I am the Ionian Minotaur, the mightiest
Of all Europa's taurine progeny--
I am the old traditional Man-Bull; _105
And from my ancestors having been Ionian,
I am called Ion, which, by interpretation,
Is JOHN; in plain Theban, that is to say,
My name's JOHN BULL; I am a famous hunter,
And can leaf any gate in all Boeotia, _110
Even the palings of the royal park,
Or double ditch about the new enclosures;
And if your Majesty will deign to mount me,
At least till you have hunted down your game,
I will not throw you. _115
IONA TAURINA [DURING THIS SPEECH SHE HAS BEEN PUTTING ON BOOTS AND
SPURS, AND A HUNTING-CAP, BUCKISHLY COCKED ON ONE SIDE, AND TUCKING UP
HER HAIR, SHE LEAPS NIMBLY ON HIS BACK]:
Hoa! hoa! tallyho! tallyho! ho! ho!
Come, let us hunt these ugly badgers down,
These stinking foxes, these devouring otters,
These hares, these wolves, these anything but men.
Hey, for a whipper-in! my loyal Pigs
Now let your noses be as keen as beagles', _120
Your steps as swift as greyhounds', and your cries
More dulcet and symphonious than the bells
Of village-towers, on sunshine holiday;
Wake all the dewy woods with jangling music.
Give them no law (are they not beasts of blood?) _125
But such as they gave you. Tallyho! ho!
Through forest, furze, and bog, and den, and desert,
Pursue the ugly beasts! tallyho! ho!
FULL CHORUS OF I0NA AND THE SWINE:
Tallyho! tallyho!
Through rain, hail, and snow, _130
Through brake, gorse, and briar,
Through fen, flood, and mire,
We go! we go!
Tallyho! tallyho!
Through pond, ditch, and slough, _135
Wind them, and find them,
Like the Devil behind them,
Tallyho! tallyho!
[EXEUNT, IN FULL CRY;
IONA DRIVING ON THE SWINE, WITH THE EMPTY GEEEN BAG.]
THE END.
NOTE ON OEDIPUS TYRANNUS, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
In the brief journal I kept in those days, I find recorded, in August,
1820, Shelley 'begins "Swellfoot the Tyrant", suggested by the pigs at
the fair of San Giuliano.' This was the period of Queen Caroline's
landing in England, and the struggles made by George IV to get rid of
her claims; which failing, Lord Castlereagh placed the "Green Bag" on
the table of the House of Commons, demanding in the King's name that
an enquiry should be instituted into his wife's conduct. These
circumstances were the theme of all conversation among the English. We
were then at the Baths of San Giuliano. A friend came to visit us on
the day when a fair was held in the square, beneath our windows:
Shelley read to us his "Ode to Liberty"; and was riotously accompanied
by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair. He
compared it to the 'chorus of frogs' in the satiric drama of
Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous
association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical
drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve
as chorus--and "Swellfoot" was begun. When finished, it was
transmitted to England, printed, and published anonymously; but
stifled at the very dawn of its existence by the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, who threatened to prosecute it, if not
immediately withdrawn. The friend who had taken the trouble of
bringing it out, of course did not think it worth the annoyance and
expense of a contest, and it was laid aside.
Hesitation of whether it would do honour to Shelley prevented my
publishing it at first. But I cannot bring myself to keep back
anything he ever wrote; for each word is fraught with the peculiar
views and sentiments which he believed to be beneficial to the human
race, and the bright light of poetry irradiates every thought. The
world has a right to the entire compositions of such a man; for it
does not live and thrive by the outworn lesson of the dullard or the
hypocrite, but by the original free thoughts of men of genius, who
aspire to pluck bright truth
'from the pale-faced moon;
Or dive into the bottom of the deep
Where fathom-line would never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned'
truth. Even those who may dissent from his opinions will consider that
he was a man of genius, and that the world will take more interest in
his slightest word than in the waters of Lethe which are so eagerly
prescribed as medicinal for all its wrongs and woe. This drama,
however, must not be judged for more than was meant. It is a mere
plaything of the imagination; which even may not excite smiles among
many, who will not see wit in those combinations of thought which were
full of the ridiculous to the author. But, like everything he wrote,
it breathes that deep sympathy for the sorrows of humanity, and
indignation against its oppressors, which make it worthy of his name.
***
EPIPSYCHIDION.
VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE NOBLE AND UNFORTUNATE LADY, EMILIA V--,
NOW IMPRISONED IN THE CONVENT OF --.
L'anima amante si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nell' infinito un
Mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro.
HER OWN WORDS.
["Epipsychidion" was composed at Pisa, January, February, 1821, and
published without the author's name, in the following summer, by C. &
J. Ollier, London. The poem was included by Mrs. Shelley in the
"Poetical Works", 1839, both editions. Amongst the Shelley manuscripts
in the Bodleian is a first draft of "Epipsychidion", 'consisting of
three versions, more or less complete, of the "Preface
[Advertisement]", a version in ink and pencil, much cancelled, of the
last eighty lines of the poem, and some additional lines which did not
appear in print' ("Examination of the Shelley manuscripts in the
Bodleian Library, by C.D. Locock". Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1903, page
3). This draft, the writing of which is 'extraordinarily confused and
illegible,' has been carefully deciphered and printed by Mr. Locock in
the volume named above. Our text follows that of the editio princeps,
1821.]
ADVERTISEMENT.
The Writer of the following lines died at Florence, as he was
preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, which he
had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins of an old building,
and where it was his hope to have realised a scheme of life, suited
perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an
inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this. His life was singular;
less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it,
than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and
feelings. The present Poem, like the "Vita Nuova" of Dante, is
sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a
matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates and to
a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a
defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it
treats. Not but that gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa
sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse
denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace
intendimento.
The present poem appears to have been intended by the Writer as the
dedication to some longer one. The stanza on the opposite page [1] is
almost a literal translation from Dante's famous Canzone
Voi, ch' intendendo, il terzo ciel movete, etc.
The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his own
composition will raise a smile at the expense of my unfortunate
friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity. S.
[1] i.e. the nine lines which follow, beginning, 'My Song, I fear,'
etc.--ED.
My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do), _5
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them that they are dull,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.
EPIPSYCHIDION.
Sweet Spirit! Sister of that orphan one,
Whose empire is the name thou weepest on,
In my heart's temple I suspend to thee
These votive wreaths of withered memory.
Poor captive bird! who, from thy narrow cage, _5
Pourest such music, that it might assuage
The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody;
This song shall be thy rose: its petals pale
Are dead, indeed, my adored Nightingale! _10
But soft and fragrant is the faded blossom,
And it has no thorn left to wound thy bosom.
High, spirit-winged Heart! who dost for ever
Beat thine unfeeling bars with vain endeavour,
Till those bright plumes of thought, in which arrayed _15
It over-soared this low and worldly shade,
Lie shattered; and thy panting, wounded breast
Stains with dear blood its unmaternal nest!
I weep vain tears: blood would less bitter be,
Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee. _20
Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light, and love, and immortality!
Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse! _25
Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe!
Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form
Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm!
Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror!
Thou Harmony of Nature's art! Thou Mirror _30
In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun,
All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!
Ay, even the dim words which obscure thee now
Flash, lightning-like, with unaccustomed glow;
I pray thee that thou blot from this sad song _35
All of its much mortality and wrong,
With those clear drops, which start like sacred dew
From the twin lights thy sweet soul darkens through,
Weeping, till sorrow becomes ecstasy:
Then smile on it, so that it may not die. _40
I never thought before my death to see
Youth's vision thus made perfect. Emily,
I love thee; though the world by no thin name
Will hide that love from its unvalued shame.
Would we two had been twins of the same mother! _45
Or, that the name my heart lent to another
Could be a sister's bond for her and thee,
Blending two beams of one eternity!
Yet were one lawful and the other true,
These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due. _50
How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!
I am not thine: I am a part of THEE.
Sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burned its wings
Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings,
Young Love should teach Time, in his own gray style, _55
All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile,
A lovely soul formed to be blessed and bless?
A well of sealed and secret happiness,
Whose waters like blithe light and music are,
Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A Star _60
Which moves not in the moving heavens, alone?
A Smile amid dark frowns? a gentle tone
Amid rude voices? a beloved light?
A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight?
A Lute, which those whom Love has taught to play _65
Make music on, to soothe the roughest day
And lull fond Grief asleep? a buried treasure?
A cradle of young thoughts of wingless pleasure?
A violet-shrouded grave of Woe?--I measure
The world of fancies, seeking one like thee, _70
And find--alas! mine own infirmity.
She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way,
And lured me towards sweet Death; as Night by Day,
Winter by Spring, or Sorrow by swift Hope,
Led into light, life, peace. An antelope, _75
In the suspended impulse of its lightness,
Were less aethereally light: the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven of June _80
Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon
Burns, inextinguishably beautiful:
And from her lips, as from a hyacinth full
Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops,
Killing the sense with passion; sweet as stops _85
Of planetary music heard in trance.
In her mild lights the starry spirits dance,
The sunbeams of those wells which ever leap
Under the lightnings of the soul--too deep
For the brief fathom-line of thought or sense. _90
The glory of her being, issuing thence,
Stains the dead, blank, cold air with a warm shade
Of unentangled intermixture, made
By Love, of light and motion: one intense
Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence, _95
Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing,
Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing
With the unintermitted blood, which there
Quivers, (as in a fleece of snow-like air
The crimson pulse of living morning quiver,) _100
Continuously prolonged, and ending never,
Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world;
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness.
Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress _105
And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress
The air of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;
And in the soul a wild odour is felt
Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt _110
Into the bosom of a frozen bud.--
See where she stands! a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,
And motion which may change but cannot die;
An image of some bright Eternity; _115
A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour
Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender
Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love
Under whose motions life's dull billows move;
A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning; _120
A Vision like incarnate April, warning,
With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy
Into his summer grave.
Ah, woe is me!
What have I dared? where am I lifted? how
Shall I descend, and perish not? I know _125
That Love makes all things equal: I have heard
By mine own heart this joyous truth averred:
The spirit of the worm beneath the sod
In love and worship, blends itself with God.
Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate _130
Whose course has been so starless! O too late
Beloved! O too soon adored, by me!
For in the fields of Immortality
My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,
A divine presence in a place divine; _135
Or should have moved beside it on this earth,
A shadow of that substance, from its birth;
But not as now:--I love thee; yes, I feel
That on the fountain of my heart a seal
Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright _140
For thee, since in those TEARS thou hast delight.
We--are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar;
Such difference without discord, as can make
Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake _145
As trembling leaves in a continuous air?
Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wrecked.
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select _150
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, _155
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
True Love in this differs from gold and clay, _160
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human fantasy, _165
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, _170
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.
Mind from its object differs most in this:
Evil from good; misery from happiness; _175
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought, _180
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law _185
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth.
There was a Being whom my spirit oft _190
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn,
Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves _195
Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor
Paved her light steps;--on an imagined shore,
Under the gray beak of some promontory
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,
That I beheld her not. In solitudes _200
Her voice came to me through the whispering woods,
And from the fountains, and the odours deep
Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep
Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there,
Breathed but of HER to the enamoured air; _205
And from the breezes whether low or loud,
And from the rain of every passing cloud,
And from the singing of the summer-birds,
And from all sounds, all silence. In the words
Of antique verse and high romance,--in form, _210
Sound, colour--in whatever checks that Storm
Which with the shattered present chokes the past;
And in that best philosophy, whose taste
Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom
As glorious as a fiery martyrdom; _215
Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.--
Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth
I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,
And towards the lodestar of my one desire,
I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight _220
Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light,
When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere
A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,
As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.--
But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame, _225
Passed, like a God throned on a winged planet,
Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it,
Into the dreary cone of our life's shade;
And as a man with mighty loss dismayed,
I would have followed, though the grave between _230
Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen:
When a voice said:--'O thou of hearts the weakest,
The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.'
Then I--'Where?'--the world's echo answered 'where?'
And in that silence, and in my despair, _235
I questioned every tongueless wind that flew
Over my tower of mourning, if it knew
Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul;
And murmured names and spells which have control
Over the sightless tyrants of our fate; _240
But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate
The night which closed on her; nor uncreate
That world within this Chaos, mine and me,
Of which she was the veiled Divinity,
The world I say of thoughts that worshipped her: _245
And therefore I went forth, with hope and fear
And every gentle passion sick to death,
Feeding my course with expectation's breath,
Into the wintry forest of our life;
And struggling through its error with vain strife, _250
And stumbling in my weakness and my haste,
And half bewildered by new forms, I passed,
Seeking among those untaught foresters
If I could find one form resembling hers,
In which she might have masked herself from me. _255
There,--One, whose voice was venomed melody
Sate by a well, under blue nightshade bowers:
The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers,
Her touch was as electric poison,--flame
Out of her looks into my vitals came, _260
And from her living cheeks and bosom flew
A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew
Into the core of my green heart, and lay
Upon its leaves; until, as hair grown gray
O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime _265
With ruins of unseasonable time.
In many mortal forms I rashly sought
The shadow of that idol of my thought.
And some were fair--but beauty dies away:
Others were wise--but honeyed words betray: _270
And One was true--oh! why not true to me?
Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee,
I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay,
Wounded and weak and panting; the cold day
Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain. _275
When, like a noonday dawn, there shone again
Deliverance. One stood on my path who seemed
As like the glorious shape which I had d reamed
As is the Moon, whose changes ever run
Into themselves, to the eternal Sun; _280
The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven's bright isles,
Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,
That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And warms not but illumines. Young and fair _285
As the descended Spirit of that sphere,
She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night
From its own darkness, until all was bright
Between the Heaven and Earth of my calm mind,
And, as a cloud charioted by the wind, _290
She led me to a cave in that wild place,
And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon
Waxing and waning o'er Endymion.
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb, _295
And all my being became bright or dim
As the Moon's image in a summer sea,
According as she smiled or frowned on me;
And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead:-- _300
For at her silver voice came Death and Life,
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew, _305
And cried 'Away, he is not of our crew.'
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.
What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,
Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse;-- _310
And how my soul was as a lampless sea,
And who was then its Tempest; and when She,
The Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost
Crept o'er those waters, till from coast to coast
The moving billows of my being fell _315
Into a death of ice, immovable;--
And then--what earthquakes made it gape and split,
The white Moon smiling all the while on it,
These words conceal:--If not, each word would be
The key of staunchless tears. Weep not for me! _320
At length, into the obscure Forest came
The Vision I had sought through grief and shame.
Athwart that wintry wilderness of thorns
Flashed from her motion splendour like the Morn's,
And from her presence life was radiated _325
Through the gray earth and branches bare and dead;
So that her way was paved, and roofed above
With flowers as soft as thoughts of budding love;
And music from her respiration spread
Like light,--all other sounds were penetrated _330
By the small, still, sweet spirit of that sound,
So that the savage winds hung mute around;
And odours warm and fresh fell from her hair
Dissolving the dull cold in the frore air:
Soft as an Incarnation of the Sun, _335
When light is changed to love, this glorious One
Floated into the cavern where I lay,
And called my Spirit, and the dreaming clay
Was lifted by the thing that dreamed below
As smoke by fire, and in her beauty's glow _340
I stood, and felt the dawn of my long night
Was penetrating me with living light:
I knew it was the Vision veiled from me
So many years--that it was Emily.
Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth, _345
This world of loves, this ME; and into birth
Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart
Magnetic might into its central heart;
And lift its billows and its mists, and guide
By everlasting laws, each wind and tide _350
To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave;
And lull its storms, each in the craggy grave
Which was its cradle, luring to faint bowers
The armies of the rainbow-winged showers;
And, as those married lights, which from the towers _355
Of Heaven look forth and fold the wandering globe
In liquid sleep and splendour, as a robe;
And all their many-mingled influence blend,
If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end;--
So ye, bright regents, with alternate sway _360
Govern my sphere of being, night and day!
Thou, not disdaining even a borrowed might;
Thou, not eclipsing a remoter light;
And, through the shadow of the seasons three,
From Spring to Autumn's sere maturity, _365
Light it into the Winter of the tomb,
Where it may ripen to a brighter bloom.
Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce,
Who drew the heart of this frail Universe
Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion, _370
Alternating attraction and repulsion,
Thine went astray and that was rent in twain;
Oh, float into our azure heaven again!
Be there Love's folding-star at thy return;
The living Sun will feed thee from its urn _375
Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn
In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn
Will worship thee with incense of calm breath
And lights and shadows; as the star of Death
And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild _380
Called Hope and Fear--upon the heart are piled
Their offerings,--of this sacrifice divine
A World shall be the altar.
Lady mine,
Scorn not these flowers of thought, the fading birth
Which from its heart of hearts that plant puts forth _385
Whose fruit, made perfect by thy sunny eyes,
Will be as of the trees of Paradise.
The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me.
To whatsoe'er of dull mortality
Is mine, remain a vestal sister still; _390
To the intense, the deep, the imperishable,
Not mine but me, henceforth be thou united
Even as a bride, delighting and delighted.
The hour is come:--the destined Star has risen
Which shall descend upon a vacant prison. _395
The walls are high, the gates are strong, thick set
The sentinels--but true Love never yet
Was thus constrained: it overleaps all fence:
Like lightning, with invisible violence
Piercing its continents; like Heaven's free breath, _400
Which he who grasps can hold not; liker Death,
Who rides upon a thought, and makes his way
Through temple, tower, and palace, and the array
Of arms: more strength has Love than he or they;
For it can burst his charnel, and make free _405
The limbs in chains, the heart in agony,
The soul in dust and chaos.
Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor, _410
No keel has ever ploughed that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? _415
Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest
Is a far Eden of the purple East;
And we between her wings will sit, while Night,
And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight,
Our ministers, along the boundless Sea, _420
Treading each other's heels, unheededly.
It is an isle under Ionian skies,
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise,
And, for the harbours are not safe and good,
This land would have remained a solitude _425
But for some pastoral people native there,
Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,
Simple and spirited; innocent and bold.
The blue Aegean girds this chosen home, _430
With ever-changing sound and light and foam,
Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar;
And all the winds wandering along the shore
Undulate with the undulating tide:
There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide; _435
And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond,
As clear as elemental diamond,
Or serene morning air; and far beyond,
The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer
(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year) _440
Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls
Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls
Illumining, with sound that never fails
Accompany the noonday nightingales;
And all the place is peopled with sweet airs; _445
The light clear element which the isle wears
Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,
Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers.
And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;
And from the moss violets and jonquils peep, _450
And dart their arrowy odour through the brain
Till you might faint with that delicious pain.
And every motion, odour, beam and tone,
With that deep music is in unison:
Which is a soul within the soul--they seem _455
Like echoes of an antenatal dream.--
It is an isle 'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;
Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer,
Washed by the soft blue Oceans of young air. _460
It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight,
Pestilence, War and Earthquake, never light
Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they
Sail onward far upon their fatal way:
The winged storms, chanting their thunder-psalm _465
To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm
Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew,
From which its fields and woods ever renew
Their green and golden immortality.
And from the sea there rise, and from the sky _470
There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright.
Veil after veil, each hiding some delight,
Which Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside,
Till the isle's beauty, like a naked bride
Glowing at once with love and loveliness, _475
Blushes and trembles at its own excess:
Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less
Burns in the heart of this delicious isle,
An atom of th' Eternal, whose own smile
Unfolds itself, and may be felt, not seen _480
O'er the gray rocks, blue waves, and forests green,
Filling their bare and void interstices.--
But the chief marvel of the wilderness
Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how
None of the rustic island-people know: _485
'Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height
It overtops the woods; but, for delight,
Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime
Had been invented, in the world's young prime,
Reared it, a wonder of that simple time, _490
An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house
Made sacred to his sister and his spouse.
It scarce seems now a wreck of human art,
But, as it were Titanic; in the heart
Of Earth having assumed its form, then grown _495
Out of the mountains, from the living stone,
Lifting itself in caverns light and high:
For all the antique and learned imagery
Has been erased, and in the place of it
The ivy and the wild-vine interknit _500
The volumes of their many-twining stems;
Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems
The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky
Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery
With moonlight patches, or star atoms keen, _505
Or fragments of the day's intense serene;--
Working mosaic on their Parian floors.
And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers
And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem
To sleep in one another's arms, and dream _510
Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we
Read in their smiles, and call reality.
This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed
Thee to be lady of the solitude.--
And I have fitted up some chambers there _515
Looking towards the golden Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below.--
I have sent books and music there, and all
Those instruments with which high Spirits call _520
The future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grave, and make the present last
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,
Folded within their own eternity.
Our simple life wants little, and true taste _525
Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste
The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,
Nature with all her children haunts the hill.
