70
And vex the nightingales in every dell.
MARENGHI1
I
LET those who pine in pride or in revenge,
Or think that ill for ill should be repaid,
Who barter wrong for wrong, until the exchange
Ruins the merchants of such thriftless trade,
5
Visit the tower of Vado, and unlearn
Such bitter faith beside Marenghi’s urn.
II
A massy tower yet overhangs the town,
A scattered group of ruined dwellings now.…
· · · · · · ·
III
Another scene ere wise Etruria knew
10
Its second ruin through internal strife,
And tyrants through the breach of discord threw
The chain which binds and kills. As death to life,
As winter to fair flowers (though some be poison)
So Monarchy succeeds to Freedom’s foison.
IV
15
In Pisa’s church a cup of sculptured gold
Was brimming with the blood of feuds forsworn:
A Sacrament more holy ne’er of old
Etrurians mingled mid the shades forlorn
Of moon-illumined forests, when.…
V
20
And reconciling factions wet their lips
With that dread wine, and swear to keep each spirit
Undarkened by their country’s last eclipse.…
· · · · · · ·
VI
Was Florence the liberticide? that band
Of free and glorious brothers who had planted,
25
Like a green isle mid Aethiopian sand,
A nation amid slaveries, disenchanted
Of many impious faiths—wise, just—do they,
Does Florence, gorge the sated tyrants’ prey?
VII
O foster-nurse of man’s abandoned glory,
30
Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour;
Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story,
As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender:—
The light-invested angel Poesy
Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee.
VIII
35
And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught
By loftiest meditations; marble knew
The sculptor’s fearless soul—and as he wrought,
The grace of his own power and freedom grew.
And more than all, heroic, just, sublime,
40
Thou wert among the false … was this thy crime?
IX
Yes; and on Pisa’s marble walls the twine
Of direst weeds hangs garlanded—the snake
Inhabits its wrecked palaces;—in thine
A beast of subtler venom now doth make
45
Its lair, and sits amid their glories overthrown,
And thus thy victim’s fate is as thine own.
X
The sweetest flowers are ever frail and rare,
And love and freedom blossom but to wither;
And good and ill like vines entangled are,
50
So that their grapes may oft be plucked together;—
Divide the vintage ere thou drink, then make
Thy heart rejoice for dead Marenghi’s sake.
Xa
[Albert] Marenghi was a Florentine;
If he had wealth, or children, or a wife
55
Or friends, [or farm] or cherished thoughts which twine
The sights and sounds of home with life’s own life
Of these he was despoiled and Florence sent.…
· · · · ·
XI
No record of his crime remains in story,
But if the morning bright as evening shone,
60
It was some high and holy deed, by glory
Pursued into forgetfulness, which won
From the blind crowd he made secure and free
The patriot’s meed, toil, death, and infamy
XII
For when by sound of trumpet was declared
65
A price upon his life, and there was set
A penalty of blood on all who shared
So much of water with him as might wet
His lips, which speech divided not—he went
Alone, as you may guess, to banishment.
XIII
70
Amid the mountains, like a hunted beast,
He hid himself, and hunger, toil, and cold,
Month after month endured; it was a feast
Whene’er he found those globes of deep-red gold
Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,
75
Suspended in their emerald atmosphere.
XIV
And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,
Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,
All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,
And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,
80
And where the huge and speckled aloe made,
Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,—
XV
He housed himself. There is a point of strand
Near Vado’s tower and town; and on one side
The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,
85
Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide,
And on the other, creeps eternally,
Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea.
XVI
Here the earth’s breath is pestilence, and few
But things whose nature is at war with life—
90
Snakes and ill worms—endure its mortal dew.
The trophies of the clime’s victorious strife—
And ringed horns which the buffalo did wear,
And the wolf’s dark gray scalp who tracked him there,
XVII
And at the utmost point … stood there
95
The relics of a reed-inwoven cot,
Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer
Had lived seven days there: the pursuit was hot
When he was cold. The birds that were his grave
Fell dead after their feast in Vado’s wave.
XVIII
100
There must have burned within Marenghi’s breast
That fire, more warm and bright than life and hope,
(Which to the martyr makes his dungeon.…
More joyous than free heaven’s majestic cope
To his oppressor), warring with decay,—
105
Or he could ne’er have lived years, day by day.
XIX
Nor was his state so lone as you might think.
He had tamed every newt and snake and toad,
And every seagull which sailed down to drink
Those freshes ere the death-mist went abroad.
110
And each one, with peculiar talk and play,
Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.
XX
And the marsh-meteors, like tame beasts, at night
Came licking with blue tongues his veinèd feet;
And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright,
115
In many entangled figures quaint and sweet
To some enchanted music they would dance—
Until they vanished at the first moon-glance.
XXI
He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed
The summer dew-globes in the golden dawn;
120
And, ere the hoar-frost languished, he could read
Its pictured path, as on bare spots of lawn
Its delicate brief touch in si
lver weaves
The likeness of the wood’s remembered leaves.
XXII
And many a fresh Spring morn would he awaken—
125
While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron
Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken
Of mountains and blue isles which did environ
With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea,—
And feel liberty.
XXIII
130
And in the moonless nights, when the dun ocean
Heaved underneath wide heaven, star-impearled,
Starting from dreams …
Communed with the immeasurable world;
And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated,
135
Till his mind grew like that it contemplated.
XXIV
His food was the wild fig and strawberry;
The milky pine-nuts which the autumn-blast
Shakes into the tall grass; or such small fry
As from the sea by winter-storms are cast;
140
And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found
Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.
