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Stanza, written at bracknell.
Stanzas.—April, 1814.
To Harriet.
To Mary WOLLSTONECRAFT Godwin.
To —. ‘Yet look on me’.
Mutability.
On death.
A summer evening churchyard.
To —. ‘Oh! There are spirits of the air’.
To Wordsworth.
Lines: ‘The cold earth slept below’
Note on the early poems, by Mrs. Shelley.
Poems written in 1816:
The sunset.
Hymn to intellectual beauty.
Mont Blanc.
Cancelled passage of Mont Blanc.
Fragment: Home.
Fragment of A ghost story.
Note on poems of 1816, by Mrs. Shelley.
Poems written in 1817:
Marianne’s dream.
To Constantia, singing.
The same: Stanzas 1 and 2.
To Constantia.
Fragment: To one singing.
A fragment: To music.
Another fragment to music.
‘Mighty eagle’.
To the lord Chancellor.
To William Shelley.
From the original draft of the poem to William Shelley.
On Fanny Godwin.
Lines: ‘That time is dead for ever’.
Death.
Otho.
Fragments supposed to be parts of Otho.
‘O that A chariot of cloud were mine’.
Fragments:
To A friend released
from prison.
Satan broken loose.
IGNICULUS DESIDERII.
Amor AETERNUS.
Thoughts come and
go in solitude.
A hate-song.
Lines to A critic.
Ozymandias.
Note on poems of 1817, by Mrs. Shelley.
Poems written in 1818.
To the Nile.
Passage of the apennines.
The past.
To Mary —.
On A faded violet.
Lines written among the Euganean hills.
Scene from “Tasso”.
Song for “Tasso”.
Invocation to misery.
Stanzas written in dejection, near Naples.
The woodman and the nightingale.
Marenghi.
Sonnet: ‘Lift not the painted veil’.
Fragments:
To Byron.
Apostrophe to silence.
The lake’s
margin.
‘My head is
wild with weeping’.
The vine-shroud.
Note on poems of 1818, by Mrs. Shelley.
Poems written in 1819:
Lines written during the Castlereagh administration.
Song to the men of England.
SIMILES for two political characters of 1819.
Fragment: To the people of England.
Fragment: ‘What men gain fairly’.
A new national anthem.
Sonnet: England in 1819.
An Ode written October, 1819.
Cancelled stanza.
Ode to heaven.
Ode to the west wind.
An exhortation.
The Indian serenade.
Cancelled passage.
To Sophia [miss Stacey].
To William Shelley, 1.
To William Shelley, 2.
To Mary Shelley, 1.
To Mary Shelley, 2.
On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci.
Love’s philosophy.
Fragment: ‘Follow to the deep wood’s weeds’.
The birth of pleasure.
Fragments:
Love the universe
to-day.
‘A gentle story
of two lovers young’.
Love’s tender
atmosphere.
Wedded souls.
‘Is it that
in some brighter sphere’.
Sufficient unto
the day.
‘Ye gentle
visitations of calm thought’.
Music and sweet
poetry.
The sepulchre of
memory.
‘When A lover
clasps his fairest’.
‘Wake the
serpent not’.
Rain.
A tale untold.
To Italy.
Wine of the
fairies.
A Roman’s chamber.
Rome and nature.
Variation of the song of the moon.
Cancelled stanza of the mask of anarchy.
Note by Mrs. Shelley.
Poems written in 1820:
The sensitive plant.
Cancelled passage.
A vision of the sea.
The cloud.
To A skylark.
Ode to liberty.
Cancelled passage.
To —. ‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’.
Arethusa.
Song of Proserpine.
Hymn of Apollo.
Hymn of Pan.
The question.
The two spirits. An allegory.
Ode to Naples.
Autumn: A dirge.
The waning moon.
To the moon.
Death.
Liberty.
Summer and winter.
The tower of famine.
An allegory.
The world’s wanderers.
Sonnet: ‘Ye hasten to the grave!’.
Lines to A reviewer.
Fragment of A satire on satire.
Good-night.
Buona notte.
Orpheus.
Fiordispina.
Time long past.
Fragments:
The deserts of
dim sleep.
‘The viewless
and invisible consequence’.
A serpent-face.
Death in life.
‘Such hope,
as is the sick despair of
good’.
‘Alas this
is not what I thought life
was’.
Milton’s spirit.
‘Unrisen splendour
of the brightest sun’.
Pater OMNIPOTENS.
To the mind
of man.
Note on poems of 1820, by Mrs Shelley.
Poems written in 1821:
Dirge for the year.
To night.
Time.
Lines: ‘Far, far away’.
From the Arabic: An imitation.
To Emilia Viviani.
The fugitives.
To —. ‘Music, when soft voices die’.
Song: ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou’.
Mutability.
Lines written on Hearing the news of the death of Napoleon.
Sonnet: Political greatness.
The aziola.
A lament.
Remembrance.
To Edward Williams.
To —. ‘One word is too often profaned’.
To —. ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’.
A bridal song.
Epithalamium.
Another version of the same.
Love, hope, desire, and fear.
Fragments written for “Hellas”.
Fragment: ‘I would not be A king’.
Ginevra.
Evening: Ponte Al Mare, Pisa.
The boat on the Serchio.
Music.
Sonnet to Byron.
Fragment on Keats.
Fragment: ‘Methought I was A billow in the crowd’.
To-morrow.
Stanza: ‘If I walk in autumn’s even’.
Fragments:
A wanderer.
Life rounded with
sleep.
‘I faint, I perish
with my love’.
The lady of
the south.
Zephyrus the awakener.
Rain.
‘When soft
winds and sunny skies’.
‘And that
I walk thus proudly crowned’.
‘The rude
wind is singing’.
‘Great spirit’.
‘O thou immortal
deity’.
The false laurel
and the true.
May the limner.
Beauty’s Halo.
‘The death
knell is ringing’.
‘I stood upon
A heaven-cleaving turret’.
Note on poems of 1821, by Mrs. Shelley.
Poems written in 1822:
The Zucca.
The magnetic lady to her patient.
Lines: ‘When the lamp is shattered’.
To Jane: The invitation.
To Jane: The recollection.
The pine forest of the Cascine near Pisa.
With A guitar, to Jane.
To Jane: ‘The keen stars were twinkling’.
A dirge.
Lines written in the bay of Lerici.
Lines: ‘We meet not as we parted’.
The isle.
Fragment: To the moon.
Epitaph.
Note on poems of 1822, by Mrs. Shelley.
***
[The poems which follow appeared, with a few exceptions, either in the volumes published from time to time by Shelley himself, or in the “Posthumous Poems” of 1824, or in the “Poetical Works” of 1839, of which a second and enlarged edition was published by Mrs. Shelley in the same year. A few made their first appearance in some fugitive publication—such as Leigh Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”—and were subsequently incorporated in the collective editions. In every case the editio princeps and (where this is possible) the exact date of composition are indicated below the title.]
***
[Composed March, 1814. Published in Hogg’s “Life of Shelley”, 1858.]
Thy dewy looks sink in my breast;
Thy gentle words stir poison there;
Thou hast disturbed the only rest
That was the portion of despair!
Subdued to Duty’s hard control,
5
I could have borne my wayward lot:
The chains that bind this ruined soul
Had cankered then—but crushed it not.
***
[Composed at Bracknell, April, 1814. Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon,
Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights
of heaven.
Pause not! The time is past! Every voice
cries, Away! 5
Tempt not with one last tear thy friend’s ungentle
mood:
Thy lover’s eye, so glazed and cold, dares not
entreat thy stay:
Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.
Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;
10
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.
The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around
thine head:
The blooms of dewy spring shall gleam beneath thy
feet:
But thy soul or this world must fade in the frost
that binds the dead, 15
Ere midnight’s frown and morning’s smile,
ere thou and peace may meet.
The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose,
For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in
the deep:
Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows;
Whatever moves, or toils, or grieves, hath its appointed
sleep. 20
Thou in the grave shalt rest—yet till the
phantoms flee
Which that house and heath and garden made dear to
thee erewhile,
Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings
are not free
From the music of two voices and the light of one
sweet smile.
Note:
6 tear 1816; glance 1839.
***
[Composed May, 1814. Published (from the Esdaile manuscript) by Dowden, “Life of Shelley”, 1887.]
Thy look of love has power to calm
The stormiest passion of my soul;
Thy gentle words are drops of balm
In life’s too bitter bowl;
No grief is mine, but that alone
5
These choicest blessings I have known.
Harriet! if all who long to live
In the warm sunshine of thine eye,
That price beyond all pain must give,—
Beneath thy scorn to die;
10
Then hear thy chosen own too late
His heart most worthy of thy hate.
Be thou, then, one among mankind
Whose heart is harder not for state,
Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind,
15
Amid a world of hate;
And by a slight endurance seal
A fellow-being’s lasting weal.
For pale with anguish is his cheek,
His breath comes fast, his eyes are dim,
20
Thy name is struggling ere he speak,
Weak is each trembling limb;
In mercy let him not endure
The misery of a fatal cure.
Oh, trust for once no erring guide!
25
Bid the remorseless feeling flee;
’Tis malice, ’tis revenge, ’tis
pride,
’Tis anything but thee;
Oh, deign a nobler pride to prove,
And pity if thou canst not love.
30
***
[Composed June, 1814. Published in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;
Yes, I was firm—thus wert not thou;—
My baffled looks did fear yet dread
To meet thy looks—I could not know
How anxiously they sought to shine
5
With soothing pity upon mine.
2.
To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage
Which preys upon itself alone;
To curse the life which is the cage
Of fettered grief that dares not groan,
10
Hiding from many a careless eye
The scorned load of agony.
3.
Whilst thou alone, then not regarded,
The ... thou alone should be,
To spend years thus, and be rewarded,
15
As thou, sweet love, requited me
When none were near—Oh! I did wake
From torture for that moment’s sake.
4.
Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew
20
On flowers half dead;—thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw
Their soft persuasion on my brain,
Charming away its dream of pain.
5.
We are not happy, sweet! our state
25
Is strange and full of doubt and fear;
More need of words that ills abate;—
Reserve or censure come not near
Our sacred friendship, lest there be
No solace left for thee and me.
30
6.
Gentle and good and mild thou art,
Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart
Away from me, or stoop to wear
The mask of scorn, although it be
35
To hide the love thou feel’st for me.
NOTES: 2 wert 1839; did 1824. 3 fear 1824, 1839; yearn cj. Rossetti. 23 Their 1839; thy 1824. 30 thee]thou 1824, 1839. 32 can I 1839; I can 1824. 36 feel’st 1839; feel 1824.
***
TO —.
[Published in “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition. See Editor’s Note.]
Yet look on me—take not thine eyes away,
Which feed upon the love within mine own,
Which is indeed but the reflected ray
Of thine own beauty from my spirit thrown.
Yet speak to me—thy voice is as the tone
5
Of my heart’s echo, and I think I hear
That thou yet lovest me; yet thou alone
Like one before a mirror, without care
Of aught but thine own features, imaged there;
And yet I wear out life in watching thee;
10
A toil so sweet at times, and thou indeed
Art kind when I am sick, and pity me...
***
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
5
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes
the day; 10
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his
morrow; 15
Nought may endure but Mutability.
NOTES:
15 may 1816; can Lodore, chapter 49, 1835 (Mrs.
Shelley).
16 Nought may endure but 1816;
Nor aught endure save Lodore,
chapter 49, 1835 (Mrs. Shelley).
***
[For the date of composition see Editor’s Note. Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
THERE IS NO WORK, NOR DEVICE, NOR KNOWLEDGE, NOR WISDOM,
IN THE GRAVE, WHITHER THOU GOEST.—Ecclesiastes.
The pale, the cold, and the moony smile
Which the meteor beam of a starless night
Sheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,
Ere the dawning of morn’s undoubted light,
Is the flame of life so fickle and wan
That flits round our steps till their strength is
gone. 5
O man! hold thee on in courage of soul
Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way,
And the billows of cloud that around thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
10
Where Hell and Heaven shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.
This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel,
And the coming of death is a fearful blow
15
To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;
When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.
The secret things of the grave are there,
Where all but this frame must surely be,
20
Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear
No longer will live to hear or to see
All that is great and all that is strange
In the boundless realm of unending change.
Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?
25
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?
Who painteth the shadows that are beneath
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?
Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be
With the fears and the love for that which we see?
30
***
LECHLADE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE.
[Composed September, 1815. Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere
Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,
5
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
They breathe their spells towards the departing day,
Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
Responding to the charm with its own mystery.
10
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
Thou too, aereal Pile! whose pinnacles
Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,
15
Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
Around whose lessening and invisible height
Gather among the stars the clouds of night.
The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:
And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,
20
Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,
And mingling with the still night and mute sky
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.
Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild
25
And terrorless as this serenest night:
Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human
sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.
30
***
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816. See Editor’s Note.]
DAKRTSI DIOISO POTMON ’APOTMON.
Oh! there are spirits of the air,
And genii of the evening breeze,
And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair
As star-beams among twilight trees:—
Such lovely ministers to meet
5
Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.
With mountain winds, and babbling springs,
And moonlight seas, that are the voice
Of these inexplicable things,
Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice
10
When they did answer thee; but they
Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.
And thou hast sought in starry eyes
Beams that were never meant for thine,
Another’s wealth:—tame sacrifice
To a fond faith! still dost thou pine?
15
Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,
Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?
Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope
On the false earth’s inconstancy?
20
Did thine own mind afford no scope
Of love, or moving thoughts to thee?
That natural scenes or human smiles
Could steal the power to wind thee in their wiles?
Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled
25
Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;
The glory of the moon is dead;
Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed;
Thine own soul still is true to thee,
But changed to a foul fiend through misery.
30
This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever
Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,
Dream not to chase;—the mad endeavour
Would scourge thee to severer pangs.
Be as thou art. Thy settled fate,
Dark as it is, all change would aggravate.
35
NOTES: 1 of 1816; in 1839. 8 moonlight 1816; mountain 1839.
***
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first
glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
5
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
10
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
***
[Published with “Alastor”, 1816.]
I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer
5
A frail and bloody pomp which Time has swept
In fragments towards Oblivion. Massacre,
For this I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,
And stifled thee, their minister. I know
10
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.
***
[Published in Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823, where it is headed “November, 1815”. Reprinted in the “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. See Editor’s Note.]
1.
The cold earth slept below,
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around, with a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow,
The breath of night like death did flow
5
Beneath the sinking moon.
2.
The wintry hedge was black,
The green grass was not seen,
The birds did rest on the bare thorn’s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track,
10
Had bound their folds o’er many a crack
Which the frost had made between.
3.
Thine eyes glowed in the glare
Of the moon’s dying light;
As a fen-fire’s beam on a sluggish stream
15
Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there,
And it yellowed the strings of thy raven hair,
That shook in the wind of night.
4.
The moon made thy lips pale, beloved—
The wind made thy bosom chill—
20
The night did shed on thy dear head
Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie
Where the bitter breath of the naked sky
Might visit thee at will.
NOTE:
17 raven 1823; tangled 1824.
***
The remainder of Shelley’s Poems will be arranged in the order in which they were written. Of course, mistakes will occur in placing some of the shorter ones; for, as I have said, many of these were thrown aside, and I never saw them till I had the misery of looking over his writings after the hand that traced them was dust; and some were in the hands of others, and I never saw them till now. The subjects of the poems are often to me an unerring guide; but on other occasions I can only guess, by finding them in the pages of the same manuscript book that contains poems with the date of whose composition I am fully conversant. In the present arrangement all his poetical translations will be placed together at the end.
The loss of his early papers prevents my being able to give any of the poetry of his boyhood. Of the few I give as “Early Poems”, the greater part were published with “Alastor”; some of them were written previously, some at the same period. The poem beginning ’Oh, there are spirits in the air’ was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom he never knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through his writings, and accounts he heard of him from some who knew him well. He regarded his change of opinions as rather an act of will than conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth. The summer evening that suggested to him the poem written in the churchyard of Lechlade occurred during his voyage up the Thames in 1815. He had been advised by a physician to live as much as possible in the open air; and a fortnight of a bright warm July was spent in tracing the Thames to its source. He never spent a season more tranquilly than the summer of 1815. He had just recovered from a severe pulmonary attack; the weather was warm and pleasant. He lived near Windsor Forest; and his life was spent under its shades or on the water, meditating subjects for verse. Hitherto, he had chiefly aimed at extending his political doctrines, and attempted so to do by appeals in prose essays to the people, exhorting them to claim their rights; but he had now begun to feel that the time for action was not ripe in England, and that the pen was the only instrument wherewith to prepare the way for better things.
In the scanty journals kept during those years I find a record of the books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814 and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and Diogenes Laertius. In Latin, Petronius, Suetonius, some of the works of Cicero, a large proportion of those of Seneca and Livy. In English, Milton’s poems, Wordsworth’s “Excursion”, Southey’s “Madoc” and “Thalaba”, Locke “On the Human Understanding”, Bacon’s “Novum Organum”. In Italian, Ariosto, Tasso, and Alfieri. In French, the “Reveries d’un Solitaire” of Rousseau. To these may be added several modern books of travel. He read few novels.
***
THE SUNSET.
[Written at Bishopsgate, 1816 (spring). Published in full in the “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Lines 9-20, and 28-42, appeared in Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823, under the titles, respectively, of “Sunset. From an Unpublished Poem”, And “Grief. A Fragment".]
There late was One within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate cloud
That fades amid the blue noon’s burning sky,
Genius and death contended. None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath
5
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the Lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o’er,
10
But to the west was open to the sky.
There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers
And the old dandelion’s hoary beard,
15
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods—and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead.—
20
‘Is it not strange, Isabel,’ said the
youth,
’I never saw the sun? We will walk here
To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’
That night the youth and lady mingled lay
In love and sleep—but when the morning
came 25
The lady found her lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on—in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles,
30
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,
If madness ’tis to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale
Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts
35
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;—
Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan:
Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,
Her lips and cheeks were like things dead—so
pale;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins
40
And weak articulations might be seen
Day’s ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead
self
Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,
Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!
’Inheritor of more than earth can give,
45
Passionless calm and silence unreproved,
Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were—Peace!’
50
This was the only moan she ever made.
NOTES: 4 death 1839; youth 1824. 22 sun? We will walk 1824; sunrise? We will wake cj. Forman. 37 Her eyes...wan Hunt, 1823; omitted 1824, 1839. 38 worn 1824; torn 1839.
***
[Composed, probably, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. Published in Hunt’s “Examiner”, January 19, 1817, and with “Rosalind and Helen”, 1819.]
1.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,—
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
Like memory of music fled,—
10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
2.
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,—where art thou
gone? 15
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
20
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,—why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
3.
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
25
To sage or poet these responses given—
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven.
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells—whose uttered charm might
not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
30
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains
driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
35
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.
4.
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
40
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his
heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes—
Thou—that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!
45
Depart not as thy shadow came
Depart not—lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
5.
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
50
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is
fed;
Page 15
I was not heard—I saw them not—
When musing deeply on the lot
55
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,—
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!
60
6.
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned
bowers 65
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night—
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
70
That thou—O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.
7.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past—there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
75
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
80
Its calm—to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
NOTES: 2 among 1819; amongst 1817. 14 dost 1819; doth 1817. 21 fear and dream 1819; care and pain Boscombe manuscript. 37-48 omitted Boscombe manuscript. 44 art 1817; are 1819. 76 or 1819; nor 1839.
***
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.
[Composed in Switzerland, July, 1816 (see date below). Printed at the end of the “History of a Six Weeks’ Tour” published by Shelley in 1817, and reprinted with “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Amongst the Boscombe manuscripts is a draft of this Ode, mainly in pencil, which has been collated by Dr. Garnett.]
1.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now
reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
5
Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
10
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
2.
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—
Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,
15
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest;—thou
dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
20
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
To hear—an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep
25
Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;—
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion,
30
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
35
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
40
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
45
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!
3.
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is
slumber, 50
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
55
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
60
Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene—
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
65
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
4.
The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
85
Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower;—the
bound 90
With which from that detested trance they leap;
The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
And that of him and all that his may be;
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.
95
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And THIS, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
100
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far
fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
105
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
110
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
115
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known. Below, vast caves
120
Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves,
125
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.
5.
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high—the power
is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
130
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them:—Winds
contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
135
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
140
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
July 23, 1816.
NOTES: 15 cloud-shadows]cloud shadows 1817;
cloud, shadows 1824; clouds,
shadows 1839.
20 Thy 1824; The 1839. 53 unfurled]upfurled
cj. James Thomson (’B.V.’). 56
Spread 1824; Speed 1839. 69 tracks her there 1824;
watches her Boscombe manuscript. 79 But for such
1824; In such a Boscombe manuscript. 108 boundaries
of the sky]boundary of the skies cj. Rossetti
(cf. lines 102, 106).
121 torrents’]torrent’s 1817, 1824,
1839.
***
[Published by Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
There is a voice, not understood by all,
Sent from these desert-caves. It is the roar
Of the rent ice-cliff which the sunbeams call,
Plunging into the vale—it is the blast
Descending on the pines—the torrents pour...
5
***
[Published by Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Dear home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,
The least of which wronged Memory ever makes
Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.
***
[Published by Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
A shovel of his ashes took
From the hearth’s obscurest nook,
Muttering mysteries as she went.
Helen and Henry knew that Granny
Was as much afraid of Ghosts as any,
5
And so they followed hard—
But Helen clung to her brother’s arm,
And her own spasm made her shake.
***
Shelley wrote little during this year. The poem entitled “The Sunset” was written in the spring of the year, while still residing at Bishopsgate. He spent the summer on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. The “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” was conceived during his voyage round the lake with Lord Byron. He occupied himself during this voyage by reading the “Nouvelle Heloise” for the first time. The reading it on the very spot where the scenes are laid added to the interest; and he was at once surprised and charmed by the passionate eloquence and earnest enthralling interest that pervade this work. There was something in the character of Saint-Preux, in his abnegation of self, and in the worship he paid to Love, that coincided with Shelley’s own disposition; and, though differing in many of the views and shocked by others, yet the effect of the whole was fascinating and delightful.
“Mont Blanc” was inspired by a view of that mountain and its surrounding peaks and valleys, as he lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Valley of Chamouni. Shelley makes the following mention of this poem in his publication of the “History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, and Letters from Switzerland”: ’The poem entitled “Mont Blanc” is written by the author of the two letters from Chamouni and Vevai. It was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang.’
This was an eventful year, and less time was given to study than usual. In the list of his reading I find, in Greek, Theocritus, the “Prometheus” of Aeschylus, several of Plutarch’s “Lives”, and the works of Lucian. In Latin, Lucretius, Pliny’s “Letters”, the “Annals” and “Germany” of Tacitus. In French, the “History of the French Revolution” by Lacretelle. He read for the first time, this year, Montaigne’s “Essays”, and regarded them ever after as one of the most delightful and instructive books in the world. The list is scanty in English works: Locke’s “Essay”, “Political Justice”, and Coleridge’s “Lay Sermon”, form nearly the whole. It was his frequent habit to read aloud to me in the evening; in this way we read, this year, the New Testament, “Paradise Lost”, Spenser’s “Faery Queen”, and “Don Quixote”.
***
MARIANNE’S DREAM.
[Composed at Marlow, 1817. Published in Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1819, and reprinted in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
A pale Dream came to a Lady fair,
And said, A boon, a boon, I pray!
I know the secrets of the air,
And things are lost in the glare of day,
Which I can make the sleeping see,
5
If they will put their trust in me.
2.
And thou shalt know of things unknown,
If thou wilt let me rest between
The veiny lids, whose fringe is thrown
Over thine eyes so dark and sheen:
10
And half in hope, and half in fright,
The Lady closed her eyes so bright.
3.
At first all deadly shapes were driven
Tumultuously across her sleep,
And o’er the vast cope of bending heaven
15
All ghastly-visaged clouds did sweep;
And the Lady ever looked to spy
If the golden sun shone forth on high.
4.
And as towards the east she turned,
She saw aloft in the morning air,
20
Which now with hues of sunrise burned,
A great black Anchor rising there;
And wherever the Lady turned her eyes,
It hung before her in the skies.
5.
The sky was blue as the summer sea,
25
The depths were cloudless overhead,
The air was calm as it could be,
There was no sight or sound of dread,
But that black Anchor floating still
Over the piny eastern hill.
30
6.
The Lady grew sick with a weight of fear
To see that Anchor ever hanging,
And veiled her eyes; she then did hear
The sound as of a dim low clanging,
And looked abroad if she might know
35
Was it aught else, or but the flow
Of the blood in her own veins, to and fro.
7.
There was a mist in the sunless air,
Which shook as it were with an earthquake’s
shock,
But the very weeds that blossomed there
40
Were moveless, and each mighty rock
Stood on its basis steadfastly;
The Anchor was seen no more on high.
8.
But piled around, with summits hid
In lines of cloud at intervals,
45
Stood many a mountain pyramid
Among whose everlasting walls
Two mighty cities shone, and ever
Through the red mist their domes did quiver.
9.
On two dread mountains, from whose crest,
50
Might seem, the eagle, for her brood,
Would ne’er have hung her dizzy nest,
Those tower-encircled cities stood.
A vision strange such towers to see,
Sculptured and wrought so gorgeously,
55
Where human art could never be.
10.
And columns framed of marble white,
And giant fanes, dome over dome
Piled, and triumphant gates, all bright
With workmanship, which could not come
60
From touch of mortal instrument,
Shot o’er the vales, or lustre lent
From its own shapes magnificent.
11.
But still the Lady heard that clang
Filling the wide air far away;
65
And still the mist whose light did hang
Among the mountains shook alway,
So that the Lady’s heart beat fast,
As half in joy, and half aghast,
On those high domes her look she cast.
70
12.
Sudden, from out that city sprung
A light that made the earth grow red;
Two flames that each with quivering tongue
Licked its high domes, and overhead
Among those mighty towers and fanes
75
Dropped fire, as a volcano rains
Its sulphurous ruin on the plains.
13.
And hark! a rush as if the deep
Had burst its bonds; she looked behind
And saw over the western steep
80
A raging flood descend, and wind
Through that wide vale; she felt no fear,
But said within herself, ’Tis clear
These towers are Nature’s own, and she
To save them has sent forth the sea.
85
14.
And now those raging billows came
Where that fair Lady sate, and she
Was borne towards the showering flame
By the wild waves heaped tumultuously.
And, on a little plank, the flow
90
Of the whirlpool bore her to and fro.
15.
The flames were fiercely vomited
From every tower and every dome,
And dreary light did widely shed
O’er that vast flood’s suspended foam,
95
Beneath the smoke which hung its night
On the stained cope of heaven’s light.
16.
The plank whereon that Lady sate
Was driven through the chasms, about and about,
Between the peaks so desolate
100
Of the drowning mountains, in and out,
As the thistle-beard on a whirlwind sails—
While the flood was filling those hollow vales.
17.
At last her plank an eddy crossed,
And bore her to the city’s wall,
105
Which now the flood had reached almost;
It might the stoutest heart appal
To hear the fire roar and hiss
Through the domes of those mighty palaces.
18.