The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet
Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit _530
Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance
Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;
The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight
Before our gate, and the slow, silent night
Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep. _535
Be this our home in life, and when years heap
Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,
Let us become the overhanging day,
The living soul of this Elysian isle,
Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile _540
We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,
Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,
And wander in the meadows, or ascend
The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour; _545
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,--
Possessing and possessed by all that is
Within that calm circumference of bliss, _550
And by each other, till to love and live
Be one:--or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep
The moonlight of the expired night asleep,
Through which the awakened day can never peep; _555
A veil for our seclusion, close as night's,
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights:
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.
And we will talk, until thought's melody _560
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, _565
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be _570
Confused in Passion's golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, _575
Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another's substance finding food, _580
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, _585
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire-- _590
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!
...
Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet,
And say:--'We are the masters of thy slave;
What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?'
Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, _595
All singing loud: 'Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.'
So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste
Over the hearts of men, until ye meet _600
Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest,
And bid them love each other and be blessed:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
And come and be my guest,--for I am Love's.
NOTES:
_100 morning]morn may Rossetti cj.
_118 of]on edition 1839.
_405 it]he edition 1839.
_501 many-twining]many twining editio prin. 1821.
_504 winter-woof]inter-woof Rossetti cj.
FRAGMENTS CONNECTED WITH EPIPSYCHIDION.
[Of the fragments of verse that follow, lines 1-37, 62-92 were printed
by Mrs. Shelley in "Posthumous Works", 1839, 2nd edition; lines 1-174
were printed or reprinted by Dr. Garnett in "Relics of Shelley", 1862;
and lines 175-186 were printed by Mr. C.D. Locock from the first draft
of "Epipsychidion" amongst the Shelley manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library. See "Examination, etc.", 1903, pages 12, 13. The three early
drafts of the "Preface (Advertisement)" were printed by Mr. Locock in
the same volume, pages 4, 5.]
THREE EARLY DRAFTS OF THE PREFACE.
(ADVERTISEMENT.)
PREFACE 1.
The following Poem was found amongst other papers in the Portfolio of
a young Englishman with whom the Editor had contracted an intimacy at
Florence, brief indeed, but sufficiently long to render the
Catastrophe by which it terminated one of the most painful events of
his life.--
The literary merit of the Poem in question may not be considerable;
but worse verses are printed every day, &
He was an accomplished & amiable person but his error was, thuntos on
un thunta phronein,--his fate is an additional proof that 'The tree of
Knowledge is not that of Life.'--He had framed to himself certain
opinions, founded no doubt upon the truth of things, but built up to a
Babel height; they fell by their own weight, & the thoughts that were
his architects, became unintelligible one to the other, as men upon
whom confusion of tongues has fallen.
[These] verses seem to have been written as a sort of dedication of
some work to have been presented to the person whom they address: but
his papers afford no trace of such a work--The circumstances to which
[they] the poem allude, may easily be understood by those to whom
[the] spirit of the poem itself is [un]intelligible: a detail of
facts, sufficiently romantic in [themselves but] their combinations
The melancholy [task] charge of consigning the body of my poor friend
to the grave, was committed to me by his desolated family. I caused
him to be buried in a spot selected by himself, & on the h
PREFACE 2.
[Epips] T. E. V. Epipsych
Lines addressed to
the Noble Lady
[Emilia] [E. V.]
Emilia
[The following Poem was found in the PF. of a young Englishman, who
died on his passage from Leghorn to the Levant. He had bought one of
the Sporades] He was accompanied by a lady [who might have been]
supposed to be his wife, & an effeminate looking youth, to whom he
shewed an [attachment] so [singular] excessive an attachment as to
give rise to the suspicion, that she was a woman--At his death this
suspicion was confirmed;...object speedily found a refuge both from
the taunts of the brute multitude, and from the...of her grief in the
same grave that contained her lover.--He had bought one of the
Sporades, & fitted up a Saracenic castle which accident had preserved
in some repair with simple elegance, & it was his intention to
dedicate the remainder of his life to undisturbed intercourse with his
companions
These verses apparently were intended as a dedication of a longer poem
or series of poems
PREFACE 3.
The writer of these lines died at Florence in [January 1820] while he
was preparing * * for one wildest of the of the Sporades, where he
bought & fitted up the ruins of some old building--His life was
singular, less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which
diversified it, than the ideal tinge which they received from his own
character & feelings--
The verses were apparently intended by the writer to accompany some
longer poem or collection of poems, of which there* [are no remnants
in his] * * * remains [in his] portfolio.--
The editor is induced to
The present poem, like the vita Nova of Dante, is sufficiently
intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter of fact
history of the circumstances to which it relate, & to a certain other
class, it must & ought ever to remain incomprehensible--It was
evidently intended to be prefixed to a longer poem or series of
poems--but among his papers there are no traces of such a collection.
PASSAGES OF THE POEM, OR CONNECTED THEREWITH.
Here, my dear friend, is a new book for you;
I have already dedicated two
To other friends, one female and one male,--
What you are, is a thing that I must veil;
What can this be to those who praise or rail? _5
I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the world a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion--though 'tis in the code _10
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world--and so
With one sad friend, and many a jealous foe, _15
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
Free love has this, different from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Like ocean, which the general north wind breaks
Into ten thousand waves, and each one makes _20
A mirror of the moon--like some great glass,
Which did distort whatever form might pass,
Dashed into fragments by a playful child,
Which then reflects its eyes and forehead mild;
Giving for one, which it could ne'er express, _25
A thousand images of loveliness.
If I were one whom the loud world held wise,
I should disdain to quote authorities
In commendation of this kind of love:--
Why there is first the God in heaven above, _30
Who wrote a book called Nature, 'tis to be
Reviewed, I hear, in the next Quarterly;
And Socrates, the Jesus Christ of Greece,
And Jesus Christ Himself, did never cease
To urge all living things to love each other, _35
And to forgive their mutual faults, and smother
The Devil of disunion in their souls.
...
I love you!--Listen, O embodied Ray
Of the great Brightness; I must pass away
While you remain, and these light words must be _40
Tokens by which you may remember me.
Start not--the thing you are is unbetrayed,
If you are human, and if but the shade
Of some sublimer spirit...
...
And as to friend or mistress, 'tis a form; _45
Perhaps I wish you were one. Some declare
You a familiar spirit, as you are;
Others with a ... more inhuman
Hint that, though not my wife, you are a woman;
What is the colour of your eyes and hair? _50
Why, if you were a lady, it were fair
The world should know--but, as I am afraid,
The Quarterly would bait you if betrayed;
And if, as it will be sport to see them stumble
Over all sorts of scandals. hear them mumble _55
Their litany of curses--some guess right,
And others swear you're a Hermaphrodite;
Like that sweet marble monster of both sexes,
Which looks so sweet and gentle that it vexes
The very soul that the soul is gone _60
Which lifted from her limbs the veil of stone.
...
It is a sweet thing, friendship, a dear balm,
A happy and auspicious bird of calm,
Which rides o'er life's ever tumultuous Ocean;
A God that broods o'er chaos in commotion; _65
A flower which fresh as Lapland roses are,
Lifts its bold head into the world's frore air,
And blooms most radiantly when others die,
Health, hope, and youth, and brief prosperity;
And with the light and odour of its bloom, _70
Shining within the dun eon and the tomb;
Whose coming is as light and music are
'Mid dissonance and gloom--a star
Which moves not 'mid the moving heavens alone--
A smile among dark frowns--a gentle tone _75
Among rude voices, a beloved light,
A solitude, a refuge, a delight.
If I had but a friend! Why, I have three
Even by my own confession; there may be
Some more, for what I know, for 'tis my mind _80
To call my friends all who are wise and kind,-
And these, Heaven knows, at best are very few;
But none can ever be more dear than you.
Why should they be? My muse has lost her wings,
Or like a dying swan who soars and sings, _85
I should describe you in heroic style,
But as it is, are you not void of guile?
A lovely soul, formed to be blessed and bless:
A well of sealed and secret happiness;
A lute which those whom Love has taught to play _90
Make music on to cheer the roughest day,
And enchant sadness till it sleeps?...
...
To the oblivion whither I and thou,
All loving and all lovely, hasten now
With steps, ah, too unequal! may we meet _95
In one Elysium or one winding-sheet!
If any should be curious to discover
Whether to you I am a friend or lover,
Let them read Shakespeare's sonnets, taking thence
A whetstone for their dull intelligence _100
That tears and will not cut, or let them guess
How Diotima, the wise prophetess,
Instructed the instructor, and why he
Rebuked the infant spirit of melody
On Agathon's sweet lips, which as he spoke _105
Was as the lovely star when morn has broke
The roof of darkness, in the golden dawn,
Half-hidden, and yet beautiful.
I'll pawn
My hopes of Heaven-you know what they are worth --
That the presumptuous pedagogues of Earth, _110
If they could tell the riddle offered here
Would scorn to be, or being to appear
What now they seem and are--but let them chide,
They have few pleasures in the world beside;
Perhaps we should be dull were we not chidden, _115
Paradise fruits are sweetest when forbidden.
Folly can season Wisdom, Hatred Love.
...
Farewell, if it can be to say farewell
To those who
...
I will not, as most dedicators do, _120
Assure myself and all the world and you,
That you are faultless--would to God they were
Who taunt me with your love! I then should wear
These heavy chains of life with a light spirit,
And would to God I were, or even as near it _125
As you, dear heart. Alas! what are we? Clouds
Driven by the wind in warring multitudes,
Which rain into the bosom of the earth,
And rise again, and in our death and birth,
And through our restless life, take as from heaven _130
Hues which are not our own, but which are given,
And then withdrawn, and with inconstant glance
Flash from the spirit to the countenance.
There is a Power, a Love, a Joy, a God
Which makes in mortal hearts its brief abode, _135
A Pythian exhalation, which inspires
Love, only love--a wind which o'er the wires
Of the soul's giant harp
There is a mood which language faints beneath;
You feel it striding, as Almighty Death _140
His bloodless steed...
...
And what is that most brief and bright delight
Which rushes through the touch and through the sight,
And stands before the spirit's inmost throne,
A naked Seraph? None hath ever known. _145
Its birth is darkness, and its growth desire;
Untameable and fleet and fierce as fire,
Not to be touched but to be felt alone,
It fills the world with glory-and is gone.
...
It floats with rainbow pinions o'er the stream _150
Of life, which flows, like a ... dream
Into the light of morning, to the grave
As to an ocean...
...
What is that joy which serene infancy
Perceives not, as the hours content them by, _155
Each in a chain of blossoms, yet enjoys
The shapes of this new world, in giant toys
Wrought by the busy ... ever new?
Remembrance borrows Fancy's glass, to show
These forms more ... sincere _160
Than now they are, than then, perhaps, they were.
