Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth—
15
Its mother’s face with Heaven’s collected tears,
When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.
III
And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,
And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
20
Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day;
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.
IV
25
And nearer to the river’s trembling edge
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
30
With moonlight beams of their own watery light;
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green
As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.
V
Methought that of these visionary flowers
I made a nosegay, bound in such a way
35
That the same hues, which in their natural bowers
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,
40
That I might there present it!—Oh! to whom?
THE TWO SPIRITS: AN ALLEGORY
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!
5
Bright are the regions of the air,
And among the winds and beams
It were delight to wander there—
Night is coming!
Second Spirit.
The deathless stars are bright above;
10
If I would cross the shade of night,
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;
15
The meteors will linger round my flight,
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—
20
Night is coming!
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.
25
I see the light, and I hear the sound;
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,
30
Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound,
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
35
O’er piles of snow and chasms of ice
Mid Alpine mountains;
And that the languid storm pursuing
That wingèd shape, for ever flies
Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
40
Its aëry fountains.
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:
45
And a silver shape like his early love doth pass
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,
He finds night day.
ODE TO NAPLES2
EPODE I α
I STOOD within the City disinterred;3
And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls
Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals
5
Thrill through those roofless halls;
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
10
The isle-sustaining ocean-flood,
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;
15
But every living lineament was clear
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
20
Because the crystal silence of the air
Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.
EPODE II α
Then gentle winds arose
With many a mingled close
25
Of wild Aeolian sound, and mountain-odours keen;
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,
30
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere
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.
35
I sailed, where ever flows
Under the calm Serene
A spirit of deep emotion
From the unknown graves
Of the dead Kings of Melody.4
40
Shadowy Aornos darkened o’er the helm
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,
45
There streamed a sunbright vapour, like the standard
Of some aethereal host;
Whilst from all the coast,
Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea
50
Prophesyings which grew articulate—
They seize me—I must speak them!—be they fate!
STROPHE I
Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!
Elysian City, which to calm enchantest
55
The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even
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,
60
Which armèd Victory offers up unstained
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 Justic
e can avail,
65
Hail, hail, all hail!
STROPHE II
Thou youngest giant birth
Which from the groaning earth
Leap’st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!
Last of the Intercessors!
70
Who ’gainst the Crowned Transgressors
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
75
With hurried legions move!
Hail, hail, all hail!
ANTISTROPHE I α
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
80
To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer;
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!
85
Gaze on Oppression, till at that dread risk
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,
90
Thou shalt be great—All hail!
ANTISTROPHE II α
From Freedom’s form divine,
From Nature’s inmost shrine,
Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil;
O’er Ruin desolate,
95
O’er Falsehood’s fallen state,
Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!
And equal laws be thine,
And wingèd words let sail,
Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:
100
That wealth, surviving fate,
Be thine.—All hail!
ANTISTROPHE I β
Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling paean
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Aeaean5
105
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
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,
110
Murmuring, ‘Where is Doria?’ fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran
The viper’s6 palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
115
Art thou of all these hopes.—O hail!
ANTISTROPHE II β
Florence! beneath the sun,
Of cities fairest one,
Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation:
From eyes of quenchless hope
120
Rome tears the priestly cope,
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:—
125
As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,
So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!
EPODE I β
Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
130
Bursting their inaccessible abodes
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,
135
The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide
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
140
And lawless slaveries,—down the aëreal regions
Of the white Alps, desolating,
Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,
145
Their dull and savage lust
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 II β
Great Spirit, deepest Love!
150
Which rulest and dost move
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;
155
Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command
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!
160
Bid the Earth’s plenty kill!
Bid thy bright Heaven above,
Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned
To make it ours and thine!
165
Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill
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!
170
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,
And frowns and fears from thee,
Would not more swiftly flee
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.—
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
175
Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh, let be
This city of thy worship ever free!
AUTUMN: A DIRGE
I
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,
5
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
10
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
II
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
15
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play—
20
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.
THE WANING MOON
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,
5
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass—
TO THE MOON
&nbs
p; I
ART thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
5
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
II
Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,
That gazes on thee till in thee it pities …
DEATH
I
DEATH is here and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death—and we are death.
II
5
Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,
· · ·
III
First our pleasures die—and then
Our hopes, and then our fears—and when
10
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust—and we die too.
IV
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot—
15
Love itself would, did they not.
LIBERTY
I
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,
5
When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.
II
From a single cloud the lightening flashes,
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley: (A Modern Library E-Book) Page 94