The eddy whirled her round and round
110
Before a gorgeous gate, which stood
Piercing the clouds of smoke which bound
Its aery arch with light like blood;
She looked on that gate of marble clear,
With wonder that extinguished fear.
115
19.
For it was filled with sculptures rarest,
Of forms most beautiful and strange,
Like nothing human, but the fairest
Of winged shapes, whose legions range
Throughout the sleep of those that are,
120
Like this same Lady, good and fair.
20.
And as she looked, still lovelier grew
Those marble forms;—the sculptor sure
Was a strong spirit, and the hue
Of his own mind did there endure
125
After the touch, whose power had braided
Such grace, was in some sad change faded.
21.
She looked, the flames were dim, the flood
Grew tranquil as a woodland river
Winding through hills in solitude;
130
Those marble shapes then seemed to quiver,
And their fair limbs to float in motion,
Like weeds unfolding in the ocean.
22.
And their lips moved; one seemed to speak,
When suddenly the mountains cracked,
135
And through the chasm the flood did break
With an earth-uplifting cataract:
The statues gave a joyous scream,
And on its wings the pale thin Dream
Lifted the Lady from the stream.
140
23.
The dizzy flight of that phantom pale
Waked the fair Lady from her sleep,
And she arose, while from the veil
Of her dark eyes the Dream did creep,
And she walked about as one who knew
145
That sleep has sights as clear and true
As any waking eyes can view.
NOTES: 18 golden 1819; gold 1824, 1839. 28 or 1824; nor 1839. 62 or]a cj. Rossetti. 63 its]their cj. Rossetti. 92 flames cj. Rossetti; waves 1819, 1824, 1839. 101 mountains 1819; mountain 1824, 1839. 106 flood]flames cj. James Thomson (’B.V.’). 120 that 1819, 1824; who 1839. 135 mountains 1819; mountain 1824, 1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian is a chaotic first draft, from which Mr. Locock ["Examination”, etc., 1903, pages 60-62] has, with patient ingenuity, disengaged a first and a second stanza consistent with the metrical scheme of stanzas 3 and 4. The two stanzas thus recovered are printed here immediately below the poem as edited by Mrs. Shelley. It need hardly be added that Mr. Locock’s restored version cannot, any more than Mrs. Shelley’s obviously imperfect one, be regarded in the light of a final recension.]
1.
Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die,
Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia,
turn!
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,
Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which
burn
Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;
5
Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour, it
is yet,
And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet.
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!
2.
A breathless awe, like the swift change
10
Unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers,
Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,
Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers.
The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven
By the enchantment of thy strain,
15
And on my shoulders wings are woven,
To follow its sublime career
Beyond the mighty moons that wane
Upon the verge of Nature’s utmost sphere,
Till the world’s shadowy walls are past and
disappear. 20
3.
Her voice is hovering o’er my soul—it
lingers
O’ershadowing it with soft and lulling wings,
The blood and life within those snowy fingers
Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings.
My brain is wild, my breath comes quick—
25
The blood is listening in my frame,
And thronging shadows, fast and thick,
Fall on my overflowing eyes;
My heart is quivering like a flame;
As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies,
30
I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies.
4.
I have no life, Constantia, now, but thee,
Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song
Flows on, and fills all things with melody.—
Now is thy voice a tempest swift and strong,
35
On which, like one in trance upborne,
Secure o’er rocks and waves I sweep,
Rejoicing like a cloud of morn.
Now ’tis the breath of summer night,
Which when the starry waters sleep,
Round western isles, with incense-blossoms bright,
40
Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.
As restored by Mr. C.D. Locock.
1.
Cease, cease—for such wild lessons madmen
learn
Thus to be lost, and thus to sink and die
Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia
turn
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie
Even though the sounds its voice that were
5
Between [thy] lips are laid to sleep:
Within thy breath, and on thy hair
Like odour, it is [lingering] yet
And from thy touch like fire doth leap—
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet—
10
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed but not forget.
2.
[A deep and] breathless awe like the swift change
Of dreams unseen but felt in youthful slumbers
Wild sweet yet incommunicably strange
Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers...
15
***
TO CONSTANTIA. [Dated 1817 by Mrs. Shelley, and printed by her in the “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. A copy exists amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 46.]
1.
The rose that drinks the fountain dew
In the pleasant air of noon,
Grows pale and blue with altered hue—
In the gaze of the nightly moon;
For the planet of frost, so cold and bright,
5
Makes it wan with her borrowed light.
2.
Such is my heart—roses are fair,
And that at best a withered blossom;
But thy false care did idly wear
Its withered leaves in a faithless bosom;
10
And fed with love, like air and dew,
Its growth—
NOTES: 1 The rose]The red Rose B. 2 pleasant]fragrant B. 6 her omitted B.
***
[Dated 1817 by Mrs. Shelley, and published in the “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. The manuscript original, by which Mr. Locock has revised and (by one line) enlarged the text, is amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. The metre, as Mr. Locock ("Examination”, etc., 1903, page 63) points out, is terza rima.]
My spirit like a charmed bark doth swim
Upon the liquid waves of thy sweet singing,
Far far away into the regions dim
Of rapture—as a boat, with swift sails
winging
Its way adown some many-winding river,
5
Speeds through dark forests o’er the waters
swinging...
NOTES: 3 Far far away B.; Far away 1839. 6 Speeds...swinging B.; omitted 1839.
***
[Published in “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. Dated 1817 (Mrs. Shelley).]
Silver key of the fountain of tears,
Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild;
Softest grave of a thousand fears,
Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child,
Is laid asleep in flowers.
5
***
[Published in “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. Dated 1817 (Mrs. Shelley).]
No, Music, thou art not the ‘food of Love.’
Unless Love feeds upon its own sweet self,
Till it becomes all Music murmurs of.
***
‘MIGHTY EAGLE’.
SUPPOSED TO BE ADDRESSED TO WILLIAM GODWIN.
[Published in 1882 ("Poetical Works of P. B. S.”) by Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B., by whom it is dated 1817.]
Mighty eagle! thou that soarest
O’er the misty mountain forest,
And amid the light of morning
Like a cloud of glory hiest,
And when night descends defiest
5
The embattled tempests’ warning!
***
[Published in part (5-9, 14) by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition (without title); in full 2nd edition (with title). Four transcripts in Mrs. Shelley’s hand are extant: two—Leigh Hunt’s and Ch. Cowden Clarke’s—described by Forman, and two belonging to Mr. C.W. Frederickson of Brooklyn, described by Woodberry ["Poetical Works”, Centenary Edition, 3 193-6]. One of the latter (here referred to as Fa) is corrected in Shelley’s autograph. A much-corrected draft in Shelley’s hand is in the Harvard manuscript book.]
1.
Thy country’s curse is on thee, darkest crest
Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm
Which rends our Mother’s bosom—Priestly
Pest!
Masked Resurrection of a buried Form!
2.
Thy country’s curse is on thee! Justice
sold, 5
Truth trampled, Nature’s landmarks overthrown,
And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,
Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction’s throne.
3.
And whilst that sure slow Angel which aye stands
Watching the beck of Mutability
10
Delays to execute her high commands,
And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee,
4.
Oh, let a father’s curse be on thy soul,
And let a daughter’s hope be on thy tomb;
Be both, on thy gray head, a leaden cowl
15
To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom.
5.
I curse thee by a parent’s outraged love,
By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,
By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed;
20
6.
By those infantine smiles of happy light,
Which were a fire within a stranger’s hearth,
Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night
Hiding the promise of a lovely birth:
7.
By those unpractised accents of young speech,
25
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teach—
THOU strike the lyre of mind!—oh, grief
and shame!
8.
By all the happy see in children’s growth—
That undeveloped flower of budding years—
30
Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,
Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears-
9.
By all the days, under an hireling’s care,
Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,—
O wretched ye if ever any were,—
35
Sadder than orphans, yet not fatherless!
10.
By the false cant which on their innocent lips
Must hang like poison on an opening bloom,
By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse
Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb—
40
11.
By thy most impious Hell, and all its terror;
By all the grief, the madness, and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be their error—
That sand on which thy crumbling power is built—
12.
By thy complicity with lust and hate—
45
Thy thirst for tears—thy hunger after gold—
The ready frauds which ever on thee wait—
The servile arts in which thou hast grown old—
13.
By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile—
By all the arts and snares of thy black den,
50
And—for thou canst outweep the crocodile—
By thy false tears—those millstones braining
men—
14.
By all the hate which checks a father’s love—
By all the scorn which kills a father’s care—
By those most impious hands which dared remove
55
Nature’s high bounds—by thee—and
by despair—
15.
Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,
And cry, ’My children are no longer mine—
The blood within those veins may be mine own,
But—Tyrant—their polluted souls
are thine;— 60
16.
I curse thee—though I hate thee not.—O
slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming Hell
Of which thou art a daemon, on thy grave
This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well!
NOTES: 9 Angel which aye cancelled by Shelley
for Fate which ever Fa. 24 promise of a 1839,
2nd edition; promises of 1839, 1st edition. 27
lore]love Fa. 32 and saddest]the saddest Fa.
36 yet not fatherless! cancelled by Shelley for
why not fatherless? Fa. 41-44 By...built
‘crossed by Shelley and marked dele by Mrs. Shelley’
(Woodberry)
Fa.
50 arts and snares 1839, 1st edition;
snares and arts Harvard Coll.
manuscript;
snares and nets Fa.;
acts and snares 1839, 2nd
edition.
59 those]their Fa.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley (1, 5, 6), “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition; in full, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition. A transcript is extant in Mrs. Shelley’s hand.]
1.
The billows on the beach are leaping around it,
The bark is weak and frail,
The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it
Darkly strew the gale.
Come with me, thou delightful child,
Come with me, though the wave is wild,
5
And the winds are loose, we must not stay,
Or the slaves of the law may rend thee away.
2.
They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
10
They have withered the smile and dried the tear
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly prime,
And they will curse my name and thee
15
Because we fearless are and free.
3.
Come thou, beloved as thou art;
Another sleepeth still
Near thy sweet mother’s anxious heart,
Which thou with joy shalt fill,
20
With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,
And which in distant lands will be
The dearest playmate unto thee.
4.
Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
25
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river,
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
30
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks on the surge of eternity.
5.
Rest, rest, and shriek not, thou gentle child!
The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?—
35
There, sit between us two, thou dearest—
Me and thy mother—well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves
40
Who hunt us o’er these sheltering waves.
6.
This hour will in thy memory
Be a dream of days forgotten long.
We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,
Or Greece, the Mother of the free;
45
And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon those heroes old
In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame
Of Grecian lore, that by such name
50
A patriot’s birthright thou mayst claim!
NOTES: 1 on the beach omitted 1839, 1st edition.
8 of the law 1839, 1st edition; of law 1839, 2nd
edition. 14 prime transcript; time editions 1839.
16 fearless are editions 1839; are fearless transcript.
20 shalt transcript; wilt editions 1839. 25-32
Fear...eternity omitted, transcript.
See
“Rosalind and Helen”, lines 894-901.
33 and transcript; omitted editions 1839. 41
us transcript, 1839, 1st edition; thee 1839, 2nd edition.
42 will in transcript, 1839, 2nd edition;
will sometime in 1839, 1st
edition.
43 long transcript; omitted editions 1839. 48
those transcript, 1839, 1st edition; their 1839, 2nd
edition.
***
[Published in Dr. Garnett’s “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
1.
The world is now our dwelling-place;
Where’er the earth one fading trace
Of what was great and free does keep,
That is our home!...
Mild thoughts of man’s ungentle race
5
Shall our contented exile reap;
For who that in some happy place
His own free thoughts can freely chase
By woods and waves can clothe his face
In cynic smiles? Child! we shall weep.
10
2.
This lament,
The memory of thy grievous wrong
Will fade...
But genius is omnipotent
To hallow...
15
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, among the poems of 1817, in “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery—O Misery,
5
This world is all too wide for thee.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley with the date ‘November 5th, 1817,’ in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
That time is dead for ever, child!
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!
We look on the past
And stare aghast
At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,
5
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life’s dark river.
2.
The stream we gazed on then rolled by;
Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand
10
In a lone land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee
In the light of life’s dim morning.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
They die—the dead return not—Misery
Sits near an open grave and calls them over,
A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye—
They are the names of kindred, friend and lover,
Which he so feebly calls—they all are gone—
5
Fond wretch, all dead! those vacant names alone,
This most familiar scene, my pain—
These tombs—alone remain.
2.
Misery, my sweetest friend—oh, weep no
more!
Thou wilt not be consoled—I wonder not!
10
For I have seen thee from thy dwelling’s door
Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot
Was even as bright and calm, but transitory,
And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary;
This most familiar scene, my pain—
15
These tombs—alone remain.
NOTE:
5 calls editions 1839; called 1824.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
1.
Thou wert not, Cassius, and thou couldst not be,
Last of the Romans, though thy memory claim
From Brutus his own glory—and on thee
Rests the full splendour of his sacred fame:
Nor he who dared make the foul tyrant quail
5
Amid his cowering senate with thy name,
Though thou and he were great—it will avail
To thine own fame that Otho’s should not fail.
2.
’Twill wrong thee not—thou wouldst,
if thou couldst feel,
Abjure such envious fame—great Otho died
10
Like thee—he sanctified his country’s
steel,
At once the tyrant and tyrannicide,
In his own blood—a deed it was to bring
Tears from all men—though full of gentle
pride,
Such pride as from impetuous love may spring,
15
That will not be refused its offering.
NOTE:
13 bring cj. Garnett; buy 1839, 1st edition;
wring cj. Rossetti.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862,—where, however, only the fragment numbered 2 is assigned to “Otho”. Forman (1876) connects all three fragments with that projected poem.]
1.
Those whom nor power, nor lying faith, nor toil,
Nor custom, queen of many slaves, makes blind,
Have ever grieved that man should be the spoil
Of his own weakness, and with earnest mind
Fed hopes of its redemption; these recur
5
Chastened by deathful victory now, and find
Foundations in this foulest age, and stir
Me whom they cheer to be their minister.
2. Dark is the realm of grief: but human things Those may not know who cannot weep for them. 10
...
3.
Once more descend
The shadows of my soul upon mankind,
For to those hearts with which they never blend,
Thoughts are but shadows which the flashing mind
From the swift clouds which track its flight of fire,
15
Casts on the gloomy world it leaves behind.
...
***
‘O THAT A CHARIOT OF CLOUD WERE MINE’.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
O that a chariot of cloud were mine!
Of cloud which the wild tempest weaves in air,
When the moon over the ocean’s line
Is spreading the locks of her bright gray hair.
O that a chariot of cloud were mine!
5
I would sail on the waves of the billowy wind
To the mountain peak and the rocky lake,
And the...
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
For me, my friend, if not that tears did tremble
In my faint eyes, and that my heart beat fast
With feelings which make rapture pain resemble,
Yet, from thy voice that falsehood starts aghast,
I thank thee—let the tyrant keep
5
His chains and tears, yea, let him weep
With rage to see thee freshly risen,
Like strength from slumber, from the prison,
In which he vainly hoped the soul to bind
Which on the chains must prey that fetter humankind.
10
NOTE:
For the metre see Fragment: “A Gentle Story”
(A.C. Bradley.)
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
A golden-winged Angel stood
Before the Eternal Judgement-seat:
His looks were wild, and Devils’ blood
Stained his dainty hands and feet.
The Father and the Son
5
Knew that strife was now begun.
They knew that Satan had broken his chain,
And with millions of daemons in his train,
Was ranging over the world again.
Before the Angel had told his tale,
10
A sweet and a creeping sound
Like the rushing of wings was heard around;
And suddenly the lamps grew pale—
The lamps, before the Archangels seven,
That burn continually in Heaven.
15
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. This fragment is amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 63.]
To thirst and find no fill—to wail and
wander
With short unsteady steps—to pause and
ponder—
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle;
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses
5
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half-created shadow, then all the night
Sick...
NOTES: 2 unsteady B.; uneasy 1839, 1st edition. 7, 8 then...Sick B.; wanting, 1839, 1st edition.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Wealth and dominion fade into the mass
Of the great sea of human right and wrong,
When once from our possession they must pass;
But love, though misdirected, is among
The things which are immortal, and surpass
5
All that frail stuff which will be—or which
was.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,
The verse that would invest them melts away
Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day:
How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,
Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!
5
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
A hater he came and sat by a ditch,
And he took an old cracked lute;
And he sang a song which was more of a screech
’Gainst a woman that was a brute.
***
[Published by Hunt in “The Liberal”, No. 3, 1823. Reprinted in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, where it is dated December, 1817.]
1.
Honey from silkworms who can gather,
Or silk from the yellow bee?
The grass may grow in winter weather
As soon as hate in me.
2.
Hate men who cant, and men who pray,
5
And men who rail like thee;
An equal passion to repay
They are not coy like me.
3.
Or seek some slave of power and gold
To be thy dear heart’s mate;
10
Thy love will move that bigot cold
Sooner than me, thy hate.
4.
A passion like the one I prove
Cannot divided be;
I hate thy want of truth and love—
15
How should I then hate thee?
***
[Published by Hunt in “The Examiner”, January, 1818. Reprinted with “Rosalind and Helen”, 1819. There is a copy amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 46.]
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
5
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
’My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
10
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
NOTE:
9 these words appear]this legend clear B.
***
The very illness that oppressed, and the aspect of death which had approached so near Shelley, appear to have kindled to yet keener life the Spirit of Poetry in his heart. The restless thoughts kept awake by pain clothed themselves in verse. Much was composed during this year. The “Revolt of Islam”, written and printed, was a great effort—“Rosalind and Helen” was begun—and the fragments and poems I can trace to the same period show how full of passion and reflection were his solitary hours.
In addition to such poems as have an intelligible aim and shape, many a stray idea and transitory emotion found imperfect and abrupt expression, and then again lost themselves in silence. As he never wandered without a book and without implements of writing, I find many such, in his manuscript books, that scarcely bear record; while some of them, broken and vague as they are, will appear valuable to those who love Shelley’s mind, and desire to trace its workings.
He projected also translating the “Hymns” of Homer; his version of several of the shorter ones remains, as well as that to Mercury already published in the “Posthumous Poems”. His readings this year were chiefly Greek. Besides the “Hymns” of Homer and the “Iliad”, he read the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the “Symposium” of Plato, and Arrian’s “Historia Indica”. In Latin, Apuleius alone is named. In English, the Bible was his constant study; he read a great portion of it aloud in the evening. Among these evening readings I find also mentioned the “Faerie Queen”; and other modern works, the production of his contemporaries, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore and Byron.
His life was now spent more in thought than action—he had lost the eager spirit which believed it could achieve what it projected for the benefit of mankind. And yet in the converse of daily life Shelley was far from being a melancholy man. He was eloquent when philosophy or politics or taste were the subjects of conversation. He was playful; and indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others—not in bitterness, but in sport. The author of “Nightmare Abbey” seized on some points of his character and some habits of his life when he painted Scythrop. He was not addicted to ‘port or madeira,’ but in youth he had read of ‘Illuminati and Eleutherarchs,’ and believed that he possessed the power of operating an immediate change in the minds of men and the state of society. These wild dreams had faded; sorrow and adversity had struck home; but he struggled with despondency as he did with physical pain. There are few who remember him sailing paper boats, and watching the navigation of his tiny craft with eagerness—or repeating with wild energy “The Ancient Mariner”, and Southey’s “Old Woman of Berkeley”; but those who do will recollect that it was in such, and in the creations of his own fancy when that was most daring and ideal, that he sheltered himself from the storms and disappointments, the pain and sorrow, that beset his life.
No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the passing of the decree, he had written a curse, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father’s love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences.
At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared that our infant son would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom afterwards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem,
***
TO THE NILE.
[’Found by Mr. Townshend Meyer among the papers of Leigh Hunt, [and] published in the “St. James’s Magazine” for March, 1876.’ (Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B.; “Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, Library Edition, 1876, volume 3 page 410.) First included among Shelley’s poetical works in Mr. Forman’s Library Edition, where a facsimile of the manuscript is given. Composed February 4, 1818. See “Complete Works of John Keats”, edition H. Buxton Forman, Glasgow, 1901, volume 4 page 76.]
Month after month the gathered rains descend
Drenching yon secret Aethiopian dells,
And from the desert’s ice-girt pinnacles
Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.
5
Girt there with blasts and meteors Tempest dwells
By Nile’s aereal urn, with rapid spells
Urging those waters to their mighty end.
O’er Egypt’s land of Memory floods are
level
And they are thine, O Nile—and well thou
knowest 10
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil
And fruits and poisons spring where’er thou
flowest.
Beware, O Man—for knowledge must to thee,
Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.
***
[Composed May 4, 1818. Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a copy amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, which supplies the last word of the fragment.]
Listen, listen, Mary mine,
To the whisper of the Apennine,
It bursts on the roof like the thunder’s roar,
Or like the sea on a northern shore,
Heard in its raging ebb and flow
5
By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
10
On the dim starlight then is spread,
And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,
Shrouding...
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Wilt thou forget the happy hours
Which we buried in Love’s sweet bowers,
Heaping over their corpses cold
Blossoms and leaves, instead of mould?
Blossoms which were the joys that fell,
5
And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.
2.
Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit’s gloom,
10
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
O Mary dear, that you were here
With your brown eyes bright and clear.
And your sweet voice, like a bird
Singing love to its lone mate
In the ivy bower disconsolate;
5
Voice the sweetest ever heard!
And your brow more...
Than the ... sky
Of this azure Italy.
Mary dear, come to me soon,
10
I am not well whilst thou art far;
As sunset to the sphered moon,
As twilight to the western star,
Thou, beloved, art to me.
O Mary dear, that you were here;
15
The Castle echo whispers ‘Here!’
***
[Published by Hunt, “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1821. Reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Again reprinted, with several variants, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. Our text is that of the editio princeps, 1821. A transcript is extant in a letter from Shelley to Sophia Stacey, dated March 7, 1820.]
1.
The odour from the flower is gone
Which like thy kisses breathed on me;
The colour from the flower is flown
Which glowed of thee and only thee!
2.
A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,
5
It lies on my abandoned breast,
And mocks the heart which yet is warm,
With cold and silent rest.
3.
I weep,—my tears revive it not!
I sigh,—it breathes no more on me;
10
Its mute and uncomplaining lot
Is such as mine should be.
NOTES: 1 odour]colour 1839. 2 kisses breathed]sweet eyes smiled 1839. 3 colour]odour 1839. 4 glowed]breathed 1839. 5 shrivelled]withered 1839. 8 cold and silent all editions; its cold, silent Stacey manuscript.
***
OCTOBER, 1818.
[Composed at Este, October, 1818. Published with “Rosalind and Helen”, 1819. Amongst the late Mr. Fredk. Locker-Lampson’s collections at Rowfant there is a manuscript of the lines (167-205) on Byron, interpolated after the completion of the poem.]
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of Misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on—
Day and night, and night and day,
5
Drifting on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel’s track:
Whilst above the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily,
10
And behind the tempest fleet
Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o’er-brimming deep;
15
And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore
20
Still recedes, as ever still
Longing with divided will,
But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever drifted on
O’er the unreposing wave
25
To the haven of the grave.
What, if there no friends will greet;
What, if there no heart will meet
His with love’s impatient beat;
Wander wheresoe’er he may,
30
Can he dream before that day
To find refuge from distress
In friendship’s smile, in love’s caress?
Then ’twill wreak him little woe
Whether such there be or no:
35
Senseless is the breast, and cold,
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve
40
That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortured lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December’s bough.
On the beach of a northern sea
45
Which tempests shake eternally,
As once the wretch there lay to sleep,
Lies a solitary heap,
One white skull and seven dry bones,
On the margin of the stones,
50
Where a few gray rushes stand,
Boundaries of the sea and land:
Nor is heard one voice of wail
But the sea-mews, as they sail
O’er the billows of the gale;
55
Or the whirlwind up and down
Howling, like a slaughtered town,
When a king in glory rides
Through the pomp of fratricides:
Those unburied bones around
60
There is many a mournful sound;
There is no lament for him,
Like a sunless vapour, dim,
Who once clothed with life and thought
What now moves nor murmurs not.
65
Ay, many flowering islands lie
In the waters of wide Agony:
To such a one this morn was led,
My bark by soft winds piloted:
’Mid the mountains Euganean
70
I stood listening to the paean
With which the legioned rooks did hail
The sun’s uprise majestical;
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar
75
Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,
Flecked with fire and azure, lie
In the unfathomable sky,
So their plumes of purple grain,
80
Starred with drops of golden rain,
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning’s fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail,
85
And the vapours cloven and gleaming
Follow, down the dark steep streaming,
Till all is bright, and clear, and still,
Round the solitary hill.
Beneath is spread like a green sea
90
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath Day’s azure eyes
Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies,
95
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite’s destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
100
Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,
105
Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;
110
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.
Sun-girt City, thou hast been
115
Ocean’s child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.
120
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew
125
Flies, as once before it flew,
O’er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace gate
130
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of Ocean’s own,
Topples o’er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aereal gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were
145
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake
150
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch’s hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously,
155
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they!—
160
Clouds which stain truth’s rising day
By her sun consumed away—
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
165
With more kindly blossoming.
Perish—let there only be
Floating o’er thy hearthless sea
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally,
170
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tattered pall of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;—
That a tempest-cleaving Swan
Of the songs of Albion,
175
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung
180
From his lips like music flung
O’er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror:—what though yet
Poesy’s unfailing River,
Which through Albion winds forever
185
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred Poet’s grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled?
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay
190
Aught thine own? oh, rather say
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander’s wasting springs;
195
As divinest Shakespeare’s might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power which he
Imaged ’mid mortality;
As the love from Petrarch’s urn,
200
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp by which the heart
Sees things unearthly;—so thou art,
Mighty spirit—so shall be
The City that did refuge thee.
205
Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-winged Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread,
210
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that gray cloud
Many-domed Padua proud
215
Stands, a peopled solitude,
’Mid the harvest-shining plain,
Where the peasant heaps his grain
In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow
220
With the purple vintage strain,
Heaped upon the creaking wain,
That the brutal Celt may swill
Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword
225
Lies unchanged, though many a lord,
Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region’s foison,
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction’s harvest-home:
230
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but ’tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge.
235
Padua, thou within whose walls
Those mute guests at festivals,
Son and Mother, Death and Sin,
Played at dice for Ezzelin,
Till Death cried, “I win, I win!”
240
And Sin cursed to lose the wager,
But Death promised, to assuage her,
That he would petition for
Her to be made Vice-Emperor,
When the destined years were o’er,
245
Over all between the Po
And the eastern Alpine snow,
Under the mighty Austrian.
Sin smiled so as Sin only can,
And since that time, ay, long before,
250
Both have ruled from shore to shore,—
That incestuous pair, who follow
Tyrants as the sun the swallow,
As Repentance follows Crime,
And as changes follow Time.
