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,
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!
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
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
B
id 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!
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.
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!
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.
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
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?
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”.)
Percy Bysshe Shelley Page 36