright fancy to sweet sentiment,
Changed half the light to fragrance. It soon fell,
And to a green and dewy embryo-fruit
Left all its treasured beauty. Day by day
I nursed the plant, and on the double flute 180
Played to it on the sunny winter days
Soft melodies, as sweet as April rain
On silent leaves, and sang those words in which
Passion makes Echo taunt the sleeping strings;
And I would send tales of forgotten love 185
Late into the lone night, and sing wild songs
Of maids deserted in the olden time,
And weep like a soft cloud in April’s bosom
Upon the sleeping eyelids of the plant,
So that perhaps it dreamed that Spring was come, 190
And crept abroad into the moonlight air,
And loosened all its limbs, as, noon by noon,
The sun averted less his oblique beam.
INDIAN:
And the plant died not in the frost?
LADY:
It grew;
And went out of the lattice which I left 195
Half open for it, trailing its quaint spires
Along the garden and across the lawn,
And down the slope of moss and through the tufts
Of wild-flower roots, and stumps of trees o’ergrown
With simple lichens, and old hoary stones, 200
On to the margin of the glassy pool,
Even to a nook of unblown violets
And lilies-of-the-valley yet unborn,
Under a pine with ivy overgrown.
And theme its fruit lay like a sleeping lizard 205
Under the shadows; but when Spring indeed
Came to unswathe her infants, and the lilies
Peeped from their bright green masks to wonder at
This shape of autumn couched in their recess,
Then it dilated, and it grew until 210
One half lay floating on the fountain wave,
Whose pulse, elapsed in unlike sympathies,
Kept time
Among the snowy water-lily buds.
Its shape was such as summer melody 215
Of the south wind in spicy vales might give
To some light cloud bound from the golden dawn
To fairy isles of evening, and it seemed
In hue and form that it had been a mirror
Of all the hues and forms around it and 220
Upon it pictured by the sunny beams
Which, from the bright vibrations of the pool,
Were thrown upon the rafters and the roof
Of boughs and leaves, and on the pillared stems
Of the dark sylvan temple, and reflections 225
Of every infant flower and star of moss
And veined leaf in the azure odorous air.
And thus it lay in the Elysian calm
Of its own beauty, floating on the line
Which, like a film in purest space, divided 230
The heaven beneath the water from the heaven
Above the clouds; and every day I went
Watching its growth and wondering;
And as the day grew hot, methought I saw
A glassy vapour dancing on the pool, 235
And on it little quaint and filmy shapes.
With dizzy motion, wheel and rise and fall,
Like clouds of gnats with perfect lineaments.
…
O friend, sleep was a veil uplift from Heaven —
As if Heaven dawned upon the world of dream — 240
When darkness rose on the extinguished day
Out of the eastern wilderness.
INDIAN:
I too
Have found a moment’s paradise in sleep
Half compensate a hell of waking sorrow.
CHARLES THE FIRST
Charles the First was designed in 1818, begun towards the close of 1819, resumed in January, and finally laid aside by June, 1822. It was published in part in the “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and printed, in its present form (with the addition of some 530 lines), by Mr. W.M. Rossetti, 1870.
CONTENTS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
SCENE 1
SCENE 2
SCENE 3
SCENE 4
SCENE 5
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
KING CHARLES I. QUEEN HENRIETTA. LAUD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. WENTWORTH, EARL OF STRAFFORD. LORD COTTINGTON. LORD WESTON. LORD COVENTRY. WILLIAMS, BISHOP OF LINCOLN. SECRETARY LYTTELTON. JUXON. ST. JOHN. ARCHY, THE COURT FOOL. HAMPDEN. PYM. CROMWELL. CROMWELL’S DAUGHTER. SIR HARRY VANE THE YOUNGER. LEIGHTON. BASTWICK. PRYNNE. GENTLEMEN OF THE INNS OF COURT, CITIZENS, PURSUIVANTS, MARSHALSMEN, LAW STUDENTS, JUDGES, CLERK.
SCENE 1
THE MASQUE OF THE INNS OF COURT.
A PURSUIVANT:
Place, for the Marshal of the Masque!
FIRST CITIZEN:
What thinkest thou of this quaint masque which turns,
Like morning from the shadow of the night,
The night to day, and London to a place
Of peace and joy?
SECOND CITIZEN:
And Hell to Heaven. 5
Eight years are gone,
And they seem hours, since in this populous street
I trod on grass made green by summer’s rain,
For the red plague kept state within that palace
Where now that vanity reigns. In nine years more 10
The roots will be refreshed with civil blood;
And thank the mercy of insulted Heaven
That sin and wrongs wound, as an orphan’s cry,
The patience of the great Avenger’s ear.
A YOUTH:
Yet, father, ‘tis a happy sight to see, 15
Beautiful, innocent, and unforbidden
By God or man;—’tis like the bright procession
Of skiey visions in a solemn dream
From which men wake as from a Paradise,
And draw new strength to tread the thorns of life. 20
If Go
d be good, wherefore should this be evil?
And if this be not evil, dost thou not draw
Unseasonable poison from the flowers
Which bloom so rarely in this barren world?
Oh, kill these bitter thoughts which make the present 25
Dark as the future! —
…
When Avarice and Tyranny, vigilant Fear,
And open-eyed Conspiracy lie sleeping
As on Hell’s threshold; and all gentle thoughts
Waken to worship Him who giveth joys 30
With His own gift.
SECOND CITIZEN:
How young art thou in this old age of time!
How green in this gray world? Canst thou discern
The signs of seasons, yet perceive no hint
Of change in that stage-scene in which thou art 35
Not a spectator but an actor? or
Art thou a puppet moved by [enginery]?
The day that dawns in fire will die in storms,
Even though the noon be calm. My travel’s done, —
Before the whirlwind wakes I shall have found 40
My inn of lasting rest; but thou must still
Be journeying on in this inclement air.
Wrap thy old cloak about thy back;
Nor leave the broad and plain and beaten road,
Although no flowers smile on the trodden dust, 45
For the violet paths of pleasure. This Charles the First
Rose like the equinoctial sun,…
By vapours, through whose threatening ominous veil
Darting his altered influence he has gained
This height of noon — from which he must decline 50
Amid the darkness of conflicting storms,
To dank extinction and to latest night…
There goes
The apostate Strafford; he whose titles
whispered aphorisms 55
From Machiavel and Bacon: and, if Judas
Had been as brazen and as bold as he —
33-37 Canst…enginery 1870;
Canst thou not think
Of change in that low scene, in which thou art
Not a spectator but an actor?… 1824.
43-57 Wrap…bold as he 1870; omitted 1824.
FIRST CITIZEN:
That
Is the Archbishop.
SECOND CITIZEN:
Rather say the Pope:
London will be soon his Rome: he walks
As if he trod upon the heads of men: 60
He looks elate, drunken with blood and gold; —
Beside him moves the Babylonian woman
Invisibly, and with her as with his shadow,
Mitred adulterer! he is joined in sin,
Which turns Heaven’s milk of mercy to revenge. 65
THIRD CITIZEN [LIFTING UP HIS EYES]:
Good Lord! rain it down upon him!…
Amid her ladies walks the papist queen,
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Delphi Poets Series Page 123