255
In thine halls the lamp of learning,
Padua, now no more is burning;
Like a meteor, whose wild way
Is lost over the grave of day,
It gleams betrayed and to betray:
260
Once remotest nations came
To adore that sacred flame,
When it lit not many a hearth
On this cold and gloomy earth:
Now new fires from antique light
265
Spring beneath the wide world’s might;
But their spark lies dead in thee,
Trampled out by Tyranny.
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depth of piny dells,
270
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn
Page 39
By the fire thus lowly born:
The spark beneath his feet is dead,
275
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darkened sky
With a myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear: so thou,
O Tyranny, beholdest now
280
Light around thee, and thou hearest
The loud flames ascend, and fearest:
Grovel on the earth; ay, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!
Noon descends around me now:
285
’Tis the noon of autumn’s glow,
When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolved star
Mingling light and fragrance, far
290
From the curved horizon’s bound
To the point of Heaven’s profound,
Fills the overflowing sky;
And the plains that silent lie
Underneath, the leaves unsodden
295
Where the infant Frost has trodden
With his morning-winged feet,
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
And the red and golden vines,
Piercing with their trellised lines
300
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
The dun and bladed grass no less,
Pointing from this hoary tower
In the windless air; the flower
Glimmering at my feet; the line
305
Of the olive-sandalled Apennine
In the south dimly islanded;
And the Alps, whose snows are spread
High between the clouds and sun;
And of living things each one;
310
And my spirit which so long
Darkened this swift stream of song,—
Interpenetrated lie
By the glory of the sky:
Be it love, light, harmony,
315
Odour, or the soul of all
Which from Heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feeds this verse
Peopling the lone universe.
Noon descends, and after noon
320
Autumn’s evening meets me soon,
Leading the infantine moon,
And that one star, which to her
Almost seems to minister
Half the crimson light she brings
325
From the sunset’s radiant springs:
And the soft dreams of the morn
(Which like winged winds had borne
To that silent isle, which lies
Mid remembered agonies,
330
The frail bark of this lone being)
Pass, to other sufferers fleeing,
And its ancient pilot, Pain,
Sits beside the helm again.
Other flowering isles must be
335
In the sea of Life and Agony:
Other spirits float and flee
O’er that gulf: even now, perhaps,
On some rock the wild wave wraps,
With folded wings they waiting sit
340
For my bark, to pilot it
To some calm and blooming cove,
Where for me, and those I love,
May a windless bower be built,
Far from passion, pain, and guilt,
345
In a dell mid lawny hills,
Which the wild sea-murmur fills,
And soft sunshine, and the sound
Of old forests echoing round,
And the light and smell divine
350
Of all flowers that breathe and shine:
We may live so happy there,
That the Spirits of the Air,
Envying us, may even entice
To our healing Paradise
355
The polluting multitude;
But their rage would be subdued
By that clime divine and calm,
And the winds whose wings rain balm
On the uplifted soul, and leaves
360
Under which the bright sea heaves;
While each breathless interval
In their whisperings musical
The inspired soul supplies
With its own deep melodies;
365
And the love which heals all strife
Circling, like the breath of life,
All things in that sweet abode
With its own mild brotherhood,
They, not it, would change; and soon
370
Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again.
NOTES: 54 seamews 1819; seamew’s Rossetti.
115 Sun-girt]Sea-girt cj. Palgrave. 165
From your dust new 1819;
From thy dust shall
Rowfant manuscript (heading of lines 167-205).
175 songs 1819; sons cj. Forman. 278
a 1819; wanting, 1839.
***
[Composed, 1818. Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
MADDALO, A COURTIER.
MALPIGLIO, A POET.
PIGNA, A MINISTER.
ALBANO, AN USHER.
MADDALO:
No access to the Duke! You have not said
That the Count Maddalo would speak with him?
PIGNA:
Did you inform his Grace that Signor Pigna
Waits with state papers for his signature?
MALPIGLIO:
The Lady Leonora cannot know
5
That I have written a sonnet to her fame,
In which I ... Venus and Adonis.
You should not take my gold and serve me not.
ALBANO:
In truth I told her, and she smiled and said,
’If I am Venus, thou, coy Poesy,
10
Art the Adonis whom I love, and he
The Erymanthian boar that wounded him.’
O trust to me, Signor Malpiglio,
Those nods and smiles were favours worth the zechin.
MALPIGLIO:
The words are twisted in some double sense
15
That I reach not: the smiles fell not on me.
PIGNA:
How are the Duke and Duchess occupied?
ALBANO:
Buried in some strange talk. The Duke was leaning,
His finger on his brow, his lips unclosed.
The Princess sate within the window-seat,
20
And so her face was hid; but on her knee
Her hands were clasped, veined, and pale as snow,
And quivering—young Tasso, too, was there.
MADDALO:
Thou seest on whom from thine own worshipped heaven
Thou drawest down smiles—they did not rain
on thee. 25
MALPIGLIO:
Would they were parching lightnings for his sake
On whom they fell!
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
I loved—alas! our life is love;
But when we cease to breathe and move
I do suppose love ceases too.
I thought, but not as now I do,
Keen thoughts and bright of linked lore,
5
Of all that men had thought before.
And all that Nature shows, and more.
2.
And still I love and still I think,
But strangely, for my heart can drink
The dregs of such despair, and live,
10
And love;...
And if I think, my thoughts come fast,
I mix the present with the past,
And each seems uglier than the last.
3.
Sometimes I see before me flee
15
A silver spirit’s form, like thee,
O Leonora, and I sit
...still watching it,
Till by the grated casement’s ledge
It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge
20
Breathes o’er the breezy streamlet’s edge.
***
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, September 8, 1832. Reprinted (as “Misery, a Fragment”) by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. Our text is that of 1839. A pencil copy of this poem is amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 38. The readings of this copy are indicated by the letter B. in the footnotes.]
1.
Come, be happy!—sit near me,
Shadow-vested Misery:
Coy, unwilling, silent bride,
Mourning in thy robe of pride,
Desolation—deified!
5
2.
Come, be happy!—sit near me:
Sad as I may seem to thee,
I am happier far than thou,
Lady, whose imperial brow
Is endiademed with woe.
10
3.
Misery! we have known each other,
Like a sister and a brother
Living in the same lone home,
Many years—we must live some
Hours or ages yet to come.
15
4.
’Tis an evil lot, and yet
Let us make the best of it;
If love can live when pleasure dies,
We two will love, till in our eyes
This heart’s Hell seem Paradise.
20
5.
Come, be happy!—lie thee down
On the fresh grass newly mown,
Where the Grasshopper doth sing
Merrily—one joyous thing
In a world of sorrowing!
25
6.
There our tent shall be the willow,
And mine arm shall be thy pillow;
Sounds and odours, sorrowful
Because they once were sweet, shall lull
Us to slumber, deep and dull.
30
7.
Ha! thy frozen pulses flutter
With a love thou darest not utter.
Thou art murmuring—thou art weeping—
Is thine icy bosom leaping
While my burning heart lies sleeping?
35
8.
Kiss me;—oh! thy lips are cold:
Round my neck thine arms enfold—
They are soft, but chill and dead;
And thy tears upon my head
Burn like points of frozen lead.
40
9.
Hasten to the bridal bed—
Underneath the grave ’tis spread:
In darkness may our love be hid,
Oblivion be our coverlid—
We may rest, and none forbid.
45
10.
Clasp me till our hearts be grown
Like two shadows into one;
Till this dreadful transport may
Like a vapour fade away,
In the sleep that lasts alway.
50
11.
We may dream, in that long sleep,
That we are not those who weep;
E’en as Pleasure dreams of thee,
Life-deserting Misery,
Thou mayst dream of her with me.
55
12.
Let us laugh, and make our mirth,
At the shadows of the earth,
As dogs bay the moonlight clouds,
Which, like spectres wrapped in shrouds,
Pass o’er night in multitudes.
60
13.
All the wide world, beside us,
Show like multitudinous
Puppets passing from a scene;
What but mockery can they mean,
Where I am—where thou hast been?
65
NOTES:
1 near B., 1839; by 1832.
8 happier far]merrier yet B.
15 Hours or]Years and 1832.
17 best]most 1832.
19 We two will]We will 1832.
27 mine arm shall be thy B., 1839; thine arm shall
be my 1832. 33 represented by asterisks, 1832.
34, 35 Thou art murmuring, thou art weeping,
Whilst my burning bosom’s leaping 1832;
Was thine icy bosom leaping
While my burning heart was sleeping B.
40 frozen 1832, 1839, B.; molten cj. Forman.
44 be]is B.
47 shadows]lovers 1832, B.
59 which B., 1839; that 1832.
62 Show]Are 1832, B.
63 Puppets passing]Shadows shifting 1832; Shadows
passing B. 64, 65 So B.: What but mockery
may they mean?
Where am I?—Where thou
hast been 1832.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, where it is dated ‘December, 1818.’ A draft of stanza 1 is amongst the Boscombe manuscripts. (Garnett).]
1.
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon’s transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
5
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City’s voice itself, is soft like Solitude’s.
2.
I see the Deep’s untrampled floor
10
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,—
The lightning of the noontide ocean
15
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
3.
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
20
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned—
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround—
25
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;—
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
4.
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
30
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
35
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
5.
Some might lament that I were cold,
As I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan;
40
They might lament—for I am one
Whom men love not,—and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.
45
NOTES: 4 might Boscombe manuscript, Medwin
1847; light 1824, 1839. 5 The...light Boscombe
manuscript, 1839, Medwin 1847;
omitted, 1824. moist earth
Boscombe manuscript;
moist air 1839; west wind
Medwin 1847.
17 measured 1824; mingled 1847. 18 did any
heart now 1824; if any heart could Medwin 1847. 31
the 1824; this Medwin 1847. 36 dying 1824; outworn
Medwin 1847.
***
[Published in part (1-67) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; the remainder (68-70) by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune
(I think such hearts yet never came to good)
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,
One nightingale in an interfluous wood
Satiate the hungry dark with melody;—
5
And as a vale is watered by a flood,
Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness—as a tuberose
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie
Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,
10
The singing of that happy nightingale
In this sweet forest, from the golden close
Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,
Was interfused upon the silentness;
The folded roses and the violets pale
15
Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss
Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear
Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness
Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere
And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,
20
And every wind of the mute atmosphere,
And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,
And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,
And every silver moth fresh from the grave
Which is its cradle—ever from below
25
Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,
To be consumed within the purest glow
Of one serene and unapproached star,
As if it were a lamp of earthly light,
Unconscious, as some human lovers are,
30
Itself how low, how high beyond all height
The heaven where it would perish!—and every
form
That worshipped in the temple of the night
Was awed into delight, and by the charm
Girt as with an interminable zone,
35
Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm
Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion
Out of their dreams; harmony became love
In every soul but one.
...
And so this man returned with axe and saw
40
At evening close from killing the tall treen,
The soul of whom by Nature’s gentle law
Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green
The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,
Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene
45
With jagged leaves,—and from the forest
tops
Singing the winds to sleep—or weeping oft
Fast showers of aereal water-drops
Into their mother’s bosom, sweet and soft,
Nature’s pure tears which have no bitterness;—
50
Around the cradles of the birds aloft
They spread themselves into the loveliness
Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers
Hang like moist clouds:—or, where high
branches kiss,
Make a green space among the silent bowers,
55
Like a vast fane in a metropolis,
Surrounded by the columns and the towers
All overwrought with branch-like traceries
In which there is religion—and the mute
Persuasion of unkindled melodies,
60
Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lute
Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast
Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,
Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passed
To such brief unison as on the brain
65
One tone, which never can recur, has cast,
One accent never to return again.
...
The world is full of Woodmen who expel
Love’s gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,
And vex the nightingales in every dell.
70
NOTE:
8 —or as a tuberose cj. A.C.
Bradley.
***
MARENGHI. (This fragment refers to an event told in Sismondi’s “Histoire des Republiques Italiennes”, which occurred during the war when Florence finally subdued Pisa, and reduced it to a province.—[MRS. SHELLEY’S NOTE, 1824.])
[Published in part (stanzas 7-15.) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; stanzas 1-28 by W.M. Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870. The Boscombe manuscript—evidently a first draft—from which (through Dr. Garnett) Rossetti derived the text of 1870 is now at the Bodleian, and has recently been collated by Mr. C.D. Locock, to whom the enlarged and amended text here printed is owing. The substitution, in title and text, of “Marenghi” for “Mazenghi” (1824) is due to Rossetti. Here as elsewhere in the footnotes B. = the Bodleian manuscript.]
1.
Let those who pine in pride or in revenge,
Or think that ill for ill should be repaid,
Who barter wrong for wrong, until the exchange
Ruins the merchants of such thriftless trade,
Visit the tower of Vado, and unlearn
5
Such bitter faith beside Marenghi’s urn.
2.
A massy tower yet overhangs the town,
A scattered group of ruined dwellings now...
...
3.
Another scene are wise Etruria knew
Its second ruin through internal strife
10
And tyrants through the breach of discord threw
The chain which binds and kills. As death to
life,
As winter to fair flowers (though some be poison)
So Monarchy succeeds to Freedom’s foison.
4.
In Pisa’s church a cup of sculptured gold
15
Was brimming with the blood of feuds forsworn:
A Sacrament more holy ne’er of old
Etrurians mingled mid the shades forlorn
Of moon-illumined forests, when...
5. And reconciling factions wet their lips 20 With that dread wine, and swear to keep each spirit Undarkened by their country’s last eclipse...
...
6.
Was Florence the liberticide? that band
Of free and glorious brothers who had planted,
Like a green isle mid Aethiopian sand,
25
A nation amid slaveries, disenchanted
Of many impious faiths—wise, just—do
they,
Does Florence, gorge the sated tyrants’ prey?
7.
O foster-nurse of man’s abandoned glory,
Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour;
30
Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story,
As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender:—
The light-invested angel Poesy
Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee.
8.
And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught
35
By loftiest meditations; marble knew
The sculptor’s fearless soul—and
as he wrought,
The grace of his own power and freedom grew.
And more than all, heroic, just, sublime,
Thou wart among the false...was this thy crime?
40
9.
Yes; and on Pisa’s marble walls the twine
Of direst weeds hangs garlanded—the snake
Inhabits its wrecked palaces;—in thine
A beast of subtler venom now doth make
Its lair, and sits amid their glories overthrown,
45
And thus thy victim’s fate is as thine own.
10.
The sweetest flowers are ever frail and rare,
And love and freedom blossom but to wither;
And good and ill like vines entangled are,
So that their grapes may oft be plucked together;—
50
Divide the vintage ere thou drink, then make
Thy heart rejoice for dead Marenghi’s sake.
10a.
[Albert] Marenghi was a Florentine;
If he had wealth, or children, or a wife
Or friends, [or farm] or cherished thoughts which
twine 55
The sights and sounds of home with life’s own
life
Of these he was despoiled and Florence sent...
...
11.
No record of his crime remains in story,
But if the morning bright as evening shone,
60
It was some high and holy deed, by glory
Pursued into forgetfulness, which won
From the blind crowd he made secure and free
The patriot’s meed, toil, death, and infamy.
12.
For when by sound of trumpet was declared
A price upon his life, and there was set
65
A penalty of blood on all who shared
So much of water with him as might wet
His lips, which speech divided not—he went
Alone, as you may guess, to banishment.
13.
Amid the mountains, like a hunted beast,
He hid himself, and hunger, toil, and cold,
70
Month after month endured; it was a feast
Whene’er he found those globes of deep-red gold
Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,
Suspended in their emerald atmosphere.
75
14.
And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,
Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,
All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,
And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,
And where the huge and speckled aloe made,
80
Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,—
15.
He housed himself. There is a point of strand
Near Vado’s tower and town; and on one side
The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,
Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide,
85
And on the other, creeps eternally,
Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea.
16.
Here the earth’s breath is pestilence, and few
But things whose nature is at war with life—
Snakes and ill worms—endure its mortal
dew.
The trophies of the clime’s victorious strife—
90
And ringed horns which the buffalo did wear,
And the wolf’s dark gray scalp who tracked him
there.
17.
And at the utmost point...stood there
The relics of a reed-inwoven cot,
95
Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer
Had lived seven days there: the pursuit was hot
When he was cold. The birds that were his grave
Fell dead after their feast in Vado’s wave.
18.
There must have burned within Marenghi’s breast
100
That fire, more warm and bright than life and hope,
(Which to the martyr makes his dungeon...
More joyous than free heaven’s majestic cope
To his oppressor), warring with decay,—
Or he could ne’er have lived years, day by day.
105
19.
Nor was his state so lone as you might think.
He had tamed every newt and snake and toad,
And every seagull which sailed down to drink
Those freshes ere the death-mist went abroad.
And each one, with peculiar talk and play,
110
Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.
20.
And the marsh-meteors, like tame beasts, at night
Came licking with blue tongues his veined feet;
And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright,
In many entangled figures quaint and sweet
115
To some enchanted music they would dance—
Until they vanished at the first moon-glance.
21.
He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed
The summer dew-globes in the golden dawn;
And, ere the hoar-frost languished, he could read
120
Its pictured path, as on bare spots of lawn
Its delicate brief touch in silver weaves
The likeness of the wood’s remembered leaves.
22.
And many a fresh Spring morn would he awaken—
While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron
125
Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken
Of mountains and blue isles which did environ
With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea,—
And feel ... liberty.
23.
And in the moonless nights when the dun ocean
130
Heaved underneath wide heaven, star-impearled,
Starting from dreams...
Communed with the immeasurable world;
And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated,
Till his mind grew like that it contemplated.
135
24.
His food was the wild fig and strawberry;
The milky pine-nuts which the autumn-blast
Shakes into the tall grass; or such small fry
As from the sea by winter-storms are cast;
And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found
140
Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.
25.
And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made
His solitude less dark. When memory came
(For years gone by leave each a deepening shade),
His spirit basked in its internal flame,—
145
As, when the black storm hurries round at night,
The fisher basks beside his red firelight.
26.
Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and errors,
Like billows unawakened by the wind,
Slept in Marenghi still; but that all terrors,
150
Weakness, and doubt, had withered in his mind.
His couch...
...
27.
And, when he saw beneath the sunset’s planet
A black ship walk over the crimson ocean,—
Its pennon streaming on the blasts that fan it,
155
Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,
Like the dark ghost of the unburied even
Striding athwart the orange-coloured heaven,—
28. The thought of his own kind who made the soul Which sped that winged shape through night and day,— 160 The thought of his own country...
...
NOTES: 3 Who B.; Or 1870. 6 Marenghi’s
1870; Mazenghi’s B. 7 town 1870; sea B.
8 ruined 1870; squalid B. (’the whole line
is cancelled,’ Locock). 11 threw 1870; cancelled,
B. 17 A Sacrament more B.; At Sacrament:
more 1870. 18 mid B.; with 1870. 19 forests
when... B.; forests. 1870. 23, 24 that
band Of free and glorious brothers who had 1870; omitted,
B. 25 a 1870; one B. 27 wise, just—do
they 1870; omitted, B. 28 Does 1870; Doth B. prey
1870; spoil B. 33 angel 1824; Herald [?] B. 34
to welcome thee 1824; cancelled for... by thee B.
42 direst 1824; Desert B. 45 sits amid 1824
amid cancelled for soils (?) B. 53-57 Albert...sent
B.; omitted 1824, 1870. Albert cancelled B.:
Pietro is the correct
name.
53 Marenghi]Mazenghi B. 55 farm doubtful:
perh. fame (Locock). 62 he 1824; thus B. 70
Amid the mountains 1824; Mid desert mountains [?] B.
71 toil, and cold]cold and toil editions 1824,
1839. 92, 93 And... there B. (see Editor’s
Note); White bones, and locks of
dun and yellow hair, And ringed
horns which buffaloes did wear— 1870.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Our text is that of the “Poetical Works”, 1839.]
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk
Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
5
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and
drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
10
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
NOTES:
6 Their...drear 1839;
The shadows, which the world calls
substance, there 1824.
7 who had lifted 1839; who lifted 1824.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age
Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,
Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862. A transcript by Mrs. Shelley, given to Charles Cowden Clarke, presents one or two variants.]
Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou
Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged
Of one abyss, where life, and truth, and joy
Are swallowed up—yet spare me, Spirit,
pity me,
Until the sounds I hear become my soul,
5
And it has left these faint and weary limbs,
To track along the lapses of the air
This wandering melody until it rests
Among lone mountains in some...
NOTES:
4 Spirit 1862; O Spirit C.C.C. manuscript.
8 This wandering melody 1862;
These wandering melodies...
C.C.C. manuscript.
***
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, 1870.]
The fierce beasts of the woods and wildernesses
Track not the steps of him who drinks of it;
For the light breezes, which for ever fleet
Around its margin, heap the sand thereon.
***
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, 1870.]
My head is wild with weeping for a grief
Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.
I walk into the air (but no relief
To seek,—or haply, if I sought, to find;
It came unsought);—to wonder that a chief
5
Among men’s spirits should be cold and blind.
NOTE:
4 find cj. A.C. Bradley.
***
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, 1870.]
Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow
Beneath the autumnal sun, none taste of thee;
For thou dost shroud a ruin, and below
The rotting bones of dead antiquity.
***
We often hear of persons disappointed by a first visit to Italy. This was not Shelley’s case. The aspect of its nature, its sunny sky, its majestic storms, of the luxuriant vegetation of the country, and the noble marble-built cities, enchanted him. The sight of the works of art was full enjoyment and wonder. He had not studied pictures or statues before; he now did so with the eye of taste, that referred not to the rules of schools, but to those of Nature and truth. The first entrance to Rome opened to him a scene of remains of antique grandeur that far surpassed his expectations; and the unspeakable beauty of Naples and its environs added to the impression he received of the transcendent and glorious beauty of Italy.
Our winter was spent at Naples. Here he wrote the fragments of “Marenghi” and “The Woodman and the Nightingale”, which he afterwards threw aside. At this time, Shelley suffered greatly in health. He put himself under the care of a medical man, who promised great things, and made him endure severe bodily pain, without any good results. Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy,—and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural
We lived in utter solitude. And such is often not the nurse of cheerfulness; for then, at least with those who have been exposed to adversity, the mind broods over its sorrows too intently; while the society of the enlightened, the witty, and the wise, enables us to forget ourselves by making us the sharers of the thoughts of others, which is a portion of the philosophy of happiness. Shelley never liked society in numbers,—it harassed and wearied him; but neither did he like loneliness, and usually, when alone, sheltered himself against memory and reflection in a book. But, with one or two whom he loved, he gave way to wild and joyous spirits, or in more serious conversation expounded his opinions with vivacity and eloquence. If an argument arose, no man ever argued better. He was clear, logical, and earnest, in supporting his own views; attentive, patient, and impartial, while listening to those on the adverse side. Had not a wall of prejudice been raised at this time between him and his countrymen, how many would have sought the acquaintance of one whom to know was to love and to revere! How many of the more enlightened of his contemporaries have since regretted that they did not seek him! how very few knew his worth while he lived! and, of those few, several were withheld by timidity or envy from declaring their sense of it. But no man was ever more enthusiastically loved—more looked up to, as one superior to his fellows in intellectual endowments and moral worth, by the few who knew him well, and had sufficient nobleness of soul to appreciate his superiority. His excellence is now acknowledged; but, even while admitted, not duly appreciated. For who, except those who were acquainted with him, can imagine his unwearied benevolence, his generosity, his systematic forbearance? And still less is his vast superiority in intellectual attainments sufficiently understood—his sagacity, his clear understanding, his learning, his prodigious memory. All these as displayed in conversation, were known to few while he lived, and are now silent in the tomb:
’Ahi orbo mondo ingrato!
Gran cagion hai di dever pianger meco;
Che quel ben ch’ era in te, perdut’ hai
seco.’
***
LINES WRITTEN DURING THE CASTLEREAGH ADMINISTRATION.
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, December 8, 1832; reprinted, “Poetical Works”, 1839. There is a transcript amongst the Harvard manuscripts, and another in the possession of Mr. C.W. Frederickson of Brooklyn. Variants from these two sources are given by Professor Woodberry, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, Centenary Edition, 1893, volume 3 pages 225, 226. The transcripts are referred to in our footnotes as Harvard and Fred. respectively.]
1.
Corpses are cold in the tomb;
Stones on the pavement are dumb;
Abortions are dead in the womb,
And their mothers look pale—like the death-white
shore
Of Albion, free no more.
5
2.
Her sons are as stones in the way—
They are masses of senseless clay—
They are trodden, and move not away,—
The abortion with which SHE travaileth
Is Liberty, smitten to death.
10
3.
Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor!
For thy victim is no redresser;
Thou art sole lord and possessor
Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions—they
pave
Thy path to the grave.
15
4.
Hearest thou the festival din
Of Death, and Destruction, and Sin,
And Wealth crying “Havoc!” within?
’Tis the bacchanal triumph that makes Truth
dumb,
Thine Epithalamium.
20
5.
Ay, marry thy ghastly wife!
Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife
Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life!
Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant! and Hell be thy guide
To the bed of the bride!
25
NOTES: 4 death-white Harvard, Fred.; white 1832, 1839. 16 festival Harvard, Fred., 1839; festal 1832. 19 that Fred.; which Harvard 1832. 22 Disquiet Harvard, Fred., 1839; Disgust 1832. 24 Hell Fred.; God Harvard, 1832, 1839. 25 the bride Harvard, Fred., 1839; thy bride 1832.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
1.
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
2.
Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
5
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?
3.
Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
10
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?
4.
Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
15
With your pain and with your fear?
5.
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge; another bears.
20
6.
Sow seed,—but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth,—let no impostor heap;
Weave robes,—let not the idle wear;
Forge arms,—in your defence to bear.
7.
Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;
25
In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.
8.
With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
30
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre.
***
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, August 25, 1832; reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839. Our title is that of 1839, 2nd edition. The poem is found amongst the Harvard manuscripts, headed “To S—th and O—gh".]
1.
As from an ancestral oak
Two empty ravens sound their clarion,
Yell by yell, and croak by croak,
When they scent the noonday smoke
Of fresh human carrion:—
5
2.
As two gibbering night-birds flit
From their bowers of deadly yew
Through the night to frighten it,
When the moon is in a fit,
And the stars are none, or few:—
10
3.
As a shark and dog-fish wait
Under an Atlantic isle,
For the negro-ship, whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,
Wrinkling their red gills the while—
15
4.
Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,
Two vipers tangled into one.
20
NOTE:
7 yew 1832; hue 1839.
**
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
People of England, ye who toil and groan,
Who reap the harvests which are not your own,
Who weave the clothes which your oppressors wear,
And for your own take the inclement air;
Who build warm houses...
5
And are like gods who give them all they have,
And nurse them from the cradle to the grave...
...
***
FRAGMENT: ‘WHAT MEN GAIN FAIRLY’. (Perhaps connected with that immediately preceding (Forman).—ED.)
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
What men gain fairly—that they should possess,
And children may inherit idleness,
From him who earns it—This is understood;
Private injustice may be general good.
But he who gains by base and armed wrong,
5
Or guilty fraud, or base compliances,
May be despoiled; even as a stolen dress
Is stripped from a convicted thief; and he
Left in the nakedness of infamy.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
1.
God prosper, speed,and save,
God raise from England’s grave
Her murdered Queen!
