"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 waves break upon the shore "like light dissolved, in star-showers
thrown. "The lightning of the noontide ocean is flashing, and a tone
arises from its measured motion. "How sweet," cries the poet, "did any
heart now share in my emotion!"
"Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around;
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--
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;--
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
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
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
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.
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."
The man over whose dying brain cruel waves were so soon to close,
feels, with a gentle mournfulness, his being dissolve into the
beneficent elements of nature, and compares his last breath to that of
the beautiful southern summer day. He did not, like Byron, love nature
only in its agitated, wild moments; simple of heart himself, he loved
its simplicity, its holy calm.
But this is not his most characteristic feature. Himself of the race
of Titans and giants, he loves the Titanic and gigantic beauty of
nature--his manner of doing so again differing entirely from Byron's.
It is not the tangible, easily accessible poetry of nature, that of
the flowers of the field or the trees of the forest, which inspires
him at his highest. No! the finest inspirations of his great spirit
are received from the grand and the distant, from the forceful motions
of the sea and the air and the dance of the spheres in the firmament
of heaven. In this familiarity with the great phenomena and the great
vicissitudes of nature Shelley resembles Byron, but he resembles him as
a fair genius resembles a dark, as Ariel resembles Lucifer the Son of
the Morning.
The poetry of the sea was to Byron the poetry of shipwreck, of the
raging hurricane, of the insatiable cry of the waves for prey; to him
the poetry of the sky lay in the howling of the storm, the roaring
of the thunder, the crackle of the lightning. It is nature as the
annihilator that he lives with and glories in. The famous passage in
the Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_, beginning: "Roll on, thou deep
and dark blue Ocean, roll!" is a jubilant record of the sea's exploits
in sweeping argosies from its surface and sinking empires into its
depths. It boasts that nothing longer-lived than a bubble tells where
man has gone down. The passage is like a prelude to the magnificent
Deluge scene which is entitled _Heaven and Earth_, and which is a
glorification of the lust of annihilation.[3]
After such verse read Shelley's famous poem, _The Cloud_. In it we
hear all the elementary forces of nature playing and jesting, with the
gaiety of giants, benevolent giants, who joy in pouring bounteous gifts
upon the earth. What freshness in the lines:
"I bring fresh showers for the thirsty flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams."
How wanton is the cloud when it sings:
"I wield the flail of the lashing hail
And whiten the green plains under;
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,
While I sleep in the arms of the Blast"