The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Yielding one only response, at each pause

  565

  In most familiar cadence, with the howl

  The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams

  Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river,

  Foaming and hurrying o’er its rugged path,

  Fell into that immeasurable void

  570

  Scattering its waters to the passing winds.

  Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine

  And torrent, were not all;—one silent nook

  Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain,

  Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks,

  575

  It overlooked in its serenity

  The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars.

  It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile

  Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped

  The fissured stones with its entwining arms,

  580

  And did embower with leaves for ever green,

  And berries dark, the smooth and even space

  Of its inviolated floor, and here

  The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore,

  In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay,

  585

  Red, yellow, or ethereally pale,

  Rivals the pride of summer. ’Tis the haunt

  Of every gentle wind, whose breath can teach

  The wilds to love tranquillity. One step,

  One human step alone, has ever broken

  590

  The stillness of its solitude:—one voice

  Alone inspired its echoes;—even that voice

  Which hither came, floating among the winds,

  And led the loveliest among human forms

  To make their wild haunts the depository

  595

  Of all the grace and beauty that endued

  Its motions, render up its majesty,

  Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm,

  And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould,

  Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss,

  600

  Commit the colours of that varying cheek,

  That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.

  The dim and hornèd moon hung low, and poured

  A sea of lustre on the horizon’s verge

  That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist

  605

  Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank

  Wan moonlight even to fulness: not a star

  Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds,

  Danger’s grim playmates, on that precipice

  Slept, clasped in his embrace.—O, storm of death!

  610

  Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night:

  And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still

  Guiding its irresistible career

  In thy devastating omnipotence,

  Art king of this frail world, from the red field

  615

  Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital,

  The patriot’s sacred couch, the snowy bed

  Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne,

  A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls

  His brother Death. A rare and regal prey

  620

  He hath prepared, prowling around the world;

  Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men

  Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms,

  Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine

  The unheeded tribute of a broken heart.

  625

  When on the threshold of the green recess

  The wanderer’s footsteps fell, he knew that death

  Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,

  Did he resign his high and holy soul

  To images of the majestic past,

  630

  That paused within his passive being now,

  Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe

  Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place

  His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk

  Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone

  635

  Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest,

  Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink

  Of that obscurest chasm;—and thus he lay,

  Surrendering to their final impulses

  The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,

  640

  The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear

  Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,

  And his own being unalloyed by pain,

  Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed

  The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there

  645

  At peace, and faintly smiling:—his last sight

  Was the great moon, which o’er the western line

  Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,

  With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed

  To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills

  650

  It rests, and still as the divided frame

  Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet’s blood,

  That ever beat in mystic sympathy

  With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still:

  And when two lessening points of light alone

  655

  Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp

  Of his faint respiration scarce did stir

  The stagnate night:—till the minutest ray

  Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.

  It paused—it fluttered. But when heaven remained

  660

  Utterly black, the murky shades involved

  An image, silent, cold, and motionless,

  As their own voiceless earth and vacant air.

  Even as a vapour fed with golden beams

  That ministered on sunlight, ere the west

  665

  Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame—

  No sense, no motion, no divinity—

  A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings

  The breath of heaven did wander—a bright stream

  Once fed with many-voicèd waves—a dream

  Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever,

  Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.

  O, for Medea’s wondrous alchemy,

  Which wheresoe’er it fell made the earth gleam

  With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale

  675

  From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God,

  Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice

  Which but one living man has drained, who now,

  Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels

  No proud exemption in the blighting curse

  680

  He bears, over the world wanders for ever,

  Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream

  Of dark magician in his visioned cave,

  Raking the cinders of a crucible

  For life and power, even when his feeble hand

  685

  Shakes in its last decay, were the true law

  Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled

  Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn

  Robes in its golden beams,—ah! thou hast fled!

  The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,

  690

  The child of grace and genius. Heartless things

  Are done and said i’ the world, and many worms

  And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth

  From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,

  In vesper low or joyous orison,

  695

  Lifts still its solemn voice:—but thou art fled—

  Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes

  Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee

  Been purest ministers,
who are, alas!

  Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips

  700

  So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes

  That image sleep in death, upon that form

  Yet safe from the worm’s outrage, let no tear

  Be shed—not even in thought. Nor, when those hues

  Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,

  705

  Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone

  In the frail pauses of this simple strain,

  Let not high verse, mourning the memory

  Of that which is no more, or painting’s woe

  Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery

  710

  Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence,

  And all the shows o’ the world are frail and vain

  To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.

  It is a woe too ‘deep for tears,’ when all

  Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,

  715

  Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves

  Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,

  The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;

  But pale despair and cold tranquillity,

  Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,

  720

  Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

  NOTE ON ALASTOR, BY MRS. SHELLEY

  Alastor is written in a very different tone from Queen Mab. In the latter, Shelley poured out all the cherished speculations of his youth—all the irrepressible emotions of sympathy, censure, and hope, to which the present suffering, and what he considers the proper destiny, of his fellow-creatures, gave birth. Alastor, on the contrary, contains an individual interest only. A very few years, with their attendant events, had checked the ardour of Shelley’s hopes, though he still thought them well grounded, and that to advance their fulfilment was the noblest task man could achieve.