When everything familiar seemed to be
Wonderful, and the immortality
Of this great world, which all things must inherit,
Was felt as one with the awakening spirit, _165
Unconscious of itself, and of the strange
Distinctions which in its proceeding change
It feels and knows, and mourns as if each were
A desolation...
...
Were it not a sweet refuge, Emily, _170
For all those exiles from the dull insane
Who vex this pleasant world with pride and pain,
For all that band of sister-spirits known
To one another by a voiceless tone?
...
If day should part us night will mend division _175
And if sleep parts us--we will meet in vision
And if life parts us--we will mix in death
Yielding our mite [?] of unreluctant breath
Death cannot part us--we must meet again
In all in nothing in delight in pain: _180
How, why or when or where--it matters not
So that we share an undivided lot...
...
And we will move possessing and possessed
Wherever beauty on the earth's bare [?] breast
Lies like the shadow of thy soul--till we _185
Become one being with the world we see...
NOTES:
_52-_53 afraid The cj. A.C. Bradley.
_54 And as cj. Rossetti, A.C. Bradley.
_61 stone... cj. A.C. Bradley.
_155 them]trip or troop cj. A.C. Bradley.
_157 in]as cj. A.C. Bradley.
***
ADONAIS.
AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS,
AUTHOR OF ENDYMION, HYPERION, ETC.
Aster prin men elampes eni zooisin Eoos
nun de thanon lampeis Esperos en phthimenois.--PLATO.
["Adonais" was composed at Pisa during the early days of June, 1821,
and printed, with the author's name, at Pisa, 'with the types of
Didot,' by July 13, 1821. Part of the impression was sent to the
brothers Ollier for sale in London. An exact reprint of this Pisa
edition (a few typographical errors only being corrected) was issued
in 1829 by Gee & Bridges, Cambridge, at the instance of Arthur Hallam
and Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton). The poem was included in
Galignani's edition of "Coleridge, Shelley and Keats", Paris, 1829,
and by Mrs. Shelley in the "Poetical Works" of 1839. Mrs. Shelley's
text presents three important variations from that of the editio
princeps. In 1876 an edition of the "Adonais", with Introduction and
Notes, was printed for private circulation by Mr. H. Buxton Forman,
C.B. Ten years later a reprint 'in exact facsimile' of the Pisa
edition was edited with a Bibliographical Introduction by Mr. T.J.
Wise ("Shelley Society Publications", 2nd Series, No. 1, Reeves &
Turner, London, 1886). Our text is that of the editio princeps, Pisa,
1821, modified by Mrs. Shelley's text of 1839. The readings of the
editio princeps, wherever superseded, are recorded in the footnotes.
The Editor's Notes at the end of the Volume 3 should be consulted.]
PREFACE.
Pharmakon elthe, Bion, poti son stoma, pharmakon eides.
pos ten tois cheilessi potesrame, kouk eglukanthe;
tis de Brotos tossouton anameros, e kerasai toi,
e dounai laleonti to pharmakon; ekphugen odan.
--MOSCHUS, EPITAPH. BION.
It is my intention to subjoin to the London edition of this poem a
criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among
the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. My known
repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which several of his
earlier compositions were modelled prove at least that I am an
impartial judge. I consider the fragment of "Hyperion" as second to
nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.
John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year,
on the -- of -- 1821; and was buried in the romantic and lonely
cemetery of the Protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is
the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering
and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery
is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and
daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one
should be buried in so sweet a place.
The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated
these unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was
beautiful; and where cankerworms abound, what wonder if its young
flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his
"Endymion", which appeared in the "Quarterly Review", produced the
most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus
originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a
rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from
more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers were
ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.
It may be well said that these wretched men know not what they do.
They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to
whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many
blows or one like Keats's composed of more penetrable stuff. One of
their associates is, to my knowledge, a most base and unprincipled
calumniator. As to "Endymion", was it a poem, whatever might be its
defects, to be treated contemptuously by those who had celebrated,
with various degrees of complacency and panegyric, "Paris", and
"Woman", and a "Syrian Tale", and Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. Barrett, and
Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of the illustrious obscure? Are
these the men who in their venal good nature presumed to draw a
parallel between the Reverend Mr. Milman and Lord Byron? What gnat did
they strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels? Against
what woman taken in adultery dares the foremost of these literary
prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? Miserable man! you, one of
the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the
workmanship of God. Nor shall it be your excuse, that, murderer as you
are, you have spoken daggers, but used none.
The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats's life were not
made known to me until the "Elegy" was ready for the press. I am given
to understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit had received
from the criticism of "Endymion" was exasperated by the bitter sense
of unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from
the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise
of his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his
care. He was accompanied to Rome, and attended in his last illness by
Mr. Severn, a young artist of the highest promise, who, I have been
informed, 'almost risked his own life, and sacrificed every prospect
to unwearied attendance upon his dying friend.' Had I known these
circumstances before the completion of my poem, I should have been
tempted to add my feeble tribute of applause to the more solid
recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own
motives. Mr. Severn can dispense with a reward from 'such stuff as
dreams are made of.' His conduct is a golden augury of the success of
his future career--may the unextinguished Spirit of his illustrious
friend animate the creations of his pencil, and plead against Oblivion
for his name!
***
ADONAIS.
I weep for Adonais--he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, _5
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"
2.
Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay, _10
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath, _15
Rekindled all the fading melodies,
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of Death.
3.
Oh, weep for Adonais--he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! _20
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
Descend;--oh, dream not that the amorous Deep _25
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.
4.
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania!--He died,
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, _30
Blind, old and lonely, when his country's pride,
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite _35
Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light.
5.
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And happier they their happiness who knew,
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time _40
In which suns perished; others more sublime,
Struck by the envious wrath of man or god,
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime;
And some yet live, treading the thorny road,
Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode. _45
6.
But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished--
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew;
Most musical of mourners, weep anew! _50
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lily lies--the storm is overpast.
7.
To that high Capital, where kingly Death _55
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal.--Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still _60
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;
Awake him not! surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.
8.
He will awake no more, oh, never more!--
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace _65
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface _70
So fair a prey, till darkness and the law
Of change, shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.
9.
Oh, weep for Adonais!--The quick Dreams,
The passion-winged Ministers of thought,
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams _75
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The love which was its music, wander not,--
Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, _80
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.
10.
And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries;
'Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, _85
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.'
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain. _90
11.
One from a lucid urn of starry dew
Washed his light limbs as if embalming them;
Another clipped her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem; _95
Another in her wilful grief would break
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem
A greater loss with one which was more weak;
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.
12.
Another Splendour on his mouth alit, _100
That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath
With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon his icy lips; _105
And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath
Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips,
It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.
13.
And others came...Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, _110
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, _115
Came in slow pomp;--the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
14.
All he had loved, and moulded into thought,
From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought _120
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aereal eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, _125
And the wild Winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.
15.
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, _130
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
Than those for whose disdain she pined away
Into a shadow of all sounds:--a drear
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear. _135
16.
Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown,
For whom should she have waked the sullen year?
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear _140
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both
Thou, Adonais: wan they stand and sere
Amid the faint companions of their youth,
With dew all turned to tears; odour, to sighing ruth.
17.
Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale _145
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest, _150
As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!
18.
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year; _155
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere; _160
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,
Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.
19.
Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean
A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion, _165
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed,
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight, _170
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.
20.
The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender,
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death _175
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?--the intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. _180
21.
Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators? Great and mean _185
Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
22.
HE will awake no more, oh, never more! _190
'Wake thou,' cried Misery, 'childless Mother, rise
Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core,
A wound more fierce than his, with tears and sighs.'
And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song _195
Had held in holy silence, cried: 'Arise!'
Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung,
From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung.
23.
She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear _200
The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
Had left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear
So struck, so roused, so rapped Urania;
So saddened round her like an atmosphere _205
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.
24.
Out of her secret Paradise she sped,
Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,
And human hearts, which to her aery tread _210
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell:
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they,
Rent the soft Form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May, _215
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.
25.
In the death-chamber for a moment Death,
Shamed by the presence of that living Might,
Blushed to annihilation, and the breath
Revisited those lips, and Life's pale light _220
Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.
'Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
Leave me not!' cried Urania: her distress
Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress. _225
26.
'Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,
With food of saddest memory kept alive, _230
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!
27.
'O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, _235
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
Defenceless as thou wert, oh, where was then
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear? _240
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.
28.
'The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead; _245
The vultures to the conqueror's banner true
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion;--how they fled,
When, like Apollo, from his golden bow
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped _250
And smiled!--The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.
29.
'The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;
He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered into death without a dawn, _255
And the immortal stars awake again;
So is it in the world of living men:
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light _260
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night.'
30.
Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came,
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent, _265
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue. _270
31.
Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, _275
Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
32.
A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift-- _280
A Love in desolation masked;--a Power
Girt round with weakness;--it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow;--even whilst we speak _285
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
33.
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; _290
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew _295
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.
34.
All stood aloof, and at his partial moan
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own, _300
As in the accents of an unknown land
He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned
The Stranger's mien, and murmured: 'Who art thou?'
He answered not, but with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, _305
Which was like Cain's or Christ's--oh! that it should be so!
35.
What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,
In mockery of monumental stone, _310
The heavy heart heaving without a moan?
If it be He, who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one,
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs,
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice. _315
36.
Our Adonais has drunk poison--oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
The nameless worm would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape, the magic tone _320
Whose prelude held all envy, hate and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.
37.
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! _325
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thy season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow; _330
Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee;
Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt--as now.
38.
Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites that scream below; _335
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now--
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow _340
Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
39.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep--
He hath awakened from the dream of life--
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep _345
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.--WE decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day, _350
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
40.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again; _355
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. _360
41.
He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.--Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! _365
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!
42.
He is made one with Nature: there is heard _370
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move _375
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
43.
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear _380
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; _385
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.
44.
The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb, _390
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there _395
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
45.
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale,--his solemn agony had not _400
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. _405
46.
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
'Thou art become as one of us,' they cry, _410
'It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid a Heaven of Song.
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!'
47.
Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth, _415
Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink _420
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
48.
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought _425
That ages, empires and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend,--they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought _430
Who waged contention with their time's decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
49.
Go thou to Rome,--at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, _435
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation's nakedness
Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead _440
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;
50.
And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned _445
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath. _450
51.
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
52.
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
53.
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is passed from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles,--the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.
54.
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
55.
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. _495
NOTES:
_49 true-love]true love editions 1821, 1839.
_72 Of change, etc. so editions 1829 (Galignani), 1839;
Of mortal change, shall fill the grave which is her maw edition 1821.