Pave with swift victory
The steps of Liberty,
5
Whom Britons own to be
Immortal Queen.
2.
See, she comes throned on high,
On swift Eternity!
God save the Queen!
10
Millions on millions wait,
Firm, rapid, and elate,
On her majestic state!
God save the Queen!
3.
She is Thine own pure soul
15
Moulding the mighty whole,—
God save the Queen!
She is Thine own deep love
Rained down from Heaven above,—
Wherever she rest or move,
20
God save our Queen!
4.
’Wilder her enemies
In their own dark disguise,—
God save our Queen!
All earthly things that dare
25
Her sacred name to bear,
Strip them, as kings are, bare;
God save the Queen!
5.
Be her eternal throne
Built in our hearts alone—
30
God save the Queen!
Let the oppressor hold
Canopied seats of gold;
She sits enthroned of old
O’er our hearts Queen.
35
6.
Lips touched by seraphim
Breathe out the choral hymn
‘God save the Queen!’
Sweet as if angels sang,
Loud as that trumpet’s clang
40
Wakening the world’s dead gang,—
God save the Queen!
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy
spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
5
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
10
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate,—Time’s worst statute, unrepealed,—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
***
AN ODE, WRITTEN OCTOBER, 1819, BEFORE THE SPANIARDS HAD RECOVERED THEIR LIBERTY.
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820.]
Arise, arise, arise!
There is blood on the earth that denies ye bread;
Be your wounds like eyes
To weep for the dead, the dead, the dead.
What other grief were it just to pay?
5
Your sons, your wives, your brethren, were they;
Who said they were slain on the battle day?
Awaken, awaken, awaken!
The slave and the tyrant are twin-born foes;
Be the cold chains shaken
10
To the dust where your kindred repose, repose:
Their bones in the grave will start and move,
When they hear the voices of those they love,
Most loud in the holy combat above.
Wave, wave high the banner!
15
When Freedom is riding to conquest by:
Though the slaves that fan her
Be Famine and Toil, giving sigh for sigh.
And ye who attend her imperial car,
Lift not your hands in the banded war,
20
But in her defence whose children ye are.
Glory, glory, glory,
To those who have greatly suffered and done!
Never name in story
Was greater than that which ye shall have won.
25
Conquerors have conquered their foes alone,
Whose revenge, pride, and power they have overthrown
Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.
Bind, bind every brow
With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine:
30
Hide the blood-stains now
With hues which sweet Nature has made divine:
Green strength, azure hope, and eternity:
But let not the pansy among them be;
Ye were injured, and that means memory.
35
***
[Published in “The Times” (Rossetti).]
Gather, O gather,
Foeman and friend in love and peace!
Waves sleep together
When the blasts that called them to battle, cease.
For fangless Power grown tame and mild
5
Is at play with Freedom’s fearless child—
The dove and the serpent reconciled!
***
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820. Dated ’Florence, December, 1819’ in Harvard manuscript (Woodberry). A transcript exists amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., page 39.]
CHORUS OF SPIRITS:
FIRST SPIRIT:
Palace-roof of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now, and which wert then
Of the Present and the Past,
5
Of the eternal Where and When,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever-canopying dome,
Of acts and ages yet to come!
Glorious shapes have life in thee,
10
Earth, and all earth’s company;
Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses;
15
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.
Even thy name is as a god,
Heaven! for thou art the abode
20
Of that Power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature sees.
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees.
Their unremaining gods and they
25
Like a river roll away:
Thou remainest such—alway!—
SECOND SPIRIT:
Thou art but the mind’s first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
Like weak insects in a cave,
30
Lighted up by stalactites;
But the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
But a dim and noonday gleam
35
From the shadow of a dream!
THIRD SPIRIT:
Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn
At your presumption, atom-born!
What is Heaven? and what are ye
Who its brief expanse inherit?
40
What are suns and spheres which flee
With the instinct of that Spirit
Of which ye are but a part?
Drops which Nature’s mighty heart
Drives through thinnest veins! Depart!
45
What is Heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new
Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world:
Constellated suns unshaken,
50
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.
***
[Published by Mr. C.D. Locock, “Examination”, etc., 1903.]
The [living frame which sustains my soul]
Is [sinking beneath the fierce control]
Down through the lampless deep of song
I am drawn and driven along—
When a Nation screams aloud
5
Like an eagle from the cloud
When a...
...
When the night...
...
Watch the look askance and old—
See neglect, and falsehood fold...
10
***
(This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.
The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.])
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820.]
1.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
10
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
2. Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, 15 Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
20
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
25
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh,
hear!
3. Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 30 Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
40
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!
4.
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
45
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
50
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
55
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
5.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
65
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
70
***
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820. Dated ‘Pisa, April, 1820’ in Harvard manuscript (Woodberry), but assigned by Mrs. Shelley to 1819.]
Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets’ food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
5
Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a day?
Poets are on this cold earth,
10
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
in a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
Where love is not, poets do:
15
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.
Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet’s free and heavenly mind:
20
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
25
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh, refuse the boon!
***
[Published, with the title, “Song written for an Indian Air”, in “The Liberal”, 2, 1822. Reprinted ("Lines to an Indian Air”) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. The poem is included in the Harvard manuscript book, and there is a description by Robert Browning of an autograph copy presenting some variations from the text of 1824. See Leigh Hunt’s “Correspondence”, 2, pages 264-8.]
1.
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee,
5
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
2.
The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream—
10
The Champak odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart;—
As I must on thine,
15
Oh, beloved as thou art!
3.
Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
20
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;—
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.
NOTES: 3 Harvard manuscript omits When.
4 shining]burning Harvard manuscript, 1822. 7
Hath led Browning manuscript, 1822;
Has borne Harvard manuscript; Has
led 1824.
11 The Champak Harvard manuscript, 1822, 1824;
And the Champak’s Browning
manuscript.
15 As I must on 1822, 1824;
As I must die on Harvard manuscript,
1839, 1st edition.
16 Oh, beloved Browning manuscript, Harvard manuscript,
1839, 1st edition;
Beloved 1822, 1824.
23 press it to thine own Browning manuscript;
press it close to thine Harvard
manuscript, 1824, 1839, 1st edition;
press me to thine own, 1822.
***
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works”, 1870.]
O pillow cold and wet with tears!
Thou breathest sleep no more!
***
[Published by W.M. Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works”, 1870.]
1.
Thou art fair, and few are fairer
Of the Nymphs of earth or ocean;
They are robes that fit the wearer—
Those soft limbs of thine, whose motion
Ever falls and shifts and glances
5
As the life within them dances.
2.
Thy deep eyes, a double Planet,
Gaze the wisest into madness
With soft clear fire,—the winds that fan
it
Are those thoughts of tender gladness
10
Which, like zephyrs on the billow,
Make thy gentle soul their pillow.
3.
If, whatever face thou paintest
In those eyes, grows pale with pleasure,
If the fainting soul is faintest
15
When it hears thy harp’s wild measure,
Wonder not that when thou speakest
Of the weak my heart is weakest.
4.
As dew beneath the wind of morning,
As the sea which whirlwinds waken,
20
As the birds at thunder’s warning,
As aught mute yet deeply shaken,
As one who feels an unseen spirit
Is my heart when thine is near it.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. The fragment included in the Harvard manuscript book.]
(With what truth may I say—
Roma! Roma! Roma!
Non e piu come era prima!)
1.
My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,—
Here its ashes find a tomb,
5
But beneath this pyramid
Thou art not—if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother’s grief and mine.
2.
Where art thou, my gentle child?
10
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild;—
Let me think that through low seeds
15
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion—
NOTE:
Motto 1 may I Harvard manuscript; I may 1824. 12 With Harvard manuscript, Mrs. Shelley, 1847; Within 1824, 1839. 16 Of sweet Harvard manuscript; Of the sweet 1824, 1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Thy little footsteps on the sands
Of a remote and lonely shore;
The twinkling of thine infant hands,
Where now the worm will feed no more;
Thy mingled look of love and glee
5
When we returned to gaze on thee—
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode;
5
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
The world is dreary,
And I am weary
Of wandering on without thee, Mary;
A joy was erewhile
In thy voice and thy smile,
5
And ’tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
5
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
2.
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone,
10
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
15
3.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As ... grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock,
20
And with unending involutions show
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
4.
And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
25
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
30
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
5.
’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error,
35
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a ... and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there—
A woman’s countenance, with serpent-locks,
Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.
40
NOTES: 5 seems 1839; seem 1824. 6 shine]shrine 1824, 1839. 26 those 1824; these 1839.
***
[Published by Leigh Hunt, “The Indicator”, December 22, 1819. Reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Included in the Harvard manuscript book, where it is headed “An Anacreontic”, and dated ‘January, 1820.’ Written by Shelley in a copy of Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1819, and presented to Sophia Stacey, December 29, 1820.]
1.
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
5
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?—
2.
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
10
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
15
If thou kiss not me?
NOTES:
3 mix for ever 1819, Stacey manuscript;
meet together, Harvard manuscript.
7 In one spirit meet and Stacey manuscript;
In one another’s being 1819,
Harvard manuscript.
11 No sister 1824, Harvard and Stacey manuscripts;
No leaf or 1819.
12 disdained its 1824, Harvard and Stacey manuscripts;
disdained to kiss its 1819.
15 is all this sweet work Stacey manuscript;
were these examples Harvard
manuscript;
are all these kissings 1819,
1824.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Follow to the deep wood’s weeds,
Follow to the wild-briar dingle,
Where we seek to intermingle,
And the violet tells her tale
To the odour-scented gale,
5
For they two have enough to do
Of such work as I and you.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
At the creation of the Earth
Pleasure, that divinest birth,
From the soil of Heaven did rise,
Wrapped in sweet wild melodies—
Like an exhalation wreathing
5
To the sound of air low-breathing
Through Aeolian pines, which make
A shade and shelter to the lake
Whence it rises soft and slow;
Her life-breathing [limbs] did flow
10
In the harmony divine
Of an ever-lengthening line
Which enwrapped her perfect form
With a beauty clear and warm.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
And who feels discord now or sorrow?
Love is the universe to-day—
These are the slaves of dim to-morrow,
Darkening Life’s labyrinthine way.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
A gentle story of two lovers young,
Who met in innocence and died in sorrow,
And of one selfish heart, whose rancour clung
Like curses on them; are ye slow to borrow
The lore of truth from such a tale?
5
Or in this world’s deserted vale,
Do ye not see a star of gladness
Pierce the shadows of its sadness,—
When ye are cold, that love is a light sent
From Heaven, which none shall quench, to cheer the
innocent? 10
NOTE:
9 cold]told cj. A.C. Bradley.
For the metre cp. Fragment:
To a Friend Released from Prison.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
There is a warm and gentle atmosphere
About the form of one we love, and thus
As in a tender mist our spirits are
Wrapped in the ... of that which is to us
The health of life’s own life—
5
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
I am as a spirit who has dwelt
Within his heart of hearts, and I have felt
His feelings, and have thought his thoughts, and known
The inmost converse of his soul, the tone
Unheard but in the silence of his blood,
5
When all the pulses in their multitude
Image the trembling calm of summer seas.
I have unlocked the golden melodies
Of his deep soul, as with a master-key,
And loosened them and bathed myself therein—
10
Even as an eagle in a thunder-mist
Clothing his wings with lightning.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Is it that in some brighter sphere
We part from friends we meet with here?
Or do we see the Future pass
Over the Present’s dusky glass?
Or what is that that makes us seem
5
To patch up fragments of a dream,
Part of which comes true, and part
Beats and trembles in the heart?
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Is not to-day enough? Why do I peer
Into the darkness of the day to come?
Is not to-morrow even as yesterday?
And will the day that follows change thy doom?
Few flowers grow upon thy wintry way;
5
And who waits for thee in that cheerless home
Whence thou hast fled, whither thou must return
Charged with the load that makes thee faint and mourn?
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
Ye gentle visitations of calm thought—
Moods like the memories of happier earth,
Which come arrayed in thoughts of little worth,
Like stars in clouds by the weak winds enwrought,—
But that the clouds depart and stars remain,
5
While they remain, and ye, alas, depart!
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
How sweet it is to sit and read the tales
Of mighty poets and to hear the while
Sweet music, which when the attention fails
Fills the dim pause—
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
And where is truth? On tombs? for such to thee
Has been my heart—and thy dead memory
Has lain from childhood, many a changeful year,
Unchangingly preserved and buried there.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
1.
When a lover clasps his fairest,
Then be our dread sport the rarest.
Their caresses were like the chaff
In the tempest, and be our laugh
His despair—her epitaph!
5
2.
When a mother clasps her child,
Watch till dusty Death has piled
His cold ashes on the clay;
She has loved it many a day—
She remains,—it fades away.
10
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
Wake the serpent not—lest he
Should not know the way to go,—
Let him crawl which yet lies sleeping
Through the deep grass of the meadow!
Not a bee shall hear him creeping,
5
Not a may-fly shall awaken
From its cradling blue-bell shaken,
Not the starlight as he’s sliding
Through the grass with silent gliding.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
The fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
One sung of thee who left the tale untold,
Like the false dawns which perish in the bursting;
Like empty cups of wrought and daedal gold,
Which mock the lips with air, when they are thirsting.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
As the sunrise to the night,
As the north wind to the clouds,
As the earthquake’s fiery flight,
Ruining mountain solitudes,
Everlasting Italy,
5
Be those hopes and fears on thee.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
I am drunk with the honey wine
Of the moon-unfolded eglantine,
Which fairies catch in hyacinth bowls.
The bats, the dormice, and the moles
Sleep in the walls or under the sward
5
Of the desolate castle yard;
And when ’tis spilt on the summer earth
Or its fumes arise among the dew,
Their jocund dreams are full of mirth,
They gibber their joy in sleep; for few
10
Of the fairies bear those bowls so new!
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
1.
In the cave which wild weeds cover
Wait for thine aethereal lover;
For the pallid moon is waning,
O’er the spiral cypress hanging
And the moon no cloud is staining.
5
2.
It was once a Roman’s chamber,
Where he kept his darkest revels,
And the wild weeds twine and clamber;
It was then a chasm for devils.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
Rome has fallen, ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
("PROMETHEUS UNBOUND”, ACT 4.)
As a violet’s gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds;
As a gray and empty mist
Lies like solid amethyst
5
Over the western mountain it enfolds,
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow;
As a strain of sweetest sound
Wraps itself the wind around
10
Until the voiceless wind be music too;
As aught dark, vain, and dull,
Basking in what is beautiful,
Is full of light and love—
***
[Published by H. Buxton Forman, “The Mask of Anarchy” ("Facsimile of Shelley’s manuscript"), 1887.]
(FOR WHICH STANZAS 68, 69 HAVE BEEN SUBSTITUTED.)
From the cities where from caves,
Like the dead from putrid graves,
Troops of starvelings gliding come,
Living Tenants of a tomb.
***
Shelley loved the People; and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and therefore more deserving of sympathy, than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side. He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their circumstances and wrongs. He wrote a few; but, in those days of prosecution for libel, they could not be printed. They are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they show his earnestness, and with what heart-felt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury—that oppression is detestable as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph: such is the scope of the “Ode to the Assertors of Liberty”. He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty.
***
THE SENSITIVE PLANT.
[Composed at Pisa, early in 1820 (dated ‘March, 1820,’ in Harvard manuscript), and published, with “Prometheus Unbound”, the same year: included in the Harvard College manuscript book. Reprinted in the “Poetical Works”, 1839, both editions.]
A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
5
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
10
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet
want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
The snowdrop, and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent
15
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.
Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream’s recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness;
20
And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;
And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
25
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addressed,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
30
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:
And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;
35
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.
40
And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was pranked, under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,
Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,
45
And starry river-buds glimmered by,
And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.
And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
Which led through the garden along and across,
50
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,
Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flow’rets which, drooping as day drooped
too, 55
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers (as an infant’s awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
60
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),
When Heaven’s blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one
65
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;
For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit
70
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all, it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver,—
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
75
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!
The light winds which from unsustaining wings
Shed the music of many murmurings;
The beams which dart from many a star
80
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
The plumed insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour, which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass;
85
The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
The quivering vapours of dim noontide,
90
Which like a sea o’er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound, and odour, and beam,
Move, as reeds in a single stream;
Each and all like ministering angels were
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,
95
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by
Like windless clouds o’er a tender sky.
And when evening descended from Heaven above,
And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love,
And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,
100
And the day’s veil fell from the world of sleep,
And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were
drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound;
Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress
The light sand which paves it, consciousness;
105
(Only overhead the sweet nightingale
Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant);—
The Sensitive Plant was the earliest
110
Upgathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite,
Cradled within the embrace of Night.
NOTES:
6 Like the Spirit of Love felt 1820;
And the Spirit of Love felt 1839,
1st edition;
And the Spirit of Love fell 1839,
2nd edition.
49 and of moss]and moss Harvard manuscript.
82 The]And the Harvard manuscript.
There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling Grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.
A Lady, the wonder of her kind,
5
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,
Tended the garden from morn to even:
And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven,
10
Like the lamps of the air when Night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!
She had no companion of mortal race,
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes,
15
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:
As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted Heaven while the stars were awake,
As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her.
20
Her step seemed to pity the grass it pressed;
You might hear by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.
And wherever her aery footstep trod,
25
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep.
I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
30
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame.
She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
35
She emptied the rain of the thunder-showers.
She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
40
And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,—
In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,
45
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.
But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris
Whose path is the lightning’s, and soft moths
that kiss 50
The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she
Make her attendant angels be.
And many an antenatal tomb,
Where butterflies dream of the life to come,
She left clinging round the smooth and dark
55
Edge of the odorous cedar bark.
This fairest creature from earliest Spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
Mi the sweet season of Summertide,
And ere the first leaf looked brown—she
died! 60
NOTES: 15 morn Harvard manuscript, 1839; moon 1820. 23 and going 1820; and the going Harvard manuscript, 1839. 59 All 1820, 1839; Through all Harvard manuscript.
Three days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,
Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.
And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant
5
Felt the sound of the funeral chant,
And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners, deep and low;
The weary sound and the heavy breath,
And the silent motions of passing death,
10
And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,
Sent through the pores of the coffin-plank;
The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,
15
And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.
The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
20
To make men tremble who never weep.
Swift Summer into the Autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,
Mocking the spoil of the secret night.
25
The rose-leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,
Paved the turf and the moss below.
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man.
And Indian plants, of scent and hue
30
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
Leaf by leaf, day after day,
Were massed into the common clay.
And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red,
And white with the whiteness of what is dead,
35
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind passed;
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.
And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds,
Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,
Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s
stem, 40
Which rotted into the earth with them.
The water-blooms under the rivulet
Fell from the stalks on which they were set;
And the eddies drove them here and there,
As the winds did those of the upper air.
45
Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks
Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless network of parasite bowers
Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.
Between the time of the wind and the snow
50
All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,
Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s
back.
And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
55
Stretched out its long and hollow shank,
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.
And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
60
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated!
65
Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.
And hour by hour, when the air was still,
70
The vapours arose which have strength to kill;
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.
And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noonday
75
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.
The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves, which together grew,
80
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.
For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.
85
For Winter came: the wind was his whip:
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;
His breath was a chain which without a sound
90
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.
Then the weeds which were forms of living death
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath.
95
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!
And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air
100
And were caught in the branches naked and bare.
First there came down a thawing rain
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;
105
And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy, and stiff,
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.
When Winter had gone and Spring came back
110
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and
darnels,
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.
CONCLUSION.
Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,
115
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.
Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
120
Found sadness, where it left delight,
I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
125
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair,
130
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
135
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
NOTES: 19 lovely Harvard manuscript, 1839;
lively 1820. 23 of the morning 1820, 1839; of
morning Harvard manuscript. 26 snow Harvard manuscript,
1839; now 1820. 28 And lilies were drooping, white
and wan Harvard manuscript. 32 Leaf by leaf, day
after day Harvard manuscript;
Leaf after leaf, day after
day 1820;
Leaf after leaf, day by day
1839.
63 mist]mists Harvard manuscript. 96 and sudden
flight]and their sudden flight the Harvard manuscript.
98 And under]Under Harvard manuscript. 114
Whether]And if Harvard manuscript. 118 Whether]Or
if Harvard manuscript.
***
[This stanza followed 3, 62-65 in the editio princeps, 1820, but was omitted by Mrs. Shelley from all editions from 1839 onwards. It is cancelled in the Harvard manuscript.]
Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake,
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s
stake,
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
Infecting the winds that wander by.
***
[Composed at Pisa early in 1820, and published with “Prometheus Unbound” in the same year. A transcript in Mrs. Shelley’s handwriting is included in the Harvard manuscript book, where it is dated ’April, 1820.’]
’Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of
the sail
Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale:
From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven,
And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from Heaven,
She sees the black trunks of the waterspouts spin
5
And bend, as if Heaven was ruining in,
Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible mass
As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they
pass
To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of
sound,
And the waves and the thunders, made silent around,
10
Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now tossed
Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost
In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down
the sweep
NOTES: 6 ruining Harvard manuscript, 1839; raining 1820. 8 sunk Harvard manuscript, 1839; sank 1820. 35 by Harvard manuscript; from 1820, 1839. 61 has 1820; had 1839. 87 all the Harvard manuscript; all that 1820, 1839. 116 through Harvard manuscript; from 1820, 1839. 121 away]alway cj. A.C. Bradley. 122 cloud Harvard manuscript, 1839; clouds 1820. 160 impetuously 1820, 1839; convulsively Harvard manuscript.
***
[Published with “Prometheus Unbound”, 1820.]
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
5
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
10
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night ’tis my pillow white,
15
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning my pilot sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
20
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills.
25
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven’s blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.
30
The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
35
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love,
40
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above.
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
45
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
50
May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof.
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees.
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
55
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.
I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl;
60
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hand like a roof,—
65
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow;
70
The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
75
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
80
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the
tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
NOTES: 3 shade 1820; shades 1839. 6 buds 1839; birds 1820. 59 with a 1820; with the 1830.
***
[Composed at Leghorn, 1820, and published with “Prometheus Unbound” in the same year. There is a transcript in the Harvard manuscript.]
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
5
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
10
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning.
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
15
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
20
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is
there. 25
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.
30
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
35
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
40
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:
45
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aereal hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from
the view! 50
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged
thieves: 55
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:
60
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
65
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
70
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
75
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest—but ne’er knew love’s
sad satiety. 80
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
85
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought. 90
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
95
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
100
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then—as I am listening
now. 105
NOTE:
55 those Harvard manuscript: these 1820, 1839.
***
[Composed early in 1820, and published, with “Prometheus Unbound”, in the same year. A transcript in Shelley’s hand of lines 1-21 is included in the Harvard manuscript book, and amongst the Boscombe manuscripts there is a fragment of a rough draft (Garnett). For further particulars concerning the text see Editor’s Notes.]
Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,
Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind.—BYRON.
1.
A glorious people vibrated again
The lightning of the nations: Liberty
From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o’er
Spain,
Scattering contagious fire into the sky,
Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay,
5
And in the rapid plumes of song
Clothed itself, sublime and strong;
As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,
Hovering inverse o’er its accustomed prey;
Till from its station in the Heaven of fame
10
The Spirit’s whirlwind rapped it, and the ray
Of the remotest sphere of living flame
Which paves the void was from behind it flung,
As foam from a ship’s swiftness, when there
came
A voice out of the deep: I will record the same.
15
2.
The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth:
The burning stars of the abyss were hurled
Into the depths of Heaven. The daedal earth,
That island in the ocean of the world,
Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air:
20
But this divinest universe
Was yet a chaos and a curse,
For thou wert not: but, power from worst producing
worse,
The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,
And of the birds, and of the watery forms,
25
And there was war among them, and despair
Within them, raging without truce or terms:
The bosom of their violated nurse
Groaned, for beasts warred on beasts, and worms on
worms,
And men on men; each heart was as a hell of storms.
30
3.
Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied
His generations under the pavilion
Of the Sun’s throne: palace and pyramid,
Temple and prison, to many a swarming million
Were, as to mountain-wolves their ragged caves.
35
This human living multitude
Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude,
For thou wert not; but o’er the populous solitude,
Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves,
Hung Tyranny; beneath, sate deified
40
The sister-pest, congregator of slaves;
Into the shadow of her pinions wide
Anarchs and priests, who feed on gold and blood
Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed,
Drove the astonished herds of men from every side.
45
4.
The nodding promontories, and blue isles,
And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves
Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles
Of favouring Heaven: from their enchanted caves
Prophetic echoes flung dim melody.
50
On the unapprehensive wild
The vine, the corn, the olive mild,
Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled;
And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,
Like the man’s thought dark in the infant’s
brain, 55
Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,
Art’s deathless dreams lay veiled by many a
vein
Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child,
Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain
Her lidless eyes for thee; when o’er the Aegean
main 60
5.
Athens arose: a city such as vision
Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision
Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it;
65
Its portals are inhabited
By thunder-zoned winds, each head
Within its cloudy wings with sun-fire garlanded,—
A divine work! Athens, diviner yet,
Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will
70
Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;
For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill
Peopled, with forms that mock the eternal dead
In marble immortality, that hill
Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.
75
6.
Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river
Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay
Immovably unquiet, and for ever
It trembles, but it cannot pass away!
The voices of thy bards and sages thunder
80
With an earth-awakening blast
Through the caverns of the past:
(Religion veils her eyes; Oppression shrinks aghast:)
A winged sound of joy, and love, and wonder,
Which soars where Expectation never flew,
85
Rending the veil of space and time asunder!
One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew;
One Sun illumines Heaven; one Spirit vast
With life and love makes chaos ever new,
As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew.
90
7.
Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest,
Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmaean Maenad,
She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest
From that Elysian food was yet unweaned;
And many a deed of terrible uprightness
95
By thy sweet love was sanctified;
And in thy smile, and by thy side,
Saintly Camillus lived, and firm Atilius died.
But when tears stained thy robe of vestal-whiteness,
And gold profaned thy Capitolian throne,
100
Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness,
The senate of the tyrants: they sunk prone
Slaves of one tyrant: Palatinus sighed
Faint echoes of Ionian song; that tone
Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown
105
8.
From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
Or utmost islet inaccessible,
Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,
Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks,
110
And every Naiad’s ice-cold urn,
To talk in echoes sad and stern
Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?
For neither didst thou watch the wizard flocks
Of the Scald’s dreams, nor haunt the Druid’s
sleep. 115
What if the tears rained through thy shattered locks
Were quickly dried? for thou didst groan, not weep,
When from its sea of death, to kill and burn,
The Galilean serpent forth did creep,
And made thy world an undistinguishable heap.
120
9.
A thousand years the Earth cried, ‘Where art
thou?’
And then the shadow of thy coming fell
On Saxon Alfred’s olive-cinctured brow:
And many a warrior-peopled citadel.