  This is neither the time nor place to speak of the misfortunes that chequered his life. It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own conscience; while the various ills of poverty and loss of friends brought home to him the sad realities of life. Physical suffering had also considerable influence in causing him to turn his eyes inward; inclining him rather to brood over the thoughts and emotions of his own soul than to glance abroad, and to make, as in Queen Mab, the whole universe the object and subject of his song. In the Spring of 1815 an eminent physician pronounced that he was dying rapidly of a consumption; abscesses were formed on his lungs, and he suffered acute spasms. Suddenly a complete change took place; and, though through life he was a martyr to pain and debility, every symptom of pulmonary disease vanished. His nerves, which nature had formed sensitive to an unexampled degree, were rendered still more susceptible by the state of his health.

  As soon as the peace of 1814 had opened the Continent, he went abroad. He visited some of the more magnificent scenes of Switzerland, and returned to England from Lucerne, by the Reuss and the Rhine. The river-navigation enchanted him. In his favourite poem of Thalaba, his imagination had been excited by a description of such a voyage. In the summer of 1815, after a tour along the southern coast of Devonshire and a visit to Clifton, he rented a house on Bishopgate Heath, on the borders of Windsor Forest, where he enjoyed several months of comparative health and tranquil happiness. The later summer months were warm and dry. Accompanied by a few friends, he visited the source of the Thames, making a voyage in a wherry from Windsor to Cricklade. His beautiful stanzas in the churchyard of Lechlade were written on that occasion. Alastor was composed on his return. He spent his days under the oak-shades of Windsor Great Park; and the magnificent wood land was a fitting study to inspire the various descriptions of forest-scenery we find in the poem.

  None of Shelley’s poems is more characteristic than this. The solemn spirit that reigns throughout, the worship of the majesty of nature, the broodings of a poet’s heart in solitude—the mingling of the exulting joy which the various aspects of the visible universe inspires with the sad and struggling pangs which human passion imparts—give a touching interest to the whole. The death which he had often contemplated during the last months as certain and near he here represented in such colours as had, in his lonely musings, soothed his soul to peace. The versification sustains the solemn spirit which breathes throughout: it is peculiarly melodious. The poem ought rather to be considered didactic than narrative: it was the outpouring of his own emotions, embodied in the purest form he could conceive, painted in the ideal hues which his brilliant imagination inspired, and softened by the recent anticipation of death.

  THE DAEMON OF THE WORLD

  A FRAGMENT

  PART I

  Nec tantum prodere vati,

  Quantum scire licet. Venit aetas omnis in unam

  Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus.

  LUCAN, Phars. v. 176.

  How wonderful is Death,

  Death and his brother Sleep!

  One pale as yonder wan and hornèd moon,

  With lips of lurid blue,

  5

  The other glowing like the vital morn,

  When throned on ocean’s wave

  It breathes over the world:

  Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!

  Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton,

  10

  Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,

  To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne

  Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form,

  Which love and admiration cannot view

  Without a beating heart, whose azure veins

  15

  Steal like dark streams along a field of snow,

  Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed

  In light of some sublimest mind, decay?

  Nor putrefaction’s breath

  Leave aught of this pure spectacle

  20

  But loathsomeness and ruin?—

  Spare aught but a dark theme,

  On which the lightest heart might moralize?

  Or is it but that downy-wingèd slumbers

  Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids

  25

  To watch their own repose?

  Will they, when morning’s beam

  Flows through those wells of light,

  Seek far from noise and day some western cave,

  Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds

  30

  A lulling murmur weave?—

  Ianthe doth not sleep

  The dreamless sleep of death:

  Nor in her moonlight chamber silently

  Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb,

  35

  Or mark her delicate cheek

  With interchange of hues mock the broad moon,

  Outwatching weary night,

  Without assured reward.

  Her dewy eyes are closed;

  40

  On their translucent lids, whose texture fine

  Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below

  With unapparent fire,

  The baby Sleep is pillowed:

  Her golden tresses shade

  45

  The bosom’s stainless pride,

  Twining like tendrils of the parasite

  Around a marble column.

  Hark! whence that rushing sound?

  ’Tis like a wondrous strain that sweeps

  50

  Around a lonely ruin

  When west winds sigh and evening waves respond

  In whispers from the shore:

  ’Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes

  Which from the unseen lyres of dells and groves

  55

  The genii of the breezes sweep.

  Floating on waves of music and of light,

  The chariot of the Daemon of the World

  Descends in
silent power:

  Its shape reposed within: slight as some cloud

  60

  That catches but the palest tinge of day

  When evening yields to night,

  Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue

  Its transitory robe.

  Four shapeless shadows bright and beautiful

  65

  Draw that strange car of glory, reins of light

  Check their unearthly speed; they stop and fold

  Their wings of braided air:

  The Daemon leaning from the ethereal car

  Gazed on the slumbering maid.

  70

  Human eye hath ne’er beheld

  A shape so wild, so bright, so beautiful,

  As that which o’er the maiden’s charmèd sleep

  Waving a starry wand,

  Hung like a mist of light.

  Such sounds as breathed around like odorous winds

  75

  Of wakening spring arose,

  Filling the chamber and the moonlight sky.

  Maiden, the world’s supremest spirit

  Beneath the shadow of her wings

  80

  Folds all thy memory doth inherit

  From ruin of divinest things,

  Feelings that lure thee to betray,

  And light of thoughts that pass away.

  For thou hast earned a mighty boon,

  85

  The truths which wisest poets see

  Dimly, thy mind may make its own,

  Rewarding its own majesty,

  Entranced in some diviner mood

  Of self-oblivious solitude.

  90

  Custom, and Faith, and Power thou spurnest;

  From hate and awe thy heart is free;

  Ardent and pure as day thou burnest,

  For dark and cold mortality

  A living light, to cheer it long,

  95

  The watch-fires of the world among.