_81 or edition 1821; nor edition 1839.
_105 his edition 1821; its edition 1839.
_126 round edition 1821; around edition 1839.
_143 faint companions edition 1839; drooping comrades edition 1821.
_204 See Editor's Note.
_252 lying low edition 1839; as they go edition 1821.
CANCELLED PASSAGES OF ADONAIS.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, "Relics of Shelley", 1862.]
PASSAGES OF THE PREFACE.
...the expression of my indignation and sympathy. I will allow myself
a first and last word on the subject of calumny as it relates to me.
As an author I have dared and invited censure. If I understand myself,
I have written neither for profit nor for fame. I have employed my
poetical compositions and publications simply as the instruments of
that sympathy between myself and others which the ardent and unbounded
love I cherished for my kind incited me to acquire. I expected all
sorts of stupidity and insolent contempt from those...
...These compositions (excepting the tragedy of "The Cenci", which was
written rather to try my powers than to unburthen my full heart) are
insufficiently...commendation than perhaps they deserve, even from
their bitterest enemies; but they have not attained any corresponding
popularity. As a man, I shrink from notice and regard; the ebb and
flow of the world vexes me; I desire to be left in peace. Persecution,
contumely, and calumny have been heaped upon me in profuse measure;
and domestic conspiracy and legal oppression have violated in my
person the most sacred rights of nature and humanity. The bigot will
say it was the recompense of my errors; the man of the world will call
it the result of my imprudence; but never upon one head...
...Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and
malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thieftaker in despair, so an
unsuccessful author turns critic. But a young spirit panting for fame,
doubtful of its powers, and certain only of its aspirations, is ill
qualified to assign its true value to the sneer of this world. He
knows not that such stuff as this is of the abortive and monstrous
births which time consumes as fast as it produces. He sees the truth
and falsehood, the merits and demerits, of his case inextricably
entangled...No personal offence should have drawn from me this public
comment upon such stuff...
...The offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in
his intimacy with Leigh Hunt, Mr. Hazlitt, and some other enemies of
despotism and superstition. My friend Hunt has a very hard skull to
crack, and will take a deal of killing. I do not know much of Mr.
Hazlitt, but...
...I knew personally but little of Keats; but on the news of his
situation I wrote to him, suggesting the propriety of trying the
Italian climate, and inviting him to join me. Unfortunately he did not
allow me...
PASSAGES OF THE POEM.
And ever as he went he swept a lyre
Of unaccustomed shape, and ... strings
Now like the ... of impetuous fire,
Which shakes the forest with its murmurings,
Now like the rush of the aereal wings _5
Of the enamoured wind among the treen,
Whispering unimaginable things,
And dying on the streams of dew serene,
Which feed the unmown meads with ever-during green.
...
And the green Paradise which western waves _10
Embosom in their ever-wailing sweep,
Talking of freedom to their tongueless caves,
Or to the spirits which within them keep
A record of the wrongs which, though they sleep,
Die not, but dream of retribution, heard _15
His hymns, and echoing them from steep to steep,
Kept--
...
And then came one of sweet and earnest looks,
Whose soft smiles to his dark and night-like eyes
Were as the clear and ever-living brooks _20
Are to the obscure fountains whence they rise,
Showing how pure they are: a Paradise
Of happy truth upon his forehead low
Lay, making wisdom lovely, in the guise
Of earth-awakening morn upon the brow _25
Of star-deserted heaven, while ocean gleams below.
His song, though very sweet, was low and faint,
A simple strain--
...
A mighty Phantasm, half concealed
In darkness of his own exceeding light, _30
Which clothed his awful presence unrevealed,
Charioted on the ... night
Of thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite.
And like a sudden meteor, which outstrips
The splendour-winged chariot of the sun, _35
... eclipse
The armies of the golden stars, each one
Pavilioned in its tent of light--all strewn
Over the chasms of blue night--
***
HELLAS
A LYRICAL DRAMA.
MANTIS EIM EZTHLON AGONUN.--OEDIP. COLON.
["Hellas" was composed at Pisa in the autumn of 1821, and dispatched
to London, November 11. It was published, with the author's name, by
C. & J. Ollier in the spring of 1822. A transcript of the poem by
Edward Williams is in the Rowfant Library. Ollier availed himself of
Shelley's permission to cancel certain passages in the notes; he also
struck out certain lines of the text. These omissions were, some of
them, restored in Galignani's one-volume edition of "Coleridge,
Shelley and Keats", Paris, 1829, and also by Mrs. Shelley in the
"Poetical Works", 1839. A passage in the "Preface", suppressed by
Ollier, was restored by Mr. Buxton Forman (1892) from a proof copy of
"Hellas" in his possession. The "Prologue to Hellas" was edited by Dr.
Garnett in 1862 ("Relics of Shelley") from the manuscripts at Boscombe
Manor.
Our text is that of the editio princeps, 1822, corrected by a list of
"Errata" sent by Shelley to Ollier, April 11, 1822. The Editor's Notes
at the end of Volume 3 should be consulted.]
TO HIS EXCELLENCY
PRINCE ALEXANDER MAVROCORDATO
LATE SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO THE HOSPODAR OF WALLACHIA
THE DRAMA OF HELLAS IS INSCRIBED AS AN
IMPERFECT TOKEN OF THE ADMIRATION,
SYMPATHY, AND FRIENDSHIP OF
THE AUTHOR.
Pisa, November 1, 1821.
PREFACE.
The poem of "Hellas", written at the suggestion of the events of the
moment, is a mere improvise, and derives its interest (should it be
found to possess any) solely from the intense sympathy which the
Author feels with the cause he would celebrate.
The subject, in its present state, is insusceptible of being treated
otherwise than lyrically, and if I have called this poem a drama from
the circumstance of its being composed in dialogue, the licence is not
greater than that which has been assumed by other poets who have
called their productions epics, only because they have been divided
into twelve or twenty-four books.
The "Persae" of Aeschylus afforded me the first model of my
conception, although the decision of the glorious contest now waging
in Greece being yet suspended forbids a catastrophe parallel to the
return of Xerxes and the desolation of the Persians. I have,
therefore, contented myself with exhibiting a series of lyric
pictures, and with having wrought upon the curtain of futurity, which
falls upon the unfinished scene, such figures of indistinct and
visionary delineation as suggest the final triumph of the Greek cause
as a portion of the cause of civilisation and social improvement.
The drama (if drama it must be called) is, however, so inartificial
that I doubt whether, if recited on the Thespian waggon to an Athenian
village at the Dionysiaca, it would have obtained the prize of the
goat. I shall bear with equanimity any punishment, greater than the
loss of such a reward, which the Aristarchi of the hour may think fit
to inflict.
The only "goat-song" which I have yet attempted has, I confess, in
spite of the unfavourable nature of the subject, received a greater
and a more valuable portion of applause than I expected or than it
deserved.
Common fame is the only authority which I can allege for the details
which form the basis of the poem, and I must trespass upon the
forgiveness of my readers for the display of newspaper erudition to
which I have been reduced. Undoubtedly, until the conclusion of the
war, it will be impossible to obtain an account of it sufficiently
authentic for historical materials; but poets have their privilege,
and it is unquestionable that actions of the most exalted courage have
been performed by the Greeks--that they have gained more than one
naval victory, and that their defeat in Wallachia was signalized by
circumstances of heroism more glorious even than victory.
The apathy of the rulers of the civilised world to the astonishing
circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their
civilisation, rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin, is
something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shows of
this mortal scene. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our
religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece--Rome,
the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors,
would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still
have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have arrived
at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China
and Japan possess.
The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece
which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose
very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated
impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest
or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the
extinction of the race.
The modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings whom the
imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our
kind, and he inherits much of their sensibility, their rapidity of
conception, their enthusiasm, and their courage. If in many instances
he is degraded by moral and political slavery to the practice of the
basest vices it engenders--and that below the level of ordinary
degradation--let us reflect that the corruption of the best produces
the worst, and that habits which subsist only in relation to a
peculiar state of social institution may be expected to cease as soon
as that relation is dissolved. In fact, the Greeks, since the
admirable novel of Anastasius could have been a faithful picture of
their manners, have undergone most important changes; the flower of
their youth, returning to their country from the universities of
Italy, Germany, and France, have communicated to their fellow-citizens
the latest results of that social perfection of which their ancestors
were the original source. The University of Chios contained before the
breaking out of the revolution eight hundred students, and among them
several Germans and Americans. The munificence and energy of many of
the Greek princes and merchants, directed to the renovation of their
country with a spirit and a wisdom which has few examples, is above
all praise.
The English permit their own oppressors to act according to their
natural sympathy with the Turkish tyrant, and to brand upon their name
the indelible blot of an alliance with the enemies of domestic
happiness, of Christianity and civilisation.
Russia desires to possess, not to liberate Greece; and is contented to
see the Turks, its natural enemies, and the Greeks, its intended
slaves, enfeeble each other until one or both fall into its net. The
wise and generous policy of England would have consisted in
establishing the independence of Greece, and in maintaining it both
against Russia and the Turk;--but when was the oppressor generous or
just?
[Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon
the part which those who presume to represent their will have played
in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which it
would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of the
oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders
of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns,
look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their
mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy
alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new
race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the
opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh
generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and
dread. (This paragraph, suppressed in 1822 by Charles Ollier, was
first restored in 1892 by Mr. Buxton Forman ["Poetical Works of P. B.
S.", volume 4 pages 40-41] from a proof copy of Hellas in his
possession.]
The Spanish Peninsula is already free. France is tranquil in the
enjoyment of a partial exemption from the abuses which its unnatural
and feeble government are vainly attempting to revive. The seed of
blood and misery has been sown in Italy, and a more vigorous race is
arising to go forth to the harvest. The world waits only the news of a
revolution of Germany to see the tyrants who have pinnacled themselves
on its supineness precipitated into the ruin from which they shall
never arise. Well do these destroyers of mankind know their enemy,
when they impute the insurrection in Greece to the same spirit before
which they tremble throughout the rest of Europe, and that enemy well
knows the power and the cunning of its opponents, and watches the
moment of their approaching weakness and inevitable division to wrest
the bloody sceptres from their grasp.
PROLOGUE TO HELLAS.
HERALD OF ETERNITY:
It is the day when all the sons of God
Wait in the roofless senate-house, whose floor
Is Chaos, and the immovable abyss
Frozen by His steadfast word to hyaline
...
The shadow of God, and delegate _5
Of that before whose breath the universe
Is as a print of dew.
