Ask the cold pale Hour
Rich in reversion of impending death
When he shall fall upon whose ripe grey hairs
905Sit Care and Sorrow and Infirmity,
The weight which Crime whose wings are plumed with years
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!
910He leans upon his crutch and talks of years
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and——
Voice without
Victory! Victory!
[The PHANTOM vanishes.
Mahmud
What sound of the importunate earth has broken
My mighty trance?
Voice without
Victory! Victory!
Mahmud
915Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
920Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?
It matters not!—for nought we see or dream,
Possess or lose or grasp at can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The future must become the Past, and I
925As they were to whom once this present hour,
This gloomy crag of Time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained.——I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
930And dying, bring despair. Victory? poor slaves!
[Exit MAHMUD.
Voice without
Shout in the jubilee of death! the Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
935Are curses, groans and gold, the fruit of death
From Thule to the Girdle of the World,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation’s blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink and die!
Semichorus I
940 Victorious Wrong with vulture scream
Salutes the risen sun, pursues the flying day!
I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant’s dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
945In Visions of the dawning undelight.—
Who shall impede her flight?
Who rob her of her prey?
Voice without
Victory! Victory! Russia’s famished Eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent’s light.
950Impale the remnants of the Greeks? despoil?
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!
Semichorus II
Thou Voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
Thou echo of the hollow heart
955Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode
When Desolation flashes o’er a world destroyed.
O bear me to those isles of jagged cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightning,
960 Or to some toppling promontory proud
Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightening
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire
965When Heaven and Earth are light, and only light
In the thunder night!
Voice without
Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England
And that tame Serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry Peace, and that means Death when monarchs speak.
970Ho, there! bring torches,—sharpen those red stakes,
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners
Than Greeks. Kill, plunder, burn! let none remain.
Semichorus I
Alas! for Liberty!
If numbers, wealth or unfulfilling years
975 Or fate can quell the free!
Alas! for Virtue when
Torments or contumely or the sneers
Of erring judging men
Can break the heart where it abides.
980Alas! if Love whose smile makes this obscure world splendid
Can change with its false times and tides,
Like hope and terror—
Alas for Love!
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
985If thou can’st veil thy lie-consuming mirror
Before the dazzled eyes of Error,
Alas for thee! Image of the Above.
Semichorus II
Repulse, with plumes from Conquest torn,
Led the Ten Thousand from the limits of the morn
990 Through many an hostile Anarchy!
At length they wept aloud and cried, ‘The Sea! The Sea!’
Through exile, persecution and despair,
Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become
The wonder, or the terror or the tomb
995Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair.
But Greece was as a hermit child,
Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman’s growth, by dreams so mild,
She knew not pain or guilt;
1000And now—O Victory, blush! and Empire tremble
When ye desert the free—
If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble
And build themselves again impregnably
1005 In a diviner clime
To Amphionic music on some cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
Semichorus I
Let the tyrants rule the desart they have made—
Let the free possess the paradise they claim,
1010 Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed
With our ruin, our resistance and our name!
Semichorus II
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away—
1015 Their dishonour a remembrance to abide!
Voice without
Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The Keys of Ocean to the Islamite—
Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled
And British skill directing Othman might,
1020Thunderstrike rebel Victory. O keep holy
This jubilee of unrevenged blood—
Kill, crush, despoil! Let not a Greek escape!
Semichorus I
Darkness has dawned in the East
On the noon of Time:
1025The death-birds descend to their feast,
From the hungry clime.—
Let Freedom and Peace flee far
To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love’s folding star
1030 To the Evening-land!
Semichorus II
The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset’s fire.
The weak day is dead,
1035 But the night is not born,
And like Loveliness panting with wild desire
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
1040 Fast flashing, soft and bright.
Thou beacon of love, thou lamp of the free!
Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now veil
ed by the ardour of day
Thou art hidden
1045 From waves on which weary noon
Faints in her summer swoon
Between Kingless continents sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Prankt on the sapphire sea.
