Russia desires to possess, not to liberate Greece; and is contented to see the Turks, its natural enemies, and the Greeks, its intended slaves, enfeeble each other until one or both fall into its net. The wise and generous policy of England would have consisted in establishing the independence of Greece, and in maintaining it both against Russia and the Turk;—but when was the oppressor generous or just?
Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent their will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.
The Spanish Peninsula is already free. France is tranquil in the enjoyment of a partial exemption from the abuses which its unnatural and feeble government are vainly attempting to revive. The seed of blood and misery has been sown in Italy, and a more vigorous race is arising to go forth to the harvest. The world waits only the news of a revolution of Germany to see the tyrants who have pinnacled themselves on its supineness precipitated into the ruin from which they shall never arise. Well do these destroyers of mankind know their enemy, when they impute the insurrection in Greece to the same spirit before which they tremble throughout the rest of Europe, and that enemy well knows the power and the cunning of its opponents, and watches the moment of their approaching weakness and inevitable division to wrest the bloody sceptres from their grasp.
PROLOGUE TO HELLAS
Herald of Eternity. It is the day when all the sons of God
Wait in the roofless senate-house, whose floor
Is Chaos, and the immovable abyss
Frozen by His steadfast word to hyaline
· · · · · · ·
5
The shadow of God, and delegate
Of that before whose breath the universe
Is as a print of dew.
Hierarchs and kings
Who from your thrones pinnacled on the past
Sway the reluctant present, ye who sit
10
Pavilioned on the radiance or the gloom
Of mortal thought, which like an exhalation
Steaming from earth, conceals the of heaven
Which gave it birth, assemble here
Before your Father’s throne; the swift decree
15
Yet hovers, and the fiery incarnation
Is yet withheld, clothed in which it shall
annul
The fairest of those wandering isles that gem
The sapphire space of interstellar air,
20
That green and azure sphere, that earth enwrapped
Less in the beauty of its tender light
Than in an atmosphere of living spirit
Which interpenetrating all the …
it rolls from realm to realm
25
And age to age, and in its ebb and flow
Impels the generations
To their appointed place,
Whilst the high Arbiter
Beholds the strife, and at the appointed time
30
Sends His decrees veiled in eternal …
Within the circuit of this pendent orb
There lies an antique region, on which fell
The dews of thought in the world’s golden dawn
Earliest and most benign, and from it sprung
35
Temples and cities and immortal forms
And harmonies of wisdom and of song,
And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts so fair.
And when the sun of its dominion failed,
And when the winter of its glory came,
40
The winds that stripped it bare blew on and swept
That dew into the utmost wildernesses
In wandering clouds of sunny rain that thawed
The unmaternal bosom of the North.
Haste, sons of God, for ye beheld,
45
Reluctant, or consenting, or astonished,
The stern decrees go forth, which heaped on Greece
Ruin and degradation and despair.
A fourth now waits: assemble, sons of God,
To speed or to prevent or to suspend,
50
If, as ye dream, such power be not withheld,
The unaccomplished destiny.
· · · · · · ·
Chorus.
The curtain of the Universe
Is rent and shattered,
The splendour-wingèd worlds disperse
55
Like wild doves scattered.
Space is roofless and bare,
And in the midst a cloudy shrine,
Dark amid thrones of light.
In the blue glow of hyaline
60
Golden worlds revolve and shine.
In flight
From every point of the Infinite,
Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread;
65
And through thunder and darkness dread
Light and music are radiated,
And in their pavilioned chariots led
By living wings high overhead
The giant Powers move,
70
Gloomy or bright as the thrones they fill.
· · · · · · ·
A chaos of light and motion
Upon that glassy ocean.
· · · · · · ·
The senate of the Gods is met,
Each in his rank and station set;
75
There is silence in the spaces—
Lo! Satan, Christ, and Mahomet
Start from their places!
Christ. Almighty Father!
Low-kneeling at the feet of Destiny
· · · · · · ·
80
There are two fountains in which spirits weep
When mortals err, Discord and Slavery named,
And with their bitter dew two Destinies
Filled each their irrevocable urns; the third,
Fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and added
85
Chaos and Death, and slow Oblivion’s lymph,
And hate and terror, and the poisoned rain
· · · · · · ·
The Aurora of the nations. By this brow
Whose pores wept tears of blood, by these wide wounds,
By this imperial crown of agony,
90
By infamy and solitude and death,
For this I underwent, and by the pain
Of pity for those who would for me
The unremembered joy of a revenge,
For this I felt—by Plato’s sacred light,
95
Of which my spirit was a burning morrow—
By Greece and all she cannot cease to be.
Her quenchless words, sparks of immortal truth,
Stars of all night—her harmonies and forms,
Echoes and shadows of what Love adores
100
In thee, I do compel thee, send forth Fate,
Thy irrevocable child: let her descend,
A seraph-wingèd Victory [arrayed]
In tempest of the omnipotence of God
Which sweeps through all things.
105
From hollow leagues, from Tyranny which arms
Adverse miscreeds and emulous anarchies
To stamp, as on a wingèd ser
pent’s seed,
Upon the name of Freedom; from the storm
Of faction, which like earthquake shakes and sickens
110
The solid heart of enterprise; from all
By which the holiest dreams of highest spirits
Are stars beneath the dawn …
She shall arise
Victorious as the world arose from Chaos!