XXV
And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made
His solitude less dark. When memory came
(For years gone by leave each a deepening shade),
145
His spirit basked in its internal flame,—
As, when the black storm hurries round at night,
The fisher basks beside his red firelight.
XXVI
Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and errors,
Like billows unawakened by the wind,
150
Slept in Marenghi still; but that all terrors,
Weakness, and doubt, had withered in his mind.
His couch …
· · · · · · ·
XXVII
And, when he saw beneath the sunset’s planet
A black ship walk over the crimson ocean,—
155
Its pennon streaming on the blasts that fan it,
Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,
Like the dark ghost of the unburied even
Striding athwart the orange-coloured heaven,—
XXVIII
The thought of his own kind who made the soul
160
Which sped that wingèd shape through night and day,—
The thought of his own country …
SONNET
LIFT not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
5
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
10
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
FRAGMENT: TO BYRON
O MIGHTY mind, in whose deep stream this age
Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,
Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?
FRAGMENT: APOSTROPHE TO SILENCE
SILENCE! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou
Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged
Of one abyss, where life, and truth, and joy
Are swallowed up—yet spare me, Spirit, pity me,
5
Until the sounds I hear become my soul,
And it has left these faint and weary limbs,
To track along the lapses of the air
This wandering melody until it rests
Among lone mountains in some …
FRAGMENT: THE LAKE’S MARGIN
THE fierce beasts of the woods and wildernesses
Track not the steps of him who drinks of it;
For the light breezes, which for ever fleet
Around its margin, heap the sand thereon.
FRAGMENT: ‘MY HEAD IS WILD WITH WEEPING’
MY head is wild with weeping for a grief
Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.
I walk into the air (but no relief
To seek,—or haply, if I sought, to find;
5
It came unsought);—to wonder that a chief
Among men’s spirits should be cold and blind.
FRAGMENT: THE VINE-SHROUD
FLOURISHING vine, whose kindling clusters glow
Beneath the autumnal sun, none taste of thee;
For thou dost shroud a ruin, and below
The rotting bones of dead antiquity.
NOTE ON POEMS OF 1818, BY MRS. SHELLEY
WE often hear of persons disappointed by a first visit to Italy. This was not Shelley’s case. The aspect of its nature, its sunny sky, its majestic storms, of the luxuriant vegetation of the country, and the noble marble-built cities, enchanted him. The sight of the works of art was full enjoyment and wonder. He had not studied pictures or statues before; he now did so with the eye of taste, that referred not to the rules of schools, but to those of Nature and truth. The first entrance to Rome opened to him a scene of remains of antique grandeur that far surpassed his expectations; and the unspeakable beauty of Naples and its environs added to the impression he received of the transcendent and glorious beauty of Italy.
Our winter was spent at Naples. Here he wrote the fragments of Marenghi and The Woodman and the Nightingale, which he afterwards threw aside. At this time, Shelley suffered greatly in health. He put himself under the care of a medical man, who promised great things, and made him endure severe bodily pain, without any good results. Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy,—and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been more alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe them, such would not have existed. And yet, enjoying as he appeared to do every sight or influence of earth or sky, it was difficult to imagine that any melancholy he showed was aught but the effect of the constant pain to which he was a martyr.
We lived in utter solitude. And such is often not the nurse of cheerfulness; for then, at least with those who have been exposed to adversity, the mind broods over its sorrows too intently; while the society of the enlightened, the witty, and the wise, enables us to forget ourselves by making us the sharers of the thoughts of others, which is a portion of the philosophy of happiness. Shelley never liked society in numbers,—it harassed and wearied him; but neither did he like loneliness, and usually, when alone, sheltered himself against memory and reflection in a book. But, with one or two whom he loved, he gave way to wild and joyous spirits, or in more serious conversation expounded his opinions with vivacity and eloquence. If an argument arose, no man ever argued better. He was clear, logical, and earnest, in supporting his own views; attentive, patient, and impartial, while listening to those on the adverse side. Had not a wall of prejudice been raised at this time between him and his countrymen, how many would have sought the acquaintance of one whom to know was to love and to revere! How many of the more enlightened of his contemporaries have since regretted that they did not seek him! how very few
knew his worth while he lived! and, of those few, several were withheld by timidity or envy from declaring their sense of it. But no man was ever more enthusiastically loved—more looked up to, as one superior to his fellows in intellectual endowments and moral worth, by the few who knew him well, and had sufficient nobleness of soul to appreciate his superiority. His excellence is now acknowledged; but, even while admitted, not duly appreciated. For who, except those who were acquainted with him, can imagine his unwearied benevolence, his generosity, his systematic forbearance? And still less is his vast superiority in intellectual attainments sufficiently understood—his sagacity, his clear understanding, his learning, his prodigious memory. All these, as displayed in conversation, were known to few while he lived, and are now silent in the tomb:
‘Ahi orbo mondo ingrato!
Gran cagion hai di dever pianger meco;
Chè quel ben ch’ era in te, perdut’ hai seco.’
* * *
1This fragment refers to an event told in Sismondi’s Histoire des Républiques Italiennes, which occurred during the war when Florence finally subdued Pisa, and reduced it to a province.—[MRS. SHELLEY’S NOTE, 1824.]
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1819
LINES WRITTEN DURING THE CASTLEREAGH ADMINISTRATION
I
CORPSES are cold in the tomb;
Stones on the pavement are dumb;
Abortions are dead in the womb,
And their mothers look pale—like the death-white shore
5
Of Albion, free no more.
II
Her sons are as stones in the way—