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
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear? 920
It matters not! — for nought we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The Future must become the Past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour, 925
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained. — I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair. Victory! poor slaves! 930
[EXIT MAHMUD.]
VOICE WITHOUT:
Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death, 935
From Thule to the girdle of the world,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation’s blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream, 940
Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day!
I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant’s dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
In visions of the dawning undelight. 945
Who shall impede her flight?
Who rob her of her prey?
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! Russia’s famished eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent’s light.
Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil! 950
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!
SEMICHORUS 2:
Thou voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode 955
When desolation flashes o’er a world destroyed:
Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightn
ing,
Or to some toppling promontory proud 960
Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright’ning
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire,
When heaven and earth are light, and only light 965
In the thunder-night!
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England,
And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.
Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes, 970
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners
Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Alas! for Liberty!
If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,
Or fate, can quell the free! 975
Alas! for Virtue, when
Torments, or contumely, or the sneers
Of erring judging men
Can break the heart where it abides.
Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid, 980
Can change with its false times and tides,
Like hope and terror, —
Alas for Love!
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror 985
Before the dazzled eyes of Error,
Alas for thee! Image of the Above.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn
Through many an hostile Anarchy! 990
At length they wept aloud, and cried, ‘The Sea! the Sea!’
Through exile, persecution, and despair,
Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become
The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb
Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair: 995
But Greece was as a hermit-child,
Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman’s growth, by dreams so mild,
She knew not pain or guilt;
And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble 1000
When ye desert the free —
If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime, 1005
To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made;
Let the free possess the Paradise they claim;
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed 1010
With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!
SEMICHORUS 2:
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away —
Their dishonour a remembrance to abide! 1015
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The keys of ocean to the Islamite. —
Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled,
And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy 1020
This jubilee of unrevenged blood!
Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Darkness has dawned in the East
On the noon of time:
The death-birds descend to their feast 1025
From the hungry clime.
Let Freedom and Peace flee far
To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love’s folding-star
To the Evening land! 1030
SEMICHORUS 2:
The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset’s fire:
The weak day is dead,
But the night is not born; 1035
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright. 1040
Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day
Thou art hidden
From waves on which weary Noon 1045
Faints in her summer swoon,
Between kingless continents sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Pranked on the sapphire sea.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Through the sunset of hope, 1050
Like the shapes of a dream.
What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
Beneath Heaven’s cope,
Their shadows more clear float by —
The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky, 1055
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe
Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,
Through the walls of our prison;
And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!
CHORUS:
The world’s great age begins anew, 1060
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. 1065
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep 1070
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies. 1075
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death’s scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy 1080
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time 1085
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose 1090
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers. 1095
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past, 1100
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
NOTES.
(1) THE QUENCHLESS ASHES OF MILAN [L. 60].
Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground, but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from its ruin. See Sismondi’s “Histoire des Republiques Italiennes”, a book which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of their great ancestors.
(2) THE CHORUS [L. 197].
The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which in all probability they will supe
rsede, without considering their merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, “clothe themselves in matter”, with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the external world.
The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or loss exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatise upon a subject, concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of His nature, having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain: meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.
(3) NO HOARY PRIESTS AFTER THAT PATRIARCH [L. 245].
The Greek Patriarch, after haying been compelled to fulminate an anathema against the insurgents, was put to death by the Turks.
Fortunately the Greeks have been taught that they cannot buy security by degradation, and the Turks, though equally cruel, are less cunning than the smooth-faced tyrants of Europe. As to the anathema, his Holiness might as well have thrown his mitre at Mount Athos for any effect that it produced. The chiefs of the Greeks are almost all men of comprehension and enlightened views on religion and politics.
(4) THE FREEDMAN OF A WESTERN POET-CHIEF [L. 563].
A Greek who had been Lord Byron’s servant commands the insurgents in Attica. This Greek, Lord Byron informs me, though a poet and an enthusiastic patriot, gave him rather the idea of a timid and unenterprising person. It appears that circumstances make men what they are, and that we all contain the germ of a degree of degradation or of greatness whose connection with our character is determined by events.
(5) THE GREEKS EXPECT A SAVIOUR FROM THE WEST [L. 598].
It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a seaport near Lacedaemon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.
(6) THE SOUND AS OF THE ASSAULT OF AN IMPERIAL CITY [LL. 814-15].
Percy Bysshe Shelley Page 122