Semichorus I
1050 Through the sunset of Hope
Like the shapes of a dream
What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
Beneath Heaven’s cope,
Their shadows more clear float by—
1055The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe
Burst, like morning on dream or like Heaven on death,
Through the walls of our prison;
And Greece which was dead is arisen!
Chorus
1060The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
1065Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far,
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning-star,
1070Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
1075 And loves, and weeps, and dies;
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
O, write no more the tale of Troy
If earth Death’s scroll must be!
1080Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free;
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
1085 And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime.
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
1090Saturn and Love their long repose
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued;
Not gold, not blood their altar dowers
1095But votive tears and symbol flowers.
O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
1100The world is weary of the past,
O might it die or rest at last!
[SHELLEY’S] NOTES
Note 1 [l. 60]
The quenchless ashes of Milan
Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground, but Liberty lived in its ashes and it rose like an exhalation from its ruin. See Sismondi’s Histoire des Républiques Italiennes, a book which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of their great ancestors.
Note 2 [l. 197]
The Chorus
The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which in all probability they will supersede, without considering their merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, clothe themselves in matter, with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the external world.
The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or less exalted existence according to the degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatize upon a subject concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of Evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of his nature having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the riddle and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain; meanwhile as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.
Note 3 [l. 245]
No hoary priests after that Patriarch
The Greek Patriarch after having been compelled to fulminate an anathema against the insurgents was put to death by the Turks.
Fortunately the Greeks have been taught that they cannot buy security by degradation, and the Turks, though equally cruel, are less cunning than the smooth-faced Tyrants of Europe. As to the anathema, his Holiness might as well have thrown his mitre at Mount Athos for any effect that it produced. The Chiefs of the Greeks are almost all men of comprehension and enlightened views on religion and politics.
Note 4 [l. 563]
The freedman of a western poet chief
A Greek who had been Lord Byron’s servant commands the insurgents in Attica. This Greek, Lord Byron informs me, though a poet and an enthusiastic patriot, gave him rather the idea of a timid and unenterprising person. It appears that circumstances make men what they are, and that we all contain the germ of a degree of degradation or of greatness whose connexion with our character is determined by events.
Note 5 [l. 598]
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West
It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a sea-port near Lacedaemon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.
Note 6 [ll. 814–15]
The sound as of the assault of an imperial city
For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1453, see Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 12, p. 223.
The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular conjuror and the phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension or even belief in supernatural agency and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess of passion animating the creations of imagination.
It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret associations of another’s thoughts.
Note 7 [l. 1060]
The Chorus
The final chorus is indistinct and obscure as the event of the living drama whose arrival it foretells. Prophesies of wars, and rumours of wars &c., may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, but to anticipate, however darkly, a period of regeneration and happiness is a more hazardous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign. It will remind the reader ‘magno nec proximus intervallo’ of Isaiah and Virgil, whose ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign of evil which we endure and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps approaching state of society in which the ‘lion shall lie down with the lamb’ and ‘omnis feret omnia tellus’. Let these great names be my authority and my excuse.
&nb
sp; Note 8 [ll. 1090–91]
Saturn and Love their long repose shall burst
Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness. All those who fell, or the gods of Greece, Asia, and Egypt; the One who rose or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan world were amerced of their worship; and the many unsubdued or, the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over the understandings of men in conjunction or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been in a state of portentous, and until the revival of learning and the arts, perpetually increasing activity. The Grecian gods seem indeed to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said that as far as temperance and chastity are concerned they gave so edifying an example as their successor. The sublime human character of Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification of it with a Demon, who tempted, betrayed and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will; and for the period of a thousand years the spirit of this the most just, wise and benevolent of men has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who approached the nearest to his innocence and his wisdom, sacrificed under every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture. The horrors of the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well known.
‘The flower that smiles today’
The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies;
5What is this world’s delight?
Lightning, that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.—
Virtue, how frail it is!—
Selected Poems and Prose Page 60