Like rocks which fire lifts out of the flat deep,
125
Arose in sacred Italy,
Frowning o’er the tempestuous sea
Of kings, and priests, and slaves, in tower-crowned
majesty;
That multitudinous anarchy did sweep
And burst around their walls, like idle foam,
130
Whilst from the human spirit’s deepest deep
Strange melody with love and awe struck dumb
Dissonant arms; and Art, which cannot die,
With divine wand traced on our earthly home
Fit imagery to pave Heaven’s everlasting dome.
135
10.
Thou huntress swifter than the Moon! thou terror
Of the world’s wolves! thou bearer of the quiver,
Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-winged Error,
As light may pierce the clouds when they dissever
In the calm regions of the orient day!
140
Luther caught thy wakening glance;
Like lightning, from his leaden lance
Reflected, it dissolved the visions of the trance
In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay;
And England’s prophets hailed thee as their
queen, 145
In songs whose music cannot pass away,
Though it must flow forever: not unseen
Before the spirit-sighted countenance
Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene
Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien.
150
11.
The eager hours and unreluctant years
As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood.
Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,
Darkening each other with their multitude,
And cried aloud, ‘Liberty!’ Indignation
155
Answered Pity from her cave;
Death grew pale within the grave,
And Desolation howled to the destroyer, Save!
When like Heaven’s Sun girt by the exhalation
Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise.
160
Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation
Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies
At dreaming midnight o’er the western wave,
Men started, staggering with a glad surprise,
Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes.
165
12.
Thou Heaven of earth! what spells could pall thee
then
In ominous eclipse? a thousand years
Bred from the slime of deep Oppression’s den.
Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears.
Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away;
170
How like Bacchanals of blood
Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood
Destruction’s sceptred slaves, and Folly’s
mitred brood!
When one, like them, but mightier far than they,
The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers,
175
Rose: armies mingled in obscure array,
Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred bowers
Of serene Heaven. He, by the past pursued,
Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral
towers. 180
13.
England yet sleeps: was she not called of old?
Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder
Vesuvius wakens Aetna, and the cold
Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder:
O’er the lit waves every Aeolian isle
185
From Pithecusa to Pelorus
Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus:
They cry, ‘Be dim; ye lamps of Heaven suspended
o’er us!’
Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile
And they dissolve; but Spain’s were links of
steel, 190
Till bit to dust by virtue’s keenest file.
Twins of a single destiny! appeal
To the eternal years enthroned before us
In the dim West; impress us from a seal,
All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare
conceal. 195
14.
Tomb of Arminius! render up thy dead
Till, like a standard from a watch-tower’s staff,
His soul may stream over the tyrant’s head;
Thy victory shall be his epitaph,
Wild Bacchanal of truth’s mysterious wine,
200
King-deluded Germany,
His dead spirit lives in thee.
Why do we fear or hope? thou art already free!
And thou, lost Paradise of this divine
And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness!
205
Thou island of eternity! thou shrine
Where Desolation, clothed with loveliness,
Worships the thing thou wert! O Italy,
Gather thy blood into thy heart; repress
The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces.
210
15.
Oh, that the free would stamp the impious name
Of KING into the dust! or write it there,
So that this blot upon the page of fame
Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air
Erases, and the flat sands close behind!
215
Ye the oracle have heard:
Lift the victory-flashing sword.
And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word,
Which, weak itself as stubble, yet can bind
Into a mass, irrefragably firm,
220
The axes and the rods which awe mankind;
The sound has poison in it, ’tis the sperm
Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred;
Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term,
To set thine armed heel on this reluctant worm.
225
16.
Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,
That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle
Into the hell from which it first was hurled,
A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure;
230
Till human thoughts might kneel alone,
Each before the judgement-throne
Of its own aweless soul, or of the Power unknown!
Oh, that the words which make the thoughts obscure
From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew
235
From a white lake blot Heaven’s blue portraiture,
Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue
And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own,
Till in the nakedness of false and true
They stand before their Lord, each to receive its
due! 240
17.
He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever
Can be between the cradle and the grave
Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavour!
If on his own high will, a willing slave,
He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor
245
What if earth can clothe and feed
Amplest millions at their need,
And power in thought be as the tree within the seed?
Or what if Art, an ardent intercessor,
Driving on fiery wings to Nature’s throne,
250
Checks the great mother stooping to caress her,
And cries: ’Give me, thy child, dominion
Over all height and depth’? if Life can breed
New wants, and wealth from those who toil and groan,
Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousandfold for one!
255
18.
Come thou, but lead out of the inmost cave
Of man’s deep spirit, as the morning-star
Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,
Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car
Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;
260
Comes she not, and come ye not,
Rulers of eternal thought,
To judge, with solemn truth, life’s ill-apportioned
lot?
Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame
Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?
265
O Liberty! if such could be thy name
Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:
If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought
By blood or tears, have not the wise and free
Wept tears, and blood like tears?—The solemn
harmony 270
19.
Paused, and the Spirit of that mighty singing
To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn;
Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aereal golden light
275
On the heavy-sounding plain,
When the bolt has pierced its brain;
As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain;
As a far taper fades with fading night,
As a brief insect dies with dying day,—
280
My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,
Drooped; o’er it closed the echoes far away
Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,
As waves which lately paved his watery way
Hiss round a drowner’s head in their tempestuous
play. 285
NOTES: 4 into]unto Harvard manuscript. 9 inverse cj. Rossetti; in verse 1820. 92 See the Bacchae of Euripides—[SHELLEY’S NOTE]. 113 lore 1839; love 1820. 116 shattered]scattered cj. Rossetti. 134 wand 1820; want 1830. 194 us]as cj. Forman. 212 KING Boscombe manuscript; **** 1820, 1839; CHRIST cj. Swinburne. 249 Or 1839; O, 1820. 250 Driving 1820; Diving 1839.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Within a cavern of man’s trackless spirit
Is throned an Image, so intensely fair
That the adventurous thoughts that wander near it
Worship, and as they kneel, tremble and wear
The splendour of its presence, and the light
5
Penetrates their dreamlike frame
Till they become charged with the strength of flame.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,
Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burthen thine.
2.
I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion,
5
Thou needest not fear mine;
Innocent is the heart’s devotion
With which I worship thine.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and dated by her ‘Pisa, 1820.’ There is a fair draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 24.]
1.
Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,—
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
5
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;—
Her steps paved with green
Page 85
10
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
15
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.
2.
Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold,
20
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks—with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind
25
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below.
30
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph’s flight
35
To the brink of the Dorian deep.
3.
’Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!’
The loud Ocean heard,
40
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth’s white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam;
45
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:—
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main
50
Alpheus rushed behind,—
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
4.
Under the bowers
55
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearled thrones;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
60
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
65
Are as green as the forest’s night:—
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean’s foam,
And up through the rifts
70
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.
5.
And now from their fountains
In Enna’s mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks,
75
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
80
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
NOTES: 6 unsealed B.; concealed 1824. 31 And the B.; The 1824. 69 Ocean’s B.; ocean 1824.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. There is a fair draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination,” etc., 1903, page 24.]
1.
Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,
Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
5
On thine own child, Proserpine.
2.
If with mists of evening dew
Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow, in scent and hue,
Fairest children of the Hours,
10
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a fair draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 25.]
1.
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries
From the broad moonlight of the sky,
Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,—
Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn,
5
Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.
2.
Then I arise, and climbing Heaven’s blue dome,
I walk over the mountains and the waves,
Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;
My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves
10
Are filled with my bright presence, and the air
Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.
3.
The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill
Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;
All men who do or even imagine ill
15
Fly me, and from the glory of my ray
Good minds and open actions take new might,
Until diminished by the reign of Night.
4.
I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers
With their aethereal colours; the moon’s globe
20
And the pure stars in their eternal bowers
Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;
Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine
Are portions of one power, which is mine.
5.
I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven,
25
Then with unwilling steps I wander down
Into the clouds of the Atlantic even;
For grief that I depart they weep and frown:
What look is more delightful than the smile
With which I soothe them from the western isle?
30
6.
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine is mine,
All light of art or nature;—to my song
35
Victory and praise in its own right belong.
NOTES: 32 itself divine]it is divine B. 34 is B.; are 1824. 36 its cj. Rossetti, 1870, B.; their 1824.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a fair draft amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 25.]
1.
From the forests and highlands
We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings.
5
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,
The cicale above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass,
10
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,
Listening to my sweet pipings.
2.
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing
15
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,
And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
20
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend and follow,
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.
3.
I sang of the dancing stars,
25
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven—and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth,—
And then I changed my pipings,—
Singing how down the vale of Maenalus
30
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
35
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
NOTE:
5, 12 Listening to]Listening B.
***
[Published by Leigh Hunt (with the signature Sigma) in “The Literary Pocket-Book”, 1822. Reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Copies exist in the Harvard manuscript book, amongst the Boscombe manuscripts, and amongst Ollier manuscripts.]
1.
I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay
5
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.
2.
There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,
10
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxslips; tender bluebells, at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets—
Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth—
Its mother’s face with Heaven’s collected
tears, 15
When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it
hears.
3.
And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,
And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day;
20
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.
4.
And nearer to the river’s trembling edge
25
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
With moonlight beams of their own watery light;
30
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green
As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.
5.
Methought that of these visionary flowers
I made a nosegay, bound in such a way
That the same hues, which in their natural bowers
35
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,
That I might there present it!—Oh! to whom?
40
NOTES:
14 Like...mirth Harvard manuscript, Boscombe manuscript;
wanting in Ollier manuscript,
1822, 1824, 1839.
15 Heaven’s collected Harvard manuscript,
Ollier manuscript, 1822;
Heaven-collected 1824, 1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
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!
Bright are the regions of the air,
5
And among the winds and beams
It were delight to wander there—
Night is coming!
SECOND SPIRIT:
The deathless stars are bright above;
If I would cross the shade of night,
10
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;
The meteors will linger round my flight,
15
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—
Night is coming!
20
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:
I see the light, and I hear the sound;
25
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,
Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound,
30
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
O’er piles of snow and chasms of ice
35
Mid Alpine mountains;
And that the languid storm pursuing
That winged shape, for ever flies
Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
Its aery fountains.
40
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:
And a silver shape like his early love doth pass
45
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,
He finds night day.
NOTES: 2 Wouldst 1839; Would 1824. 31 moon-like 1824; moonlight 1839. 44 make]makes 1824, 1839.
***
(The Author has connected many recollections of his visit to Pompeii and Baiae with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples. This has given a tinge of picturesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory Epodes which depicture these scenes, and some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene of this animating event.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.])
[Composed at San Juliano di Pisa, August 17-25, 1820; published in “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a copy, ’for the most part neat and legible,’ amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. See Mr. C.D. Locock’s “Examination”, etc., 1903, pages 14-18.]
EPODE 1a.
I stood within the City disinterred;
And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls
Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals
Thrill through those roofless halls;
5
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
Page 90
glowed
The isle-sustaining ocean-flood,
10
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;
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.
NOTE:
1 Pompeii.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]
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
NOTES: 25 odours B.; odour 1824. 42 depth B.; depths 1824. 45 sun-bright B.; sunlit 1824. 39 Homer and Virgil.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]
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!
NOTE:
100 wealth-surviving cj. A.C. Bradley.
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
NOTES:
104 Aeaea, the island of Circe.—[SHELLEY’S
NOTE.]
112 The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti,
tyrants of Milan.—[SHELLEY’S
NOTE.]
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
Bid 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!
NOTES: 143 old 1824; lost B. 147 black 1824; blue B.
***
[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.
***
[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—
***
[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...
***
[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
***
[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.
NOTE:
4 zone editions 1824, 1839; throne later editions.
***
[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!
NOTE:
11 birds die 1839; birds do die 1829.
***
[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.
NOTE:
7 For]With 1829.
***
[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
NOTE:
8 pass Rossetti; passed editions 1824, 1839.
***
[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?
***
[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?
NOTE:
1 grave Ollier manuscript;
dead Harvard manuscript, 1823, editions
1824, 1839.
5 pale Expectation Ollier manuscript;
anticipation Harvard manuscript,
1823, editions 1824, 1839.
7 must Harvard manuscript, 1823; mayst 1824; mayest
editions 1839.
8 all that Harvard manuscript, 1823; that which
editions 1824, 1839.
would Harvard manuscript, 1823;
wouldst editions 1839.
***
[Published by Leigh Hunt, “The Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823. These lines, and the “Sonnet” immediately preceding, are signed Sigma in the “Literary Pocket-Book".]
Alas, good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate where all the rage
Is on one side: in vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
5
In which not even contempt lurks to beguile
Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh, conquer what you cannot satiate!
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy
10
In winter noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.
NOTE:
3 where editions 1824, 1839; when 1823.
***
[Published by Edward Dowden, “Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Bowles”, 1880.]
If gibbets, axes, confiscations, chains,
And racks of subtle torture, if the pains
Of shame, of fiery Hell’s tempestuous wave,
Seen through the caverns of the shadowy grave,
Hurling the damned into the murky air
5
While the meek blest sit smiling; if Despair
And Hate, the rapid bloodhounds with which Terror
Page 97
Hunts through the world the homeless steps of Error,
Are the true secrets of the commonweal
To make men wise and just;...
10
And not the sophisms of revenge and fear,
Bloodier than is revenge...
Then send the priests to every hearth and home
To preach the burning wrath which is to come,
In words like flakes of sulphur, such as thaw
15
The frozen tears...
If Satire’s scourge could wake the slumbering
hounds
Of Conscience, or erase the deeper wounds,
The leprous scars of callous Infamy;
If it could make the present not to be,
20
Or charm the dark past never to have been,
Or turn regret to hope; who that has seen
What Southey is and was, would not exclaim,
‘Lash on!’ ... be the keen verse dipped
in flame;
Follow his flight with winged words, and urge
25
The strokes of the inexorable scourge
Until the heart be naked, till his soul
See the contagion’s spots ... foul;
And from the mirror of Truth’s sunlike shield,
From which his Parthian arrow...
30
Flash on his sight the spectres of the past,
Until his mind’s eye paint thereon—
Let scorn like ... yawn below,
And rain on him like flakes of fiery snow.
This cannot be, it ought not, evil still—
35
Suffering makes suffering, ill must follow ill.
Rough words beget sad thoughts, ... and, beside,
Men take a sullen and a stupid pride
In being all they hate in others’ shame,
By a perverse antipathy of fame.
40
’Tis not worth while to prove, as I could, how
From the sweet fountains of our Nature flow
These bitter waters; I will only say,
If any friend would take Southey some day,
And tell him, in a country walk alone,
45
Softening harsh words with friendship’s gentle
tone,
How incorrect his public conduct is,
And what men think of it, ’twere not amiss.
Far better than to make innocent ink—
***
[Published by Leigh Hunt over the signature Sigma, “The Literary Pocket-Book”, 1822. It is included in the Harvard manuscript book, and there is a transcript by Shelley in a copy of “The Literary Pocket-Book”, 1819, presented by him to Miss Sophia Stacey, December 29, 1820. (See “Love’s Philosophy” and “Time Long Past".) Our text is that of the editio princeps, 1822, with which the Harvard manuscript and “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, agree. The variants of the Stacey manuscript, 1820, are given in the footnotes.]
1.
Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be GOOD night.
2.
How can I call the lone night good,
5
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood—
Then it will be—GOOD night.
3.
To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
10
The night is good; because, my love,
They never SAY good-night.
NOTES: 1 Good-night? no, love! the night is ill Stacey manuscript. 5 How were the night without thee good Stacey manuscript. 9 The hearts that on each other beat Stacey manuscript. 11 Have nights as good as they are sweet Stacey manuscript. 12 But never SAY good night Stacey manuscript.
***
[Published by Medwin, “The Angler in Wales, or Days and Nights of Sportsmen”, 1834. The text is revised by Rossetti from the Boscombe manuscript.]
1.
’Buona notte, buona notte!’—Come
mai
La notte sara buona senza te?
Non dirmi buona notte,—che tu sai,
La notte sa star buona da per se.
2.
Solinga, scura, cupa, senza speme,
5
La notte quando Lilla m’abbandona;
Pei cuori chi si batton insieme
Ogni notte, senza dirla, sara buona.
3.
Come male buona notte ci suona
Con sospiri e parole interrotte!—
10
Il modo di aver la notte buona
E mai non di dir la buona notte.
NOTES: 2 sara]sia 1834. 4 buona]bene 1834. 9 Come]Quanto 1834.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862; revised and enlarged by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
A:
Not far from hence. From yonder pointed hill,
Crowned with a ring of oaks, you may behold
A dark and barren field, through which there flows,
Sluggish and black, a deep but narrow stream,
Which the wind ripples not, and the fair moon
5
Gazes in vain, and finds no mirror there.
Follow the herbless banks of that strange brook
Until you pause beside a darksome pond,
The fountain of this rivulet, whose gush
Cannot be seen, hid by a rayless night
10
That lives beneath the overhanging rock
That shades the pool—an endless spring
of gloom,
Upon whose edge hovers the tender light,
Trembling to mingle with its paramour,—
But, as Syrinx fled Pan, so night flies day,
15
Or, with most sullen and regardless hate,
Refuses stern her heaven-born embrace.
On one side of this jagged and shapeless hill
There is a cave, from which there eddies up
A pale mist, like aereal gossamer,
20
Whose breath destroys all life—awhile it
veils
The rock—then, scattered by the wind, it
flies
Along the stream, or lingers on the clefts,
Killing the sleepy worms, if aught bide there.
Upon the beetling edge of that dark rock
CHORUS:
What wondrous sound is that, mournful and faint,
35
But more melodious than the murmuring wind
Which through the columns of a temple glides?
A:
It is the wandering voice of Orpheus’ lyre,
Borne by the winds, who sigh that their rude king
Hurries them fast from these air-feeding notes;
40
But in their speed they bear along with them
The waning sound, scattering it like dew
Upon the startled sense.
CHORUS:
Does he still sing?
Methought he rashly cast away his harp
When he had lost Eurydice.
A:
Ah, no!
45
Awhile he paused. As a poor hunted stag
A moment shudders on the fearful brink
Of a swift stream—the cruel hounds press
on
With deafening yell, the arrows glance and wound,—
He plunges in: so Orpheus, seized and torn
50
By the sharp fangs of an insatiate grief,
Maenad-like waved his lyre in the bright air,
And wildly shrieked ‘Where she is, it is dark!’
And then he struck from forth the strings a sound
Of deep and fearful melody. Alas!
55
In times long past, when fair Eurydice
With her bright eyes sat listening by his side,
He gently sang of high and heavenly themes.
As in a brook, fretted with little waves
By the light airs of spring—each riplet
makes 60
A many-sided mirror for the sun,
While it flows musically through green banks,
Ceaseless and pauseless, ever clear and fresh,
So flowed his song, reflecting the deep joy
And tender love that fed those sweetest notes,
65
The heavenly offspring of ambrosial food.
But that is past. Returning from drear Hell,
He chose a lonely seat of unhewn stone,
Blackened with lichens, on a herbless plain.
Then from the deep and overflowing spring
70
Of his eternal ever-moving grief
There rose to Heaven a sound of angry song.
’Tis as a mighty cataract that parts
Two sister rocks with waters swift and strong,
75
And casts itself with horrid roar and din
Adown a steep; from a perennial source
It ever flows and falls, and breaks the air
With loud and fierce, but most harmonious roar,
And as it falls casts up a vaporous spray
Page 100
Which the sun clothes in hues of Iris light.
80
Thus the tempestuous torrent of his grief
Is clothed in sweetest sounds and varying words
Of poesy. Unlike all human works,
It never slackens, and through every change
Wisdom and beauty and the power divine
85
Of mighty poesy together dwell,
Mingling in sweet accord. As I have seen
A fierce south blast tear through the darkened sky,
Driving along a rack of winged clouds,
Which may not pause, but ever hurry on,
90
As their wild shepherd wills them, while the stars,
Twinkling and dim, peep from between the plumes.
Anon the sky is cleared, and the high dome
Of serene Heaven, starred with fiery flowers,
Shuts in the shaken earth; or the still moon
95
Swiftly, yet gracefully, begins her walk,
Rising all bright behind the eastern hills.
I talk of moon, and wind, and stars, and not
Of song; but, would I echo his high song,
Nature must lend me words ne’er used before,
100
Or I must borrow from her perfect works,
To picture forth his perfect attributes.
He does no longer sit upon his throne
Of rock upon a desert herbless plain,
For the evergreen and knotted ilexes,
105
And cypresses that seldom wave their boughs,
And sea-green olives with their grateful fruit,
And elms dragging along the twisted vines,
Which drop their berries as they follow fast,
And blackthorn bushes with their infant race
110
Of blushing rose-blooms; beeches, to lovers dear,
And weeping willow trees; all swift or slow,
As their huge boughs or lighter dress permit,
Have circled in his throne, and Earth herself
Has sent from her maternal breast a growth
115
Of starlike flowers and herbs of odour sweet,
To pave the temple that his poesy
Has framed, while near his feet grim lions couch,
And kids, fearless from love, creep near his lair.
Even the blind worms seem to feel the sound.
120
The birds are silent, hanging down their heads,
Perched on the lowest branches of the trees;
Not even the nightingale intrudes a note
In rivalry, but all entranced she listens.
NOTES: 16, 17, 24 1870 only. 45-55 Ah, no!... melody 1870 only. 66 1870 only. 112 trees 1870; too 1862. 113 huge 1870; long 1862. 116 starlike 1870; starry 1862. odour 1862; odours 1870.
***
[Published in part (lines 11-30) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; in full (from the Boscombe manuscript) by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
The season was the childhood of sweet June,
Whose sunny hours from morning until noon
Went creeping through the day with silent feet,
Each with its load of pleasure; slow yet sweet;
Like the long years of blest Eternity
5
Never to be developed. Joy to thee,
Fiordispina and thy Cosimo,
For thou the wonders of the depth canst know
Of this unfathomable flood of hours,
Sparkling beneath the heaven which embowers—
10
...
They were two cousins, almost like to twins,
Except that from the catalogue of sins
Nature had rased their love—which could
not be
But by dissevering their nativity.
And so they grew together like two flowers
15
Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers
Lull or awaken in their purple prime,
Which the same hand will gather—the same
clime
Shake with decay. This fair day smiles to see
All those who love—and who e’er loved
like thee, 20
Fiordispina? Scarcely Cosimo,
Within whose bosom and whose brain now glow
The ardours of a vision which obscure
The very idol of its portraiture.
He faints, dissolved into a sea of love;
25
But thou art as a planet sphered above;
But thou art Love itself—ruling the motion
Of his subjected spirit: such emotion
Must end in sin and sorrow, if sweet May
Had not brought forth this morn—your wedding-day.
30
...
’Lie there; sleep awhile in your own dew,
Ye faint-eyed children of the ... Hours,’
Fiordispina said, and threw the flowers
Which she had from the breathing—
...
A table near of polished porphyry.
35
They seemed to wear a beauty from the eye
That looked on them—a fragrance from the
touch
Whose warmth ... checked their life; a light such
As sleepers wear, lulled by the voice they love, which
did reprove 40
The childish pity that she felt for them,
And a ... remorse that from their stem
She had divided such fair shapes ... made
A feeling in the ... which was a shade
Of gentle beauty on the flowers: there lay
45
All gems that make the earth’s dark bosom gay.
... rods of myrtle-buds and lemon-blooms,
And that leaf tinted lightly which assumes
The livery of unremembered snow—
Violets whose eyes have drunk—
50
...
Fiordispina and her nurse are now
Upon the steps of the high portico,
Under the withered arm of Media
She flings her glowing arm
...
... step by step and stair by stair,
55
That withered woman, gray and white and brown—
More like a trunk by lichens overgrown
Than anything which once could have been human.
And ever as she goes the palsied woman
...
’How slow and painfully you seem to walk,
60
Poor Media! you tire yourself with talk.’
’And well it may,
Fiordispina, dearest—well-a-day!
You are hastening to a marriage-bed;
I to the grave!’—’And if my
love were dead, 65
Unless my heart deceives me, I would lie
Beside him in my shroud as willingly
As now in the gay night-dress Lilla wrought.’
’Fie, child! Let that unseasonable thought
Not be remembered till it snows in June;
70
Such fancies are a music out of tune
With the sweet dance your heart must keep to-night.
What! would you take all beauty and delight
Back to the Paradise from which you sprung,
And leave to grosser mortals?—
75
And say, sweet lamb, would you not learn the sweet
And subtle mystery by which spirits meet?
Who knows whether the loving game is played,
When, once of mortal [vesture] disarrayed,
The naked soul goes wandering here and there
80
Through the wide deserts of Elysian air?
The violet dies not till it’—
NOTES: 11 to 1824; two editions 1839. 20 e’er 1862; ever editions 1824, 1839. 25 sea edition 1862; sense editions 1824, 1839.
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870. This is one of three poems (cf. “Love’s Philosophy” and “Good-Night”) transcribed by Shelley in a copy of Leigh Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book” for 1819 presented by him to Miss Sophia Stacey, December 29, 1820.]
1.
Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past.
A tone which is now forever fled,
A hope which is now forever past,
A love so sweet it could not last,
5
Was Time long past.
2.
There were sweet dreams in the night
Of Time long past:
And, was it sadness or delight,
Each day a shadow onward cast
10
Which made us wish it yet might last—
That Time long past.
3.
There is regret, almost remorse,
For Time long past.
’Tis like a child’s beloved corse
15
A father watches, till at last
Beauty is like remembrance, cast
From Time long past.
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
I went into the deserts of dim sleep—
That world which, like an unknown wilderness,
Bounds this with its recesses wide and deep—
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
The viewless and invisible Consequence
Watches thy goings-out, and comings-in,
And...hovers o’er thy guilty sleep,
Unveiling every new-born deed, and thoughts
More ghastly than those deeds—
5
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
His face was like a snake’s—wrinkled
and loose
And withered—
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,
And it is not life that makes me move.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Such hope, as is the sick despair of good,
Such fear, as is the certainty of ill,
Such doubt, as is pale Expectation’s food
Turned while she tastes to poison, when the will
Is powerless, and the spirit...
5
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. This fragment is joined by Forman with that immediately preceding.]
Alas! this is not what I thought life was.
I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
Untouched by suffering, through the rugged glen.
In mine own heart I saw as in a glass
5
The hearts of others ... And when
I went among my kind, with triple brass
Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woful mass!
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
I dreamed that Milton’s spirit rose, and took
From life’s green tree his Uranian lute;
And from his touch sweet thunder flowed, and shook
All human things built in contempt of man,—
And sanguine thrones and impious altars quaked,
5
Prisons and citadels...
NOTE:
2 lute Uranian cj. A.C. Bradley.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Unrisen splendour of the brightest sun,
To rise upon our darkness, if the star
Now beckoning thee out of thy misty throne
Could thaw the clouds which wage an obscure war
With thy young brightness!
5
***
[Edited from manuscript Shelley E 4 in the Bodleian Library, and published by Mr. C.D. Locock, “Examination” etc., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1903. Here placed conjecturally amongst the compositions of 1820, but of uncertain date, and belonging possibly to 1819 or a still earlier year.]