Hierarchs and kings
Who from your thrones pinnacled on the past
Sway the reluctant present, ye who sit
Pavilioned on the radiance or the gloom _10
Of mortal thought, which like an exhalation
Steaming from earth, conceals the ... of heaven
Which gave it birth. ... assemble here
Before your Father's throne; the swift decree
Yet hovers, and the fiery incarnation _15
Is yet withheld, clothed in which it shall
annul
The fairest of those wandering isles that gem
The sapphire space of interstellar air,
That green and azure sphere, that earth enwrapped _20
Less in the beauty of its tender light
Than in an atmosphere of living spirit
Which interpenetrating all the ...
it rolls from realm to realm
And age to age, and in its ebb and flow _25
Impels the generations
To their appointed place,
Whilst the high Arbiter
Beholds the strife, and at the appointed time
Sends His decrees veiled in eternal... _30
Within the circuit of this pendent orb
There lies an antique region, on which fell
The dews of thought in the world's golden dawn
Earliest and most benign, and from it sprung
Temples and cities and immortal forms _35
And harmonies of wisdom and of song,
And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts so fair.
And when the sun of its dominion failed,
And when the winter of its glory came,
The winds that stripped it bare blew on and swept _40
That dew into the utmost wildernesses
In wandering clouds of sunny rain that thawed
The unmaternal bosom of the North.
Haste, sons of God, ... for ye beheld,
Reluctant, or consenting, or astonished, _45
The stern decrees go forth, which heaped on Greece
Ruin and degradation and despair.
A fourth now waits: assemble, sons of God,
To speed or to prevent or to suspend,
If, as ye dream, such power be not withheld, _50
The unaccomplished destiny.
NOTE:
_8 your Garnett; yon Forman, Dowden.
...
CHORUS:
The curtain of the Universe
Is rent and shattered,
The splendour-winged worlds disperse
Like wild doves scattered. _55
Space is roofless and bare,
And in the midst a cloudy shrine,
Dark amid thrones of light.
In the blue glow of hyaline
Golden worlds revolve and shine. _60
In ... flight
From every point of the Infinite,
Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread;
And through thunder and darkness dread _65
Light and music are radiated,
And in their pavilioned chariots led
By living wings high overhead
The giant Powers move,
Gloomy or bright as the thrones they fill. _70
...
A chaos of light and motion
Upon that glassy ocean.
...
The senate of the Gods is met,
Each in his rank and station set;
There is silence in the spaces-- _75
Lo! Satan, Christ, and Mahomet
Start from their places!
CHRIST:
Almighty Father!
Low-kneeling at the feet of Destiny
...
There are two fountains in which spirits weep _80
When mortals err, Discord and Slavery named,
And with their bitter dew two Destinies
Filled each their irrevocable urns; the third
Fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and added
Chaos and Death, and slow Oblivion's lymph, _85
And hate and terror, and the poisoned rain
...
The Aurora of the nations. By this brow
Whose pores wept tears of blood, by these wide wounds,
By this imperial crown of agony,
By infamy and solitude and death, _90
For this I underwent, and by the pain
Of pity for those who would ... for me
The unremembered joy of a revenge,
For this I felt--by Plato's sacred light,
Of which my spirit was a burning morrow-- _95
By Greece and all she cannot cease to be.
Her quenchless words, sparks of immortal truth,
Stars of all night--her harmonies and forms,
Echoes and shadows of what Love adores
In thee, I do compel thee, send forth Fate, _100
Thy irrevocable child: let her descend,
A seraph-winged Victory [arrayed]
In tempest of the omnipotence of God
Which sweeps through all things.
From hollow leagues, from Tyranny which arms _105
Adverse miscreeds and emulous anarchies
To stamp, as on a winged serpent's seed,
Upon the name of Freedom; from the storm
Of faction, which like earthquake shakes and sickens
The solid heart of enterprise; from all _110
By which the holiest dreams of highest spirits
Are stars beneath the dawn...
She shall arise
Victorious as the world arose from Chaos!
And as the Heavens and the Earth arrayed
Their presence in the beauty and the light _115
Of Thy first smile, O Father,--as they gather
The spirit of Thy love which paves for them
Their path o'er the abyss, till every sphere
Shall be one living Spirit,--so shall Greece--
SATAN:
Be as all things beneath the empyrean, _120
Mine! Art thou eyeless like old Destiny,
Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thorns?
Whose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed
Which pierces thee! whose throne a chair of scorn;
For seest thou not beneath this crystal floor _125
The innumerable worlds of golden light
Which are my empire, and the least of them
which thou wouldst redeem from me?
Know'st thou not them my portion?
Or wouldst rekindle the ... strife _130
Which our great Father then did arbitrate
Which he assigned to his competing sons
Each his apportioned realm?
Thou Destiny,
Thou who art mailed in the omnipotence
Of Him who tends thee forth, whate'er thy task, _135
Speed, spare not to accomplish, and be mine
Thy trophies, whether Greece again become
The fountain in the desert whence the earth
Shall drink of freedom, which shall give it strength
To suffer, or a gulf of hollow death _140
To swallow all delight, all life, all hope.
Go, thou Vicegerent of my will, no less
Than of the Father's; but lest thou shouldst faint,
The winged hounds, Famine and Pestilence,
Shall wait on thee, the hundred-forked snake _145
Insatiate Superstition still shall...
The earth behind thy steps, and War shall hover
Above, and Fraud shall gape below, and Change
Shall flit before thee on her dragon wings,
Convulsing and consuming, and I add _150
Three vials of the tears which daemons weep
When virtuous spirits through the gate of Death
Pass triumphing over the thorns of life,
Sceptres and crowns, mitres and swords and snares,
Trampling in scorn, like Him and Socrates. _155
The first is Anarchy; when Power and Pleasure,
Glory and science and security,
On Freedom hang like fruit on the green tree,
Then pour it forth, and men shall gather ashes.
The second Tyranny--
CHRIST:
Obdurate spirit! _160
Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.
Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them. _165
True greatness asks not space, true excellence
Lives in the Spirit of all things that live,
Which lends it to the worlds thou callest thine.
...
MAHOMET:
...Haste thou and fill the waning crescent
With beams as keen as those which pierced the shadow _170
Of Christian night rolled back upon the West,
When the orient moon of Islam rode in triumph
From Tmolus to the Acroceraunian snow.
...
Wake, thou Word
Of God, and from the throne of Destiny _175
Even to the utmost limit of thy way
May Triumph
...
Be thou a curse on them whose creed
Divides and multiplies the most high God.
HELLAS.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
MAHMUD.
HASSAN.
DAOOD.
AHASUERUS, A JEW.
CHORUS OF GREEK CAPTIVE WOMEN.
[THE PHANTOM OF MAHOMET II. (OMITTED, EDITION 1822.)]
MESSENGERS, SLAVES, AND ATTENDANTS.
SCENE:
CONSTANTINOPLE.
TIME: SUNSET.
SCENE:
A TERRACE ON THE SERAGLIO.
MAHMUD SLEEPING,
AN INDIAN SLAVE SITTING BESIDE HIS COUCH.
CHORUS OF GREEK CAPTIVE WOMEN:
We strew these opiate flowers
On thy restless pillow,--
They were stripped from Orient bowers,
By the Indian billow.
Be thy sleep _5
Calm and deep,
Like theirs who fell--not ours who weep!
INDIAN:
Away, unlovely dreams!
Away, false shapes of sleep
Be his, as Heaven seems, _10
Clear, and bright, and deep!
Soft as love, and calm as death,
Sweet as a summer night without a breath.
CHORUS:
Sleep, sleep! our song is laden
With the soul of slumber; _15
It was sung by a Samian maiden,
Whose lover was of the number
Who now keep
That calm sleep
Whence none may wake, where none shall weep. _20
INDIAN:
I touch thy temples pale!
I breathe my soul on thee!
And could my prayers avail,
All my joy should be
Dead, and I would live to weep, _25
So thou mightst win one hour of quiet sleep.
CHORUS:
Breathe low, low
The spell of the mighty mistress now!
When Conscience lulls her sated snake,
And Tyrants sleep, let Freedom wake. _30
Breathe low--low
The words which, like secret fire, shall flow
Through the veins of the frozen earth--low, low!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not; _35
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed,--but it returneth!
SEMICHORUS 2:
Yet were life a charnel where
Hope lay coffined with Despair;
Yet were truth a sacred lie, _40
Love were lust--
SEMICHORUS 1:
If Liberty
Lent not life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet's robe to wear,
Love its power to give and bear. _45
CHORUS:
In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
Like vultures frighted from Imaus, _50
Before an earthquake's tread.--
So from Time's tempestuous dawn
Freedom's splendour burst and shone:--
Thermopylae and Marathon
Caught like mountains beacon-lighted, _55
The springing Fire.--The winged glory
On Philippi half-alighted,
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
The quenchless ashes of Milan. _60
From age to age, from man to man,
It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.
Then night fell; and, as from night,
Reassuming fiery flight, _65
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of Heaven and doom.
A second sun arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
From far Atlantis its young beams _70
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine steams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain. _75
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest's warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain-cedar's hair,
And her brood expect the clanging _80
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine:--Freedom, so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
Like Orient mountains lost in day; _85
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings prey,
And in the naked lightenings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
Let Freedom leave--where'er she flies, _90
A Desert, or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.
NOTES:
_77 tempest's]tempests edition 1822.
_87 prey edition 1822; play editions 1839.
SEMICHORUS 1:
With the gifts of gladness
Greece did thy cradle strew; _95
SEMICHORUS 2:
With the tears of sadness
Greece did thy shroud bedew!
SEMICHORUS 1:
With an orphan's affection
She followed thy bier through Time;
SEMICHORUS 2:
And at thy resurrection _100
Reappeareth, like thou, sublime!
SEMICHORUS 1:
If Heaven should resume thee,
To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;
SEMICHORUS 2:
If Hell should entomb thee,
To Hell shall her high hearts bend. _105
SEMICHORUS 1:
If Annihilation--
SEMICHORUS 2:
Dust let her glories be!
And a name and a nation
Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!
INDIAN:
His brow grows darker--breathe not--move not! _110
He starts--he shudders--ye that love not,
With your panting loud and fast,
Have awakened him at last.
MAHMUD [STARTING FROM HIS SLEEP]:
Man the Seraglio-guard! make fast the gate!
What! from a cannonade of three short hours? _115
'Tis false! that breach towards the Bosphorus
Cannot be practicable yet--who stirs?
Stand to the match; that when the foe prevails
One spark may mix in reconciling ruin
The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower _120
Into the gap--wrench off the roof!
