The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,285 pages of information about The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete.

The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,285 pages of information about The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete.

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ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

[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.

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LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.

[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?—­

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The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.