Serene in his unconquerable might
Endued[,] the Almighty King, his steadfast throne
Encompassed unapproachably with power
And darkness and deep solitude an awe
Stood like a black cloud on some aery cliff
5
Embosoming its lightning—in his sight
Unnumbered glorious spirits trembling stood
Like slaves before their Lord—prostrate
around
Heaven’s multitudes hymned everlasting praise.
***
[Edited, published and here placed as the preceding.]
Thou living light that in thy rainbow hues
Clothest this naked world; and over Sea
And Earth and air, and all the shapes that be
In peopled darkness of this wondrous world
The Spirit of thy glory dost diffuse
5
... truth ... thou Vital Flame
Mysterious thought that in this mortal frame
Of things, with unextinguished lustre burnest
Now pale and faint now high to Heaven upcurled
That eer as thou dost languish still returnest
10
And ever
Before the ... before the Pyramids
So soon as from the Earth formless and rude
One living step had chased drear Solitude
Thou wert, Thought; thy brightness charmed the lids
15
Of the vast snake Eternity, who kept
The tree of good and evil.—
***
We spent the latter part of the year 1819 in Florence, where Shelley passed several hours daily in the Gallery, and made various notes on its ancient works of art. His thoughts were a good deal taken up also by the project of a steamboat, undertaken by a friend, an engineer, to ply between Leghorn and Marseilles, for which he supplied a sum of money. This was a sort of plan to delight Shelley, and he was greatly disappointed when it was thrown aside.
There was something in Florence that disagreed excessively with his health, and he suffered far more pain than usual; so much so that we left it sooner than we intended, and removed to Pisa, where we had some friends, and, above all, where we could consult the celebrated Vacca as to the cause of Shelley’s sufferings. He, like every other medical man, could only guess at that, and gave little hope of immediate relief; he enjoined him to abstain from all physicians and medicine, and to leave his complaint to Nature. As he had vainly consulted medical men of the highest repute in England, he was easily persuaded to adopt this advice. Pain and ill-health followed him to the end; but the residence at Pisa agreed with him better than any other, and there in consequence we remained.
In the Spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle-hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems. He addressed the letter to Mrs. Gisborne from this house, which was hers: he had made his study of the workshop of her son, who was an engineer. Mrs. Gisborne had been a friend of my father in her younger days. She was a lady of great accomplishments, and charming from her frank and affectionate nature. She had the most intense love of knowledge, a delicate and trembling sensibility, and preserved freshness of mind after a life of considerable adversity. As a favourite friend of my father, we had sought her with eagerness; and the most open and cordial friendship was established between us.
Our stay at the Baths of San Giuliano was shortened by an accident. At the foot of our garden ran the canal that communicated between the Serchio and the Arno. The Serchio overflowed its banks, and, breaking its bounds, this canal also overflowed; all this part of the country is below the level of its rivers, and the consequence was that it was speedily flooded. The rising waters filled the Square of the Baths, in the lower part of which our house was situated. The canal overflowed in the garden behind; the rising waters on either side at last burst open the doors, and, meeting in the house, rose to the height of six feet. It was a picturesque sight at night to see the peasants driving the cattle from the plains below to the hills above the Baths. A fire was kept up to guide them across the ford; and the forms of the men and the animals showed in dark relief against the red glare of the flame, which was reflected again in the waters that filled the Square.
We then removed to Pisa, and took up our abode there for the winter. The extreme mildness of the climate suited Shelley, and his solitude was enlivened by an intercourse with several intimate friends. Chance cast us strangely enough on this quiet half-unpeopled town; but its very peace suited Shelley. Its river, the near mountains, and not distant sea, added to its attractions, and were the objects of many delightful excursions. We feared the south of Italy, and a hotter climate, on account of our child; our former bereavement inspiring us with terror. We seemed to take root here, and moved little afterwards; often, indeed, entertaining projects for visiting other parts of Italy, but still delaying. But for our fears on account of our child, I believe we should have wandered over the world, both being passionately fond of travelling. But human life, besides its great unalterable necessities, is ruled by a thousand lilliputian ties that shackle at the time, although it is difficult to account afterwards for their influence over our destiny.
***
DIRGE FOR THE YEAR.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and dated January 1, 1821.]
1.
Orphan Hours, the Year is dead,
Come and sigh, come and weep!
Merry Hours, smile instead,
For the Year is but asleep.
See, it smiles as it is sleeping,
5
Mocking your untimely weeping.
2.
As an earthquake rocks a corse
In its coffin in the clay,
So White Winter, that rough nurse,
Rocks the death-cold Year to-day;
10
Solemn Hours! wail aloud
For your mother in her shroud.
3.
As the wild air stirs and sways
The tree-swung cradle of a child,
So the breath of these rude days
15
Rocks the Year:—be calm and mild,
Trembling Hours, she will arise
With new love within her eyes.
4.
January gray is here,
Like a sexton by her grave;
20
February bears the bier,
March with grief doth howl and rave,
And April weeps—but, O ye Hours!
Follow with May’s fairest flowers.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a transcript in the Harvard manuscript book.]
1.
Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
5
’Which make thee terrible and dear,—
Swift be thy flight!
2.
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day;
10
Kiss her until she be wearied out,
Then wander o’er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand—
Come, long-sought!
3.
When I arose and saw the dawn,
15
I sighed for thee;
When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest, I sighed for thee.
20
4.
Thy brother Death came, and cried,
Wouldst thou me?
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noontide bee,
25
Shall I nestle near thy side?
Wouldst thou me?—And I replied,
No, not thee!
5.
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon—
30
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night—
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!
35
NOTE:
1 o’er Harvard manuscript; over editions
1824, 1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality,
5
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea?
10
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
Far, far away, O ye
Halcyons of Memory,
Seek some far calmer nest
Than this abandoned breast!
No news of your false spring
5
To my heart’s winter bring,
Once having gone, in vain
Ye come again.
2.
Vultures, who build your bowers
High in the Future’s towers,
10
Withered hopes on hopes are spread!
Dying joys, choked by the dead,
Will serve your beaks for prey
Many a day.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is an intermediate draft amongst the Bodleian manuscripts. See Locock, “Examination”, etc., 1903, page 13.]
1.
My faint spirit was sitting in the light
Of thy looks, my love;
It panted for thee like the hind at noon
For the brooks, my love.
Thy barb whose hoofs outspeed the tempest’s
flight 5
Bore thee far from me;
My heart, for my weak feet were weary soon,
Did companion thee.
2.
Ah! fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed
Or the death they bear,
10
The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove
With the wings of care;
In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,
Shall mine cling to thee,
Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,
15
It may bring to thee.
NOTES: 3 hoofs]feet B. 7 were]grew B. 9 Ah!]O B.
***
[Published, (1) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; (2, 1) by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862; (2, 2 and 3) by H. Buxton Forman, “Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1876.]
1.
Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me
Sweet-basil and mignonette?
Embleming love and health, which never yet
In the same wreath might be.
Alas, and they are wet!
5
Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?
For never rain or dew
Such fragrance drew
From plant or flower—the very doubt endears
My sadness ever new,
10
The sighs I breathe, the tears I shed for thee.
2.
Send the stars light, but send not love to me,
In whom love ever made
Health like a heap of embers soon to fade—
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”. 1824.]
1.
The waters are flashing,
The white hail is dashing,
The lightnings are glancing,
The hoar-spray is dancing—
Away!
5
The whirlwind is rolling,
The thunder is tolling,
The forest is swinging,
The minster bells ringing—
Come away!
10
The Earth is like Ocean,
Wreck-strewn and in motion:
Bird, beast, man and worm
Have crept out of the storm—
Come away!
15
2.
’Our boat has one sail
And the helmsman is pale;—
A bold pilot I trow,
Who should follow us now,’—
Shouted he—
20
And she cried: ’Ply the oar!
Put off gaily from shore!’—
As she spoke, bolts of death
Mixed with hail, specked their path
O’er the sea.
25
And from isle, tower and rock,
The blue beacon-cloud broke,
And though dumb in the blast,
The red cannon flashed fast
From the lee.
30
3.
And ‘Fear’st thou?’ and ‘Fear’st
thou?’
And Seest thou?’ and ‘Hear’st thou?’
And ’Drive we not free
O’er the terrible sea,
I and thou?’
35
One boat-cloak did cover
The loved and the lover—
Their blood beats one measure,
They murmur proud pleasure
Soft and low;—
40
While around the lashed Ocean,
Like mountains in motion,
Is withdrawn and uplifted,
Sunk, shattered and shifted
To and fro.
45
4.
In the court of the fortress
Beside the pale portress,
Like a bloodhound well beaten
The bridegroom stands, eaten
By shame;
50
On the topmost watch-turret,
As a death-boding spirit
Stands the gray tyrant father,
To his voice the mad weather
Seems tame;
55
And with curses as wild
As e’er clung to child,
He devotes to the blast,
The best, loveliest and last
Of his name!
60
NOTES: 28 And though]Though editions 1839. 57 clung]cling editions 1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
5
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a transcript in the Harvard manuscript book.]
1.
Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
5
’Tis since thou art fled away.
2.
How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
10
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.
3.
As a lizard with the shade
Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismayed;
15
Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.
4.
Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure;
20
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.
5.
I love all that thou lovest,
25
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
30
6.
I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature’s, and may be
35
Untainted by man’s misery.
7.
I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good
Between thee and me
40
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.
8.
I love Love—though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
45
Spirit, I love thee—
Thou art love and life! Oh, come,
Make once more my heart thy home.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a fair draft amongst the Boscombe manuscripts.]
1.
The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight?
5
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.
2.
Virtue, how frail it is!
Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
10
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.
3.
Whilst skies are blue and bright,
15
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
20
Then wake to weep.
NOTES: 9 how Boscombe manuscript; too editions 1824, 1839. 12 though soon they fall]though soon we or so soon they cj. Rossetti.
***
[Published with “Hellas”, 1821.]
What! alive and so bold, O Earth?
Art thou not overbold?
What! leapest thou forth as of old
In the light of thy morning mirth,
The last of the flock of the starry fold?
5
Ha! leapest thou forth as of old?
Are not the limbs still when the ghost is fled,
And canst thou move, Napoleon being dead?
How! is not thy quick heart cold?
What spark is alive on thy hearth?
10
How! is not HIS death-knell knolled?
And livest THOU still, Mother Earth?
Thou wert warming thy fingers old
O’er the embers covered and cold
Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled—
15
What, Mother, do you laugh now he is dead?
‘Who has known me of old,’ replied Earth,
’Or who has my story told?
It is thou who art overbold.’
And the lightning of scorn laughed forth
20
As she sung, ’To my bosom I fold
All my sons when their knell is knolled,
And so with living motion all are fed,
And the quick spring like weeds out of the dead.
‘Still alive and still bold,’ shouted
Earth, 25
’I grow bolder and still more bold.
The dead fill me ten thousandfold
Fuller of speed, and splendour, and mirth.
I was cloudy, and sullen, and cold,
Like a frozen chaos uprolled,
30
Till by the spirit of the mighty dead
My heart grew warm. I feed on whom I fed.
‘Ay, alive and still bold.’ muttered Earth,
’Napoleon’s fierce spirit rolled,
In terror and blood and gold,
35
A torrent of ruin to death from his birth.
Leave the millions who follow to mould
The metal before it be cold;
And weave into his shame, which like the dead
Shrouds me, the hopes that from his glory fled.’
40
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a transcript, headed “Sonnet to the Republic of Benevento”, in the Harvard manuscript book.]
Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,
Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,
Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame,
5
Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts
As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be,
10
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley in “The Keepsake”, 1829.]
1.
’Do you not hear the Aziola cry?
Methinks she must be nigh,’
Said Mary, as we sate
In dusk, ere stars were lit, or candles brought;
And I, who thought
5
This Aziola was some tedious woman,
Asked, ‘Who is Aziola?’ How elate
I felt to know that it was nothing human,
No mockery of myself to fear or hate:
And Mary saw my soul,
10
And laughed, and said, ’Disquiet yourself not;
‘Tis nothing but a little downy owl.’
2.
Sad Aziola! many an eventide
Thy music I had heard
By wood and stream, meadow and mountain-side,
15
And fields and marshes wide,—
Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird,
The soul ever stirred;
Unlike and far sweeter than them all.
Sad Aziola! from that moment I
20
Loved thee and thy sad cry.
NOTES: 4 ere stars]ere the stars editions 1839. 9 or]and editions 1839. 19 them]they editions 1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more—Oh, never more!
5
2.
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—Oh, never more!
10
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, where it is entitled “A Lament”. Three manuscript copies are extant: The Trelawny manuscript ("Remembrance"), the Harvard manuscript ("Song”) and the Houghton manuscript—the last written by Shelley on a flyleaf of a copy of “Adonais".]
1.
Swifter far than summer’s flight—
Swifter far than youth’s delight—
Swifter far than happy night,
Art thou come and gone—
As the earth when leaves are dead,
5
As the night when sleep is sped,
As the heart when joy is fled,
I am left lone, alone.
2.
The swallow summer comes again—
The owlet night resumes her reign—
10
But the wild-swan youth is fain
To fly with thee, false as thou.—
My heart each day desires the morrow;
Sleep itself is turned to sorrow;
Vainly would my winter borrow
15
Sunny leaves from any bough.
3.
Lilies for a bridal bed—
Roses for a matron’s head—
Violets for a maiden dead—
Pansies let MY flowers be:
20
On the living grave I bear
Scatter them without a tear—
Let no friend, however dear,
Waste one hope, one fear for me.
NOTES:
5-7 So editions 1824, 1839, Trelawny manuscript,
Harvard manuscript;
As the wood when leaves are
shed,
As the night when sleep is
fled,
As the heart when joy is dead
Houghton manuscript.
13 So editions 1824, 1839, Harvard manuscript,
Houghton manuscript.
My heart to-day desires to-morrow
Trelawny manuscript.
20 So editions 1824, 1839, Harvard manuscript,
Houghton manuscript.
Sadder flowers find for me
Trelawny manuscript.
24 one hope, one fear]a hope, a fear Trelawny manuscript.
***
[Published in Ascham’s edition of the “Poems”, 1834. There is a copy amongst the Trelawny manuscripts.]
1.
The serpent is shut out from Paradise.
The wounded deer must seek the herb no more
In which its heart-cure lies:
The widowed dove must cease to haunt a bower
Like that from which its mate with feigned sighs
5
Fled in the April hour.
I too must seldom seek again
Near happy friends a mitigated pain.
2.
Of hatred I am proud,—with scorn content;
Indifference, that once hurt me, now is grown
10
Itself indifferent;
But, not to speak of love, pity alone
Can break a spirit already more than bent.
The miserable one
Turns the mind’s poison into food,—
15
Its medicine is tears,—its evil good.
3.
Therefore, if now I see you seldomer,
Dear friends, dear FRIEND! know that I only fly
Your looks, because they stir
Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:
20
The very comfort that they minister
I scarce can bear, yet I,
So deeply is the arrow gone,
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
4.
When I return to my cold home, you ask
25
Why I am not as I have ever been.
YOU spoil me for the task
Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,—
Of wearing on my brow the idle mask
Of author, great or mean,
30
In the world’s carnival. I sought
Peace thus, and but in you I found it not.
5.
Full half an hour, to-day, I tried my lot
With various flowers, and every one still said,
‘She loves me—loves me not.’
35
And if this meant a vision long since fled—
If it meant fortune, fame, or peace of thought—
If it meant,—but I dread
To speak what you may know too well:
Still there was truth in the sad oracle.
40
6.
The crane o’er seas and forests seeks her home;
No bird so wild but has its quiet nest,
When it no more would roam;
The sleepless billows on the ocean’s breast
Break like a bursting heart, and die in foam,
45
And thus at length find rest:
Doubtless there is a place of peace
Where MY weak heart and all its throbs will cease.
7.
I asked her, yesterday, if she believed
That I had resolution. One who HAD
50
Would ne’er have thus relieved
His heart with words,—but what his judgement
bade
Would do, and leave the scorner unrelieved.
These verses are too sad
To send to you, but that I know,
55
Happy yourself, you feel another’s woe.
NOTES: 10 Indifference, which once hurt me,
is now grown Trelawny manuscript. 18 Dear friends,
dear friend Trelawny manuscript, 1839, 2nd edition;
Dear gentle friend 1834, 1839,
1st edition.
26 ever]lately Trelawny manuscript. 28 in
Trelawny manuscript; on 1834, editions 1839, 43
When 1839, 2nd edition; Whence 1834, 1839, 1st edition.
48 will 1839, 2nd edition; shall 1834, 1839, 1st
edition. 53 unrelieved Trelawny manuscript, 1839,
2nd. edition;
unreprieved 1834, 1839, 1st
edition.
54 are]were Trelawny manuscript.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
5
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
2.
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
10
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
15
From the sphere of our sorrow?
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a Boscombe manuscript.]
1.
When passion’s trance is overpast,
If tenderness and truth could last,
Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep,
I should not weep, I should not weep!
5
2.
It were enough to feel, to see,
Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly,
And dream the rest—and burn and be
The secret food of fires unseen,
Couldst thou but be as thou hast been,
10
3.
After the slumber of the year
The woodland violets reappear;
All things revive in field or grove,
And sky and sea, but two, which move
And form all others, life and love.
15
NOTE:
15 form Boscombe manuscript; for editions 1824,
1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
The golden gates of Sleep unbar
Where Strength and Beauty, met together,
Kindle their image like a star
In a sea of glassy weather!
Night, with all thy stars look down,—
5
Darkness, weep thy holiest dew,—
Never smiled the inconstant moon
On a pair so true.
Let eyes not see their own delight;—
Haste, swift Hour, and thy flight
10
Oft renew.
2.
Fairies, sprites, and angels, keep her!
Holy stars, permit no wrong!
And return to wake the sleeper,
Dawn,—ere it be long!
15
O joy! O fear! what will be done
In the absence of the sun!
Come along!
***
ANOTHER VERSION OF THE PRECEDING.
[Published by Medwin, “Life of Shelley”, 1847.]
Night, with all thine eyes look down!
Darkness shed its holiest dew!
When ever smiled the inconstant moon
On a pair so true?
Hence, coy hour! and quench thy light,
5
Lest eyes see their own delight!
Hence, swift hour! and thy loved flight
Oft renew.
BOYS:
O joy! O fear! what may be done
In the absence of the sun?
10
Come along!
The golden gates of sleep unbar!
When strength and beauty meet together,
Kindles their image like a star
In a sea of glassy weather.
15
Hence, coy hour! and quench thy light,
Lest eyes see their own delight!
Hence, swift hour! and thy loved flight
Oft renew.
GIRLS:
O joy! O fear! what may be done
20
In the absence of the sun?
Come along!
Fairies! sprites! and angels, keep her!
Holiest powers, permit no wrong!
And return, to wake the sleeper,
25
Dawn, ere it be long.
Hence, swift hour! and quench thy light,
Lest eyes see their own delight!
Hence, coy hour! and thy loved flight
Oft renew.
30
BOYS AND GIRLS:
O joy! O fear! what will be done
In the absence of the sun?
Come along!
NOTE:
17 Lest]Let 1847.
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870, from the Trelawny manuscript of Edward Williams’s play, “The Promise: or, A Year, a Month, and a Day".]
BOYS SING:
Night! with all thine eyes look down!
Darkness! weep thy holiest dew!
Never smiled the inconstant moon
On a pair so true.
Haste, coy hour! and quench all light,
5
Lest eyes see their own delight!
Haste, swift hour! and thy loved flight
Oft renew!
GIRLS SING:
Fairies, sprites, and angels, keep her!
Holy stars! permit no wrong!
10
And return, to wake the sleeper,
Dawn, ere it be long!
O joy! O fear! there is not one
Of us can guess what may be done
In the absence of the sun:—
15
Come along!
BOYS:
Oh! linger long, thou envious eastern lamp
In the damp
Caves of the deep!
GIRLS:
Nay, return, Vesper! urge thy lazy car!
20
Swift unbar
The gates of Sleep!
CHORUS:
The golden gate of Sleep unbar,
When Strength and Beauty, met together,
Kindle their image, like a star
25
In a sea of glassy weather.
May the purple mist of love
Round them rise, and with them move,
Nourishing each tender gem
Which, like flowers, will burst from them.
30
As the fruit is to the tree
May their children ever be!
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862. ’A very free translation of Brunetto Latini’s “Tesoretto”, lines 81-154.’—A.C. Bradley.]
...
And many there were hurt by that strong boy,
His name, they said, was Pleasure,
And near him stood, glorious beyond measure
Four Ladies who possess all empery
In earth and air and sea,
5
Nothing that lives from their award is free.
Their names will I declare to thee,
Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear,
And they the regents are
Of the four elements that frame the heart,
10
And each diversely exercised her art
By force or circumstance or sleight
To prove her dreadful might
Upon that poor domain.
Desire presented her [false] glass, and then
15
The spirit dwelling there
Was spellbound to embrace what seemed so fair
Within that magic mirror,
And dazed by that bright error,
It would have scorned the [shafts] of the avenger
20
And death, and penitence, and danger,
Had not then silent Fear
Touched with her palsying spear,
So that as if a frozen torrent
The blood was curdled in its current;
25
It dared not speak, even in look or motion,
But chained within itself its proud devotion.
Between Desire and Fear thou wert
A wretched thing, poor heart!
Sad was his life who bore thee in his breast,
30
Wild bird for that weak nest.
Till Love even from fierce Desire it bought,
And from the very wound of tender thought
Drew solace, and the pity of sweet eyes
Gave strength to bear those gentle agonies,
35
Surmount the loss, the terror, and the sorrow.
Then Hope approached, she who can borrow
For poor to-day, from rich tomorrow,
And Fear withdrew, as night when day
Descends upon the orient ray,
40
And after long and vain endurance
The poor heart woke to her assurance.
—At one birth these four were born
With the world’s forgotten morn,
And from Pleasure still they hold
45
All it circles, as of old.
When, as summer lures the swallow,
Pleasure lures the heart to follow—
O weak heart of little wit!
The fair hand that wounded it,
50
Seeking, like a panting hare,
Refuge in the lynx’s lair,
Love, Desire, Hope, and Fear,
Ever will be near.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
1.
Fairest of the Destinies,
Disarray thy dazzling eyes:
Keener far thy lightnings are
Than the winged [bolts] thou bearest,
And the smile thou wearest
5
Wraps thee as a star
Is wrapped in light.
2.
Could Arethuse to her forsaken urn
From Alpheus and the bitter Doris run,
Or could the morning shafts of purest light
10
Again into the quivers of the Sun
Be gathered—could one thought from its
wild flight
Return into the temple of the brain
Without a change, without a stain,—
Could aught that is, ever again
15
Be what it once has ceased to be,
Greece might again be free!
3.
A star has fallen upon the earth
Mid the benighted nations,
A quenchless atom of immortal light,
20
A living spark of Night,
A cresset shaken from the constellations.
Swifter than the thunder fell
To the heart of Earth, the well
Where its pulses flow and beat,
25
And unextinct in that cold source
Burns, and on ... course
Guides the sphere which is its prison,
Like an angelic spirit pent
In a form of mortal birth,
30
Till, as a spirit half-arisen
Shatters its charnel, it has rent,
In the rapture of its mirth,
The thin and painted garment of the Earth,
Ruining its chaos—a fierce breath
35
Consuming all its forms of living death.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
I would not be a king—enough
Of woe it is to love;
The path to power is steep and rough,
And tempests reign above.
I would not climb the imperial throne;
5
’Tis built on ice which fortune’s sun
Thaws in the height of noon.
Then farewell, king, yet were I one,
Care would not come so soon.
Would he and I were far away
10
Keeping flocks on Himalay!
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and dated ‘Pisa, 1821.’]
Wild, pale, and wonder-stricken, even as one
Who staggers forth into the air and sun
From the dark chamber of a mortal fever,
Bewildered, and incapable, and ever
Fancying strange comments in her dizzy brain
5
Of usual shapes, till the familiar train
Of objects and of persons passed like things
Strange as a dreamer’s mad imaginings,
Ginevra from the nuptial altar went;
The vows to which her lips had sworn assent
10
Rung in her brain still with a jarring din,
Deafening the lost intelligence within.
And so she moved under the bridal veil,
Which made the paleness of her cheek more pale,
And deepened the faint crimson of her mouth,
15
And darkened her dark locks, as moonlight doth,—
And of the gold and jewels glittering there
She scarce felt conscious,—but the weary
glare
Lay like a chaos of unwelcome light,
Vexing the sense with gorgeous undelight,
20
A moonbeam in the shadow of a cloud
Was less heavenly fair—her face was bowed,
And as she passed, the diamonds in her hair
Were mirrored in the polished marble stair
Which led from the cathedral to the street;
25
And ever as she went her light fair feet
Erased these images.
The bride-maidens who round her thronging came,
Some with a sense of self-rebuke and shame,
Envying the unenviable; and others
Making the joy which should have been another’s
30
Their own by gentle sympathy; and some
Sighing to think of an unhappy home:
Some few admiring what can ever lure
Maidens to leave the heaven serene and pure
Of parents’ smiles for life’s great cheat;
a thing 35
Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining.
But they are all dispersed—and, lo! she
stands
Looking in idle grief on her white hands,
Alone within the garden now her own;
40
And through the sunny air, with jangling tone,
The music of the merry marriage-bells,
Killing the azure silence, sinks and swells;—
Absorbed like one within a dream who dreams
That he is dreaming, until slumber seems
45
A mockery of itself—when suddenly
Antonio stood before her, pale as she.
With agony, with sorrow, and with pride,
He lifted his wan eyes upon the bride,
And said—’Is this thy faith?’
and then as one 50
Whose sleeping face is stricken by the sun
With light like a harsh voice, which bids him rise
And look upon his day of life with eyes
Which weep in vain that they can dream no more,
Ginevra saw her lover, and forbore
55
To shriek or faint, and checked the stifling blood
Rushing upon her heart, and unsubdued
Said—’Friend, if earthly violence
or ill,
Suspicion, doubt, or the tyrannic will
Of parents, chance or custom, time or change,
60
Or circumstance, or terror, or revenge,
Or wildered looks, or words, or evil speech,
With all their stings and venom can impeach
Our love,—we love not:—if the
grave which hides
The victim from the tyrant, and divides
65
The cheek that whitens from the eyes that dart
Imperious inquisition to the heart
That is another’s, could dissever ours,
We love not.’—’What! do not
Meanwhile the day sinks fast, the sun is set,
And in the lighted hall the guests are met;
The beautiful looked lovelier in the light
Of love, and admiration, and delight
Reflected from a thousand hearts and eyes,
110
Kindling a momentary Paradise.
This crowd is safer than the silent wood,
Where love’s own doubts disturb the solitude;
On frozen hearts the fiery rain of wine
Falls, and the dew of music more divine
115
Tempers the deep emotions of the time
To spirits cradled in a sunny clime:—
How many meet, who never yet have met,
To part too soon, but never to forget.
How many saw the beauty, power and wit
120
Of looks and words which ne’er enchanted yet;
But life’s familiar veil was now withdrawn,
As the world leaps before an earthquake’s dawn,
And unprophetic of the coming hours,
The matin winds from the expanded flowers
125
Scatter their hoarded incense, and awaken
They found Ginevra dead! if it be death
145
To lie without motion, or pulse, or breath,
With waxen cheeks, and limbs cold, stiff, and white,
And open eyes, whose fixed and glassy light
Mocked at the speculation they had owned.
