The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
They are masses of senseless clay—
They are trodden, and move not away,—
The abortion with which she travaileth
10
Is Liberty, smitten to death.
III
Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor!
For thy victim is no redresser;
Thou art sole lord and possessor
Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions—they pave
15
Thy path to the grave.
IV
Hearest thou the festival din
Of Death, and Destruction, and Sin,
And Wealth crying Havoc! within?
’Tis the bacchanal triumph that makes Truth dumb,
20
Thine Epithalamium.
V
Ay, marry thy ghastly wife!
Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife
Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life!
Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant! and Hell be thy guide
25
To the bed of the bride!
SONG TO THE MEN OF ENGLAND
I
MEN of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
II
5
Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?
III
Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?
IV
Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
15
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?
V
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
20
The arms ye forge, another bears.
VI
Sow seed,—but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth,—let no impostor heap;
Weave robes,—let not the idle wear;
Forge arms,—in your defence to bear.
VII
25
Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;
In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.
VIII
With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
30
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre.
SIMILES FOR TWO POLITICAL CHARACTERS OF 1819
I
As from an ancestral oak
Two empty ravens sound their clarion,
Yell by yell, and croak by croak,
When they scent the noonday smoke
5
Of fresh human carrion:—
II
As two gibbering night-birds flit
From their bowers of deadly yew
Through the night to frighten it,
When the moon is in a fit,
10
And the stars are none, or few:—
III
As a shark and dog-fish wait
Under an Atlantic isle,
For the negro-ship, whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,
15
Wrinkling their red gills the while—
IV
Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,
20
Two vipers tangled into one.
FRAGMENT: TO THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND
PEOPLE of England, ye who toil and groan,
Who reap the harvests which are not your own,
Who weave the clothes which your oppressors wear,
And for your own take the inclement air;
5
Who build warm houses …
And are like gods who give them all they have,
And nurse them from the cradle to the grave …
· · · · · · ·
FRAGMENT: ‘WHAT MEN GAIN FAIRLY’
WHAT men gain fairly—that they should possess,
And children may inherit idleness,
From him who earns it—This is understood;
Private injustice may be general good.
5
But he who gains by base and armèd wrong,
Or guilty fraud, or base compliances,
May be despoiled; even as a stolen dress
Is stripped from a convicted thief, and he
Left in the nakedness of infamy.
A NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM
I
GOD prosper, speed, and save,
God raise from England’s grave
Her murdered Queen!
Pave with swift victory
5
The steps of Liberty,
Whom Britons own to be
Immortal Queen.
II
See, she comes throned on high,
On swift Eternity!
10
God save the Queen!
Millions on millions wait,
Firm, rapid, and elate,
On her majestic state!
God save the Queen!
III
15
She is Thine own pure soul
Moulding the mighty whole,—
God save the Queen!
She is Thine own deep love
Rained down from Heaven above,—
20
Wherever she rest or move,
God save our Queen!
IV
’Wilder her enemies
In their own dark disguise,—
God save our Queen!
25
All earthly things that dare
Her sacred name to bear,
Strip them, as kings are, bare;
God save the Queen!
V
Be her eternal throne
30
Built in our hearts alone—
God save the Queen!
Let the oppressor hold
Canopied seats of gold;
She sits enthroned of old
35
O’er our hearts Queen.
VI
Lips touched by seraphim
Breathe out the choral hymn
‘God save the Queen!’
Sweet as if angels sang,
40
Loud as that trumpet’s clang
Wakening the world’s dead gang,—
God save the Queen!
SONNET: ENGLAND IN 1819
AN old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
5
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
10
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate,—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,—
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
AN ODE
WRITTEN OCTOBER, 1819, BEFORE THE SPANIARDS HAD RE
COVERED THEIR LIBERTY
ARISE, arise, arise!
There is blood on the earth that denies ye bread;
Be your wounds like eyes
To weep for the dead, the dead, the dead.
5
What other grief were it just to pay?
Your sons, your wives, your brethren, were they;
Who said they were slain on the battle day?
Awaken, awaken, awaken!
The slave and the tyrant are twin-born foes;
10
Be the cold chains shaken
To the dust where your kindred repose, repose:
Their bones in the grave will start and move,
When they hear the voices of those they love,
Most loud in the holy combat above.
15
Wave, wave high the banner!
When Freedom is riding to conquest by:
Though the slaves that fan her
Be Famine and Toil, giving sigh for sigh.
And ye who attend her imperial car,
20
Lift not your hands in the banded war,
But in her defence whose children ye are.
Glory, glory, glory,
To those who have greatly suffered and done!
Never name in story
25
Was greater than that which ye shall have won.
Conquerors have conquered their foes alone,
Whose revenge, pride, and power they have overthrown:
Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.
Bind, bind every brow
30
With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine:
Hide the blood-stains now
With hues which sweet Nature has made divine:
Green strength, azure hope, and eternity:
But let not the pansy among them be;
35
Ye were injured, and that means memory.
CANCELLED STANZA
GATHER, O gather,
Foeman and friend in love and peace!
Waves sleep together
When the blasts that called them to battle, cease.
5
For fangless Power grown tame and mild
Is at play with Freedom’s fearless child—
The dove and the serpent reconciled!
ODE TO HEAVEN
CHORUS OF SPIRITS
First Spirit.
PALACE-ROOF of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now, and which wert then
5
Of the Present and the Past,
Of the eternal Where and When,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever-canopying dome,
Of acts and ages yet to come!
10
Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth’s company;
Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses;
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.
Even thy name is as a god,
20
Heaven! for thou art the abode
Of that Power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature sees.
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees.
Their unremaining gods and they
Like a river roll away:
Thou remainest such—alway!—
Second Spirit.
Thou art but the mind’s first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
30
Like weak insects in a cave,
Lighted up by stalactites;
But the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
35
But a dim and noonday gleam
From the shadow of a dream!
Third Spirit.
Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn
At your presumption, atom-born!
What is Heaven? and what are ye
40
Who its brief expanse inherit?
What are suns and spheres which flee
With the instinct of that Spirit
Of which ye are but a part?
Drops which Nature’s mighty heart
45
Drives through thinnest veins! Depart!
What is Heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new
Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world:
50
Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.
CANCELLED FRAGMENTS OF THE ODE TO HEAVEN
THE [living frame which sustains my soul]
Is [sinking beneath the fierce control]
Down through the lampless deep of song
I am drawn and driven along—
5
When a Nation screams aloud
Like an eagle from the cloud
When a …
· · · · ·
When the night …
· · · · ·
Watch the look askance and old—
10
See neglect, and falsehood fold…
ODE TO THE WEST WIND1
I
O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
5
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
10
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
II
15
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
20
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
25
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
30
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
35
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cl
eave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
40
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
45
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
50
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
55
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
60
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,