[ENTER HASSAN.]
Ha! what!
The truth of day lightens upon my dream
And I am Mahmud still.
HASSAN:
Your Sublime Highness
Is strangely moved.
MAHMUD:
The times do cast strange shadows
On those who watch and who must rule their course, _125
Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,
Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:--and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea, _130
Leaving no figure upon memory's glass.
Would that--no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle
Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
I bade thee summon him:--'tis said his tribe _135
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.
HASSAN:
The Jew of whom I spake is old,--so old
He seems to have outlived a world's decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he;--his hair and beard _140
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift _145
To the winter wind:--but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The Present, and the Past, and the To-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery, _150
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-adamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence _155
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts _160
Which others fear and know not.
MAHMUD:
I would talk
With this old Jew.
HASSAN:
Thy will is even now
Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him _165
Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream
Of Ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle, _170
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
'Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round
Will answer 'Ahasuerus!' If his prayer _175
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmora, and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him _180
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion--but that shout _185
Bodes--
[A SHOUT WITHIN.]
MAHMUD:
Evil, doubtless; Like all human sounds.
Let me converse with spirits.
HASSAN:
That shout again.
MAHMUD:
This Jew whom thou hast summoned--
HASSAN:
Will be here--
MAHMUD:
When the omnipotent hour to which are yoked
He, I, and all things shall compel--enough! _190
Silence those mutineers--that drunken crew,
That crowd about the pilot in the storm.
Ay! strike the foremost shorter by a head!
They weary me, and I have need of rest.
Kinks are like stars--they rise and set, they have _195
The worship of the world, but no repose.
[EXEUNT SEVERALLY.]
CHORUS:
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away. _200
But they are still immortal
Who, through birth's orient portal
And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
In the brief dust and light _205
Gathered around their chariots as they go;
New shapes they still may weave,
New gods, new laws receive,
Bright or dim are they as the robes they last
On Death's bare ribs had cast. _210
A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror, came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him _215
Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with light;
Hell, Sin, and Slavery came,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed, until their Lord had taken flight; _220
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set:
While blazoned as on Heaven's immortal noon
The cross leads generations on.
Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep _225
From one whose dreams are Paradise
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And Day peers forth with her blank eyes;
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The Powers of earth and air _230
Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem:
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them;
Our hills and seas and streams, _235
Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years.
[ENTER MAHMUD, HASSAN, DAOOD, AND OTHERS.]
MAHMUD:
More gold? our ancestors bought gold with victory,
And shall I sell it for defeat?
DAOOD:
The Janizars _240
Clamour for pay.
MAHMUD:
Go! bid them pay themselves
With Christian blood! Are there no Grecian virgins
Whose shrieks and spasms and tears they may enjoy?
No infidel children to impale on spears?
No hoary priests after that Patriarch _245
Who bent the curse against his country's heart,
Which clove his own at last? Go! bid them kill,
Blood is the seed of gold.
DAOOD:
It has been sown,
And yet the harvest to the sicklemen
Is as a grain to each.
MAHMUD:
Then, take this signet, _250
Unlock the seventh chamber in which lie
The treasures of victorious Solyman,--
An empire's spoil stored for a day of ruin.
O spirit of my sires! is it not come?
The prey-birds and the wolves are gorged and sleep; _255
But these, who spread their feast on the red earth,
Hunger for gold, which fills not.--See them fed;
Then, lead them to the rivers of fresh death.
[EXIT DAOOD.]
O miserable dawn, after a night
More glorious than the day which it usurped! _260
O faith in God! O power on earth! O word
Of the great prophet, whose o'ershadowing wings
Darkened the thrones and idols of the West,
Now bright!--For thy sake cursed be the hour,
Even as a father by an evil child, _265
When the orient moon of Islam rolled in triumph
From Caucasus to White Ceraunia!
Ruin above, and anarchy below;
Terror without, and treachery within;
The Chalice of destruction full, and all _270
Thirsting to drink; and who among us dares
To dash it from his lips? and where is Hope?
HASSAN:
The lamp of our dominion still rides high;
One God is God--Mahomet is His prophet.
Four hundred thousand Moslems, from the limits _275
Of utmost Asia, irresistibly
Throng, like full clouds at the Sirocco's cry;
But not like them to weep their strength in tears:
They bear destroying lightning, and their step
Wakes earthquake to consume and overwhelm, _280
And reign in ruin. Phrygian Olympus,
Tmolus, and Latmos, and Mycale, roughen
With horrent arms; and lofty ships even now,
Like vapours anchored to a mountain's edge,
Freighted with fire and whirlwind, wait at Scala _285
The convoy of the ever-veering wind.
Samos is drunk with blood;--the Greek has paid
Brief victory with swift loss and long despair.
The false Moldavian serfs fled fast and far
When the fierce shout of 'Allah-illa-Allah!' _290
Rose like the war-cry of the northern wind
Which kills the sluggish clouds, and leaves a flock
Of wild swans struggling with the naked storm.
So were the lost Greeks on the Danube's day!
If night is mute, yet the returning sun _295
Kindles the voices of the morning birds;
Nor at thy bidding less exultingly
Than birds rejoicing in the golden day,
The Anarchies of Africa unleash
Their tempest-winged cities of the sea, _300
To speak in thunder to the rebel world.
Like sulphurous clouds, half-shattered by the storm,
They sweep the pale Aegean, while the Queen
Of Ocean, bound upon her island-throne,
Far in the West, sits mourning that her sons _305
Who frown on Freedom spare a smile for thee:
Russia still hovers, as an eagle might
Within a cloud, near which a kite and crane
Hang tangled in inextricable fight,
To stoop upon the victor;--for she fears _310
The name of Freedom, even as she hates thine.
But recreant Austria loves thee as the Grave
Loves Pestilence, and her slow dogs of war
Fleshed with the chase, come up from Italy,
And howl upon their limits; for they see _315
The panther, Freedom, fled to her old cover,
Amid seas and mountains, and a mightier brood
Crouch round. What Anarch wears a crown or mitre,
Or bears the sword, or grasps the key of gold,
Whose friends are not thy friends, whose foes thy foes? _320
Our arsenals and our armouries are full;
Our forts defy assault; ten thousand cannon
Lie ranged upon the beach, and hour by hour
Their earth-convulsing wheels affright the city;
The galloping of fiery steeds makes pale _325
The Christian merchant; and the yellow Jew
Hides his hoard deeper in the faithless earth.
Like clouds, and like the shadows of the clouds,
Over the hills of Anatolia,
Swift in wide troops the Tartar chivalry _330
Sweep;--the far flashing of their starry lances
Reverberates the dying light of day.
We have one God, one King, one Hope, one Law;
But many-headed Insurrection stands
Divided in itself, and soon must fall. _335
NOTES:
_253 spoil edition 1822; spoils editions 1839.
_279 bear edition 1822; have editions 1839.
_322 assault edition 1822; assaults editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
Proud words, when deeds come short, are seasonable:
Look, Hassan, on yon crescent moon, emblazoned
Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud
Which leads the rear of the departing day;
Wan emblem of an empire fading now! _340
See how it trembles in the blood-red air,
And like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent
Shrinks on the horizon's edge, while, from above,
One star with insolent and victorious light
Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams, _345
Like arrows through a fainting antelope,
Strikes its weak form to death.
HASSAN:
Even as that moon
Renews itself--
MAHMUD:
Shall we be not renewed!
Far other bark than ours were needed now
To stem the torrent of descending time: _350
The Spirit that lifts the slave before his lord
Stalks through the capitals of armed kings,
And spreads his ensign in the wilderness:
Exults in chains; and, when the rebel falls,
Cries like the blood of Abel from the dust; _355
And the inheritors of the earth, like beasts
When earthquake is unleashed, with idiot fear
Cower in their kingly dens--as I do now.
What were Defeat when Victory must appal?
Or Danger, when Security looks pale?-- _360
How said the messenger--who, from the fort
Islanded in the Danube, saw the battle
Of Bucharest?--that--
NOTES:
_351 his edition 1822; its editions 1839.
_356 of the earth edition 1822; of earth editions 1839.
HASSAN:
Ibrahim's scimitar
Drew with its gleam swift victory from Heaven,
To burn before him in the night of battle-- _365
A light and a destruction.
MAHMUD:
Ay! the day
Was ours: but how?--
HASSAN:
The light Wallachians,
The Arnaut, Servian, and Albanian allies
Fled from the glance of our artillery
Almost before the thunderstone alit. _370
One half the Grecian army made a bridge
Of safe and slow retreat, with Moslem dead;
The other--
MAHMUD:
Speak--tremble not.--
HASSAN:
Islanded
By victor myriads, formed in hollow square
With rough and steadfast front, and thrice flung back _375
The deluge of our foaming cavalry;
Thrice their keen wedge of battle pierced our lines.
Our baffled army trembled like one man
Before a host, and gave them space; but soon,
From the surrounding hills, the batteries blazed, _380
Kneading them down with fire and iron rain:
Yet none approached; till, like a field of corn
Under the hook of the swart sickleman,
The band, intrenched in mounds of Turkish dead,
Grew weak and few.--Then said the Pacha, 'Slaves, _385
Render yourselves--they have abandoned you--
What hope of refuge, or retreat, or aid?
We grant your lives.' 'Grant that which is thine own!'
Cried one, and fell upon his sword and died!
Another--'God, and man, and hope abandon me; _390
But I to them, and to myself, remain
Constant:'--he bowed his head, and his heart burst.
A third exclaimed, 'There is a refuge, tyrant,
Where thou darest not pursue, and canst not harm
Shouldst thou pursue; there we shall meet again.' _395
Then held his breath, and, after a brief spasm,
The indignant spirit cast its mortal garment
Among the slain--dead earth upon the earth!
So these survivors, each by different ways,
Some strange, all sudden, none dishonourable, _400
Met in triumphant death; and when our army
Closed in, while yet wonder, and awe, and shame
Held back the base hyaenas of the battle
That feed upon the dead and fly the living,
One rose out of the chaos of the slain: _405
And if it were a corpse which some dread spirit
Of the old saviours of the land we rule
Had lifted in its anger, wandering by;--
Or if there burned within the dying man
Unquenchable disdain of death, and faith _410
Creating what it feigned;--I cannot tell--
But he cried, 'Phantoms of the free, we come!