If it be death, when there is felt around
150
A smell of clay, a pale and icy glare,
And silence, and a sense that lifts the hair
From the scalp to the ankles, as it were
Corruption from the spirit passing forth,
And giving all it shrouded to the earth,
155
And leaving as swift lightning in its flight
Ashes, and smoke, and darkness: in our night
Of thought we know thus much of death,—no
more
Than the unborn dream of our life before
Their barks are wrecked on its inhospitable shore.
160
The marriage feast and its solemnity
Was turned to funeral pomp—the company,
With heavy hearts and looks, broke up; nor they
Who loved the dead went weeping on their way
Alone, but sorrow mixed with sad surprise
165
Loosened the springs of pity in all eyes,
On which that form, whose fate they weep in vain,
Will never, thought they, kindle smiles again.
The lamps which, half extinguished in their haste,
Gleamed few and faint o’er the abandoned feast,
170
Showed as it were within the vaulted room
A cloud of sorrow hanging, as if gloom
Had passed out of men’s minds into the air.
Some few yet stood around Gherardi there,
Friends and relations of the dead,—and
he, 175
A loveless man, accepted torpidly
The consolation that he wanted not;
Awe in the place of grief within him wrought.
Their whispers made the solemn silence seem
More still—some wept,...
180
Some melted into tears without a sob,
And some with hearts that might be heard to throb
...
THE DIRGE.
Old winter was gone
In his weakness back to the mountains hoar,
And the spring came down
From the planet that hovers upon the shore
Where the sea of sunlight encroaches
200
On the limits of wintry night;—
If the land, and the air, and the sea,
Rejoice not when spring approaches,
We did not rejoice in thee,
Ginevra!
205
She is still, she is cold
On the bridal couch,
One step to the white deathbed,
And one to the bier,
And one to the charnel—and one, oh where?
210
The dark arrow fled
In the noon.
Ere the sun through heaven once more has rolled,
The rats in her heart
Will have made their nest,
215
And the worms be alive in her golden hair,
While the Spirit that guides the sun,
Sits throned in his flaming chair,
She shall sleep.
NOTES: 22 Was]Were cj. Rossetti.old 26 ever 1824; even editions 1839. 37 Bitter editions 1839; Better 1824. 63 wanting in 1824. 103 quiet rest cj. A.C. Bradley; quiet and rest 1824. 129 winds]lands cj. Forman; waves, sands or strands cj. Rossetti. 167 On]In cj. Rossetti.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a draft amongst the Boscombe manuscripts.]
1.
The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening’s breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
5
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.
2.
There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,
Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;
The wind is intermitting, dry, and light;
And in the inconstant motion of the breeze
10
The dust and straws are driven up and down,
And whirled about the pavement of the town.
3.
Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and forever
15
It trembles, but it never fades away;
Go to the...
You, being changed, will find it then as now.
4.
The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut
By darkest barriers of cinereous cloud,
20
Like mountain over mountain huddled—but
Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,
And over it a space of watery blue,
Which the keen evening star is shining through..
NOTES: 6 summer 1839, 2nd edition; silent 1824, 1839, 1st edition. 20 cinereous Boscombe manuscript; enormous editions 1824, 1839.
***
[Published in part (lines 1-61, 88-118) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; revised and enlarged by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream,
Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream,
The helm sways idly, hither and thither;
Dominic, the boatman, has brought the mast,
And the oars, and the sails; but ’tis sleeping
fast, 5
Like a beast, unconscious of its tether.
The stars burnt out in the pale blue air,
And the thin white moon lay withering there;
To tower, and cavern, and rift, and tree,
The owl and the bat fled drowsily.
10
Day had kindled the dewy woods,
And the rocks above and the stream below,
And the vapours in their multitudes,
And the Apennine’s shroud of summer snow,
And clothed with light of aery gold
15
The mists in their eastern caves uprolled.
Day had awakened all things that be,
The lark and the thrush and the swallow free,
And the milkmaid’s song and the mower’s
scythe
And the matin-bell and the mountain bee:
20
Fireflies were quenched on the dewy corn,
Glow-worms went out on the river’s brim,
Like lamps which a student forgets to trim:
The beetle forgot to wind his horn,
The crickets were still in the meadow and hill:
25
Like a flock of rooks at a farmer’s gun
Night’s dreams and terrors, every one,
Fled from the brains which are their prey
From the lamp’s death to the morning ray.
All rose to do the task He set to each,
30
Who shaped us to His ends and not our own;
The million rose to learn, and one to teach
What none yet ever knew or can be known.
And many rose
Whose woe was such that fear became desire;—
35
Melchior and Lionel were not among those;
They from the throng of men had stepped aside,
And made their home under the green hill-side.
’What think you, as she lies in her green cove,
Our little sleeping boat is dreaming of?’
’If morning dreams are true, why I should guess
That she was dreaming of our idleness,
And of the miles of watery way
50
We should have led her by this time of day.’-
‘Never mind,’ said Lionel,
’Give care to the winds, they can bear it well
About yon poplar-tops; and see
The white clouds are driving merrily,
55
And the stars we miss this morn will light
More willingly our return to-night.—
How it whistles, Dominic’s long black hair!
List, my dear fellow; the breeze blows fair:
Hear how it sings into the air—’
60
—’Of us and of our lazy motions,’
Impatiently said Melchior,
’If I can guess a boat’s emotions;
And how we ought, two hours before,
To have been the devil knows where.’
65
And then, in such transalpine Tuscan
As would have killed a Della-Cruscan,
...
So, Lionel according to his art
Weaving his idle words, Melchior said:
’She dreams that we are not yet out of bed;
70
We’ll put a soul into her, and a heart
Which like a dove chased by a dove shall beat.’
...
’Ay, heave the ballast overboard,
And stow the eatables in the aft locker.’
‘Would not this keg be best a little lowered?’
75
‘No, now all’s right.’ ’Those
bottles of warm tea—
(Give me some straw)—must be stowed tenderly;
Such as we used, in summer after six,
To cram in greatcoat pockets, and to mix
Hard eggs and radishes and rolls at Eton,
80
And, couched on stolen hay in those green harbours
Farmers called gaps, and we schoolboys called arbours,
Would feast till eight.’
...
With a bottle in one hand,
As if his very soul were at a stand
85
Lionel stood—when Melchior brought him
steady:—
‘Sit at the helm—fasten this sheet—all
ready!’
The chain is loosed, the sails are spread,
The living breath is fresh behind,
As with dews and sunrise fed,
90
Comes the laughing morning wind;—
The sails are full, the boat makes head
Against the Serchio’s torrent fierce,
Then flags with intermitting course,
And hangs upon the wave, and stems
Page 124
95
The tempest of the...
Which fervid from its mountain source
Shallow, smooth and strong doth come,—
Swift as fire, tempestuously
It sweeps into the affrighted sea;
100
In morning’s smile its eddies coil,
Its billows sparkle, toss and boil,
Torturing all its quiet light
Into columns fierce and bright.
The Serchio, twisting forth
105
Between the marble barriers which it clove
At Ripafratta, leads through the dread chasm
The wave that died the death which lovers love,
Living in what it sought; as if this spasm
Had not yet passed, the toppling mountains cling,
110
But the clear stream in full enthusiasm
Pours itself on the plain, then wandering
Down one clear path of effluence crystalline
Sends its superfluous waves, that they may fling
At Arno’s feet tribute of corn and wine;
Then, through the pestilential deserts wild
Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted pine,
It rushes to the Ocean.
NOTES: 58-61 List, my dear fellow, the breeze blows fair; How it scatters Dominic’s long black hair! Singing of us, and our lazy motions, If I can guess a boat’s emotions.’—editions 1824, 1839. 61-67 Rossetti places these lines conjecturally between lines 51 and 52. 61-65 ‘are evidently an alternative version of 48-51’ (A.C. Bradley). 95, 96 and stems The tempest of the wanting in editions 1824, 1839. 112 then Boscombe manuscript; until editions 1824, 1839 114 superfluous Boscombe manuscript; clear editions 1824, 1839. 117 pine Boscombe manuscript; fir editions 1824, 1839.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
1.
I pant for the music which is divine,
My heart in its thirst is a dying flower;
Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine,
Loosen the notes in a silver shower;
Like a herbless plain, for the gentle rain,
5
I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.
2.
Let me drink of the spirit of that sweet sound,
More, oh more,—I am thirsting yet;
It loosens the serpent which care has bound
Upon my heart to stifle it;
10
The dissolving strain, through every vein,
Passes into my heart and brain.
3.
As the scent of a violet withered up,
Which grew by the brink of a silver lake,
When the hot noon has drained its dewy cup,
15
And mist there was none its thirst to slake—
And the violet lay dead while the odour flew
On the wings of the wind o’er the waters blue—
4.
As one who drinks from a charmed cup
Of foaming, and sparkling, and murmuring wine,
20
Whom, a mighty Enchantress filling up,
Invites to love with her kiss divine...
NOTES:
16 mist 1824; tank 1839, 2nd edition.
***
[Published by Medwin, “The Shelley Papers”, 1832 (lines 1-7), and “Life of Shelley”, 1847 (lines 1-9, 12-14). Revised and completed from the Boscombe manuscript by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
[I am afraid these verses will not please you, but]
If I esteemed you less, Envy would kill
Pleasure, and leave to Wonder and Despair
The ministration of the thoughts that fill
The mind which, like a worm whose life may share
A portion of the unapproachable,
5
Marks your creations rise as fast and fair
As perfect worlds at the Creator’s will.
But such is my regard that nor your power
To soar above the heights where others [climb],
Nor fame, that shadow of the unborn hour
10
Cast from the envious future on the time,
Move one regret for his unhonoured name
Who dares these words:—the worm beneath
the sod
May lift itself in homage of the God.
NOTES: 1 you edition 1870; him 1832; thee
1847. 4 So edition 1870; My soul which as a worm
may haply share 1832;
My soul which even as a worm may
share 1847.
6 your edition 1870; his 1832; thy 1847. 8,
9 So edition 1870 wanting 1832 —
But not the blessings of thy
happier lot,
Nor thy well-won prosperity,
and fame 1847.
10, 11 So edition 1870; wanting 1832, 1847.
12-14 So 1847, edition 1870; wanting 1832.
***
FRAGMENT ON KEATS.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition—ED.]
ON KEATS, WHO DESIRED THAT ON HIS TOMB SHOULD BE INSCRIBED—
’Here lieth One whose name was writ on water.
But, ere the breath that could erase it blew,
Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter,
Death, the immortalizing winter, flew
Athwart the stream,—and time’s printless
torrent grew 5
A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name
Of Adonais!
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
Methought I was a billow in the crowd
Of common men, that stream without a shore,
That ocean which at once is deaf and loud;
That I, a man, stood amid many more
By a wayside..., which the aspect bore
5
Of some imperial metropolis,
Where mighty shapes—pyramid, dome, and
tower—
Gleamed like a pile of crags—
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
Where art thou, beloved To-morrow?
When young and old, and strong and weak,
Rich and poor, through joy and sorrow,
Thy sweet smiles we ever seek,—
In thy place—ah! well-a-day!
5
We find the thing we fled—To-day.
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870. Connected by Dowden with the preceding.]
If I walk in Autumn’s even
While the dead leaves pass,
If I look on Spring’s soft heaven,—
Something is not there which was
Winter’s wondrous frost and snow,
5
Summer’s clouds, where are they now?
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,
Through the dim wildernesses of the mind;
Through desert woods and tracts, which seem
Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
The babe is at peace within the womb;
The corpse is at rest within the tomb:
We begin in what we end.
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
I faint, I perish with my love! I grow
Frail as a cloud whose [splendours] pale
Under the evening’s ever-changing glow:
I die like mist upon the gale,
And like a wave under the calm I fail.
5
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
Faint with love, the Lady of the South
Lay in the paradise of Lebanon
Under a heaven of cedar boughs: the drouth
Of love was on her lips; the light was gone
Out of her eyes—
5
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
Come, thou awakener of the spirit’s ocean,
Zephyr, whom to thy cloud or cave
No thought can trace! speed with thy gentle motion!
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
The gentleness of rain was in the wind.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
When soft winds and sunny skies
With the green earth harmonize,
And the young and dewy dawn,
Bold as an unhunted fawn,
Up the windless heaven is gone,—
5
Laugh—for ambushed in the day,—
Clouds and whirlwinds watch their prey.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
And that I walk thus proudly crowned withal
Is that ’tis my distinction; if I fall,
I shall not weep out of the vital day,
To-morrow dust, nor wear a dull decay.
NOTE:
2 ’Tis that is or In that is cj. A.C.
Bradley.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
The rude wind is singing
The dirge of the music dead;
The cold worms are clinging
Where kisses were lately fed.
***
[Published by Rossetti, “Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.”, 1870.]
Great Spirit whom the sea of boundless thought
Nurtures within its unimagined caves,
In which thou sittest sole, as in my mind,
Giving a voice to its mysterious waves—
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition.]
O thou immortal deity
Whose throne is in the depth of human thought,
I do adjure thy power and thee
By all that man may be, by all that he is not,
By all that he has been and yet must be!
5
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition.]
’What art thou, Presumptuous, who profanest
The wreath to mighty poets only due,
Even whilst like a forgotten moon thou wanest?
Touch not those leaves which for the eternal few
Who wander o’er the Paradise of fame,
5
In sacred dedication ever grew:
One of the crowd thou art without a name.’
’Ah, friend, ’tis the false laurel that
I wear;
Bright though it seem, it is not the same
As that which bound Milton’s immortal hair;
10
Its dew is poison; and the hopes that quicken
Under its chilling shade, though seeming fair,
Are flowers which die almost before they sicken.’
***
[This and the three following Fragments were edited from manuscript Shelley D1 at the Bodleian Library and published by Mr. C.D. Locock, “Examination”, etc., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1903. They are printed here as belonging probably to the year 1821.]
When May is painting with her colours gay
The landscape sketched by April her sweet twin...
***
[Published by Mr. C.D. Locock, “Examination”, etc, 1903.]
Thy beauty hangs around thee like
Splendour around the moon—
Thy voice, as silver bells that strike
Upon
***
(’This reads like a study for “Autumn, A Dirge"’ (Locock). Might it not be part of a projected Fit v. of “The Fugitives"?—ED.)
[Published by Mr. C.D. Locock, “Examination”, etc., 1903.]
The death knell is ringing
The raven is singing
The earth worm is creeping
The mourners are weeping
Ding dong, bell—
5
***
I stood upon a heaven-cleaving turret
Which overlooked a wide Metropolis—
And in the temple of my heart my Spirit
Lay prostrate, and with parted lips did kiss
The dust of Desolations [altar] hearth—
5
And with a voice too faint to falter
It shook that trembling fane with its weak prayer
’Twas noon,—the sleeping skies were
blue
The city
***
My task becomes inexpressibly painful as the year draws near that which sealed our earthly fate, and each poem, and each event it records, has a real or mysterious connection with the fatal catastrophe. I feel that I am incapable of putting on paper the history of those times. The heart of the man, abhorred of the poet, who could
’peep and botanize
Upon his mother’s grave,’
does not appear to me more inexplicably framed than that of one who can dissect and probe past woes, and repeat to the public ear the groans drawn from them in the throes of their agony.
The year 1821 was spent in Pisa, or at the Baths of San Giuliano. We were not, as our wont had been, alone; friends had gathered round us. Nearly all are dead, and, when Memory recurs to the past, she wanders among tombs. The genius, with all his blighting errors and mighty powers; the companion of Shelley’s ocean-wanderings, and the sharer of his fate, than whom no man ever existed more gentle, generous, and fearless; and others, who found in Shelley’s society, and in his great knowledge and warm sympathy, delight, instruction, and solace; have joined him beyond the grave. A few survive who have felt life a desert since he left it. What misfortune can equal death? Change can convert every other into a blessing, or heal its sting—death alone has no cure. It shakes the foundations of the earth on which we tread; it destroys its beauty; it casts down our shelter; it exposes us bare to desolation. When those we love have passed into eternity, ’life is the desert and the solitude’ in which we are forced to linger—but never find comfort more.
There is much in the “Adonais” which seems now more applicable to Shelley himself than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness before the fame he inherits.
Shelley’s favourite taste was boating; when living near the Thames or by the Lake of Geneva, much of his life was spent on the water. On the shore of every lake or stream or sea near which he dwelt, he had a boat moored. He had latterly enjoyed this pleasure again. There are no pleasure-boats on the Arno; and the shallowness of its waters (except in winter-time, when the stream is too turbid and impetuous for boating) rendered it difficult to get any skiff light enough to float. Shelley, however, overcame the difficulty; he, together with a friend, contrived a boat such as the huntsmen carry about with them in the Maremma, to cross the sluggish but deep streams that intersect the forests,—a boat of laths and pitched canvas. It held three persons; and he was often seen on the Arno in it, to the horror of the Italians, who remonstrated on the danger, and could not understand how anyone could take pleasure in an exercise that risked life. ’Ma va per la vita!’ they exclaimed. I little thought how true their words would prove. He once ventured, with a friend, on the glassy sea of a calm day, down the Arno and round the coast to Leghorn, which, by keeping close in shore, was very practicable. They returned to Pisa by the canal, when, missing the direct cut, they got entangled among weeds, and the boat upset; a wetting was all the harm done, except that the intense cold of his drenched clothes made Shelley faint. Once I went down with him to the mouth of the Arno, where the stream, then high and swift, met the tideless sea, and disturbed its sluggish waters. It was a waste and dreary scene; the desert sand stretched into a point surrounded by waves that broke idly though perpetually around; it was a scene very similar to Lido, of which he had said—
’I love all waste
And solitary places; where
we taste
The pleasure of believing
what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our
souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean,
and this shore
More barren than its billows.’
Our little boat was of greater use, unaccompanied by any danger, when we removed to the Baths. Some friends lived at the village of Pugnano, four miles off, and we went to and fro to see them, in our boat, by the canal; which, fed by the Serchio, was, though an artificial, a full and picturesque stream, making its way under verdant banks, sheltered by trees that dipped their boughs into the murmuring waters. By day, multitudes of Ephemera darted to and fro on the surface; at night, the fireflies came out among the shrubs on the banks; the cicale at noon-day kept
Still, Shelley’s passion was the ocean; and he wished that our summers, instead of being passed among the hills near Pisa, should be spent on the shores of the sea. It was very difficult to find a spot. We shrank from Naples from a fear that the heats would disagree with Percy: Leghorn had lost its only attraction, since our friends who had resided there were returned to England; and, Monte Nero being the resort of many English, we did not wish to find ourselves in the midst of a colony of chance travellers. No one then thought it possible to reside at Via Reggio, which latterly has become a summer resort. The low lands and bad air of Maremma stretch the whole length of the western shores of the Mediterranean, till broken by the rocks and hills of Spezia. It was a vague idea, but Shelley suggested an excursion to Spezia, to see whether it would be feasible to spend a summer there. The beauty of the bay enchanted him. We saw no house to suit us; but the notion took root, and many circumstances, enchained as by fatality, occurred to urge him to execute it.
He looked forward this autumn with great pleasure to the prospect of a visit from Leigh Hunt. When Shelley visited Lord Byron at Ravenna, the latter had suggested his coming out, together with the plan of a periodical work in which they should all join. Shelley saw a prospect of good for the fortunes of his friend, and pleasure in his society; and instantly exerted himself to have the plan executed. He did not intend himself joining in the work: partly from pride, not wishing to have the air of acquiring readers for his poetry by associating it with the compositions of more popular writers; and also because he might feel shackled in the free expression of his opinions, if any friends were to be compromised. By those opinions, carried even to their outermost extent, he wished to live and die, as being in his conviction not only true, but such as alone would conduce to the moral improvement and happiness of mankind. The sale of the work might meanwhile, either really or supposedly, be injured by the free expression of his thoughts; and this evil he resolved to avoid.
***
THE ZUCCA.
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and dated ‘January, 1822.’ There is a copy amongst the Boscombe manuscripts.]
1.
Summer was dead and Autumn was expiring,
And infant Winter laughed upon the land
All cloudlessly and cold;—when I, desiring
More in this world than any understand,
Wept o’er the beauty, which, like sea retiring,
5
Had left the earth bare as the wave-worn sand
Of my lorn heart, and o’er the grass and flowers
Pale for the falsehood of the flattering Hours.
2.
Summer was dead, but I yet lived to weep
The instability of all but weeping;
10
And on the Earth lulled in her winter sleep
I woke, and envied her as she was sleeping.
Too happy Earth! over thy face shall creep
The wakening vernal airs, until thou, leaping
From unremembered dreams, shalt ... see
15
No death divide thy immortality.
3.
I loved—oh, no, I mean not one of ye,
Or any earthly one, though ye are dear
As human heart to human heart may be;—
I loved, I know not what—but this low sphere
20
And all that it contains, contains not thee,
Thou, whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.
From Heaven and Earth, and all that in them are,
Veiled art thou, like a ... star.
4.
By Heaven and Earth, from all whose shapes thou flowest,
25
Neither to be contained, delayed, nor hidden;
Making divine the loftiest and the lowest,
When for a moment thou art not forbidden
To live within the life which thou bestowest;
And leaving noblest things vacant and chidden,
30
Cold as a corpse after the spirit’s flight
Blank as the sun after the birth of night.
5.
In winds, and trees, and streams, and all things common,
In music and the sweet unconscious tone
Of animals, and voices which are human,
35
Meant to express some feelings of their own;
In the soft motions and rare smile of woman,
In flowers and leaves, and in the grass fresh-shown,
Or dying in the autumn, I the most
Adore thee present or lament thee lost.
40
6.
And thus I went lamenting, when I saw
A plant upon the river’s margin lie
Like one who loved beyond his nature’s law,
And in despair had cast him down to die;
Its leaves, which had outlived the frost, the thaw
45
Had blighted; like a heart which hatred’s eye
Can blast not, but which pity kills; the dew
Lay on its spotted leaves like tears too true.
7. The Heavens had wept upon it, but the Earth Had crushed it on her maternal breast 50
...
8.
I bore it to my chamber, and I planted
It in a vase full of the lightest mould;
The winter beams which out of Heaven slanted
Fell through the window-panes, disrobed of cold,
Upon its leaves and flowers; the stars which panted
55
In evening for the Day, whose car has rolled
Over the horizon’s wave, with looks of light
Smiled on it from the threshold of the night.
9.
The mitigated influences of air
And light revived the plant, and from it grew
60
Strong leaves and tendrils, and its flowers fair,
Full as a cup with the vine’s burning dew,
O’erflowed with golden colours; an atmosphere
Of vital warmth enfolded it anew,
And every impulse sent to every part
The unbeheld pulsations of its heart.
65
10.
Well might the plant grow beautiful and strong,
Even if the air and sun had smiled not on it;
For one wept o’er it all the winter long
Tears pure as Heaven’s rain, which fell upon
it 70
Hour after hour; for sounds of softest song
Mixed with the stringed melodies that won it
To leave the gentle lips on which it slept,
Had loosed the heart of him who sat and wept.
11.
Had loosed his heart, and shook the leaves and flowers
75
On which he wept, the while the savage storm
Waked by the darkest of December’s hours
Was raving round the chamber hushed and warm;
The birds were shivering in their leafless bowers,
The fish were frozen in the pools, the form
80
Of every summer plant was dead
Whilst this....
...
NOTES: 7 lorn Boscombe manuscript; poor edition 1824. 23 So Boscombe manuscript; Dim object of soul’s idolatry edition 1824. 24 star Boscombe manuscript; wanting edition 1824. 38 grass fresh Boscombe manuscript; fresh grass edition 1824. 46 like Boscombe manuscript; as edition 1824. 68 air and sun Boscombe manuscript; sun and air edition 1824.
***
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, August 11, 1832. There is a copy amongst the Trelawny manuscripts.]
1.
’Sleep, sleep on! forget thy pain;
My hand is on thy brow,
My spirit on thy brain;
My pity on thy heart, poor friend;
And from my fingers flow
5
The powers of life, and like a sign,
Seal thee from thine hour of woe;
And brood on thee, but may not blend
With thine.
2.
’Sleep, sleep on! I love thee not;
10
But when I think that he
Who made and makes my lot
As full of flowers as thine of weeds,
Might have been lost like thee;
And that a hand which was not mine
15
Might then have charmed his agony
As I another’s—my heart bleeds
For thine.
3.
’Sleep, sleep, and with the slumber of
The dead and the unborn
20
Forget thy life and love;
Forget that thou must wake forever;
Forget the world’s dull scorn;
Forget lost health, and the divine
Feelings which died in youth’s brief morn;
25
And forget me, for I can never
Be thine.
4.
’Like a cloud big with a May shower,
My soul weeps healing rain
On thee, thou withered flower!
30
It breathes mute music on thy sleep
Its odour calms thy brain!
Its light within thy gloomy breast
Spreads like a second youth again.
By mine thy being is to its deep
35
Possessed.
5.
‘The spell is done. How feel you now?’
‘Better—Quite well,’ replied
The sleeper.—’What would do
39
You good when suffering and awake?
What cure your head and side?—’
’What would cure, that would kill me, Jane:
And as I must on earth abide
Awhile, yet tempt me not to break
My chain.’
45
NOTES;
1, 10 Sleep Trelawny manuscript, 1839, 2nd
edition;
Sleep
on 1832, 1839, 1st edition.
16 charmed Trelawny manuscript;
chased 1832, editions 1839.
21 love]woe 1832.
42 so Trelawny manuscript
’Twould kill me what
would cure my pain 1832, editions 1839.
44 Awhile yet, cj. A.C. Bradley.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. There is a copy amongst the Trelawny manuscripts.]
1.
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead—
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow’s glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
5
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
2.
As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
10
The heart’s echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute:—
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
15
That ring the dead seaman’s knell.
3.
When hearts have once mingled
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
20
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?
4.
Its passions will rock thee
25
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
30
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.
NOTES: 6 tones edition 1824; notes Trelawny manuscript. 14 through edition 1824; in Trelawny manuscript. 16 dead edition 1824; lost Trelawny manuscript. 23 choose edition 1824; chose Trelawny manuscript. 25-32 wanting Trelawny manuscript.
***
[This and the following poem were published together in their original form as one piece under the title, “The Pine Forest of the Cascine near Pisa”, by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; reprinted in the same shape, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition; republished separately in their present form, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition. There is a copy amongst the Trelawny manuscripts.]
Best and brightest, come away!
Fairer far than this fair Day,
Which, like thee to those in sorrow,
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough Year just awake
5
In its cradle on the brake.
The brightest hour of unborn Spring,
Through the winter wandering,
Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn
To hoar February born,
10
Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth,
It kissed the forehead of the Earth,
And smiled upon the silent sea,
And bade the frozen streams be free,
And waked to music all their fountains,
15
And breathed upon the frozen mountains,
And like a prophetess of May
Strewed flowers upon the barren way,
Making the wintry world appear
Like one on whom thou smilest, dear.
