160
Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise,
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,
165
Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes.
XII
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,
170
Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away;
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,
175
The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers,
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,
180
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers.
XIII
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:
185
O’er the lit waves every Aeolian isle
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
190
And they dissolve; but Spain’s were links of steel,
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,
195
All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal.
XIV
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,
200
Wild Bacchanal of truth’s mysterious wine,
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
205
And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness!
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
210
The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces.
XV
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
215
Erases, and the flat sands close behind!
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
220
Into a mass, irrefragably firm,
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,
225
To set thine armèd heel on this reluctant worm.
XVI
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,
230
A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure;
Till human thoughts might kneel alone,
Each before the judgment-throne
Of its own aweless soul, or of the Power unknown!
Oh, that the words which make the thoughts obscure
235
From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew
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
240
They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due!
XVII
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,
245
He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor.
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,
250
Driving on fiery wings to Nature’s throne,
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,
255
Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousandfold for one!
XVIII
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
260
Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;
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
265
Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?
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
270
Wept tears, and blood like tears?—The solemn harmony
XIX
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,
275
Sinks headlong through the aëreal golden light
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,
280
As a brief insect dies with dying day,—
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
285
Hiss round a drowner’s head in their tempestuous play.
TO—–
I
I FEAR thy kisses, gentle maiden,
Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burthen thine.
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II
5
I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion,
Thou needest not fear mine;
Innocent is the heart’s devotion
With which I worship thine.
ARETHUSA
I
ARETHUSA arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,—
From cloud and from crag,
5
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;—
10
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
15
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.
II
Then Alpheus bold
20
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks—with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
25
And the black south wind
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
30
The bars of the springs below.
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep,
As he followed the light
35
Of the fleet nymph’s flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.
III
‘Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!’
40
The loud Ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The earth’s white daughter
45
Fled like a sunny beam;
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:—
Like a gloomy stain
50
On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,—
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
IV
55
Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearlèd thrones;
Through the coral woods,
Of the weltering floods,
60
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
65
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest’s night:—
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean’s foam,
70
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.
V
And now from their fountains
In Enna’s mountains,
75
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
80
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
85
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;—
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
90
When they love but live no more.
SONG OF PROSERPINE
WHILE GATHERING FLOWERS ON THE PLAIN OF ENNA
I
SACRED Goddess, Mother Earth,
Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
5
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
II
If with mists of evening dew
Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow, in scent and hue,
10
Fairest children of the Hours,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
HYMN OF APOLLO
I
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,—
5
Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn,
Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.
II
Then I arise, and climbing Heaven’s blue dome,
I walk over the mountains and the waves,
Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;
10
My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves
Are filled with my bright presence, and the air
Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.
III
The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill
Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;
15
All men who do or even imagine ill
Fly me, and from the glory of my ray
Good minds and open actions take new might,
Until diminished by the reign of Night.
IV
I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers
20
With their aethereal colours; the moon’s globe
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.
V
25
I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven,
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
30
With which I soothe them from the western isle?
VI
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,
35
All light of art or nature;—to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.
HYMN OF PAN
I
FROM the forests and highlands
We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings.
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,
Were as silent as ever old Timolus was,
Listening to my sweet pipings.
II
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
15<
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In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing
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,
20
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
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.
III
25
I sang of the dancing stars,
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,—
30
Singing how down the vale of Maenalus
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,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
THE QUESTION
I
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
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.
II
There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
10
Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxslips; tender bluebells, at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets—
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley: (A Modern Library E-Book) Page 93