Armies of the Eternal, ye who strike
To dust the citadels of sanguine kings,
And shake the souls throned on their stony hearts, _415
And thaw their frostwork diadems like dew;--
O ye who float around this clime, and weave
The garment of the glory which it wears,
Whose fame, though earth betray the dust it clasped,
Lies sepulchred in monumental thought;-- _420
Progenitors of all that yet is great,
Ascribe to your bright senate, O accept
In your high ministrations, us, your sons--
Us first, and the more glorious yet to come!
And ye, weak conquerors! giants who look pale _425
When the crushed worm rebels beneath your tread,
The vultures and the dogs, your pensioners tame,
Are overgorged; but, like oppressors, still
They crave the relic of Destruction's feast.
The exhalations and the thirsty winds _430
Are sick with blood; the dew is foul with death;
Heaven's light is quenched in slaughter: thus, where'er
Upon your camps, cities, or towers, or fleets,
The obscene birds the reeking remnants cast
Of these dead limbs,--upon your streams and mountains, _435
Upon your fields, your gardens, and your housetops,
Where'er the winds shall creep, or the clouds fly,
Or the dews fall, or the angry sun look down
With poisoned light--Famine, and Pestilence,
And Panic, shall wage war upon our side! _440
Nature from all her boundaries is moved
Against ye: Time has found ye light as foam.
The Earth rebels; and Good and Evil stake
Their empire o'er the unborn world of men
On this one cast;--but ere the die be thrown, _445
The renovated genius of our race,
Proud umpire of the impious game, descends,
A seraph-winged Victory, bestriding
The tempest of the Omnipotence of God,
Which sweeps all things to their appointed doom, _450
And you to oblivion!'--More he would have said,
But--
NOTE:
_384 band edition 1822; bands editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
Died--as thou shouldst ore thy lips had painted
Their ruin in the hues of our success.
A rebel's crime, gilt with a rebel's tongue!
Your heart is Greek, Hassan.
HASSAN:
It may be so: _455
A spirit not my own wrenched me within,
And I have spoken words I fear and hate;
Yet would I die for--
MAHMUD:
Live! oh live! outlive
Me and this sinking empire. But the fleet--
HASSAN:
Alas!--
MAHMUD:
The fleet which, like a flock of clouds _460
Chased by the wind, flies the insurgent banner!
Our winged castles from their merchant ships!
Our myriads before their weak pirate bands!
Our arms before their chains! our years of empire
Before their centuries of servile fear! _465
Death is awake! Repulse is on the waters!
They own no more the thunder-bearing banner
Of Mahmud; but, like hounds of a base breed,
Gorge from a stranger's hand, and rend their master.
NOTE:
_466 Repulse is "Shelley, Errata", edition 1822; Repulsed edition 1822.
HASSAN:
Latmos, and Ampelos, and Phanae saw _470
The wreck--
MAHMUD:
The caves of the Icarian isles
Told each to the other in loud mockery,
And with the tongue as of a thousand echoes,
First of the sea-convulsing fight--and, then,--
Thou darest to speak--senseless are the mountains: _475
Interpret thou their voice!
NOTE:
_472 Told Errata, Wms. transcript; Hold edition 1822.
HASSAN:
My presence bore
A part in that day's shame. The Grecian fleet
Bore down at daybreak from the North, and hung
As multitudinous on the ocean line,
As cranes upon the cloudless Thracian wind. _480
Our squadron, convoying ten thousand men,
Was stretching towards Nauplia when the battle
Was kindled.--
First through the hail of our artillery
The agile Hydriote barks with press of sail _485
Dashed:--ship to ship, cannon to cannon, man
To man were grappled in the embrace of war,
Inextricable but by death or victory.
The tempest of the raging fight convulsed
To its crystalline depths that stainless sea, _490
And shook Heaven's roof of golden morning clouds,
Poised on an hundred azure mountain-isles.
In the brief trances of the artillery
One cry from the destroyed and the destroyer
Rose, and a cloud of desolation wrapped _495
The unforeseen event, till the north wind
Sprung from the sea, lifting the heavy veil
Of battle-smoke--then victory--victory!
For, as we thought, three frigates from Algiers
Bore down from Naxos to our aid, but soon _500
The abhorred cross glimmered behind, before,
Among, around us; and that fatal sign
Dried with its beams the strength in Moslem hearts,
As the sun drinks the dew.--What more? We fled!--
Our noonday path over the sanguine foam _505
Was beaconed,--and the glare struck the sun pale,--
By our consuming transports: the fierce light
Made all the shadows of our sails blood-red,
And every countenance blank. Some ships lay feeding
The ravening fire, even to the water's level; _510
Some were blown up; some, settling heavily,
Sunk; and the shrieks of our companions died
Upon the wind, that bore us fast and far,
Even after they were dead. Nine thousand perished!
We met the vultures legioned in the air _515
Stemming the torrent of the tainted wind;
They, screaming from their cloudy mountain-peaks,
Stooped through the sulphurous battle-smoke and perched
Each on the weltering carcase that we loved,
Like its ill angel or its damned soul, _520
Riding upon the bosom of the sea.
We saw the dog-fish hastening to their feast.
Joy waked the voiceless people of the sea,
And ravening Famine left his ocean cave
To dwell with War, with us, and with Despair. _525
We met night three hours to the west of Patmos,
And with night, tempest--
NOTES:
_503 in edition 1822; of editions 1839.
_527 And edition 1822; As editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
Cease!
[ENTER A MESSENGER.]
MESSENGER:
Your Sublime Highness,
That Christian hound, the Muscovite Ambassador,
Has left the city.--If the rebel fleet
Had anchored in the port, had victory _530
Crowned the Greek legions in the Hippodrome,
Panic were tamer.--Obedience and Mutiny,
Like giants in contention planet-struck,
Stand gazing on each other.--There is peace
In Stamboul.--
MAHMUD:
Is the grave not calmer still? _535
Its ruins shall be mine.
HASSAN:
Fear not the Russian:
The tiger leagues not with the stag at bay
Against the hunter.--Cunning, base, and cruel,
He crouches, watching till the spoil be won,
And must be paid for his reserve in blood. _540
After the war is fought, yield the sleek Russian
That which thou canst not keep, his deserved portion
Of blood, which shall not flow through streets and fields,
Rivers and seas, like that which we may win,
But stagnate in the veins of Christian slaves! _545
[ENTER SECOND MESSENGER.]
SECOND MESSENGER:
Nauplia, Tripolizza, Mothon, Athens,
Navarin, Artas, Monembasia,
Corinth, and Thebes are carried by assault,
And every Islamite who made his dogs
Fat with the flesh of Galilean slaves _550
Passed at the edge of the sword: the lust of blood,
Which made our warriors drunk, is quenched in death;
But like a fiery plague breaks out anew
In deeds which make the Christian cause look pale
In its own light. The garrison of Patras _555
Has store but for ten days, nor is there hope
But from the Briton: at once slave and tyrant,
His wishes still are weaker than his fears,
Or he would sell what faith may yet remain
From the oaths broke in Genoa and in Norway; _560
And if you buy him not, your treasury
Is empty even of promises--his own coin.
The freedman of a western poet-chief
Holds Attica with seven thousand rebels,
And has beat back the Pacha of Negropont: _565
The aged Ali sits in Yanina
A crownless metaphor of empire:
His name, that shadow of his withered might,
Holds our besieging army like a spell
In prey to famine, pest, and mutiny; _570
He, bastioned in his citadel, looks forth
Joyless upon the sapphire lake that mirrors
The ruins of the city where he reigned
Childless and sceptreless. The Greek has reaped
The costly harvest his own blood matured, _575
Not the sower, Ali--who has bought a truce
From Ypsilanti with ten camel-loads
Of Indian gold.
NOTE:
_563 freedman edition 1822; freeman editions 1839.
[ENTER A THIRD MESSENGER.]
MAHMUD:
What more?
THIRD MESSENGER:
The Christian tribes
Of Lebanon and the Syrian wilderness
Are in revolt;--Damascus, Hems, Aleppo _580
Tremble;--the Arab menaces Medina,
The Aethiop has intrenched himself in Sennaar,
And keeps the Egyptian rebel well employed,
Who denies homage, claims investiture
As price of tardy aid. Persia demands _585
The cities on the Tigris, and the Georgians
Refuse their living tribute. Crete and Cyprus,
Like mountain-twins that from each other's veins
Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake-spasm,
Shake in the general fever. Through the city, _590
Like birds before a storm, the Santons shriek,
And prophesyings horrible and new
Are heard among the crowd: that sea of men
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Dervise, learned in the Koran, preaches _595
That it is written how the sins of Islam
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West,
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that Spirit _600
In which all live and are. Ominous signs
Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky:
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;
It has rained blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord. _605
The army encamped upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time
Cast on the mirror of the night. While yet _610
The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm
Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the Spirit of the Plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents;
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead. _615
The last news from the camp is, that a thousand
Have sickened, and--
[ENTER A FOURTH MESSENGER.]
MAHMUD:
And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumour, speak!
FOURTH MESSENGER:
One comes
Fainting with toil, covered with foam and blood:
He stood, he says, on Chelonites' _620
Promontory, which o'erlooks the isles that groan
Under the Briton's frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon,
When as the wandering clouds unveiled or hid
Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets _625
Stalk through the night in the horizon's glimmer,
Mingling fierce thunders and sulphureous gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco _630
Awoke, and drove his flock of thunder-clouds
Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objects--save that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dreamed he saw, the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war, _635
With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorred cross--
NOTE:
_620 on Chelonites']on Chelonites "Errata";
upon Clelonite's edition 1822;
upon Clelonit's editions 1839.
[ENTER AN ATTENDANT.]
ATTENDANT:
Your Sublime Highness,
The Jew, who--
MAHMUD:
Could not come more seasonably:
Bid him attend. I'll hear no more! too long _640
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge _645
Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not in whose hand we are.
[EXEUNT.]
SEMICHORUS 1:
Would I were the winged cloud
Of a tempest swift and loud!
I would scorn _650
The smile of morn
And the wave where the moonrise is born!
I would leave
The spirits of eve
A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave _655
From other threads than mine!
Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
Who would? Not I.
NOTE:
_657 the deep blue "Errata", Wms. transcript; the blue edition 1822.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Whither to fly?
SEMICHORUS 1:
Where the rocks that gird th' Aegean _660
Echo to the battle paean
Of the free--
I would flee
A tempestuous herald of victory!
My golden rain
For the Grecian slain _665
Should mingle in tears with the bloody main,
And my solemn thunder-knell
Should ring to the world the passing-bell
Of Tyranny! _670
SEMICHORUS 2:
Ah king! wilt thou chain
The rack and the rain?
Wilt thou fetter the lightning and hurricane?
The storms are free,
But we-- _675