And as the Heavens and the Earth arrayed
115
Their presence in the beauty and the light
Of Thy first smile, O Father,—as they gather
The spirit of Thy love which paves for them
Their path o’er the abyss, till every sphere
Shall be one living Spirit,—so shall Greece—
120
Satan. Be as all things beneath the empyrean,
Mine! Art thou eyeless like old Destiny,
Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thorns?
Whose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed
Which pierces thee! whose throne a chair of scorn;
125
For seest thou not beneath this crystal floor
The innumerable worlds of golden light
Which are my empire, and the least of them which thou wouldst redeem from me?
Know’st thou not them my portion?
130
Or wouldst rekindle the strife
Which our great Father then did arbitrate
Which he assigned to his competing sons
Each his apportioned realm?
Thou Destiny,
Thou who art mailed in the omnipotence
135
Of Him who sends thee forth, whate’er thy task,
Speed, spare not to accomplish, and be mine
Thy trophies, whether Greece again become
The fountain in the desert whence the earth
Shall drink of freedom, which shall give it strength
140
To suffer, or a gulf of hollow death
To swallow all delight, all life, all hope.
Go, thou Vicegerent of my will, no less
Than of the Father’s; but lest thou shouldst faint,
The wingèd hounds, Famine and Pestilence,
145
Shall wait on thee, the hundred-forkèd snake
Insatiate Superstition still shall …
The earth behind thy steps, and War shall hover
Above, and Fraud shall gape below, and Change
Shall flit before thee on her dragon wings,
150
Convulsing and consuming, and I add
Three vials of the tears which daemons weep
When virtuous spirits through the gate of Death
Pass triumphing over the thorns of life,
Sceptres and crowns, mitres and swords and snares,
155
Trampling in scorn, like Him and Socrates.
The first is Anarchy; when Power and Pleasure,
Glory and science and security,
On Freedom hang like fruit on the green tree,
Then pour it forth, and men shall gather ashes.
The second Tyranny—
160
Christ. Obdurate spirit!
Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.
Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
165
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space, true excellence
Lives in the Spirit of all things that live,
Which lends it to the worlds thou callest thine.
· · · · · · ·
Mahomet.… Haste thou and fill the waning crescent
170
With beams as keen as those which pierced the shadow
Of Christian night rolled back upon the West,
When the orient moon of Islam rode in triumph
From Tmolus to the Acroceraunian snow.
· · · · · · ·
Wake, thou Word
175
Of God, and from the throne of Destiny
Even to the utmost limit of thy way
May Triumph
· · · · · · ·
Be thou a curse on them whose creed
Divides and multiplies the most high God.
HELLAS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
SCENE.—A Terrace on the Seraglio. MAHMUD sleeping, an Indian Slave sitting beside his Couch.
Chorus of Greek Captive Women.
WE strew these opiate flowers
On thy restless pillow,—
They were stripped from Orient bowers,
By the Indian billow.
5
Be thy sleep
Calm and deep,
Like theirs who fell—not ours who weep!
Indian.
Away, unlovely dreams!
Away, false shapes of sleep!
10
Be his, as Heaven seems,
Clear, and bright, and deep!
Soft as love, and calm as death,
Sweet as a summer night without a breath.
Chorus.
Sleep, sleep! our song is laden
15
With the soul of slumber;
It was sung by a Samian maiden,
Whose lover was of the number
Who now keep
That calm sleep
20
Whence none may wake, where none shall weep.
Indian.
I touch thy temples pale!
I breathe my soul on thee!
And could my prayers avail,
All my joy should be
25
Dead, and I would live to weep,
So thou mightst win one hour of quiet sleep.
Chorus.
Breathe low, low
The spell of the mighty mistress now!
When Conscience lulls her sated snake,
30
And Tyrants sleep, let Freedom wake.
Breathe low—low
The words which, like secret fire, shall flow
Through the veins of the frozen earth—low, low!
Semichorus I.
Life may change, but it may fly not;
35
Hope may vanish, but can die not;
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed,—but it returneth!
Semichorus II.
Yet were life a charnel where
Hope lay coffined with Despair;
40
Yet were truth a sacred lie,
Love were lust—
Semichorus I.
If Liberty
Lent not life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet’s robe to wear,
45
Love its power to give and bear.
Chorus.
In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
50
Like vultures frighted from Imaus,
Before an earthquake’s tread.—
So from Time’s tempestuous dawn
Freedom’s splendour burst and shone:—
Thermopylae and Marathon
55
Caught, like mountains beacon-lighted,
The springing Fire.—The wingèd glory
On Philippi half-alighted,
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
60
The quenchless ashes of Milan.
From age to age, from man to man,
It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.
Then night fell; and, as from night,
65
Reassumin
g fiery flight,
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of Heaven and doom,
A second sun arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
70
From far Atlantis its young beams
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine steams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
75
From utmost Germany to Spain.
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest’s warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain-cedar’s hair,
80
And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine:—Freedom, so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
85
Like Orient mountains lost in day;
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings prey,
And in the naked lightenings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
90
Let Freedom leave—where’er she flies,
A Desert, or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.
Semichorus I.
With the gifts of gladness
95
Greece did thy cradle strew;
Semichorus II.
With the tears of sadness
Greece did thy shroud bedew!
Semichorus I.
With an orphan’s affection
She followed thy bier through Time;
Semichorus II.
100
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley: (A Modern Library E-Book) Page 73