20
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs—
To the silent wilderness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music lest it should not find
25
An echo in another’s mind,
While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart.
I leave this notice on my door
For each accustomed visitor:—
30
’I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields;—
Reflection, you may come to-morrow,
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.—
You with the unpaid bill, Despair,—
You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care,—
35
I will pay you in the grave,—
Death will listen to your stave.
Expectation too, be off!
To-day is for itself enough;
40
Hope, in pity mock not Woe
With smiles, nor follow where I go;
Long having lived on thy sweet food,
At length I find one moment’s good
After long pain—with all your love,
45
This you never told me of.’
Radiant Sister of the Day,
Awake! arise! and come away!
To the wild woods and the plains,
And the pools where winter rains
50.
Image all their roof of leaves,
Where the pine its garland weaves
Of sapless green and ivy dun
Round stems that never kiss the sun;
Where the lawns and pastures be,
55
And the sandhills of the sea;—
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
And wind-flowers, and violets,
Which yet join not scent to hue,
60
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
65
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.
NOTES: 34 with Trelawny manuscript; of 1839, 2nd edition. 44 moment’s Trelawny manuscript; moment 1839, 2nd edition. 50 And Trelawny manuscript; To 1839, 2nd edition. 53 dun Trelawny manuscript; dim 1839, 2nd edition.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition. See the Editor’s prefatory note to the preceding.]
1.
Now the last day of many days,
All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest and the last, is dead,
Rise, Memory, and write its praise!
Up,—to thy wonted work! come, trace
5
The epitaph of glory fled,—
For now the Earth has changed its face,
A frown is on the Heaven’s brow.
2.
We wandered to the Pine Forest
That skirts the Ocean’s foam,
10
The lightest wind was in its nest,
The tempest in its home.
The whispering waves were half asleep,
The clouds were gone to play,
And on the bosom of the deep
15
The smile of Heaven lay;
It seemed as if the hour were one
Sent from beyond the skies,
Which scattered from above the sun
A light of Paradise.
20
3.
We paused amid the pines that stood
The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
As serpents interlaced;
And, soothed by every azure breath,
25
That under Heaven is blown,
To harmonies and hues beneath,
As tender as its own,
Now all the tree-tops lay asleep,
Like green waves on the sea,
30
As still as in the silent deep
The ocean woods may be.
4.
How calm it was!—the silence there
By such a chain was bound
That even the busy woodpecker
35
Made stiller by her sound
The inviolable quietness;
The breath of peace we drew
With its soft motion made not less
The calm that round us grew.
40
There seemed from the remotest seat
Of the white mountain waste,
To the soft flower beneath our feet,
A magic circle traced,—
A spirit interfused around
45
A thrilling, silent life,—
To momentary peace it bound
Our mortal nature’s strife;
And still I felt the centre of
The magic circle there
50
Was one fair form that filled with love
The lifeless atmosphere.
5.
We paused beside the pools that lie
Under the forest bough,—
Each seemed as ’twere a little sky
55
Gulfed in a world below;
A firmament of purple light
Which in the dark earth lay,
More boundless than the depth of night,
And purer than the day—
60
In which the lovely forests grew,
As in the upper air,
More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any spreading there.
There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn,
65
And through the dark green wood
The white sun twinkling like the dawn
Out of a speckled cloud.
Sweet views which in our world above
Can never well be seen,
70
Were imaged by the water’s love
Of that fair forest green.
And all was interfused beneath
With an Elysian glow,
An atmosphere without a breath,
75
A softer day below.
Like one beloved the scene had lent
To the dark water’s breast,
Its every leaf and lineament
With more than truth expressed;
80
Until an envious wind crept by,
Like an unwelcome thought,
Which from the mind’s too faithful eye
Blots one dear image out.
Though thou art ever fair and kind,
85
The forests ever green,
Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind,
Than calm in waters, seen.
NOTES: 6 fled edition. 1824; dead Trelawny manuscript, 1839, 2nd edition. 10 Ocean’s]Ocean 1839, 2nd edition. 24 Interlaced, 1839; interlaced; cj. A.C. Bradley. 28 own; 1839 own, cj. A.C. Bradley. 42 white Trelawny manuscript; wide 1839, 2nd edition 87 Shelley’s Trelawny manuscript; S—’s 1839, 2nd edition.]
***
[This, the first draft of “To Jane: The Invitation, The Recollection”, was published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824, and reprinted, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. See Editor’s Prefatory Note to “The Invitation”, above.]
Dearest, best and brightest,
Come away,
To the woods and to the fields!
Dearer than this fairest day
Which, like thee to those in sorrow,
5
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough Year just awake
In its cradle in the brake.
The eldest of the Hours of Spring,
Into the Winter wandering,
10
Looks upon the leafless wood,
And the banks all bare and rude;
Found, it seems, this halcyon Morn
In February’s bosom born,
Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth,
15
Kissed the cold forehead of the Earth,
And smiled upon the silent sea,
And bade the frozen streams be free;
And waked to music all the fountains,
And breathed upon the rigid mountains,
20
And made the wintry world appear
Like one on whom thou smilest, Dear.
Radiant Sister of the Day,
Awake! arise! and come away!
To the wild woods and the plains,
25
To the pools where winter rains
Image all the roof of leaves,
Where the pine its garland weaves
Sapless, gray, and ivy dun
Round stems that never kiss the sun—
30
To the sandhills of the sea,
Where the earliest violets be.
Now the last day of many days,
All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest and the last, is dead,
35
Rise, Memory, and write its praise!
And do thy wonted work and trace
The epitaph of glory fled;
For now the Earth has changed its face,
A frown is on the Heaven’s brow.
40
We wandered to the Pine Forest
That skirts the Ocean’s foam,
The lightest wind was in its nest,
The tempest in its home.
The whispering waves were half asleep,
45
The clouds were gone to play,
And on the woods, and on the deep
The smile of Heaven lay.
It seemed as if the day were one
Sent from beyond the skies,
50
Which shed to earth above the sun
A light of Paradise.
We paused amid the pines that stood,
The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
55
With stems like serpents interlaced.
How calm it was—the silence there
By such a chain was bound,
That even the busy woodpecker
Made stiller by her sound
60
The inviolable quietness;
The breath of peace we drew
With its soft motion made not less
The calm that round us grew.
It seemed that from the remotest seat
65
Of the white mountain’s waste
To the bright flower beneath our feet,
A magic circle traced;—
A spirit interfused around,
A thinking, silent life;
70
To momentary peace it bound
Our mortal nature’s strife;—
And still, it seemed, the centre of
The magic circle there,
Was one whose being filled with love
75
The breathless atmosphere.
Were not the crocuses that grew
Under that ilex-tree
As beautiful in scent and hue
As ever fed the bee?
80
We stood beneath the pools that lie
Under the forest bough,
And each seemed like a sky
Gulfed in a world below;
A purple firmament of light
85
Which in the dark earth lay,
More boundless than the depth of night,
And clearer than the day—
In which the massy forests grew
As in the upper air,
90
More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any waving there.
Like one beloved the scene had lent
To the dark water’s breast
Its every leaf and lineament
95
With that clear truth expressed;
There lay far glades and neighbouring lawn,
And through the dark green crowd
The white sun twinkling like the dawn
Under a speckled cloud.
100
Sweet views, which in our world above
Can never well be seen,
Were imaged by the water’s love
Of that fair forest green.
And all was interfused beneath
105
With an Elysian air,
An atmosphere without a breath,
A silence sleeping there.
Until a wandering wind crept by,
Like an unwelcome thought,
110
Which from my mind’s too faithful eye
Blots thy bright image out.
For thou art good and dear and kind,
The forest ever green,
But less of peace in S—’s mind,
Than calm in waters, seen.
116.
***
[Published by Medwin, “The Athenaeum”, October 20, 1832; “Frazer’s Magazine”, January 1833. There is a copy amongst the Trelawny manuscripts.]
Ariel to Miranda:—Take
This slave of Music, for the sake
Of him who is the slave of thee,
And teach it all the harmony
In which thou canst, and only thou,
5
Make the delighted spirit glow,
Till joy denies itself again,
And, too intense, is turned to pain;
For by permission and command
Of thine own Prince Ferdinand,
10
Poor Ariel sends this silent token
Of more than ever can be spoken;
The artist who this idol wrought,
To echo all harmonious thought,
Felled a tree, while on the steep
45
The woods were in their winter sleep,
Rocked in that repose divine
On the wind-swept Apennine;
And dreaming, some of Autumn past,
And some of Spring approaching fast,
50
And some of April buds and showers,
And some of songs in July bowers,
And all of love; and so this tree,—
O that such our death may be!—
Died in sleep, and felt no pain,
55
To live in happier form again:
From which, beneath Heaven’s fairest star,
The artist wrought this loved Guitar,
And taught it justly to reply,
To all who question skilfully,
60
In language gentle as thine own;
Whispering in enamoured tone
Sweet oracles of woods and dells,
And summer winds in sylvan cells;
For it had learned all harmonies
65
Of the plains and of the skies,
Of the forests and the mountains,
And the many-voiced fountains;
The clearest echoes of the hills,
The softest notes of falling rills,
70
The melodies of birds and bees,
The murmuring of summer seas,
And pattering rain, and breathing dew,
And airs of evening; and it knew
That seldom-heard mysterious sound,
75
Which, driven on its diurnal round,
As it floats through boundless day,
Our world enkindles on its way.—
All this it knows, but will not tell
To those who cannot question well
Page 140
80
The Spirit that inhabits it;
It talks according to the wit
Of its companions; and no more
Is heard than has been felt before,
By those who tempt it to betray
85
These secrets of an elder day:
But, sweetly as its answers will
Flatter hands of perfect skill,
It keeps its highest, holiest tone
For our beloved Jane alone.
90
NOTES:
12 Of more than ever]Of love that never 1833.
46 woods Trelawny manuscript, 1839, 2nd edition;
winds 1832, 1833, 1839, 1st
edition.
58 this Trelawny manuscript, 1839, 2nd edition;
that 1832, 1833, 1839, 1st
edition.
61 thine own Trelawny manuscript, 1839, 2nd edition;
its own 1832, 1833, 1839,
1st edition.
76 on Trelawny manuscript, 1839, 2nd edition;
in 1832, 1833, 1839, 1st edition.
90 Jane Trelawny manuscript; friend 1832, 1833,
editions 1839.
***
[Published in part (lines 7-24) by Medwin (under the title, “An Ariette for Music. To a Lady singing to her Accompaniment on the Guitar"), “The Athenaeum”, November 17, 1832; reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, “Poetical Works”, 1839, 1st edition. Republished in full (under the title, To —.), “Poetical Works”, 1839, 2nd edition. The Trelawny manuscript is headed “To Jane”. Mr. C.W. Frederickson of Brooklyn possesses a transcript in an unknown hand.]
1.
The keen stars were twinkling,
And the fair moon was rising among them,
Dear Jane!
The guitar was tinkling,
But the notes were not sweet till you sung them
5
Again.
2.
As the moon’s soft splendour
O’er the faint cold starlight of Heaven
Is thrown,
So your voice most tender
10
To the strings without soul had then given
Its own.
3.
The stars will awaken,
Though the moon sleep a full hour later,
To-night;
15
No leaf will be shaken
Whilst the dews of your melody scatter
Delight.
4.
Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
20
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
NOTES: 3 Dear *** 1839, 2nd edition. 7
soft]pale Fred. manuscript. 10 your 1839, 2nd edition.;
thy 1832, 1839, 1st edition,
Fred. manuscript.
11 had then 1839, 2nd edition; has 1832, 1839,
1st edition;
hath Fred. manuscript.
12 Its]Thine Fred. manuscript. 17 your 1839,
2nd edition;
thy 1832, 1839, 1st edition,
Fred. manuscript.
19 sound]song Fred. manuscript. 20 your dear
1839, 2nd edition; thy sweet 1832, 1839, 1st edition;
thy soft Fred. manuscript.
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
Rough wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm whose tears are vain,
5
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main,—
Wail, for the world’s wrong!
NOTE:
6 strain cj. Rossetti; stain edition 1824.
***
[Published from the Boscombe manuscripts by Dr. Garnett, “Macmillan’s Magazine”, June, 1862; reprinted, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
She left me at the silent time
When the moon had ceased to climb
The azure path of Heaven’s steep,
And like an albatross asleep,
Balanced on her wings of light,
5
Hovered in the purple night,
Ere she sought her ocean nest
In the chambers of the West.
She left me, and I stayed alone
Thinking over every tone
10
Which, though silent to the ear,
The enchanted heart could hear,
Like notes which die when born, but still
Haunt the echoes of the hill;
And feeling ever—oh, too much!—
15
The soft vibration of her touch,
As if her gentle hand, even now,
Lightly trembled on my brow;
And thus, although she absent were,
Memory gave me all of her
20
That even Fancy dares to claim:—
Her presence had made weak and tame
All passions, and I lived alone
In the time which is our own;
The past and future were forgot,
25
As they had been, and would be, not.
But soon, the guardian angel gone,
The daemon reassumed his throne
In my faint heart. I dare not speak
My thoughts, but thus disturbed and weak
30
I sat and saw the vessels glide
Over the ocean bright and wide,
Like spirit-winged chariots sent
O’er some serenest element
For ministrations strange and far;
35
As if to some Elysian star
Sailed for drink to medicine
Such sweet and bitter pain as mine.
And the wind that winged their flight
From the land came fresh and light,
40
And the scent of winged flowers,
And the coolness of the hours
Of dew, and sweet warmth left by day,
Were scattered o’er the twinkling bay.
And the fisher with his lamp
45
And spear about the low rocks damp
Crept, and struck the fish which came
To worship the delusive flame.
Too happy they, whose pleasure sought
Extinguishes all sense and thought
50
Of the regret that pleasure leaves,
Destroying life alone, not peace!
NOTES: 11 though silent Relics 1862; though now silent Mac. Mag. 1862. 31 saw Relics 1862; watched Mac. Mag. 1862.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
1.
We meet not as we parted,
We feel more than all may see;
My bosom is heavy-hearted,
And thine full of doubt for me:—
One moment has bound the free.
5
2.
That moment is gone for ever,
Like lightning that flashed and died—
Like a snowflake upon the river—
Like a sunbeam upon the tide,
Which the dark shadows hide.
10
3.
That moment from time was singled
As the first of a life of pain;
The cup of its joy was mingled
—Delusion too sweet though vain!
Too sweet to be mine again.
15
4.
Sweet lips, could my heart have hidden
That its life was crushed by you,
Ye would not have then forbidden
The death which a heart so true
Sought in your briny dew.
20
5. ... ... ... Methinks too little cost For a moment so found, so lost! 25
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
There was a little lawny islet
By anemone and violet,
Like mosaic, paven:
And its roof was flowers and leaves
Which the summer’s breath enweaves,
5
Where nor sun nor showers nor breeze
Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
Each a gem engraven;—
Girt by many an azure wave
With which the clouds and mountains pave
10
A lake’s blue chasm.
***
[Published by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]
Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven,
To whom alone it has been given
To change and be adored for ever,
Envy not this dim world, for never
But once within its shadow grew
5
One fair as—
***
[Published by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824.]
These are two friends whose lives were undivided;
So let their memory be, now they have glided
Under the grave; let not their bones be parted,
For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.
***
This morn thy gallant bark
Sailed on a sunny sea:
’Tis noon, and tempests
dark
Have wrecked it on the lee.
Ah woe! ah woe!
By Spirits of the deep
Thou’rt cradled on the
billow
To thy eternal sleep.
Thou sleep’st upon the
shore
Beside the knelling surge,
And Sea-nymphs evermore
Shall sadly chant thy dirge.
They come, they come,
The Spirits of the deep,—
While near thy seaweed pillow
My lonely watch I keep.
From far across the sea
I hear a loud lament,
By Echo’s voice for
thee
From Ocean’s caverns
sent.
O list! O list!
The Spirits of the deep!
They raise a wail of sorrow,
While I forever weep.
With this last year of the life of Shelley these Notes end. They are not what I intended them to be. I began with energy, and a burning desire to impart to the world, in worthy language, the sense I have of the virtues and genius of the beloved and the lost; my strength has failed under the task. Recurrence to the past, full of its own deep and unforgotten joys and sorrows, contrasted with succeeding years of painful and solitary struggle, has shaken my health. Days of great suffering have followed my attempts to write, and these again produced a weakness and languor that spread their sinister influence over these notes. I dislike speaking of myself, but cannot help apologizing to the dead, and to the public, for not having executed in the manner I desired the history I engaged to give of Shelley’s writings. (I at one time feared that the correction of the press might be less exact through my illness; but I believe that it is nearly free from error. Some asterisks occur in a few pages, as they did in the volume of “Posthumous Poems”, either because they refer to private concerns, or because the original manuscript was left imperfect. Did any one see the papers from which I drew that volume, the wonder would be how any eyes or patience were capable of extracting it from so confused a mass, interlined and broken into fragments, so that the sense could only be deciphered and joined by guesses which might seem rather intuitive than founded on reasoning. Yet I believe no mistake was made.)
The winter of 1822 was passed in Pisa, if we might call that season winter in which autumn merged into spring after the interval of but few days of bleaker weather. Spring sprang up early, and with extreme beauty. Shelley had conceived the idea of writing a tragedy on the subject of Charles I. It was one that he believed adapted for a drama; full of intense interest, contrasted character, and busy passion. He had recommended it long before, when he encouraged me to attempt a play. Whether the subject proved more difficult than he anticipated, or whether in fact he could not bend his mind away from the broodings and wanderings of thought, divested from human interest, which he best loved, I cannot tell; but he proceeded slowly, and threw it aside for one of the most mystical of his poems, the “Triumph of Life”, on which he was employed at the last.
His passion for boating was fostered at this time by having among our friends several sailors. His favourite companion, Edward Ellerker Williams, of the 8th Light Dragoons, had begun his life in the navy, and had afterwards entered the army; he had spent several years in India, and his love for adventure and manly exercises accorded with Shelley’s taste. It was their favourite plan to build a boat such as they could manage themselves, and, living on the sea-coast, to enjoy at every hour and season the pleasure they loved best. Captain Roberts, R.N., undertook to build the boat at Genoa, where he was also occupied in building the “Bolivar” for Lord Byron. Ours was to be an open boat, on a model taken from one of the royal dockyards. I have since heard that there was a defect in this model, and that it was never seaworthy. In the month of February, Shelley and his friend went to Spezia to seek for houses for us. Only one was to be found at all suitable; however, a trifle such as not finding a house could not stop Shelley; the one found was to serve for all. It was unfurnished; we sent our furniture by sea, and with a good deal of precipitation, arising from his impatience, made our removal. We left Pisa on the 26th of April.
The Bay of Spezia is of considerable extent, and divided by a rocky promontory into a larger and smaller one. The town of Lerici is situated on the eastern point, and in the depth of the smaller bay, which bears the name of this town, is the village of San Terenzo. Our house, Casa Magni, was close to this village; the sea came up to the door, a steep hill sheltered it behind. The proprietor of the estate on which it was situated was insane; he had begun to erect a large house at the summit of the hill behind, but his malady prevented its being finished, and it was falling into ruin. He had (and this to the Italians had seemed a glaring symptom of very decided madness) rooted up the olives on the hillside, and planted forest trees. These were mostly young, but the plantation was more in English taste than I ever elsewhere saw in Italy; some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark massy foliage, and formed groups which still haunt my memory, as then they satiated the eye with a sense of loveliness. The scene was indeed of unimaginable beauty. The blue extent of waters, the almost landlocked bay, the near castle of Lerici shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west; the varied forms of the precipitous rocks that bound in the beach, over which there was only a winding rugged footpath towards Lerici, and none on the other side; the tideless sea leaving no sands nor shingle, formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes only. Sometimes the sunshine vanished when the sirocco raged—the ‘ponente’ the wind was called on that shore. The gales and squalls that hailed our first arrival surrounded the bay with foam; the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship. At other times sunshine and calm invested sea and sky, and the rich tints of Italian heaven bathed the scene in bright and ever-varying tints.
The natives were wilder than the place. Our near neighbours of San Terenzo were more like savages than any people I ever before lived among. Many a night they passed on the beach, singing, or rather howling; the women dancing about among the waves that broke at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks and joining in their loud wild chorus. We could get no provisions nearer than Sarzana, at a distance of three miles and a half off, with the torrent of the Magra between; and even there the supply was very deficient. Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves farther from civilisation and comfort; but, where the sun shines, the latter becomes an unnecessary luxury, and we had enough society among ourselves. Yet I confess housekeeping became rather a toilsome task, especially as I was suffering in my health, and could not exert myself actively.
At first the fatal boat had not arrived, and was expected with great impatience. On Monday, 12th May, it came. Williams records the long-wished-for fact in his journal: ’Cloudy and threatening weather. M. Maglian called; and after dinner, and while walking with him on the terrace, we discovered a strange sail coming round the point of Porto Venere, which proved at length to be Shelley’s boat. She had left Genoa on Thursday last, but had been driven back by the prevailing bad winds. A Mr. Heslop and two English seamen brought her round, and they speak most highly of her performances. She does indeed excite my surprise and admiration. Shelley and I walked to Lerici, and made a stretch off the land to try her: and I find she fetches whatever she looks at. In short, we have now a perfect plaything for the summer.’—It was thus that short-sighted mortals welcomed Death, he having disguised his grim form in a pleasing mask! The time of the friends was now spent on the sea; the weather became fine, and our whole party often passed the evenings on the water when the wind promised pleasant sailing. Shelley and Williams made longer excursions; they sailed several times to Massa. They had engaged one of the seamen who brought her round, a boy, by name Charles Vivian; and they had not the slightest apprehension of danger. When the weather was unfavourable, they employed themselves with alterations in the rigging, and by building a boat of canvas and reeds, as light as possible, to have on board the other for the convenience of landing in waters too shallow for the larger vessel. When Shelley was on board, he had his papers with him; and much of the “Triumph of Life” was written as he sailed or weltered on that sea which was soon to engulf him.
The heats set in in the middle of June; the days became excessively hot. But the sea-breeze cooled the air at noon, and extreme heat always put Shelley in spirits. A long drought had preceded the heat; and prayers for rain were being put up in the churches, and processions of relics for the same effect took place in every town. At this time we received letters announcing the arrival of Leigh Hunt at Genoa. Shelley was very eager to see him. I was confined to my room by severe illness, and could not move; it was agreed that Shelley and Williams should go to Leghorn in the boat. Strange that no fear of danger crossed our minds! Living on the sea-shore, the ocean became as a plaything: as a child may sport with a lighted stick, till a spark inflames a forest, and spreads destruction over all, so did we fearlessly and blindly tamper with danger, and make a game of the terrors of the ocean. Our Italian neighbours, even, trusted themselves as far as Massa in the skiff; and the running down the line of coast to Leghorn gave no more notion of peril than a fair-weather inland navigation would have done to those who had never seen the sea. Once, some months before, Trelawny had raised a warning voice as to the difference of our calm bay and the open sea beyond; but Shelley and his friend, with their one sailor-boy, thought themselves a match for the storms of the Mediterranean, in a boat which they looked upon as equal to all it was put to do.
On the 1st of July they left us. If ever shadow of future ill darkened the present hour, such was over my mind when they went. During the whole of our stay at Lerici, an intense presentiment of coming evil brooded over my mind, and covered this beautiful place and genial summer with the shadow of coming misery. I had vainly struggled with these emotions—they seemed accounted for by my illness; but at this hour of separation they recurred with renewed violence. I did not anticipate danger for them, but a vague expectation of evil shook me to agony, and I could scarcely bring myself to let them go. The day was calm and clear; and, a fine breeze rising at twelve, they weighed for Leghorn. They made the run of about fifty miles in seven hours and a half. The “Bolivar” was in port; and, the regulations of the Health-office not permitting them to go on shore after sunset, they borrowed cushions from the larger vessel, and slept on board their boat.
They spent a week at Pisa and Leghorn. The want of rain was severely felt in the country. The weather continued sultry and fine. I have heard that Shelley all this time was in brilliant spirits. Not long before, talking of presentiment, he had said the only one that he ever found infallible was the certain advent of some evil fortune when he felt peculiarly joyous. Yet, if ever fate whispered of coming disaster, such inaudible but not unfelt prognostics hovered around us. The beauty of the place seemed unearthly in its excess: the distance we were at from all signs of civilization, the sea at our feet, its murmurs or its roaring for ever in our ears,—all these things led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and, lifting it from everyday life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal. A sort of spell surrounded us; and each day, as the voyagers did not return, we grew restless and disquieted, and yet, strange to say, we were not fearful of the most apparent danger.
The spell snapped; it was all over; an interval of agonizing doubt—of days passed in miserable journeys to gain tidings, of hopes that took firmer root even as they were more baseless—was changed to the certainty of the death that eclipsed all happiness for the survivors for evermore.
There was something in our fate peculiarly harrowing. The remains of those we lost were cast on shore; but, by the quarantine-laws of the coast, we were not permitted to have possession of them—the law with respect to everything cast on land by the sea being that such should be burned, to prevent the possibility of any remnant bringing the plague into Italy; and no representation could alter the law. At length, through the kind and unwearied exertions of Mr. Dawkins, our Charge d’Affaires at Florence, we gained permission to receive the ashes after the bodies were consumed. Nothing could equal the zeal of Trelawny in carrying our wishes into effect. He was indefatigable in his exertions, and full of forethought and sagacity in his arrangements. It was a fearful task; he stood before us at last, his hands scorched and blistered by the flames of the funeral-pyre, and by touching the burnt relics as he placed them in the receptacles prepared for the purpose. And there, in compass of that small case, was gathered all that remained on earth of him whose genius and virtue were a crown of glory to the world—whose love had been the source of happiness, peace, and good,—to be buried with him!
The concluding stanzas of the “Adonais” pointed out where the remains ought to be deposited; in addition to which our beloved child lay buried in the cemetery at Rome. Thither Shelley’s ashes were conveyed; and they rest beneath one of the antique weed-grown towers that recur at intervals in the circuit of the massy ancient wall of Rome. He selected the hallowed place himself; there is
’the sepulchre, Oh, not of him, but of our joy!— ... And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand; And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, Pavilioning the dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory, doth stand Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath, A field is spread, on which a newer band Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death, Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.’
Could sorrow for the lost, and shuddering anguish at the vacancy left behind, be soothed by poetic imaginations, there was something in Shelley’s fate to mitigate pangs which yet, alas! could not be so mitigated; for hard reality brings too miserably home to the mourner all that is lost of happiness, all of lonely unsolaced struggle that remains. Still, though dreams and hues of poetry cannot blunt grief, it invests his fate with a sublime fitness, which those less nearly allied may regard with complacency. A year before he had poured into verse all such ideas about death as give it a glory of its own. He had, as it now
’The breath whose might
I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s
bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from
the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to
the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered
skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully,
afar;
Whilst burning through the
inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like
a star,
Beacons from the abode where
the Eternal are.’
Putney, May 1, 1839.