Title:  The Daemon of the World

Author:  Percy Bysshe Shelley

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

Release Date:  November, 2003 [Etext #4654] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 21, 2002]

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THE DAEMON OF THE WORLD.

A fragment.

PART 1.

Nec tantum prodere vati,
Quantum scire licet.  Venit aetas omnis in unam
Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus. 
Lucan, Phars. v. 176.

  How wonderful is Death,
  Death and his brother Sleep! 
One pale as yonder wan and horned moon,
  With lips of lurid blue,
The other glowing like the vital morn, 5
  When throned on ocean’s wave
  It breathes over the world: 
Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!

Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton,
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres, 10
To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne
Cast that fair prey?  Must that divinest form,
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, whose azure veins
Steal like dark streams along a field of snow, 15
Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed
In light of some sublimest mind, decay? 
  Nor putrefaction’s breath
Leave aught of this pure spectacle
  But loathsomeness and ruin?—­ 20
  Spare aught but a dark theme,
On which the lightest heart might moralize? 
Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers
Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids
  To watch their own repose? 25
  Will they, when morning’s beam
  Flows through those wells of light,
Seek far from noise and day some western cave,
Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds