Produced by Sue Asscher <asschers@dingoblue.net.au>
THE COMPLETE
POETICAL WORKS
OF
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
VOLUME 1
OXFORD EDITION.
INCLUDING MATERIALS NEVER BEFORE
PRINTED IN ANY EDITION OF THE POEMS.
EDITED WITH TEXTUAL NOTES
BY
THOMAS HUTCHINSON, M. A.
EDITOR OF THE OXFORD WORDSWORTH.
1914.
PREFACE.
This edition of his "Poetical Works" contains all Shelley's
ascertained poems and fragments of verse that have hitherto appeared
in print. In preparing the volume I have worked as far as possible on
the principle of recognizing the editio princeps as the primary
textual authority. I have not been content to reprint Mrs. Shelley's
recension of 1839, or that of any subsequent editor of the "Poems".
The present text is the result of a fresh collation of the early
editions; and in every material instance of departure from the wording
of those originals the rejected reading has been subjoined in a
footnote. Again, wherever--as in the case of "Julian and
Maddalo"--there has appeared to be good reason for superseding the
authority of the editio princeps, the fact is announced, and the
substituted exemplar indicated, in the Prefatory Note. in the case of
a few pieces extant in two or more versions of debatable authority the
alternative text or texts will be found at the [end] of the [relevant
work]; but it may be said once for all that this does not pretend to
be a variorum edition, in the proper sense of the term--the textual
apparatus does not claim to be exhaustive. Thus I have not thought it
necessary to cumber the footnotes with every minute grammatical
correction introduced by Mrs. Shelley, apparently on her own
authority, into the texts of 1839; nor has it come within the scheme
of this edition to record every conjectural emendation adopted or
proposed by Rossetti and others in recent times. But it is hoped that,
up to and including the editions of 1839 at least, no important
variation of the text has been overlooked. Whenever a reading has been
adopted on manuscript authority, a reference to the particular source
has been added below.
I have been chary of gratuitous interference with the punctuation of
the manuscripts and early editions; in this direction, however, some
revision was indispensable. Even in his most carefully finished "fair
copy" Shelley under-punctuates (Thus in the exquisite autograph "Hunt
MS." of "Julian and Maddalo", Mr. Buxton Forman, the most conservative
of editors, finds it necessary to supplement Shelley's punctuation in
no fewer than ninety-four places.), and sometimes punctuates
capriciously. In the very act of transcribing his mind was apt to
stray from the work in hand to higher things; he would lose himself in
contemplating those airy abstractions and lofty visions of which alone
he greatly cared to sing, to the neglect and detriment of the merely
external and formal element of his song. Shelley recked little of the
jots and tittles of literary craftsmanship; he committed many a small
sin against the rules of grammar, and certainly paid but a halting
attention to the nice distinctions of punctuation. Thus in the early
editions a comma occasionally plays the part of a semicolon; colons
and semicolons seem to be employed interchangeably; a semicolon almost
invariably appears where nowadays we should employ the dash; and,
lastly, the dash itself becomes a point of all work, replacing
indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and
sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far
as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at
times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention--for, in Shelley's
hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and
onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to
indicate the structure or elucidate the sense. For this reason the
original pointing has been retained, save where it tends to obscure or
pervert the poet's meaning. Amongst the Editor's Notes at the end of
the Volume 3 the reader will find lists of the punctual variations in
the longer poems, by means of which the supplementary points now added
may be identified, and the original points, which in this edition have
been deleted or else replaced by others, ascertained, in the order of
their occurrence. In the use of capitals Shelley's practice has been
followed, while an attempt has been made to reduce the number of his
inconsistencies in this regard.
To have reproduced the spelling of the manuscripts would only have
served to divert attention from Shelley's poetry to my own ingenuity
in disgusting the reader according to the rules of editorial
punctilio. (I adapt a phrase or two from the preface to "The Revolt of
Islam".) Shelley was neither very accurate, nor always consistent, in
his spelling. He was, to say the truth, indifferent about all such
matters: indeed, to one absorbed in the spectacle of a world
travailing for lack of the gospel of "Political Justice", the study of
orthographical niceties must have seemed an occupation for Bedlamites.
Again--as a distinguished critic and editor of Shelley, Professor
Dowden, aptly observes in this connexion--'a great poet is not of an
age, but for all time.' Irregular or antiquated forms such as
'recieve,' 'sacrifize,' 'tyger,' 'gulph,' 'desart,' 'falshood,' and
the like, can only serve to distract the reader's attention, and mar
his enjoyment of the verse. Accordingly Shelley's eccentricities in
this kind have been discarded, and his spelling reversed in accordance
with modern usage. All weak preterite-forms, whether indicatives or
participles, have been printed with "ed" rather than "t", participial
adjectives and substantives, such as 'past,' alone excepted. In the
case of 'leap,' which has two preterite-forms, both employed by
Shelley (See for an example of the longer form, the "Hymn to Mercury",
18 5, where 'leaped' rhymes with 'heaped' (line 1). The shorter form,
rhyming to 'wept,' 'adapt,' etc., occurs more frequently.)--one with
the long vowel of the present-form, the other with a vowel-change (Of
course, wherever this vowel-shortening takes place, whether indicated
by a corresponding change in the spelling or not, "t", not "ed" is
properly used--'cleave,' 'cleft,'; 'deal,' 'dealt'; etc. The forms
discarded under the general rule laid down above are such as 'wrackt,'
'prankt,' 'snatcht,' 'kist,' 'opprest,' etc.) like that of 'crept'
from 'creep'--I have not hesitated to print the longer form 'leaped,'
and the shorter (after Mr. Henry Sweet's example) 'lept,' in order
clearly to indicate the pronunciation intended by Shelley. In the
editions the two vowel-sounds are confounded under the one spelling,
'leapt.' In a few cases Shelley's spelling, though unusual or
obsolete, has been retained. Thus in 'aethereal,' 'paean,' and one or
two more words the "ae" will be found, and 'airy' still appears as
'aery'. Shelley seems to have uniformly written 'lightening': here the
word is so printed whenever it is employed as a trisyllable; elsewhere
the ordinary spelling has been adopted. (Not a little has been written
about 'uprest' ("Revolt of Islam", 3 21 5), which has been described
as a nonce-word deliberately coined by Shelley 'on no better warrant
than the exigency of the rhyme.' There can be little doubt that
'uprest' is simply an overlooked misprint for 'uprist'--not by any
means a nonce-word, but a genuine English verbal substantive of
regular formation, familiar to many from its employment by Chaucer.
True, the corresponding rhyme-words in the passage above referred to
are 'nest,' 'possessed,' 'breast'; but a laxity such as
'nest'--'uprist' is quite in Shelley's manner. Thus in this very poem
we find 'midst'--'shed'st' (6 16), 'mist'--'rest'--'blest' (5 58),
'loveliest'--'mist'--kissed'--'dressed' (5 53). Shelley may have first
seen the word in "The Ancient Mariner"; but he employs it more
correctly than Coleridge, who seems to have mistaken it for a
preterite-form (='uprose') whereas in truth it serves either as the
third person singular of the present (='upriseth'), or, as here, for
the verbal substantive (='uprising').
The editor of Shelley to-day enters upon a goodly heritage, the
accumulated gains of a series of distinguished predecessors. Mrs.
Shelley's two editions of 1839 form the nucleus of the present volume,
and her notes are here reprinted in full; but the arrangement of the
poems differs to some extent from that followed by her--chiefly in
respect of "Queen Mab", which is here placed at the head of the
"Juvenilia", instead of at the forefront of the poems of Shelley's
maturity. In 1862 a slender volume of poems and fragments, entitled
"Relics of Shelley", was published by Dr. Richard Garnett, C.B.--a
precious sheaf gleaned from the manuscripts preserved at Boscombe
Manor. The "Relics" constitute a salvage second only in value to the
"Posthumous Poems" of 1824. To the growing mass of Shelley's verse yet
more material was added in 1870 by Mr. William Michael Rossetti, who
edited for Moxon the "Complete Poetical Works" published in that year.
To him we owe in particular a revised and greatly enlarged version of
the fragmentary drama of "Charles I". But though not seldom successful
in restoring the text, Mr. Rossetti pushed revision beyond the bounds
of prudence, freely correcting grammatical errors, rectifying small
inconsistencies in the sense, and too lightly adopting conjectural
emendations on the grounds of rhyme or metre. In the course of an
article published in the "Westminster Review" for July, 1870, Miss
Mathilde Blind, with the aid of material furnished by Dr. Garnett,
'was enabled,' in the words of Mr. Buxton Forman, 'to supply
omissions, make authoritative emendations, and controvert erroneous
changes' in Mr. Rossetti's work; and in the more cautiously edited
text of his later edition, published by Moxon in 1878, may be traced
the influence of her strictures.
Six years later appeared a variorum edition in which for the first
time Shelley's text was edited with scientific exactness of method,
and with a due respect for the authority of the original editions. It
would be difficult indeed to over-estimate the gains which have
accrued to the lovers of Shelley from the strenuous labours of Mr.
Harry Buxton Forman, C.B. He too has enlarged the body of Shelley's
poetry (Mr. Forman's most notable addition is the second part of "The
Daemon of the World", which he printed privately in 1876, and included
in his Library Edition of the "Poetical Works" published in the same
year. See the "List of Editions", etc. at the end of Volume 3.); but,
important as his editions undoubtedly are, it may safely be affirmed
that his services in this direction constitute the least part of what
we owe him. He has vindicated the authenticity of the text in many
places, while in many others he has succeeded, with the aid of
manuscripts, in restoring it. His untiring industry in research, his
wide bibliographical knowledge and experience, above all, his
accuracy, as invariable as it is minute, have combined to make him, in
the words of Professor Dowden, 'our chief living authority on all that
relates to Shelley's writings.' His name stands securely linked for
all time to Shelley's by a long series of notable words, including
three successive editions (1876, 1882, 1892) of the Poems, an edition
of the Prose Remains, as well as many minor publications--a
Bibliography ("The Shelley Library", 1886)and several Facsimile
Reprints of the early issues, edited for the Shelley Society.
To Professor Dowden, whose authoritative Biography of the poet,
published in 1886, was followed in 1890 by an edition of the Poems
(Macmillans), is due the addition of several pieces belonging to the
juvenile period, incorporated by him in the pages of the "Life of
Shelley". Professor Dowden has also been enabled, with the aid of the
manuscripts placed in his hands, to correct the text of the
"Juvenilia" in many places. In 1893 Professor George E. Woodberry
edited a "Centenary Edition of the Complete Poetical Works", in which,
to quote his own words, an attempt is made 'to summarize the labours
of more than half a century on Shelley's text, and on his biography so
far as the biography is bound up with the text.' In this Centenary
edition the textual variations found in the Harvard College
manuscripts, as well as those in the manuscripts belonging to Mr.
Frederickson of Brooklyn, are fully recorded. Professor Woodberry's
text is conservative on the whole, but his revision of the punctuation
is drastic, and occasionally sacrifices melody to perspicuity.
In 1903 Mr. C.D. Locock published, in a quarto volume of seventy-five
pages, the fruits of a careful scrutiny of the Shelley manuscripts now
lodged in the Bodleian Library. Mr. Locock succeeded in recovering
several inedited fragments of verse and prose. Amongst the poems
chiefly concerned in the results of his "Examination" may be named
"Marenghi", "Prince Athanase", "The Witch of Atlas", "To Constantia",
the "Ode to Naples", and (last, not least) "Prometheus Unbound". Full
use has been made in this edition of Mr. Locock's collations, and the
fragments recovered and printed by him are included in the text.
Variants derived from the Bodleian manuscripts are marked "B." in the
footnotes.
On the state of the text generally, and the various quarters in which
it lies open to conjectural emendation, I cannot do better than quote
the following succinct and luminous account from a "Causerie" on the
Shelley manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, contributed by Dr.
Richard Garnett, C.B., to the columns of "The Speaker" of December 19,
1903:--
'From the textual point of view, Shelley's works may be divided into
three classes--those published in his lifetime under his own
direction; those also published in his lifetime, but in his absence
from the press; and those published after his death. The first class
includes "Queen Mab", "The Revolt of Islam", and "Alastor" with its
appendages, published in England before his final departure for the
continent; and "The Cenci" and "Adonais", printed under his own eye at
Leghorn and Pisa respectively. Except for some provoking but
corrigible misprints in "The Revolt of Islam" and one crucial passage
in "Alastor", these poems afford little material for conjectural
emendation; for the Alexandrines now and then left in the middle of
stanzas in "The Revolt of Islam" must remain untouched, as proceeding
not from the printer's carelessness but the author's. The second
class, poems printed during Shelley's lifetime, but not under his
immediate inspection, comprise "Prometheus Unbound" and "Rosalind and
Helen", together with the pieces which accompanied them,
"Epipsychidion", "Hellas", and "Swellfoot the Tyrant". The correction
of the most important of these, the "Prometheus", was the least
satisfactory. Shelley, though speaking plainly to the publisher,
rather hints than expresses his dissatisfaction when writing to
Gisborne, the corrector, but there is a pretty clear hint when on a
subsequent occasion he says to him, "I have received 'Hellas', which
is prettily printed, and with fewer mistakes than any poem I ever
published." This also was probably not without influence on his
determination to have "The Cenci" and "Adonais" printed in Italy...Of
the third class of Shelley's writings--those which were first
published after his death--sufficient facsimiles have been published
to prove that Trelawny's graphic description of the chaotic state of
most of them was really in no respect exaggerated...The difficulty is
much augmented by the fact that these pieces are rarely consecutive,
but literally disiecti membra poetae, scattered through various
notebooks in a way to require piecing together as well as deciphering.
The editors of the Posthumous Poems, moreover, though diligent
according to their light, were neither endowed with remarkable acumen
nor possessed of the wide knowledge requisite for the full
intelligence of so erudite a poet as Shelley, hence the perpetration
of numerous mistakes. Some few of the manuscripts, indeed, such as
those of "The Witch of Atlas", "Julian and Maddalo", and the "Lines at
Naples", were beautifully written out for the press in Shelley's best
hand, but their very value and beauty necessitated the ordeal of
transcription, with disastrous results in several instances. An entire
line dropped out of the "Lines at Naples", and although "Julian and
Maddalo" was extant in more than one very clear copy, the printed text
had several such sense-destroying errors as "least" for "lead".
'The corrupt state of the text has stimulated the ingenuity of
numerous correctors, who have suggested many acute and convincing
emendations, and some very specious ones which sustained scrutiny has
proved untenable. It should be needless to remark that success has in
general been proportionate to the facilities of access to the
manuscripts, which have only of late become generally available. If
Shelley is less fortunate than most modern poets in the purity of his
text, he is more fortunate than many in the preservation of his
manuscripts. These have not, as regards a fair proportion, been
destroyed or dispersed at auctions, but were protected from either
fate by their very character as confused memoranda. As such they
remained in the possession of Shelley's widow, and passed from her to
her son and daughter-in-law. After Sir Percy Shelley's death, Lady
Shelley took the occasion of the erection of the monument to Shelley
at University College, Oxford, to present [certain of] the manuscripts
to the Bodleian Library, and verse and sculpture form an imperishable
memorial of his connection with the University where his residence was
so brief and troubled.' (Dr. Garnett proceeds:--'The most important of
the Bodleian manuscripts is that of "Prometheus Unbound", which, says
Mr. Locock, has the appearance of being an intermediate draft, and
also the first copy made. This should confer considerable authority on
its variations from the accepted text, as this appears to have been
printed from a copy not made by Shelley himself. "My 'Prometheus'," he
writes to Ollier on September 6, 1819, "is now being transcribed," an
expression which he would hardly have used if he had himself been the
copyist. He wished the proofs to be sent to him in Italy for
correction, but to this Ollier objected, and on May 14, 1820, Shelley
signifies his acquiescence, adding, however, "In this case I shall
repose trust in your care respecting the correction of the press; Mr.
Gisborne will revise it; he heard it recited, and will therefore more
readily seize any error." This confidence in the accuracy of
Gisborne's verbal memory is touching! From a letter to Gisborne on May
26 following it appears that the offer to correct came from him, and
that Shelley sent him "two little papers of corrections and
additions," which were probably made use of, or the fact would have
been made known. In the case of additions this may satisfactorily
account for apparent omissions in the Bodleian manuscript. Gisborne,
after all, did not prove fully up to the mark. "It is to be
regretted," writes Shelley to Ollier on November 20, "that the errors
of the press are so numerous," adding, "I shall send you the list of
errata in a day or two." This was probably "the list of errata written
by Shelley himself," from which Mrs. Shelley corrected the edition of
1839.')
In placing "Queen Mab" at the head of the "Juvenilia" I have followed
the arrangement adopted by Mr. Buxton Forman in his Library Edition of
1876. I have excluded "The Wandering Jew", having failed to satisfy
myself of the sufficiency of the grounds on which, in certain
quarters, it is accepted as the work of Shelley. The shorter fragments
are printed, as in Professor Dowden's edition of 1890, along with the
miscellaneous poems of the years to which they severally belong, under
titles which are sometimes borrowed from Mr. Buxton Forman, sometimes
of my own choosing. I have added a few brief Editor's Notes, mainly on
textual questions, at the end of the book. Of the poverty of my work
in this direction I am painfully aware; but in the present edition the
ordinary reader will, it is hoped, find an authentic, complete, and
accurately printed text, and, if this be so, the principal end and aim
of the OXFORD SHELLEY will have been attained.
I desire cordially to acknowledge the courtesy of Mr. H. Buxton
Forman, C.B., by whose kind sanction the second part of "The Daemon
the World" appears in this volume. And I would fain express my deep
sense of obligation for manifold information and guidance, derived
from Mr. Buxton Forman's various editions, reprints and other
publications--especially from the monumental Library Edition of 1876.
Acknowledgements are also due to the poet's grandson, Charles E.J.
Esdaile, Esq., for permission to include the early poems first printed
in Professor Dowden's "Life of Shelley"; and to Mr. C.D. Locock, for
leave to make full use of the material contained in his interesting
and stimulating volume. To Dr. Richard Garnett, C.B., and to Professor
Dowden, cordial thanks are hereby tendered for good counsel cheerfully
bestowed. To two of the editors of the Shelley Society Reprints, Mr.
Thomas J. Wise and Mr. Robert A. Potts--both generously communicative
collectors--I am deeply indebted for the gift or loan of scarce
volumes, as well as for many kind offices in other ways. Lastly, to
the staff of the Oxford University Press my heartiest thanks are
owing, for their unremitting care in all that relates to the printing
and correcting of the sheets.
THOMAS HUTCHINSON.
December, 1904.
POSTSCRIPT.
In a valuable paper, 'Notes on Passages in Shelley,' contributed to
"The Modern Language Review" (October, 1905), Mr. A.C. Bradley
discussed, amongst other things, some fifty places in the text of
Shelley's verse, and indicated certain errors and omissions in this
edition. With the aid of these "Notes" the editor has now carefully
revised the text, and has in many places adopted the suggestions or
conclusions of their accomplished author.
June, 1913.
PREFACE BY MRS. SHELLEY
TO FIRST COLLECTED EDITION, 1839.
Obstacles have long existed to my presenting the public with a perfect
edition of Shelley's Poems. These being at last happily removed, I
hasten to fulfil an important duty,--that of giving the productions of
a sublime genius to the world, with all the correctness possible, and
of, at the same time, detailing the history of those productions, as
they sprang, living and warm, from his heart and brain. I abstain from
any remark on the occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch as
the passions which they engendered inspired his poetry. This is not
the time to relate the truth; and I should reject any colouring of the
truth. No account of these events has ever been given at all
approaching reality in their details, either as regards himself or
others; nor shall I further allude to them than to remark that the
errors of action committed by a man as noble and generous as Shelley,
may, as far as he only is concerned, be fearlessly avowed by those who
loved him, in the firm conviction that, were they judged impartially,
his character would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of
any contemporary. Whatever faults he had ought to find extenuation
among his fellows, since they prove him to be human; without them, the
exalted nature of his soul would have raised him into something
divine.
The qualities that struck any one newly introduced to Shelley
were,--First, a gentle and cordial goodness that animated his
intercourse with warm affection and helpful sympathy. The other, the
eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human
happiness and improvement; and the fervent eloquence with which he
discussed such subjects. His conversation was marked by its happy
abundance, and the beautiful language in which he clothed his poetic
ideas and philosophical notions. To defecate life of its misery and
its evil was the ruling passion of his soul; he dedicated to it every
power of his mind, every pulsation of his heart. He looked on
political freedom as the direct agent to effect the happiness of
mankind; and thus any new-sprung hope of liberty inspired a joy and an
exultation more intense and wild than he could have felt for any
personal advantage. Those who have never experienced the workings of
passion on general and unselfish subjects cannot understand this; and
it must be difficult of comprehension to the younger generation rising
around, since they cannot remember the scorn and hatred with which the
partisans of reform were regarded some few years ago, nor the
persecutions to which they were exposed. He had been from youth the
victim of the state of feeling inspired by the reaction of the French
Revolution; and believing firmly in the justice and excellence of his
views, it cannot be wondered that a nature as sensitive, as impetuous,
and as generous as his, should put its whole force into the attempt to
alleviate for others the evils of those systems from which he had
himself suffered. Many advantages attended his birth; he spurned them
all when balanced with what he considered his duties. He was generous
to imprudence, devoted to heroism.
These characteristics breathe throughout his poetry. The struggle for
human weal; the resolution firm to martyrdom; the impetuous pursuit,
the glad triumph in good; the determination not to despair;--such were
the features that marked those of his works which he regarded with
most complacency, as sustained by a lofty subject and useful aim.
In addition to these, his poems may be divided into two classes,--the
purely imaginative, and those which sprang from the emotions of his
heart. Among the former may be classed the "Witch of Atlas",
"Adonais", and his latest composition, left imperfect, the "Triumph of
Life". In the first of these particularly he gave the reins to his
fancy, and luxuriated in every idea as it rose; in all there is that
sense of mystery which formed an essential portion of his perception
of life--a clinging to the subtler inner spirit, rather than to the
outward form--a curious and metaphysical anatomy of human passion and
perception.
The second class is, of course, the more popular, as appealing at once
to emotions common to us all; some of these rest on the passion of
love; others on grief and despondency; others on the sentiments
inspired by natural objects. Shelley's conception of love was exalted,
absorbing, allied to all that is purest and noblest in our nature, and
warmed by earnest passion; such it appears when he gave it a voice in
verse. Yet he was usually averse to expressing these feelings, except
when highly idealized; and many of his more beautiful effusions he had
cast aside unfinished, and they were never seen by me till after I had
lost him. Others, as for instance "Rosalind and Helen" and "Lines
written among the Euganean Hills", I found among his papers by chance;
and with some difficulty urged him to complete them. There are others,
such as the "Ode to the Skylark and The Cloud", which, in the opinion
of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his
productions. They were written as his mind prompted: listening to the
carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the
cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on
the Thames.
No poet was ever warmed by a more genuine and unforced inspiration.
His extreme sensibility gave the intensity of passion to his
intellectual pursuits; and rendered his mind keenly alive to every
perception of outward objects, as well as to his internal sensations.
Such a gift is, among the sad vicissitudes of human life, the
disappointments we meet, and the galling sense of our own mistakes and
errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such, he delivered up his
soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself, from the
influence of human sympathies, in the wildest regions of fancy. His
imagination has been termed too brilliant, his thoughts too subtle. He
loved to idealize reality; and this is a taste shared by few. We are
willing to have our passing whims exalted into passions, for this
gratifies our vanity; but few of us understand or sympathize with the
endeavour to ally the love of abstract beauty, and adoration of
abstract good, the to agathon kai to kalon of the Socratic
philosophers, with our sympathies with our kind. In this, Shelley
resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the
ideal than in the special and tangible. This did not result from
imitation; for it was not till Shelley resided in Italy that he made
Plato his study. He then translated his "Symposium" and his "Ion"; and
the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than
Plato's Praise of Love translated by Shelley. To return to his own
poetry. The luxury of imagination, which sought nothing beyond itself
(as a child burdens itself with spring flowers, thinking of no use
beyond the enjoyment of gathering them), often showed itself in his
verses: they will be only appreciated by minds which have resemblance
to his own; and the mystic subtlety of many of his thoughts will share
the same fate. The metaphysical strain that characterizes much of what
he has written was, indeed, the portion of his works to which, apart
from those whose scope was to awaken mankind to aspirations for what
he considered the true and good, he was himself particularly attached.
There is much, however, that speaks to the many. When he would consent
to dismiss these huntings after the obscure (which, entwined with his
nature as they were, he did with difficulty), no poet ever expressed
in sweeter, more heart-reaching, or more passionate verse, the gentler
or more forcible emotions of the soul.
A wise friend once wrote to Shelley: 'You are still very young, and in
certain essential respects you do not yet sufficiently perceive that
you are so.' It is seldom that the young know what youth is, till they
have got beyond its period; and time was not given him to attain this
knowledge. It must be remembered that there is the stamp of such
inexperience on all he wrote; he had not completed his
nine-and-twentieth year when he died. The calm of middle life did not
add the seal of the virtues which adorn maturity to those generated by
the vehement spirit of youth. Through life also he was a martyr to
ill-health, and constant pain wound up his nerves to a pitch of
susceptibility that rendered his views of life different from those of
a man in the enjoyment of healthy sensations. Perfectly gentle and
forbearing in manner, he suffered a good deal of internal
irritability, or rather excitement, and his fortitude to bear was
almost always on the stretch; and thus, during a short life, he had
gone through more experience of sensation than many whose existence is
protracted. 'If I die to-morrow,' he said, on the eve of his
unanticipated death, 'I have lived to be older than my father.' The
weight of thought and feeling burdened him heavily; you read his
sufferings in his attenuated frame, while you perceived the mastery he
held over them in his animated countenance and brilliant eyes.
He died, and the world showed no outward sign. But his influence over
mankind, though slow in growth, is fast augmenting; and, in the
ameliorations that have taken place in the political state of his
country, we may trace in part the operation of his arduous struggles.
His spirit gathers peace in its new state from the sense that, though
late, his exertions were not made in vain, and in the progress of the
liberty he so fondly loved.
He died, and his place, among those who knew him intimately, has never
been filled up. He walked beside them like a spirit of good to comfort
and benefit--to enlighten the darkness of life with irradiations of
genius, to cheer it with his sympathy and love. Any one, once attached
to Shelley, must feel all other affections, however true and fond, as
wasted on barren soil in comparison. It is our best consolation to
know that such a pure-minded and exalted being was once among us, and
now exists where we hope one day to join him;--although the
intolerant, in their blindness, poured down anathemas, the Spirit of
Good, who can judge the heart, never rejected him.
In the notes appended to the poems I have endeavoured to narrate the
origin and history of each. The loss of nearly all letters and papers
which refer to his early life renders the execution more imperfect
than it would otherwise have been. I have, however, the liveliest
recollection of all that was done and said during the period of my
knowing him. Every impression is as clear as if stamped yesterday, and
I have no apprehension of any mistake in my statements as far as they
go. In other respects I am indeed incompetent: but I feel the
importance of the task, and regard it as my most sacred duty. I
endeavour to fulfil it in a manner he would himself approve; and hope,
in this publication, to lay the first stone of a monument due to
Shelley's genius, his sufferings, and his virtues:--
Se al seguir son tarda,
Forse avverra che 'l bel nome gentile
Consacrero con questa stanca penna.
POSTSCRIPT IN SECOND EDITION OF 1839.
In revising this new edition, and carefully consulting Shelley's
scattered and confused papers, I found a few fragments which had
hitherto escaped me, and was enabled to complete a few poems hitherto
left unfinished. What at one time escapes the searching eye, dimmed by
its own earnestness, becomes clear at a future period. By the aid of a
friend, I also present some poems complete and correct which hitherto
have been defaced by various mistakes and omissions. It was suggested
that the poem "To the Queen of my Heart" was falsely attributed to
Shelley. I certainly find no trace of it among his papers; and, as
those of his intimate friends whom I have consulted never heard of it,
I omit it.
Two poems are added of some length, "Swellfoot the Tyrant" and "Peter
Bell the Third". I have mentioned the circumstances under which they
were written in the notes; and need only add that they are conceived
in a very different spirit from Shelley's usual compositions. They are
specimens of the burlesque and fanciful; but, although they adopt a
familiar style and homely imagery, there shine through the radiance of
the poet's imagination the earnest views and opinions of the
politician and the moralist.
At my request the publisher has restored the omitted passages of
"Queen Mab". I now present this edition as a complete collection of my
husband's poetical works, and I do not foresee that I can hereafter
add to or take away a word or line.
Putney, November 6, 1839.
PREFACE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
TO THE VOLUME OF POSTHUMOUS POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1824.
In nobil sangue vita umile e queta,
Ed in alto intelletto un puro core
Frutto senile in sul giovenil fibre,
E in aspetto pensoso anima lieta.--PETRARCA.
It had been my wish, on presenting the public with the Posthumous
Poems of Mr. Shelley, to have accompanied them by a biographical
notice; as it appeared to me that at this moment a narration of the
events of my husband's life would come more gracefully from other
hands than mine, I applied to Mr. Leigh Hunt. The distinguished
friendship that Mr. Shelley felt for him, and the enthusiastic
affection with which Mr. Leigh Hunt clings to his friend's memory,
seemed to point him out as the person best calculated for such an
undertaking. His absence from this country, which prevented our mutual
explanation, has unfortunately rendered my scheme abortive. I do not
doubt but that on some other occasion he will pay this tribute to his
lost friend, and sincerely regret that the volume which I edit has not
been honoured by its insertion.
The comparative solitude in which Mr. Shelley lived was the occasion
that he was personally known to few; and his fearless enthusiasm in
the cause which he considered the most sacred upon earth, the
improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind, was the chief
reason why he, like other illustrious reformers, was pursued by hatred
and calumny. No man was ever more devoted than he to the endeavour of
making those around him happy; no man ever possessed friends more
unfeignedly attached to him. The ungrateful world did not feel his
loss, and the gap it made seemed to close as quickly over his memory
as the murderous sea above his living frame. Hereafter men will lament
that his transcendent powers of intellect were extinguished before
they had bestowed on them their choicest treasures. To his friends his
loss is irremediable: the wise, the brave, the gentle, is gone for
ever! He is to them as a bright vision, whose radiant track, left
behind in the memory, is worth all the realities that society can
afford. Before the critics contradict me, let them appeal to any one
who had ever known him. To see him was to love him: and his presence,
like Ithuriel's spear, was alone sufficient to disclose the falsehood
of the tale which his enemies whispered in the ear of the ignorant
world.
His life was spent in the contemplation of Nature, in arduous study,
or in acts of kindness and affection. He was an elegant scholar and a
profound metaphysician; without possessing much scientific knowledge,
he was unrivalled in the justness and extent of his observations on
natural objects; he knew every plant by its name, and was familiar
with the history and habits of every production of the earth; he could
interpret without a fault each appearance in the sky; and the varied
phenomena of heaven and earth filled him with deep emotion. He made
his study and reading-room of the shadowed copse, the stream, the
lake, and the waterfall. Ill health and continual pain preyed upon his
powers; and the solitude in which we lived, particularly on our first
arrival in Italy, although congenial to his feelings, must frequently
have weighed upon his spirits; those beautiful and affecting "Lines
written in Dejection near Naples" were composed at such an interval;
but, when in health, his spirits were buoyant and youthful to an
extraordinary degree.
Such was his love for Nature that every page of his poetry is
associated, in the minds of his friends, with the loveliest scenes of
the countries which he inhabited. In early life he visited the most
beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of
Switzerland became his inspirers. "Prometheus Unbound" was written
among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and, when he made
his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him
as he composed the "Witch of Atlas", "Adonais", and "Hellas". In the
wild but beautiful Bay of Spezzia, the winds and waves which he loved
became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the
management of his boat, its alterations and improvements, were his
principal occupation. At night, when the unclouded moon shone on the
calm sea, he often went alone in his little shallop to the rocky caves
that bordered it, and, sitting beneath their shelter, wrote the
"Triumph of Life", the last of his productions. The beauty but
strangeness of this lonely place, the refined pleasure which he felt
in the companionship of a few selected friends, our entire
sequestration from the rest of the world, all contributed to render
this period of his life one of continued enjoyment. I am convinced
that the two months we passed there were the happiest which he had
ever known: his health even rapidly improved, and he was never better
than when I last saw him, full of spirits and joy, embark for Leghorn,
that he might there welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy. I was to have
accompanied him; but illness confined me to my room, and thus put the
seal on my misfortune. His vessel bore out of sight with a favourable
wind, and I remained awaiting his return by the breakers of that sea
which was about to engulf him.
He spent a week at Pisa, employed in kind offices toward his friend,
and enjoying with keen delight the renewal of their intercourse. He
then embarked with Mr. Williams, the chosen and beloved sharer of his
pleasures and of his fate, to return to us. We waited for them in
vain; the sea by its restless moaning seemed to desire to inform us of
what we would not learn:--but a veil may well be drawn over such
misery. The real anguish of those moments transcended all the fictions
that the most glowing imagination ever portrayed; our seclusion, the
savage nature of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, and our
immediate vicinity to the troubled sea, combined to imbue with strange
horror our days of uncertainty. The truth was at last known,--a truth
that made our loved and lovely Italy appear a tomb, its sky a pall.
Every heart echoed the deep lament, and my only consolation was in the
praise and earnest love that each voice bestowed and each countenance
demonstrated for him we had lost,--not, I fondly hope, for ever; his
unearthly and elevated nature is a pledge of the continuation of his
being, although in an altered form. Rome received his ashes; they are
deposited beneath its weed-grown wall, and 'the world's sole monument'
is enriched by his remains.
I must add a few words concerning the contents of this volume. "Julian
and Maddalo", the "Witch of Atlas", and most of the "Translations",
were written some years ago; and, with the exception of the "Cyclops",
and the Scenes from the "Magico Prodigioso", may be considered as
having received the author's ultimate corrections. The "Triumph of
Life" was his last work, and was left in so unfinished a state that I
arranged it in its present form with great difficulty. All his poems
which were scattered in periodical works are collected in this volume,
and I have added a reprint of "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude":
the difficulty with which a copy can be obtained is the cause of its
republication. Many of the Miscellaneous Poems, written on the spur of
the occasion, and never retouched, I found among his manuscript books,
and have carefully copied. I have subjoined, whenever I have been
able, the date of their composition.
I do not know whether the critics will reprehend the insertion of some
of the most imperfect among them; but I frankly own that I have been
more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should
escape me than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to
the fastidious reader. I feel secure that the lovers of Shelley's
poetry (who know how, more than any poet of the present day, every
line and word he wrote is instinct with peculiar beauty) will pardon
and thank me: I consecrate this volume to them.
The size of this collection has prevented the insertion of any prose
pieces. They will hereafter appear in a separate publication.
MARY W. SHELLEY.
London, June 1, 1824.
***
CONTENTS.
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
MRS. SHELLEY'S PREFACE TO FIRST COLLECTED EDITION, 1839.
POSTSCRIPT IN SECOND EDITION OF 1839.
MRS. SHELLEY'S PREFACE TO "POSTHUMOUS POEMS", 1824.
THE DAEMON OF THE WORLD. A FRAGMENT.
PART 1.
PART 2.
ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRiT OF SOLITUDE.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
THE REVOLT OF ISLAM. A POEM IN TWELVE CANTOS.
PREFACE.
DEDICATION: TO MARY -- --.
CANTO 1.
CANTO 2.
CANTO 3.
CANTO 4.
CANTO 5.
CANTO 6.
CANTO 7.
CANTO 8.
CANTO 9.
CANTO 10.
CANTO 11.
CANTO 12.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
PRINCE ATHANASE. A FRAGMENT.
ROSALIND AND HELEN. A MODERN ECLOGUE.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
JULIAN AND MADDALO. A CONVERSATION.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. A LYRICAL DRAMA IN FOUR ACTS.
PREFACE.
ACT 1.
ACT 2.
ACT 3.
ACT 4.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
THE CENCI. A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
DEDICATION, TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQUIRE.
PREFACE
ACT 1.
ACT 2.
ACT 3.
ACT 4.
ACT 5.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
THe MASK OF ANARCHY.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
PETER BELL THE THIRD.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.
THE WITCH OF ATLAS.
TO MARY.
THE WITCH OF ATLAS.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
OEDIPUS TYRANNUS; OR, SWELLFOOT THE TYRANT. A TRAGEDY IN TWO ACTS.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
EPIPSYCHIDION.
FRAGMENTS CONNECTED WITH EPIPSYCHIDION.
ADONAIS. AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS.
PREFACE.
ADONAIS.
CANCELLED PASSAGES.
HELLAS. A LYRICAL DRAMA.
PREFACE.
PROLOGUE.
HELLAS.
SHELLEY'S NOTES.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
FRAGMENTS OF AN UNFINISHED DRAMA.
CHARLES THE FIRST.
THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.
CANCELLED OPENING.
***
THE DAEMON OF THE WORLD.
A FRAGMENT.
PART 1.
[Sections 1 and 2 of "Queen Mab" rehandled, and published by Shelley
in the "Alastor" volume, 1816. See "Bibliographical List", and the
Editor's Introductory Note to "Queen Mab".]
Nec tantum prodere vati,
Quantum scire licet. Venit aetas omnis in unam
Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus.
LUCAN, Phars. v. 176.
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
One pale as yonder wan and horned moon,
With lips of lurid blue,
The other glowing like the vital morn, _5
When throned on ocean's wave
It breathes over the world:
Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!
Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton,
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres, _10
To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne
Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form,
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, whose azure veins
Steal like dark streams along a field of snow, _15
Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed
In light of some sublimest mind, decay?
Nor putrefaction's breath
Leave aught of this pure spectacle
But loathsomeness and ruin?-- _20
Spare aught but a dark theme,
On which the lightest heart might moralize?
Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers
Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids
To watch their own repose? _25
Will they, when morning's beam
Flows through those wells of light,
Seek far from noise and day some western cave,
Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds
A lulling murmur weave?-- _30
Ianthe doth not sleep
The dreamless sleep of death:
Nor in her moonlight chamber silently
Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb,
Or mark her delicate cheek _35
With interchange of hues mock the broad moon,
Outwatching weary night,
Without assured reward.
Her dewy eyes are closed;
On their translucent lids, whose texture fine _40
Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below
With unapparent fire,
The baby Sleep is pillowed:
Her golden tresses shade
The bosom's stainless pride, _45
Twining like tendrils of the parasite
Around a marble column.
Hark! whence that rushing sound?
'Tis like a wondrous strain that sweeps
Around a lonely ruin _50
When west winds sigh and evening waves respond
In whispers from the shore:
'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes
Which from the unseen lyres of dells and groves
The genii of the breezes sweep. _55
Floating on waves of music and of light,
The chariot of the Daemon of the World
Descends in silent power:
Its shape reposed within: slight as some cloud
That catches but the palest tinge of day _60
When evening yields to night,
Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue
Its transitory robe.
Four shapeless shadows bright and beautiful
Draw that strange car of glory, reins of light _65
Check their unearthly speed; they stop and fold
Their wings of braided air:
The Daemon leaning from the ethereal car
Gazed on the slumbering maid.
Human eye hath ne'er beheld _70
A shape so wild, so bright, so beautiful,
As that which o'er the maiden's charmed sleep
Waving a starry wand,
Hung like a mist of light.
Such sounds as breathed around like odorous winds _75
Of wakening spring arose,
Filling the chamber and the moonlight sky.
Maiden, the world's supremest spirit
Beneath the shadow of her wings
Folds all thy memory doth inherit _80
From ruin of divinest things,
Feelings that lure thee to betray,
And light of thoughts that pass away.
For thou hast earned a mighty boon,
The truths which wisest poets see _85
Dimly, thy mind may make its own,
Rewarding its own majesty,
Entranced in some diviner mood
Of self-oblivious solitude.
Custom, and Faith, and Power thou spurnest; _90
From hate and awe thy heart is free;
Ardent and pure as day thou burnest,
For dark and cold mortality
A living light, to cheer it long,
The watch-fires of the world among. _95
Therefore from nature's inner shrine,
Where gods and fiends in worship bend,
Majestic spirit, be it thine
The flame to seize, the veil to rend,
Where the vast snake Eternity _100
In charmed sleep doth ever lie.
All that inspires thy voice of love,
Or speaks in thy unclosing eyes,
Or through thy frame doth burn or move,
Or think or feel, awake, arise! _105
Spirit, leave for mine and me
Earth's unsubstantial mimicry!
It ceased, and from the mute and moveless frame
A radiant spirit arose,
All beautiful in naked purity. _110
Robed in its human hues it did ascend,
Disparting as it went the silver clouds,
It moved towards the car, and took its seat
Beside the Daemon shape.
Obedient to the sweep of aery song, _115
The mighty ministers
Unfurled their prismy wings.
The magic car moved on;
The night was fair, innumerable stars
Studded heaven's dark blue vault; _120
The eastern wave grew pale
With the first smile of morn.
The magic car moved on.
From the swift sweep of wings
The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew; _125
And where the burning wheels
Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak
Was traced a line of lightning.
Now far above a rock the utmost verge
Of the wide earth it flew, _130
The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow
Frowned o'er the silver sea.
Far, far below the chariot's stormy path,
Calm as a slumbering babe,
Tremendous ocean lay. _135
Its broad and silent mirror gave to view
The pale and waning stars,
The chariot's fiery track,
And the grey light of morn
Tingeing those fleecy clouds _140
That cradled in their folds the infant dawn.
The chariot seemed to fly
Through the abyss of an immense concave,
Radiant with million constellations, tinged
With shades of infinite colour, _145
And semicircled with a belt
Flashing incessant meteors.
As they approached their goal,
The winged shadows seemed to gather speed.
The sea no longer was distinguished; earth _150
Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere, suspended
In the black concave of heaven
With the sun's cloudless orb,
Whose rays of rapid light
Parted around the chariot's swifter course, _155
And fell like ocean's feathery spray
Dashed from the boiling surge
Before a vessel's prow.
The magic car moved on.
Earth's distant orb appeared _160
The smallest light that twinkles in the heavens,
Whilst round the chariot's way
Innumerable systems widely rolled,
And countless spheres diffused
An ever varying glory. _165
It was a sight of wonder! Some were horned,
And like the moon's argentine crescent hung
In the dark dome of heaven; some did shed
A clear mild beam like Hesperus, while the sea
Yet glows with fading sunlight; others dashed _170
Athwart the night with trains of bickering fire,
Like sphered worlds to death and ruin driven;
Some shone like stars, and as the chariot passed
Bedimmed all other light.
Spirit of Nature! here _175
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose involved immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers,
Here is thy fitting temple.
Yet not the lightest leaf _180
That quivers to the passing breeze
Is less instinct with thee,--
Yet not the meanest worm.
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead,
Less shares thy eternal breath. _185
Spirit of Nature! thou
Imperishable as this glorious scene,
Here is thy fitting temple.
If solitude hath ever led thy steps
To the shore of the immeasurable sea, _190
And thou hast lingered there
Until the sun's broad orb
Seemed resting on the fiery line of ocean,
Thou must have marked the braided webs of gold
That without motion hang _195
Over the sinking sphere:
Thou must have marked the billowy mountain clouds,
Edged with intolerable radiancy,
Towering like rocks of jet
Above the burning deep: _200
And yet there is a moment
When the sun's highest point
Peers like a star o'er ocean's western edge,
When those far clouds of feathery purple gleam
Like fairy lands girt by some heavenly sea: _205
Then has thy rapt imagination soared
Where in the midst of all existing things
The temple of the mightiest Daemon stands.
Yet not the golden islands
That gleam amid yon flood of purple light, _210
Nor the feathery curtains
That canopy the sun's resplendent couch,
Nor the burnished ocean waves
Paving that gorgeous dome,
So fair, so wonderful a sight _215
As the eternal temple could afford.
The elements of all that human thought
Can frame of lovely or sublime, did join
To rear the fabric of the fane, nor aught
Of earth may image forth its majesty. _220
Yet likest evening's vault that faery hall,
As heaven low resting on the wave it spread
Its floors of flashing light,
Its vast and azure dome;
And on the verge of that obscure abyss _225
Where crystal battlements o'erhang the gulf
Of the dark world, ten thousand spheres diffuse
Their lustre through its adamantine gates.
The magic car no longer moved;
The Daemon and the Spirit _230
Entered the eternal gates.
Those clouds of aery gold
That slept in glittering billows
Beneath the azure canopy,
With the ethereal footsteps trembled not; _235
While slight and odorous mists
Floated to strains of thrilling melody
Through the vast columns and the pearly shrines.
The Daemon and the Spirit
Approached the overhanging battlement, _240
Below lay stretched the boundless universe!
There, far as the remotest line
That limits swift imagination's flight.
Unending orbs mingled in mazy motion,
Immutably fulfilling _245
Eternal Nature's law.
Above, below, around,
The circling systems formed
A wilderness of harmony.
Each with undeviating aim _250
In eloquent silence through the depths of space
Pursued its wondrous way.--
Awhile the Spirit paused in ecstasy.
Yet soon she saw, as the vast spheres swept by,
Strange things within their belted orbs appear. _255
Like animated frenzies, dimly moved
Shadows, and skeletons, and fiendly shapes,
Thronging round human graves, and o'er the dead
Sculpturing records for each memory
In verse, such as malignant gods pronounce, _260
Blasting the hopes of men, when heaven and hell
Confounded burst in ruin o'er the world:
And they did build vast trophies, instruments
Of murder, human bones, barbaric gold,
Skins torn from living men, and towers of skulls _265
With sightless holes gazing on blinder heaven,
Mitres, and crowns, and brazen chariots stained
With blood, and scrolls of mystic wickedness,
The sanguine codes of venerable crime.
The likeness of a throned king came by. _270
When these had passed, bearing upon his brow
A threefold crown; his countenance was calm.
His eye severe and cold; but his right hand
Was charged with bloody coin, and he did gnaw
By fits, with secret smiles, a human heart _275
Concealed beneath his robe; and motley shapes,
A multitudinous throng, around him knelt.
With bosoms bare, and bowed heads, and false looks
Of true submission, as the sphere rolled by.
Brooking no eye to witness their foul shame, _280
Which human hearts must feel, while human tongues
Tremble to speak, they did rage horribly,
Breathing in self-contempt fierce blasphemies
Against the Daemon of the World, and high
Hurling their armed hands where the pure Spirit, _285
Serene and inaccessibly secure,
Stood on an isolated pinnacle.
The flood of ages combating below,
The depth of the unbounded universe
Above, and all around _290
Necessity's unchanging harmony.
PART 2.
[Sections 8 and 9 of "Queen Mab" rehandled by Shelley. First printed
in 1876 by Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B., by whose kind permission it is
here reproduced. See Editor's Introductory Note to "Queen Mab".]
O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!
To which those restless powers that ceaselessly
Throng through the human universe aspire;
Thou consummation of all mortal hope! _295
Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!
Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,
Verge to one point and blend for ever there:
Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place!
Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime, _300
Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:
O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!
Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,
And dim forebodings of thy loveliness,
Haunting the human heart, have there entwined _305
Those rooted hopes, that the proud Power of Evil
Shall not for ever on this fairest world
Shake pestilence and war, or that his slaves
With blasphemy for prayer, and human blood
For sacrifice, before his shrine for ever _310
In adoration bend, or Erebus
With all its banded fiends shall not uprise
To overwhelm in envy and revenge
The dauntless and the good, who dare to hurl
Defiance at his throne, girt tho' it be _315
With Death's omnipotence. Thou hast beheld
His empire, o'er the present and the past;
It was a desolate sight--now gaze on mine,
Futurity. Thou hoary giant Time,
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,-- _320
And from the cradles of eternity,
Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,
Tear thou that gloomy shroud.--Spirit, behold
Thy glorious destiny!
The Spirit saw _325
The vast frame of the renovated world
Smile in the lap of Chaos, and the sense
Of hope thro' her fine texture did suffuse
Such varying glow, as summer evening casts
On undulating clouds and deepening lakes. _330
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,
That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea
And dies on the creation of its breath,
And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits,
Was the sweet stream of thought that with wild motion _335
Flowed o'er the Spirit's human sympathies.
The mighty tide of thought had paused awhile,
Which from the Daemon now like Ocean's stream
Again began to pour.--
To me is given
The wonders of the human world to keep- _340
Space, matter, time and mind--let the sight
Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.
All things are recreated, and the flame
Of consentaneous love inspires all life:
The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck _345
To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,
Rewarding her with their pure perfectness:
The balmy breathings of the wind inhale
Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:
Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere, _350
Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream;
No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven,
Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride
The foliage of the undecaying trees;
But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair, _355
And Autumn proudly bears her matron grace,
Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of Spring,
Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit
Reflects its tint and blushes into love.
The habitable earth is full of bliss; _360
Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,
Where matter dared not vegetate nor live,
But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed; _365
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls
Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,
Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves _370
And melodise with man's blest nature there.
The vast tract of the parched and sandy waste
Now teems with countless rills and shady woods,
Corn-fields and pastures and white cottages;
And where the startled wilderness did hear _375
A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,
Hymmng his victory, or the milder snake
Crushing the bones of some frail antelope
Within his brazen folds--the dewy lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles _380
To see a babe before his mother's door,
Share with the green and golden basilisk
That comes to lick his feet, his morning's meal.
Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail
Has seen, above the illimitable plain, _385
Morning on night and night on morning rise,
Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread
Its shadowy mountains on the sunbright sea,
Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves
So long have mingled with the gusty wind _390
In melancholy loneliness, and swept
The desert of those ocean solitudes,
But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,
The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm,
Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds _395
Of kindliest human impulses respond:
Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,
With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,
And fertile valleys resonant with bliss,
Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave, _400
Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,
To meet the kisses of the flowerets there.
Man chief perceives the change, his being notes
The gradual renovation, and defines
Each movement of its progress on his mind. _405
Man, where the gloom of the long polar night
Lowered o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,
Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost
Basked in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,
Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night; _410
Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day
With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,
Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere
Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed
Unnatural vegetation, where the land _415
Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,
Was man a nobler being; slavery
Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust.
Even where the milder zone afforded man
A seeming shelter, yet contagion there, _420
Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,
Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth availed
Till late to arrest its progress, or create
That peace which first in bloodless victory waved
Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime: _425
There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,
The mimic of surrounding misery,
The jackal of ambition's lion-rage,
The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.
Here now the human being stands adorning _430
This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;
Blest from his birth with all bland impulses,
Which gently in his noble bosom wake
All kindly passions and all pure desires.
Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing, _435
Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal
Dawns on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness gift
With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks
The unprevailing hoariness of age, _440
And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon earth: no longer now
He slays the beast that sports around his dwelling
And horribly devours its mangled flesh, _445
Or drinks its vital blood, which like a stream
Of poison thro' his fevered veins did flow
Feeding a plague that secretly consumed
His feeble frame, and kindling in his mind
Hatred, despair, and fear and vain belief, _450
The germs of misery, death, disease and crime.
No longer now the winged habitants,
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,
Flee from the form of man; but gather round,
And prune their sunny feathers on the hands _455
Which little children stretch in friendly sport
Towards these dreadless partners of their play.
All things are void of terror: man has lost
His desolating privilege, and stands
An equal amidst equals: happiness _460
And science dawn though late upon the earth;
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reason and passion cease to combat there;
Whilst mind unfettered o'er the earth extends _465
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there.
Mild is the slow necessity of death:
The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear, _470
Resigned in peace to the necessity,
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope as he.
The deadly germs of languor and disease
Waste in the human frame, and Nature gifts _475
With choicest boons her human worshippers.
How vigorous now the athletic form of age!
How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!
Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, or care,
Had stamped the seal of grey deformity _480
On all the mingling lineaments of time.
How lovely the intrepid front of youth!
How sweet the smiles of taintless infancy.
Within the massy prison's mouldering courts,
Fearless and free the ruddy children play, _485
Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows
With the green ivy and the red wall-flower,
That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;
The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,
There rust amid the accumulated ruins _490
Now mingling slowly with their native earth:
There the broad beam of day, which feebly once
Lighted the cheek of lean captivity
With a pale and sickly glare, now freely shines
On the pure smiles of infant playfulness: _495
No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair
Peals through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes
Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds
And merriment are resonant around.
The fanes of Fear and Falsehood hear no more _500
The voice that once waked multitudes to war
Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond
To the death dirge of the melancholy wind:
It were a sight of awfulness to see
The works of faith and slavery, so vast, _505
So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing!
Even as the corpse that rests beneath their wall.
A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death
To-day, the breathing marble glows above
To decorate its memory, and tongues _510
Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms
In silence and in darkness seize their prey.
These ruins soon leave not a wreck behind:
Their elements, wide-scattered o'er the globe,
To happier shapes are moulded, and become _515
Ministrant to all blissful impulses:
Thus human things are perfected, and earth,
Even as a child beneath its mother's love,
Is strengthened in all excellence, and grows
Fairer and nobler with each passing year. _520
Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene
Closes in steadfast darkness, and the past
Fades from our charmed sight. My task is done:
Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own,
With all the fear and all the hope they bring. _525
My spells are past: the present now recurs.
Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains
Yet unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand.
Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,
Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue _530
The gradual paths of an aspiring change:
For birth and life and death, and that strange state
Before the naked powers that thro' the world
Wander like winds have found a human home,
All tend to perfect happiness, and urge _535
The restless wheels of being on their way,
Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,
Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:
For birth but wakes the universal mind
Whose mighty streams might else in silence flow _540
Thro' the vast world, to individual sense
Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape
New modes of passion to its frame may lend;
Life is its state of action, and the store
Of all events is aggregated there _545
That variegate the eternal universe;
Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,
That leads to azure isles and beaming skies
And happy regions of eternal hope.
Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: _550
Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,
Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,
Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth,
To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower,
That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens, _555
Lighting the green wood with its sunny smile.
Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand,
So welcome when the tyrant is awake,
So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch flares;
'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour, _560
The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep.
For what thou art shall perish utterly,
But what is thine may never cease to be;
Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen
Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom, _565
Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there,
And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.
Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene
Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?
Hopes that not vainly thou, and living fires _570
Of mind as radiant and as pure as thou,
Have shone upon the paths of men--return,
Surpassing Spirit, to that world, where thou
Art destined an eternal war to wage
With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot _575
The germs of misery from the human heart.
Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe
The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,
Whose impotence an easy pardon gains,
Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease: _580
Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy
Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will,
When fenced by power and master of the world.
Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind,
Free from heart-withering custom's cold control, _585
Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued.
Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee,
And therefore art thou worthy of the boon
Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep
Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod, _590
And many days of beaming hope shall bless
Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love.
Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy
Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch
Light, life and rapture from thy smile. _595
The Daemon called its winged ministers.
Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car,
That rolled beside the crystal battlement,
Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness.
The burning wheels inflame _600
The steep descent of Heaven's untrodden way.
Fast and far the chariot flew:
The mighty globes that rolled
Around the gate of the Eternal Fane
Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared _605
Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs
That ministering on the solar power
With borrowed light pursued their narrower way.
Earth floated then below:
The chariot paused a moment; _610
The Spirit then descended:
And from the earth departing
The shadows with swift wings
Speeded like thought upon the light of Heaven.
The Body and the Soul united then, _615
A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's frame:
Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;
Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained:
She looked around in wonder and beheld
Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch, _620
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
And the bright beaming stars
That through the casement shone.
Notes:
_87 Regarding cj. A.C. Bradley.)
***
ALASTOR: OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE.
[Composed at Bishopsgate Heath, near Windsor Park, 1815 (autumn);
published, as the title-piece of a slender volume containing other
poems (see "Biographical List", by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, London,
1816 (March). Reprinted--the first edition being sold out--amongst the
"Posthumous Poems", 1824. Sources of the text are (1) the editio
princeps, 1816; (2) "Posthumous Poems", 1824; (3) "Poetical Works",
1839, editions 1st and 2nd. For (2) and (3) Mrs. Shelley is
responsible.]
PREFACE.
The poem entitled "Alastor" may be considered as allegorical of one of
the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents a
youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an
imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is
excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He
drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The
magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into
the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications at
variety not to be exhausted. so long as it is possible for his desires
to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous,
and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these
objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and
thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He
images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with
speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in
which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or
wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover
could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the
functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy
of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented
as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image.
He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his
disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.
The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's
self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible
passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the
luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by
awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms
to a slow and poisonous decay those manner spirits that dare to abjure
its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their
delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by
no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful
knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on
this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from
sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor
mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their
apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their
common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor
lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of
their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human
sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and
passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of
their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and
torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together
with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those
who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare
for their old age a miserable grave.
'The good die first,
And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust,
Burn to the socket!'
December 14, 1815.
ALASTOR: OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE.
Earth, Ocean, Air, beloved brotherhood!
If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, _5
With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight's tingling silentness;
If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood,
And winter robing with pure snow and crowns
Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; _10
If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes
Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me;
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred; then forgive _15
This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw
No portion of your wonted favour now!
Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favour my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched _20
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, _25
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, _30
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears,
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made _35
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge:...and, though ne'er yet
Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought, _40
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane,
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain _45
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.
There was a Poet whose untimely tomb _50
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:--
A lovely youth,--no mourning maiden decked _55
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:--
Gentle, and brave, and generous,--no lorn bard
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:
He lived, he died, he sung in solitude. _60
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, _65
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.
By solemn vision, and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air,
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. _70
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had passed, he left _75
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.
Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness
Has lured his fearless steps; and he has bought
With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men, _80
His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps
He like her shadow has pursued, where'er
The red volcano overcanopies
Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice
With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes _85
On black bare pointed islets ever beat
With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves,
Rugged and dark, winding among the springs
Of fire and poison, inaccessible
To avarice or pride, their starry domes _90
Of diamond and of gold expand above
Numberless and immeasurable halls,
Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines
Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.
Nor had that scene of ampler majesty _95
Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven
And the green earth lost in his heart its claims
To love and wonder; he would linger long
In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,
Until the doves and squirrels would partake _100
From his innocuous hand his bloodless food,
Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,
And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er
The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend
Her timid steps, to gaze upon a form
More graceful than her own. _105
His wandering step,
Obedient to high thoughts, has visited
The awful ruins of the days of old:
Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste
Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers _110
Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids,
Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange,
Sculptured on alabaster obelisk,
Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx,
Dark Aethiopia in her desert hills _115
Conceals. Among the ruined temples there,
Stupendous columns, and wild images
Of more than man, where marble daemons watch
The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men
Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, _120
He lingered, poring on memorials
Of the world's youth: through the long burning day
Gazed on those speechless shapes; nor, when the moon
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades
Suspended he that task, but ever gazed _125
And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw
The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.
Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,
Her daily portion, from her father's tent, _130
And spread her matting for his couch, and stole
From duties and repose to tend his steps,
Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe
To speak her love:--and watched his nightly sleep,
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips _135
Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath
Of innocent dreams arose; then, when red morn
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home
Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.
The Poet, wandering on, through Arabie, _140
And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way;
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within _145
Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine
Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet _150
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held _155
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, _160
Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood
Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame
A permeating fire; wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos; her fair hands _165
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp
Strange symphony, and in their branching veins
The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
The pauses of her music, and her breath _170
Tumultuously accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,
And saw by the warm light of their own life _175
Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil
Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,
Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,
Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips
Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. _180
His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess
Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom:...she drew back a while,
Then, yielding to the irresistible joy, _185
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course, _190
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.
Roused by the shock he started from his trance--
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods, _195
Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and the majesty of Earth,
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes _200
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues _205
Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;
He overleaps the bounds. Alas! Alas!
Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined
Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost
In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, _210
That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death
Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds
And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake,
Lead only to a black and watery depth, _215
While death's blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung,
Where every shade which the foul grave exhales
Hides its dead eye from the detested day,
Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?
This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart; _220
The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung
His brain even like despair.
While daylight held
The sky, the Poet kept mute conference
With his still soul. At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream, _225
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness.--As an eagle, grasped
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast
Burn with the poison, and precipitates
Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud, _230
Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight
O'er the wide aery wilderness: thus driven
By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,
Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,
Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells, _235
Startling with careless step the moonlight snake,
He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight,
Shedding the mockery of its vital hues
Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on
Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep _240
Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud;
Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs
Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind
Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on,
Day after day a weary waste of hours, _245
Bearing within his life the brooding care
That ever fed on its decaying flame.
And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering
Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand _250
Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,
Who ministered with human charity _255
His human wants, beheld with wondering awe
Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer,
Encountering on some dizzy precipice
That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind
With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet _260
Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused
In its career: the infant would conceal
His troubled visage in his mother's robe
In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,
To remember their strange light in many a dream _265
Of after-times; but youthful maidens, taught
By nature, would interpret half the woe
That wasted him, would call him with false names
Brother and friend, would press his pallid hand
At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path _270
Of his departure from their father's door.
At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, _275
Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.
It rose as he approached, and, with strong wings
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.
His eyes pursued its flight:--'Thou hast a home, _280
Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home,
Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck
With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes
Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy.
And what am I that I should linger here, _285
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not my thoughts?' A gloomy smile _290
Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.
For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly
Its precious charge, and silent death exposed,
Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure,
With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. _295
Startled by his own thoughts he looked around.
There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight
Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind.
A little shallop floating near the shore
Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze. _300
It had been long abandoned, for its sides
Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints
Swayed with the undulations of the tide.
A restless impulse urged him to embark
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste; _305
For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves
The slimy caverns of the populous deep.
The day was fair and sunny; sea and sky
Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind
Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. _310
Following his eager soul, the wanderer
Leaped in the boat, he spread his cloak aloft
On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat,
And felt the boat speed o'er the tranquil sea
Like a torn cloud before the hurricane. _315
As one that in a silver vision floats
Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds
Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly
Along the dark and ruffled waters fled
The straining boat.--A whirlwind swept it on, _320
With fierce gusts and precipitating force,
Through the white ridges of the chafed sea.
The waves arose. Higher and higher still
Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest's scourge
Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp. _325
Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war
Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast
Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven
With dark obliterating course, he sate:
As if their genii were the ministers _330
Appointed to conduct him to the light
Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate,
Holding the steady helm. Evening came on,
The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues
High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray _335
That canopied his path o'er the waste deep;
Twilight, ascending slowly from the east,
Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks
O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day;
Night followed, clad with stars. On every side _340
More horribly the multitudinous streams
Of ocean's mountainous waste to mutual war
Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock
The calm and spangled sky. The little boat
Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam _345
Down the steep cataract of a wintry river;
Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave;
Now leaving far behind the bursting mass
That fell, convulsing ocean: safely fled--
As if that frail and wasted human form, _350
Had been an elemental god.
At midnight
The moon arose; and lo! the ethereal cliffs
Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone
Among the stars like sunlight, and around
Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves _355
Bursting and eddying irresistibly
Rage and resound forever.--Who shall save?--
The boat fled on,--the boiling torrent drove,--
The crags closed round with black and jagged arms,
The shattered mountain overhung the sea, _360
And faster still, beyond all human speed,
Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave,
The little boat was driven. A cavern there
Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths
Ingulfed the rushing sea. The boat fled on _365
With unrelaxing speed.--'Vision and Love!'
The Poet cried aloud, 'I have beheld
The path of thy departure. Sleep and death
Shall not divide us long.'
The boat pursued
The windings of the cavern. Daylight shone _370
At length upon that gloomy river's flow;
Now, where the fiercest war among the waves
Is calm, on the unfathomable stream
The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven,
Exposed those black depths to the azure sky, _375
Ere yet the flood's enormous volume fell
Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound
That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass
Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm:
Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, _380
Circling immeasurably fast, and laved
With alternating dash the gnarled roots
Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms
In darkness over it. I' the midst was left,
Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud, _385
A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm.
Seized by the sway of the ascending stream,
With dizzy swiftness, round, and round, and round,
Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose,
Till on the verge of the extremest curve, _390
Where, through an opening of the rocky bank,
The waters overflow, and a smooth spot
Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides
Is left, the boat paused shuddering.--Shall it sink
Down the abyss? Shall the reverting stress _395
Of that resistless gulf embosom it?
Now shall it fall?--A wandering stream of wind,
Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail,
And, lo! with gentle motion, between banks
Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream, _400
Beneath a woven grove it sails, and, hark!
The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar,
With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods.
Where the embowering trees recede, and leave
A little space of green expanse, the cove _405
Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers
For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes,
Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave
Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task,
Which naught but vagrant bird, or wanton wind, _410
Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay
Had e'er disturbed before. The Poet longed
To deck with their bright hues his withered hair,
But on his heart its solitude returned,
And he forbore. Not the strong impulse hid _415
In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame
Had yet performed its ministry: it hung
Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud
Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods
Of night close over it.
The noonday sun _420
Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass
Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence
A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves,
Scooped in the dark base of their aery rocks,
Mocking its moans, respond and roar for ever. _425
The meeting boughs and implicated leaves
Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as led
By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death,
He sought in Nature's dearest haunt some bank,
Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark _430
And dark the shades accumulate. The oak,
Expanding its immense and knotty arms,
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
Of the tall cedar overarching frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below, _435
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around _440
The grey trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes,
With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs
Uniting their close union; the woven leaves _445
Make net-work of the dark blue light of day,
And the night's noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns
Beneath these canopies extend their swells,
Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms _450
Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine,
A soul-dissolving odour to invite
To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell,
Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep _455
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades,
Like vaporous shapes half-seen; beyond, a well,
Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave,
Images all the woven boughs above,
And each depending leaf, and every speck _460
Of azure sky, darting between their chasms;
Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves
Its portraiture, but some inconstant star
Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,
Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, _465
Or gorgeous insect floating motionless,
Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings
Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon.
Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld
Their own wan light through the reflected lines _470
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth
Of that still fountain; as the human heart,
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard
The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprung _475
Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel
An unaccustomed presence, and the sound
Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs
Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed
To stand beside him--clothed in no bright robes _480
Of shadowy silver or enshrining light,
Borrowed from aught the visible world affords
Of grace, or majesty, or mystery;--
But, undulating woods, and silent well,
And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom _485
Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming,
Held commune with him, as if he and it
Were all that was,--only...when his regard
Was raised by intense pensiveness,...two eyes,
Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, _490
And seemed with their serene and azure smiles
To beckon him.
Obedient to the light
That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing
The windings of the dell.--The rivulet,
Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine _495
Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell
Among the moss with hollow harmony
Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones
It danced; like childhood laughing as it went:
Then, through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept, _500
Reflecting every herb and drooping bud
That overhung its quietness.--'O stream!
Whose source is inaccessibly profound,
Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?
Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, _505
Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs,
Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course
Have each their type in me; and the wide sky.
And measureless ocean may declare as soon
What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud _510
Contains thy waters, as the universe
Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched
Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste
I' the passing wind!'
Beside the grassy shore
Of the small stream he went; he did impress _515
On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught
Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one
Roused by some joyous madness from the couch
Of fever, he did move; yet, not like him,
Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame _520
Of his frail exultation shall be spent,
He must descend. With rapid steps he went
Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flow
Of the wild babbling rivulet; and now
The forest's solemn canopies were changed _525
For the uniform and lightsome evening sky.
Grey rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed
The struggling brook; tall spires of windlestrae
Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope,
And nought but gnarled roots of ancient pines _530
Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots
The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here,
Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away,
The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin
And white, and where irradiate dewy eyes _535
Had shone, gleam stony orbs:--so from his steps
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade
Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds
And musical motions. Calm, he still pursued
The stream, that with a larger volume now _540
Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there
Fretted a path through its descending curves
With its wintry speed. On every side now rose
Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms,
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles _545
In the light of evening, and its precipice
Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above,
Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves,
Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues
To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands _550
Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,
And seems, with its accumulated crags,
To overhang the world: for wide expand
Beneath the wan stars and descending moon
Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, _555
Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom
Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills
Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge
Of the remote horizon. The near scene,
In naked and severe simplicity, _560
Made contrast with the universe. A pine,
Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy
Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast
Yielding one only response, at each pause
In most familiar cadence, with the howl _565
The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams
Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river
Foaming and hurrying o'er its rugged path,
Fell into that immeasurable void
Scattering its waters to the passing winds. _570
Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine
And torrent were not all;--one silent nook
Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain,
Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks,
It overlooked in its serenity _575
The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars.
It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile
Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped
The fissured stones with its entwining arms,
And did embower with leaves for ever green, _580
And berries dark, the smooth and even space
Of its inviolated floor, and here
The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore,
In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay,
Red, yellow, or ethereally pale, _585
Rivals the pride of summer. 'Tis the haunt
Of every gentle wind, whose breath can teach
The wilds to love tranquillity. One step,
One human step alone, has ever broken
The stillness of its solitude:--one voice _590
Alone inspired its echoes;--even that voice
Which hither came, floating among the winds,
And led the loveliest among human forms
To make their wild haunts the depository
Of all the grace and beauty that endued _595
Its motions, render up its majesty,
Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm,
And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould,
Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss,
Commit the colours of that varying cheek, _600
That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.
The dim and horned moon hung low, and poured
A sea of lustre on the horizon's verge
That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist
Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank _605
Wan moonlight even to fulness; not a star
Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds,
Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice
Slept, clasped in his embrace.--O, storm of death!
Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night: 610
And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still
Guiding its irresistible career
In thy devastating omnipotence,
Art king of this frail world, from the red field
Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, _615
The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed
Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne,
A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls
His brother Death. A rare and regal prey
He hath prepared, prowling around the world; _620
Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men
Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms,
Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine
The unheeded tribute of a broken heart.
When on the threshold of the green recess _625
The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death
Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,
Did he resign his high and holy soul
To images of the majestic past,
That paused within his passive being now, _630
Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe
Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place
His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk
Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone
Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, _635
Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink
Of that obscurest chasm;--and thus he lay,
Surrendering to their final impulses
The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear _640
Marred his repose; the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
At peace, and faintly smiling:--his last sight _645
Was the great moon, which o'er the western line
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,
With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed
To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills
It rests; and still as the divided frame _650
Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood,
That ever beat in mystic sympathy
With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still:
And when two lessening points of light alone
Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp _655
Of his faint respiration scarce did stir
The stagnate night:--till the minutest ray
Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.
It paused--it fluttered. But when heaven remained
Utterly black, the murky shades involved _660
An image, silent, cold, and motionless,
As their own voiceless earth and vacant air.
Even as a vapour fed with golden beams
That ministered on sunlight, ere the west
Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame-- _665
No sense, no motion, no divinity--
A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings
The breath of heaven did wander--a bright stream
Once fed with many-voiced waves--a dream
Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever, _670
Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.
Oh, for Medea's wondrous alchemy,
Which wheresoe'er it fell made the earth gleam
With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale
From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God, _675
Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice
Which but one living man has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
He bears, over the world wanders for ever, _680
Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream
Of dark magician in his visioned cave,
Raking the cinders of a crucible
For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law _685
Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled,
Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams,--ah! thou hast fled!
The brave, the gentle and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius. Heartless things _690
Are done and said i' the world, and many worms
And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth
From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,
In vesper low or joyous orison,
Lifts still its solemn voice:--but thou art fled-- _695
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee
Been purest ministers, who are, alas!
Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips
So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes _700
That image sleep in death, upon that form
Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear
Be shed--not even in thought. Nor, when those hues
Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,
Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone _705
In the frail pauses of this simple strain,
Let not high verse, mourning the memory
Of that which is no more, or painting's woe
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence, _710
And all the shows o' the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.
It is a woe "too deep for tears," when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves _715
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. _720
Notes:
_219 Conduct edition 1816. See "Editor's Notes".
_530 roots edition 1816: query stumps or trunks. See "Editor's Notes".
NOTE ON ALASTOR, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
"Alastor" is written in a very different tone from "Queen Mab". In the
latter, Shelley poured out all the cherished speculations of his
youth--all the irrepressible emotions of sympathy, censure, and hope,
to which the present suffering, and what he considers the proper
destiny of his fellow-creatures, gave birth. "Alastor", on the
contrary, contains an individual interest only. A very few years, with
their attendant events, had checked the ardour of Shelley's hopes,
though he still thought them well-grounded, and that to advance their
fulfilment was the noblest task man could achieve.
This is neither the time nor place to speak of the misfortunes that
chequered his life. It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did,
he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own
conscience; while the various ills of poverty and loss of friends
brought home to him the sad realities of life. Physical suffering had
also considerable influence in causing him to turn his eyes inward;
inclining him rather to brood over the thoughts and emotions of his
own soul than to glance abroad, and to make, as in "Queen Mab", the
whole universe the object and subject of his song. In the Spring of
1815, an eminent physician pronounced that he was dying rapidly of a
consumption; abscesses were formed on his lungs, and he suffered acute
spasms. Suddenly a complete change took place; and though through life
he was a martyr to pain and debility, every symptom of pulmonary
disease vanished. His nerves, which nature had formed sensitive to an
unexampled degree, were rendered still more susceptible by the state
of his health.
As soon as the peace of 1814 had opened the Continent, he went abroad.
He visited some of the more magnificent scenes of Switzerland, and
returned to England from Lucerne, by the Reuss and the Rhine. This
river-navigation enchanted him. In his favourite poem of "Thalaba",
his imagination had been excited by a description of such a voyage. In
the summer of 1815, after a tour along the southern coast of
Devonshire and a visit to Clifton, he rented a house on Bishopgate
Heath, on the borders of Windsor Forest, where he enjoyed several
months of comparative health and tranquil happiness. The later summer
months were warm and dry. Accompanied by a few friends, he visited the
source of the Thames, making a voyage in a wherry from Windsor to
Crichlade. His beautiful stanzas in the churchyard of Lechlade were
written on that occasion. "Alastor" was composed on his return. He
spent his days under the oak-shades of Windsor Great Park; and the
magnificent woodland was a fitting study to inspire the various
descriptions of forest scenery we find in the poem.
None of Shelley's poems is more characteristic than this. The solemn
spirit that reigns throughout, the worship of the majesty of nature,
the broodings of a poet's heart in solitude--the mingling of the
exulting joy which the various aspects of the visible universe
inspires with the sad and struggling pangs which human passion
imparts--give a touching interest to the whole. The death which he had
often contemplated during the last months as certain and near he here
represented in such colours as had, in his lonely musings, soothed his
soul to peace. The versification sustains the solemn spirit which
breathes throughout: it is peculiarly melodious. The poem ought rather
to be considered didactic than narrative: it was the outpouring of his
own emotions, embodied in the purest form he could conceive, painted
in the ideal hues which his brilliant imagination inspired, and
softened by the recent anticipation of death.
***
THE REVOLT OF ISLAM.
A POEM IN TWELVE CANTOS.
Osais de Broton ethnos aglaiais aptomestha
perainei pros eschaton
ploon nausi d oute pezos ion an eurois
es Uperboreon agona thaumatan odon.
Pind. Pyth. x.
[Composed in the neighbourhood of Bisham Wood, near Great Marlow,
Bucks, 1817 (April-September 23); printed, with title (dated 1818),
"Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of
the Nineteenth Century", October, November, 1817, but suppressed,
pending revision, by the publishers, C & J. Ollier. (A few copies had
got out, but these were recalled, and some recovered.) Published, with
a fresh title-page and twenty-seven cancel-leaves, as "The Revolt of
Islam", January 10, 1818. Sources of the text are (1) "Laon and
Cythna", 1818; (2) "The Revolt of Islam", 1818; (3) "Poetical Works",
1839, editions 1st and 2nd--both edited by Mrs. Shelley. A copy, with
several pages missing, of the "Preface", the Dedication", and "Canto
1" of "Laon and Cythna" is amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the
Bodleian. For a full collation of this manuscript see Mr. C.D.
Locock's "Examination of the Shelley Manuscripts at the Bodleian
Library". Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903. Two manuscript fragments from
the Hunt papers are also extant: one (twenty-four lines) in the
possession of Mr. W.M. Rossetti, another (9 23 9 to 29 6) in that of
Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B. See "The Shelley Library", pages 83-86, for
an account of the copy of "Laon" upon which Shelley worked in revising
for publication.]
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
The Poem which I now present to the world is an attempt from which I
scarcely dare to expect success, and in which a writer of established
fame might fail without disgrace. It is an experiment on the temper of
the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of
moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and
refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live. I
have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal
combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human
passion, all those elements which essentially compose a Poem, in the
cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality; and in the view of
kindling within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for
those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in
something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor
prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind.
For this purpose I have chosen a story of human passion in its most
universal character, diversified with moving and romantic adventures,
and appealing, in contempt of all artificial opinions or institutions,
to the common sympathies of every human breast. I have made no attempt
to recommend the motives which I would substitute for those at present
governing mankind, by methodical and systematic argument. I would only
awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true
virtue, and be incited to those inquiries which have led to my moral
and political creed, and that of some of the sublimest intellects in
the world. The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first canto,
which is purely introductory) is narrative, not didactic. It is a
succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of
individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of
mankind; its influence in refining and making pure the most daring and
uncommon impulses of the imagination, the understanding, and the
senses; its impatience at 'all the oppressions which are done under
the sun;' its tendency to awaken public hope, and to enlighten and
improve mankind; the rapid effects of the application of that
tendency; the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and
degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom; the
bloodless dethronement of their oppressors, and the unveiling of the
religious frauds by which they had been deluded into submission; the
tranquillity of successful patriotism, and the universal toleration
and benevolence of true philanthropy; the treachery and barbarity of
hired soldiers; vice not the object of punishment and hatred, but
kindness and pity; the faithlessness of tyrants; the confederacy of
the Rulers of the World and the restoration of the expelled Dynasty by
foreign arms; the massacre and extermination of the Patriots, and the
victory of established power; the consequences of legitimate
despotism,--civil war, famine, plague, superstition, and an utter
extinction of the domestic affections; the judicial murder of the
advocates of Liberty; the temporary triumph of oppression, that secure
earnest of its final and inevitable fall; the transient nature of
ignorance and error and the eternity of genius and virtue. Such is the
series of delineations of which the Poem consists. And, if the lofty
passions with which it has been my scope to distinguish this story
shall not excite in the reader a generous impulse, an ardent thirst
for excellence, an interest profound and strong such as belongs to no
meaner desires, let not the failure be imputed to a natural unfitness
for human sympathy in these sublime and animating themes. It is the
business of the Poet to communicate to others the pleasure and the
enthusiasm arising out of those images and feelings in the vivid
presence of which within his own mind consists at once his inspiration
and his reward.
The panic which, like an epidemic transport, seized upon all classes
of men during the excesses consequent upon the French Revolution, is
gradually giving place to sanity. It has ceased to be believed that
whole generations of mankind ought to consign themselves to a hopeless
inheritance of ignorance and misery, because a nation of men who had
been dupes and slaves for centuries were incapable of conducting
themselves with the wisdom and tranquillity of freemen so soon as some
of their fetters were partially loosened. That their conduct could not
have been marked by any other characters than ferocity and
thoughtlessness is the historical fact from which liberty derives all
its recommendations, and falsehood the worst features of its
deformity. There is a reflux in the tide of human things which bears
the shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven after the storms are
past. Methinks, those who now live have survived an age of despair.
The French Revolution may be considered as one of those manifestations
of a general state of feeling among civilised mankind produced by a
defect of correspondence between the knowledge existing in society and
the improvement or gradual abolition of political institutions. The
year 1788 may be assumed as the epoch of one of the most important
crises produced by this feeling. The sympathies connected with that
event extended to every bosom. The most generous and amiable natures
were those which participated the most extensively in these
sympathies. But such a degree of unmingled good was expected as it was
impossible to realise. If the Revolution had been in every respect
prosperous, then misrule and superstition would lose half their claims
to our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive can unlock with the
slightest motion of his fingers, and which do not eat with poisonous
rust into the soul. The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the
demagogues, and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in
France, was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilised
world. Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under
the calamities of a social state according to the provisions of which
one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can
he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become
liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence
of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute
perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and
long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of
men of intellect and virtue. Such is the lesson which experience
teaches now. But, on the first reverses of hope in the progress of
French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the
solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the
unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and
tender-hearted of the worshippers of public good have been morally
ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared
to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes.
Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age
in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously
finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This
influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness
of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics (I ought to except sir
W. Drummond's "Academical Questions"; a volume of very acute and
powerful metaphysical criticism.), and inquiries into moral and
political science, have become little else than vain attempts to
revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus
(It is remarkable, as a symptom of the revival of public hope, that
Mr. Malthus has assigned, in the later editions of his work, an
indefinite dominion to moral restraint over the principle of
population. This concession answers all the inferences from his
doctrine unfavourable to human improvement, and reduces the "Essay on
Population" to a commentary illustrative of the unanswerableness of
"Political Justice".), calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind
into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and
poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But
mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware,
methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change. In that belief I have
composed the following Poem.
I do not presume to enter into competition with our greatest
contemporary Poets. Yet I am unwilling to tread in the footsteps of
any who have preceded me. I have sought to avoid the imitation of any
style of language or versification peculiar to the original minds of
which it is the character; designing that, even if what I have
produced be worthless, it should still be properly my own. Nor have I
permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of
the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating,
to my own ingenuity in contriving to disgust them according to the
rules of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared
to me the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar
with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human
mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to
selection of language, produced by that familiarity.
There is an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet, without which
genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities.
No education, indeed, can entitle to this appellation a dull and
unobservant mind, or one, though neither dull nor unobservant, in
which the channels of communication between thought and expression
have been obstructed or closed. How far it is my fortune to belong to
either of the latter classes I cannot know. I aspire to be something
better. The circumstances of my accidental education have been
favourable to this ambition. I have been familiar from boyhood with
mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger,
which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I
have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont
Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down
mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come
forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among
mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions
which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled
multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages
of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of
black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished
upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of
genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and
our own country, has been to me, like external nature, a passion and
an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the
imagery of my Poem have been drawn. I have considered Poetry in its
most comprehensive sense; and have read the Poets and the Historians
and the Metaphysicians (In this sense there may be such a thing as
perfectibility in works of fiction, notwithstanding the concession
often made by the advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility
is a term applicable only to science.) whose writings have been
accessible to me, and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic
scenery of the earth, as common sources of those elements which it is
the province of the Poet to embody and combine. Yet the experience and
the feelings to which I refer do not in themselves constitute men
Poets, but only prepares them to be the auditors of those who are. How
far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of
Poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which
animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, I know not;
and which, with an acquiescent and contented spirit, I expect to be
taught by the effect which I shall produce upon those whom I now
address.
I have avoided, as I have said before, the imitation of any
contemporary style. But there must be a resemblance, which does not
depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular
age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which
arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to
the times in which they live; though each is in a degree the author of
the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded. Thus, the
tragic poets of the age of Pericles; the Italian revivers of ancient
learning; those mighty intellects of our own country that succeeded
the Reformation, the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare, Spenser,
the Dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon (Milton
stands alone in the age which he illumined.); the colder spirits of
the interval that succeeded;--all resemble each other, and differ from
every other in their several classes. In this view of things, Ford can
no more be called the imitator of Shakespeare than Shakespeare the
imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other points of resemblance
between these two men than that which the universal and inevitable
influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which
neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest genius of any era can
escape; and which I have not attempted to escape.
I have adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly
beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical
harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in
the latter there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed
or fail. This perhaps an aspiring spirit should desire. But I was
enticed also by the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind
that has been nourished upon musical thoughts can produce by a just
and harmonious arrangement of the pauses of this measure. Yet there
will be found some instances where I have completely failed in this
attempt, and one, which I here request the reader to consider as an
erratum, where there is left, most inadvertently, an alexandrine in
the middle of a stanza.
But in this, as in every other respect, I have written fearlessly. It
is the misfortune of this age that its Writers, too thoughtless of
immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or blame.
They write with the fear of Reviews before their eyes. This system of
criticism sprang up in that torpid interval when Poetry was not.
Poetry, and the art which professes to regulate and limit its powers,
cannot subsist together. Longinus could not have been the contemporary
of Homer, nor Boileau of Horace. Yet this species of criticism never
presumed to assert an understanding of its own; it has always, unlike
true science, followed, not preceded, the opinion of mankind, and
would even now bribe with worthless adulation some of our greatest
Poets to impose gratuitous fetters on their own imaginations, and
become unconscious accomplices in the daily murder of all genius
either not so aspiring or not so fortunate as their own. I have sought
therefore to write, as I believe that Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton
wrote, with an utter disregard of anonymous censure. I am certain that
calumny and misrepresentation, though it may move me to compassion,
cannot disturb my peace. I shall understand the expressive silence of
those sagacious enemies who dare not trust themselves to speak. I
shall endeavour to extract, from the midst of insult and contempt and
maledictions, those admonitions which may tend to correct whatever
imperfections such censurers may discover in this my first serious
appeal to the Public. If certain Critics were as clear-sighted as they
are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their
virulent writings! As it is, I fear I shall be malicious enough to be
amused with their paltry tricks and lame invectives. Should the Public
judge that my composition is worthless, I shall indeed bow before the
tribunal from which Milton received his crown of immortality, and
shall seek to gather, if I live, strength from that defeat, which may
nerve me to some new enterprise of thought which may not be worthless.
I cannot conceive that Lucretius, when he meditated that poem whose
doctrines are yet the basis of our metaphysical knowledge, and whose
eloquence has been the wonder of mankind, wrote in awe of such censure
as the hired sophists of the impure and superstitious noblemen of Rome
might affix to what he should produce. It was at the period when
Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast
verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian
captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the
unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious
subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices
and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead,
with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that
contempt for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and that faith in
portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the
imaginations of men, which, arising from the enslaved communities of
the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its
stream. Were these the kind of men whose disapprobation the wise and
lofty-minded Lucretius should have regarded with a salutary awe? The
latest and perhaps the meanest of those who follow in his footsteps
would disdain to hold life on such conditions.
The Poem now presented to the Public occupied little more than six
months in the composition. That period has been devoted to the task
with unremitting ardour and enthusiasm. I have exercised a watchful
and earnest criticism on my work as it grew under my hands. I would
willingly have sent it forth to the world with that perfection which
long labour and revision is said to bestow. But I found that, if I
should gain something in exactness by this method, I might lose much
of the newness and energy of imagery and language as it flowed fresh
from my mind. And, although the mere composition occupied no more than
six months, the thoughts thus arranged were slowly gathered in as many
years.
I trust that the reader will carefully distinguish between those
opinions which have a dramatic propriety in reference to the
characters which they are designed to elucidate, and such as are
properly my own. The erroneous and degrading idea which men have
conceived of a Supreme Being, for instance, is spoken against, but not
the Supreme Being itself. The belief which some superstitious persons
whom I have brought upon the stage entertain of the Deity, as
injurious to the character of his benevolence, is widely different
from my own. In recommending also a great and important change in the
spirit which animates the social institutions of mankind, I have
avoided all flattery to those violent and malignant passions of our
nature which are ever on the watch to mingle with and to alloy the
most beneficial innovations. There is no quarter given to Revenge, or
Envy, or Prejudice. Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law
which should govern the moral world.
DEDICATION.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is: there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.--CHAPMAN.
TO MARY -- --.
1.
So now my summer-task is ended, Mary,
And I return to thee, mine own heart's home;
As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faery,
Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome;
Nor thou disdain, that ere my fame become _5
A star among the stars of mortal night,
If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom,
Its doubtful promise thus I would unite
With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light.
2.
The toil which stole from thee so many an hour, _10
Is ended,--and the fruit is at thy feet!
No longer where the woods to frame a bower
With interlaced branches mix and meet,
Or where with sound like many voices sweet,
Waterfalls leap among wild islands green, _15
Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat
Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen;
But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been.
3.
Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. _20
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit's sleep. A fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices that, alas! _25
Were but one echo from a world of woes--
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
4.
And then I clasped my hands and looked around--
--But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground-- _30
So without shame I spake:--'I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise
Without reproach or check.' I then controlled _35
My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
5.
And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store _40
Wrought linked armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. _45
6.
Alas, that love should be a blight and snare
To those who seek all sympathies in one!--
Such once I sought in vain; then black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the world in which I moved alone:-- _50
Yet never found I one not false to me,
Hard hearts, and cold, like weights of icy stone
Which crushed and withered mine, that could not be
Aught but a lifeless clod, until revived by thee.
7.
Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart _55
Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain;
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of Custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walked as free as light the clouds among, _60
Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain
From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung
To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long!
8.
No more alone through the world's wilderness,
Although I trod the paths of high intent, _65
I journeyed now: no more companionless,
Where solitude is like despair, I went.--
There is the wisdom of a stern content
When Poverty can blight the just and good,
When Infamy dares mock the innocent, _70
And cherished friends turn with the multitude
To trample: this was ours, and we unshaken stood!
9.
Now has descended a serener hour,
And with inconstant fortune, friends return;
Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power _75
Which says:--Let scorn be not repaid with scorn.
And from thy side two gentle babes are born
To fill our home with smiles, and thus are we
Most fortunate beneath life's beaming morn;
And these delights, and thou, have been to me _80
The parents of the Song I consecrate to thee.
10.
Is it that now my inexperienced fingers
But strike the prelude of a loftier strain?
Or, must the lyre on which my spirit lingers
Soon pause in silence, ne'er to sound again, _85
Though it might shake the Anarch Custom's reign,
And charm the minds of men to Truth's own sway
Holier than was Amphion's? I would fain
Reply in hope--but I am worn away,
And Death and Love are yet contending for their prey. _90
11.
And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak:
Time may interpret to his silent years.
Yet in the paleness of thy thoughtful cheek,
And in the light thine ample forehead wears,
And in thy sweetest smiles, and in thy tears, _95
And in thy gentle speech, a prophecy
Is whispered, to subdue my fondest fears:
And through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see
A lamp of vestal fire burning internally.
12.
They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth, _100
Of glorious parents thou aspiring Child.
I wonder not--for One then left this earth
Whose life was like a setting planet mild,
Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled
Of its departing glory; still her fame _105
Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild
Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim
The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name.
13.
One voice came forth from many a mighty spirit,
Which was the echo of three thousand years; _110
And the tumultuous world stood mute to hear it,
As some lone man who in a desert hears
The music of his home:--unwonted fears
Fell on the pale oppressors of our race,
And Faith, and Custom, and low-thoughted cares, _115
Like thunder-stricken dragons, for a space
Left the torn human heart, their food and dwelling-place.
14.
Truth's deathless voice pauses among mankind!
If there must be no response to my cry--
If men must rise and stamp with fury blind _120
On his pure name who loves them,--thou and I,
Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity
Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,--
Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by
Which wrap them from the foundering seaman's sight, _125
That burn from year to year with unextinguished light.
NOTES.
_54 cloaking edition 1818. See notes at end.
CANTO 1.
1.
When the last hope of trampled France had failed
Like a brief dream of unremaining glory,
From visions of despair I rose, and scaled
The peak of an aerial promontory, _130
Whose caverned base with the vexed surge was hoary;
And saw the golden dawn break forth, and waken
Each cloud, and every wave:--but transitory
The calm; for sudden, the firm earth was shaken,
As if by the last wreck its frame were overtaken. _135
2.
So as I stood, one blast of muttering thunder
Burst in far peals along the waveless deep,
When, gathering fast, around, above, and under,
Long trains of tremulous mist began to creep,
Until their complicating lines did steep _140
The orient sun in shadow:--not a sound
Was heard; one horrible repose did keep
The forests and the floods, and all around
Darkness more dread than night was poured upon the ground.
3.
Hark! 'tis the rushing of a wind that sweeps _145
Earth and the ocean. See! the lightnings yawn
Deluging Heaven with fire, and the lashed deeps
Glitter and boil beneath: it rages on,
One mighty stream, whirlwind and waves upthrown,
Lightning, and hail, and darkness eddying by. _150
There is a pause--the sea-birds, that were gone
Into their caves to shriek, come forth, to spy
What calm has fall'n on earth, what light is in the sky.
4.
For, where the irresistible storm had cloven
That fearful darkness, the blue sky was seen _155
Fretted with many a fair cloud interwoven
Most delicately, and the ocean green,
Beneath that opening spot of blue serene,
Quivered like burning emerald; calm was spread
On all below; but far on high, between _160
Earth and the upper air, the vast clouds fled,
Countless and swift as leaves on autumn's tempest shed.
5.
For ever, as the war became more fierce
Between the whirlwinds and the rack on high,
That spot grew more serene; blue light did pierce _165
The woof of those white clouds, which seem to lie
Far, deep, and motionless; while through the sky
The pallid semicircle of the moon
Passed on, in slow and moving majesty;
Its upper horn arrayed in mists, which soon _170
But slowly fled, like dew beneath the beams of noon.
6.
I could not choose but gaze; a fascination
Dwelt in that moon, and sky, and clouds, which drew
My fancy thither, and in expectation
Of what I knew not, I remained:--the hue _175
Of the white moon, amid that heaven so blue,
Suddenly stained with shadow did appear;
A speck, a cloud, a shape, approaching grew,
Like a great ship in the sun's sinking sphere
Beheld afar at sea, and swift it came anear. _180
7.
Even like a bark, which from a chasm of mountains,
Dark, vast and overhanging, on a river
Which there collects the strength of all its fountains,
Comes forth, whilst with the speed its frame doth quiver,
Sails, oars and stream, tending to one endeavour; _185
So, from that chasm of light a winged Form
On all the winds of heaven approaching ever
Floated, dilating as it came; the storm
Pursued it with fierce blasts, and lightnings swift and warm.
8.
A course precipitous, of dizzy speed, _190
Suspending thought and breath; a monstrous sight!
For in the air do I behold indeed
An Eagle and a Serpent wreathed in fight:--
And now, relaxing its impetuous flight,
Before the aerial rock on which I stood, _195
The Eagle, hovering, wheeled to left and right,
And hung with lingering wings over the flood,
And startled with its yells the wide air's solitude.
9.
A shaft of light upon its wings descended,
And every golden feather gleamed therein-- _200
Feather and scale, inextricably blended.
The Serpent's mailed and many-coloured skin
Shone through the plumes its coils were twined within
By many a swoln and knotted fold, and high
And far, the neck, receding lithe and thin, _205
Sustained a crested head, which warily
Shifted and glanced before the Eagle's steadfast eye.
10.
Around, around, in ceaseless circles wheeling
With clang of wings and scream, the Eagle sailed
Incessantly--sometimes on high concealing _210
Its lessening orbs, sometimes as if it failed,
Drooped through the air; and still it shrieked and wailed,
And casting back its eager head, with beak
And talon unremittingly assailed
The wreathed Serpent, who did ever seek _215
Upon his enemy's heart a mortal wound to wreak.
11.
What life, what power, was kindled and arose
Within the sphere of that appalling fray!
For, from the encounter of those wondrous foes,
A vapour like the sea's suspended spray _220
Hung gathered; in the void air, far away,
Floated the shattered plumes; bright scales did leap,
Where'er the Eagle's talons made their way,
Like sparks into the darkness;--as they sweep,
Blood stains the snowy foam of the tumultuous deep. _225
12.
Swift chances in that combat--many a check,
And many a change, a dark and wild turmoil;
Sometimes the Snake around his enemy's neck
Locked in stiff rings his adamantine coil,
Until the Eagle, faint with pain and toil, _230
Remitted his strong flight, and near the sea
Languidly fluttered, hopeless so to foil
His adversary, who then reared on high
His red and burning crest, radiant with victory.
13.
Then on the white edge of the bursting surge, _235
Where they had sunk together, would the Snake
Relax his suffocating grasp, and scourge
The wind with his wild writhings; for to break
That chain of torment, the vast bird would shake
The strength of his unconquerable wings _240
As in despair, and with his sinewy neck,
Dissolve in sudden shock those linked rings--
Then soar, as swift as smoke from a volcano springs.
14.
Wile baffled wile, and strength encountered strength,
Thus long, but unprevailing:--the event _245
Of that portentous fight appeared at length:
Until the lamp of day was almost spent
It had endured, when lifeless, stark, and rent,
Hung high that mighty Serpent, and at last
Fell to the sea, while o'er the continent _250
With clang of wings and scream the Eagle passed,
Heavily borne away on the exhausted blast.
15.
And with it fled the tempest, so that ocean
And earth and sky shone through the atmosphere--
Only, 'twas strange to see the red commotion _255
Of waves like mountains o'er the sinking sphere
Of sunset sweep, and their fierce roar to hear
Amid the calm: down the steep path I wound
To the sea-shore--the evening was most clear
And beautiful, and there the sea I found _260
Calm as a cradled child in dreamless slumber bound.
16.
There was a Woman, beautiful as morning,
Sitting beneath the rocks, upon the sand
Of the waste sea--fair as one flower adorning
An icy wilderness; each delicate hand _265
Lay crossed upon her bosom, and the band
Of her dark hair had fall'n, and so she sate
Looking upon the waves; on the bare strand
Upon the sea-mark a small boat did wait,
Fair as herself, like Love by Hope left desolate. _270
17.
It seemed that this fair Shape had looked upon
That unimaginable fight, and now
That her sweet eyes were weary of the sun,
As brightly it illustrated her woe;
For in the tears which silently to flow _275
Paused not, its lustre hung: she watching aye
The foam-wreaths which the faint tide wove below
Upon the spangled sands, groaned heavily,
And after every groan looked up over the sea.
18.
And when she saw the wounded Serpent make _280
His path between the waves, her lips grew pale,
Parted, and quivered; the tears ceased to break
From her immovable eyes; no voice of wail
Escaped her; but she rose, and on the gale
Loosening her star-bright robe and shadowy hair _285
Poured forth her voice; the caverns of the vale
That opened to the ocean, caught it there,
And filled with silver sounds the overflowing air.
19.
She spake in language whose strange melody
Might not belong to earth. I heard alone, _290
What made its music more melodious be,
The pity and the love of every tone;
But to the Snake those accents sweet were known
His native tongue and hers; nor did he beat
The hoar spray idly then, but winding on _295
Through the green shadows of the waves that meet
Near to the shore, did pause beside her snowy feet.
20.
Then on the sands the Woman sate again,
And wept and clasped her hands, and all between,
Renewed the unintelligible strain _300
Of her melodious voice and eloquent mien;
And she unveiled her bosom, and the green
And glancing shadows of the sea did play
O'er its marmoreal depth:--one moment seen,
For ere the next, the Serpent did obey _305
Her voice, and, coiled in rest in her embrace it lay.
21.
Then she arose, and smiled on me with eyes
Serene yet sorrowing, like that planet fair,
While yet the daylight lingereth in the skies
Which cleaves with arrowy beams the dark-red air, _310
And said: 'To grieve is wise, but the despair
Was weak and vain which led thee here from sleep:
This shalt thou know, and more, if thou dost dare
With me and with this Serpent, o'er the deep,
A voyage divine and strange, companionship to keep.' _315
22.
Her voice was like the wildest, saddest tone,
Yet sweet, of some loved voice heard long ago.
I wept. 'Shall this fair woman all alone,
Over the sea with that fierce Serpent go?
His head is on her heart, and who can know _320
How soon he may devour his feeble prey?'--
Such were my thoughts, when the tide gan to flow;
And that strange boat like the moon's shade did sway
Amid reflected stars that in the waters lay:--
23.
A boat of rare device, which had no sail _325
But its own curved prow of thin moonstone,
Wrought like a web of texture fine and frail,
To catch those gentlest winds which are not known
To breathe, but by the steady speed alone
With which it cleaves the sparkling sea; and now _330
We are embarked--the mountains hang and frown
Over the starry deep that gleams below,
A vast and dim expanse, as o'er the waves we go.
24.
And as we sailed, a strange and awful tale
That Woman told, like such mysterious dream _335
As makes the slumberer's cheek with wonder pale!
'Twas midnight, and around, a shoreless stream,
Wide ocean rolled, when that majestic theme
Shrined in her heart found utterance, and she bent
Her looks on mine; those eyes a kindling beam _340
Of love divine into my spirit sent,
And ere her lips could move, made the air eloquent.
25.
'Speak not to me, but hear! Much shalt thou learn,
Much must remain unthought, and more untold,
In the dark Future's ever-flowing urn: _345
Know then, that from the depth of ages old
Two Powers o'er mortal things dominion hold,
Ruling the world with a divided lot,
Immortal, all-pervading, manifold,
Twin Genii, equal Gods--when life and thought _350
Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought.
26.
'The earliest dweller of the world, alone,
Stood on the verge of chaos. Lo! afar
O'er the wide wild abyss two meteors shone,
Sprung from the depth of its tempestuous jar: _355
A blood-red Comet and the Morning Star
Mingling their beams in combat--as he stood,
All thoughts within his mind waged mutual war,
In dreadful sympathy--when to the flood
That fair Star fell, he turned and shed his brother's blood. _360
27.
'Thus evil triumphed, and the Spirit of evil,
One Power of many shapes which none may know,
One Shape of many names; the Fiend did revel
In victory, reigning o'er a world of woe,
For the new race of man went to and fro, _365
Famished and homeless, loathed and loathing, wild,
And hating good--for his immortal foe,
He changed from starry shape, beauteous and mild,
To a dire Snake, with man and beast unreconciled.
28.
'The darkness lingering o'er the dawn of things, _370
Was Evil's breath and life; this made him strong
To soar aloft with overshadowing wings;
And the great Spirit of Good did creep among
The nations of mankind, and every tongue
Cursed and blasphemed him as he passed; for none _375
Knew good from evil, though their names were hung
In mockery o'er the fane where many a groan,
As King, and Lord, and God, the conquering Fiend did own,--
29.
'The Fiend, whose name was Legion: Death, Decay,
Earthquake and Blight, and Want, and Madness pale, _380
Winged and wan diseases, an array
Numerous as leaves that strew the autumnal gale;
Poison, a snake in flowers, beneath the veil
Of food and mirth, hiding his mortal head;
And, without whom all these might nought avail, _385
Fear, Hatred, Faith, and Tyranny, who spread
Those subtle nets which snare the living and the dead.
30.
'His spirit is their power, and they his slaves
In air, and light, and thought, and language, dwell;
And keep their state from palaces to graves, _390
In all resorts of men--invisible,
But when, in ebon mirror, Nightmare fell
To tyrant or impostor bids them rise,
Black winged demon forms--whom, from the hell,
His reign and dwelling beneath nether skies, _395
He loosens to their dark and blasting ministries.
31.
'In the world's youth his empire was as firm
As its foundations...Soon the Spirit of Good,
Though in the likeness of a loathsome worm,
Sprang from the billows of the formless flood, _400
Which shrank and fled; and with that Fiend of blood
Renewed the doubtful war...Thrones then first shook,
And earth's immense and trampled multitude
In hope on their own powers began to look,
And Fear, the demon pale, his sanguine shrine forsook. _405
32.
'Then Greece arose, and to its bards and sages,
In dream, the golden-pinioned Genii came,
Even where they slept amid the night of ages,
Steeping their hearts in the divinest flame
Which thy breath kindled, Power of holiest name! _410
And oft in cycles since, when darkness gave
New weapons to thy foe, their sunlike fame
Upon the combat shone--a light to save,
Like Paradise spread forth beyond the shadowy grave.
33.
'Such is this conflict--when mankind doth strive _415
With its oppressors in a strife of blood,
Or when free thoughts, like lightnings, are alive,
And in each bosom of the multitude
Justice and truth with Custom's hydra brood
Wage silent war; when Priests and Kings dissemble _420
In smiles or frowns their fierce disquietude,
When round pure hearts a host of hopes assemble,
The Snake and Eagle meet--the world's foundations tremble!
34.
'Thou hast beheld that fight--when to thy home
Thou dost return, steep not its hearth in tears; _425
Though thou may'st hear that earth is now become
The tyrant's garbage, which to his compeers,
The vile reward of their dishonoured years,
He will dividing give.--The victor Fiend,
Omnipotent of yore, now quails, and fears _430
His triumph dearly won, which soon will lend
An impulse swift and sure to his approaching end.
35.
'List, stranger, list, mine is an human form,
Like that thou wearest--touch me--shrink not now!
My hand thou feel'st is not a ghost's, but warm _435
With human blood.--'Twas many years ago,
Since first my thirsting soul aspired to know
The secrets of this wondrous world, when deep
My heart was pierced with sympathy, for woe
Which could not be mine own, and thought did keep, _440
In dream, unnatural watch beside an infant's sleep.
36.
'Woe could not be mine own, since far from men
I dwelt, a free and happy orphan child,
By the sea-shore, in a deep mountain glen;
And near the waves, and through the forests wild, _445
I roamed, to storm and darkness reconciled:
For I was calm while tempest shook the sky:
But when the breathless heavens in beauty smiled,
I wept, sweet tears, yet too tumultuously
For peace, and clasped my hands aloft in ecstasy. _450
37.
'These were forebodings of my fate--before
A woman's heart beat in my virgin breast,
It had been nurtured in divinest lore:
A dying poet gave me books, and blessed
With wild but holy talk the sweet unrest _455
In which I watched him as he died away--
A youth with hoary hair--a fleeting guest
Of our lone mountains: and this lore did sway
My spirit like a storm, contending there alway.
38.
'Thus the dark tale which history doth unfold _460
I knew, but not, methinks, as others know,
For they weep not; and Wisdom had unrolled
The clouds which hide the gulf of mortal woe,--
To few can she that warning vision show--
For I loved all things with intense devotion; _465
So that when Hope's deep source in fullest flow,
Like earthquake did uplift the stagnant ocean
Of human thoughts--mine shook beneath the wide emotion.
39.
'When first the living blood through all these veins
Kindled a thought in sense, great France sprang forth, _470
And seized, as if to break, the ponderous chains
Which bind in woe the nations of the earth.
I saw, and started from my cottage-hearth;
And to the clouds and waves in tameless gladness
Shrieked, till they caught immeasurable mirth-- _475
And laughed in light and music: soon, sweet madness
Was poured upon my heart, a soft and thrilling sadness.
40.
'Deep slumber fell on me:--my dreams were fire--
Soft and delightful thoughts did rest and hover
Like shadows o'er my brain; and strange desire, _480
The tempest of a passion, raging over
My tranquil soul, its depths with light did cover,
Which passed; and calm, and darkness, sweeter far,
Came--then I loved; but not a human lover!
For when I rose from sleep, the Morning Star _485
Shone through the woodbine-wreaths which round my casement were.
41.
''Twas like an eye which seemed to smile on me.
I watched, till by the sun made pale, it sank
Under the billows of the heaving sea;
But from its beams deep love my spirit drank, _490
And to my brain the boundless world now shrank
Into one thought--one image--yes, for ever!
Even like the dayspring, poured on vapours dank,
The beams of that one Star did shoot and quiver
Through my benighted mind--and were extinguished never. _495
42.
'The day passed thus: at night, methought, in dream
A shape of speechless beauty did appear:
It stood like light on a careering stream
Of golden clouds which shook the atmosphere;
A winged youth, his radiant brow did wear _500
The Morning Star: a wild dissolving bliss
Over my frame he breathed, approaching near,
And bent his eyes of kindling tenderness
Near mine, and on my lips impressed a lingering kiss,--
43.
'And said: "A Spirit loves thee, mortal maiden, _505
How wilt thou prove thy worth?" Then joy and sleep
Together fled; my soul was deeply laden,
And to the shore I went to muse and weep;
But as I moved, over my heart did creep
A joy less soft, but more profound and strong _510
Than my sweet dream; and it forbade to keep
The path of the sea-shore: that Spirit's tongue
Seemed whispering in my heart, and bore my steps along.
44.
'How, to that vast and peopled city led,
Which was a field of holy warfare then, _515
I walked among the dying and the dead,
And shared in fearless deeds with evil men,
Calm as an angel in the dragon's den--
How I braved death for liberty and truth,
And spurned at peace, and power, and fame--and when _520
Those hopes had lost the glory of their youth,
How sadly I returned--might move the hearer's ruth:
45.
'Warm tears throng fast! the tale may not be said--
Know then, that when this grief had been subdued,
I was not left, like others, cold and dead; _525
The Spirit whom I loved, in solitude
Sustained his child: the tempest-shaken wood,
The waves, the fountains, and the hush of night--
These were his voice, and well I understood
His smile divine, when the calm sea was bright _530
With silent stars, and Heaven was breathless with delight.
46.
'In lonely glens, amid the roar of rivers,
When the dim nights were moonless, have I known
Joys which no tongue can tell; my pale lip quivers
When thought revisits them:--know thou alone, _535
That after many wondrous years were flown,
I was awakened by a shriek of woe;
And over me a mystic robe was thrown,
By viewless hands, and a bright Star did glow
Before my steps--the Snake then met his mortal foe.' _540
47.
'Thou fearest not then the Serpent on thy heart?'
'Fear it!' she said, with brief and passionate cry,
And spake no more: that silence made me start--
I looked, and we were sailing pleasantly,
Swift as a cloud between the sea and sky; _545
Beneath the rising moon seen far away,
Mountains of ice, like sapphire, piled on high,
Hemming the horizon round, in silence lay
On the still waters--these we did approach alway.
48.
And swift and swifter grew the vessel's motion, _550
So that a dizzy trance fell on my brain--
Wild music woke me; we had passed the ocean
Which girds the pole, Nature's remotest reign--
And we glode fast o'er a pellucid plain
Of waters, azure with the noontide day. _555
Ethereal mountains shone around--a Fane
Stood in the midst, girt by green isles which lay
On the blue sunny deep, resplendent far away.
49.
It was a Temple, such as mortal hand
Has never built, nor ecstasy, nor dream _560
Reared in the cities of enchanted land:
'Twas likest Heaven, ere yet day's purple stream
Ebbs o'er the western forest, while the gleam
Of the unrisen moon among the clouds
Is gathering--when with many a golden beam _565
The thronging constellations rush in crowds,
Paving with fire the sky and the marmoreal floods.
50.
Like what may be conceived of this vast dome,
When from the depths which thought can seldom pierce
Genius beholds it rise, his native home, _570
Girt by the deserts of the Universe;
Yet, nor in painting's light, or mightier verse,
Or sculpture's marble language, can invest
That shape to mortal sense--such glooms immerse
That incommunicable sight, and rest _575
Upon the labouring brain and overburdened breast.
51.
Winding among the lawny islands fair,
Whose blosmy forests starred the shadowy deep,
The wingless boat paused where an ivory stair
Its fretwork in the crystal sea did steep, _580
Encircling that vast Fane's aerial heap:
We disembarked, and through a portal wide
We passed--whose roof of moonstone carved, did keep
A glimmering o'er the forms on every side,
Sculptures like life and thought, immovable, deep-eyed. _585
52.
We came to a vast hall, whose glorious roof
Was diamond, which had drunk the lightning's sheen
In darkness, and now poured it through the woof
Of spell-inwoven clouds hung there to screen
Its blinding splendour--through such veil was seen _590
That work of subtlest power, divine and rare;
Orb above orb, with starry shapes between,
And horned moons, and meteors strange and fair,
On night-black columns poised--one hollow hemisphere!
53.
Ten thousand columns in that quivering light _595
Distinct--between whose shafts wound far away
The long and labyrinthine aisles--more bright
With their own radiance than the Heaven of Day;
And on the jasper walls around, there lay
Paintings, the poesy of mightiest thought, _600
Which did the Spirit's history display;
A tale of passionate change, divinely taught,
Which, in their winged dance, unconscious Genii wrought.
54.
Beneath, there sate on many a sapphire throne,
The Great, who had departed from mankind, _605
A mighty Senate;--some, whose white hair shone
Like mountain snow, mild, beautiful, and blind;
Some, female forms, whose gestures beamed with mind;
And ardent youths, and children bright and fair;
And some had lyres whose strings were intertwined _610
With pale and clinging flames, which ever there
Waked faint yet thrilling sounds that pierced the crystal air.
55.
One seat was vacant in the midst, a throne,
Reared on a pyramid like sculptured flame,
Distinct with circling steps which rested on _615
Their own deep fire--soon as the Woman came
Into that hall, she shrieked the Spirit's name
And fell; and vanished slowly from the sight.
Darkness arose from her dissolving frame,
Which gathering, filled that dome of woven light, _620
Blotting its sphered stars with supernatural night.
56.
Then first, two glittering lights were seen to glide
In circles on the amethystine floor,
Small serpent eyes trailing from side to side,
Like meteors on a river's grassy shore, _625
They round each other rolled, dilating more
And more--then rose, commingling into one,
One clear and mighty planet hanging o'er
A cloud of deepest shadow, which was thrown
Athwart the glowing steps and the crystalline throne. _630
57.
The cloud which rested on that cone of flame
Was cloven; beneath the planet sate a Form,
Fairer than tongue can speak or thought may frame,
The radiance of whose limbs rose-like and warm
Flowed forth, and did with softest light inform _635
The shadowy dome, the sculptures, and the state
Of those assembled shapes--with clinging charm
Sinking upon their hearts and mine. He sate
Majestic, yet most mild--calm, yet compassionate.
58.
Wonder and joy a passing faintness threw _640
Over my brow--a hand supported me,
Whose touch was magic strength; an eye of blue
Looked into mine, like moonlight, soothingly;
And a voice said:--'Thou must a listener be
This day--two mighty Spirits now return, _645
Like birds of calm, from the world's raging sea,
They pour fresh light from Hope's immortal urn;
A tale of human power--despair not--list and learn!
59.
I looked, and lo! one stood forth eloquently.
His eyes were dark and deep, and the clear brow _650
Which shadowed them was like the morning sky,
The cloudless Heaven of Spring, when in their flow
Through the bright air, the soft winds as they blow
Wake the green world--his gestures did obey
The oracular mind that made his features glow, _655
And where his curved lips half-open lay,
Passion's divinest stream had made impetuous way.
60.
Beneath the darkness of his outspread hair
He stood thus beautiful; but there was One
Who sate beside him like his shadow there, _660
And held his hand--far lovelier; she was known
To be thus fair, by the few lines alone
Which through her floating locks and gathered cloak,
Glances of soul-dissolving glory, shone:--
None else beheld her eyes--in him they woke _665
Memories which found a tongue as thus he silence broke.