Gliding o’er ocean, smooth, serene, and even,
Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move;
Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left
Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft
390Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured;
Then when it wanders home with rosy smile,
Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile
It is a Spirit—then weeps on her child restored.
Man, oh, not men! A chain of linked thought,
395 Of love and might to be divided not,
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the Sun rules, even with a tyrant’s gaze,
The unquiet Republic of the maze
Of Planets, struggling fierce towards Heaven’s free wilderness:
400 Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour and Pain and Grief in life’s green grove
405Sport like tame beasts—none knew how gentle they could be!
His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm
410 Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm,
Forcing Life’s wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.
All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his dreams pass—
Bright threads, whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
415 Language is a perpetual Orphic song,
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The Lightning is his slave; Heaven’s utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
420They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The Tempest is his steed,—he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
‘Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.’
The Moon
The shadow of white Death has past
425 From my path in Heaven at last,
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep;
And through my newly-woven bowers,
Wander happy paramours,
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep
430 Thy vales more deep.
The Earth
As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold
A half-unfrozen dew-globe, green and gold
And crystalline, till it becomes a winged mist,
And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
435 Outlives the noon, and on the sun’s last ray
Hangs o’er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst—
The Moon
Thou art folded, thou art lying
In the light which is undying
Of thine own joy, and Heaven’s smile divine;
440 All suns and constellations shower
On thee a light, a life, a power
Which doth array thy sphere—thou pourest thine
On mine, on mine!
The Earth
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
445 Which points into the heavens, dreaming delight,
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams, faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.
The Moon
450 As in the soft and sweet eclipse,
When soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull;
So, when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
455Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,
Full, oh, too full!
Thou art speeding round the sun,
Brightest world of many a one,
Green and azure sphere which shinest
460 With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy crystal paramour,
Borne beside thee by a power
465 Like the polar Paradise,
Magnet-like, of lovers’ eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
470 Maniac-like around thee move,
Gazing, an insatiate bride,
On thy form from every side,
Like a Maenad, round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
475 In the weird Cadmaean forest.
Brother, whersoe’er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow
Through the heavens wide and hollow,
Sheltered by the warm embrace
480 Of thy soul from hungry space,
Drinking from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty, and might,
As a lover or cameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
485 As a violet’s gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a grey and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
490Athwart the western mountain it enfolds
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow—
The Earth
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.
495O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night
Through isles for ever calm;
Oh gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce
500The caverns of my pride’s deep universe,
Charming the tiger Joy, whose tramplings fierce
Made wounds which need thy balm.
Panthea
I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,
A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,
505Out of the stream of sound.
Ione
Ah me! sweet sister,
The stream of sound has ebbed away from us,
And you pretend to rise out of its wave,
Because your words fall like the clear soft dew
Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph’s limbs and hair.
Panthea
510Peace! peace! A mighty Power, which is as darkness,
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight—the bright Visions,
515Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone,
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.
Ione
There is a sense of words upon mine ear—
Panthea
A universal sound like words: O, list!
Demogorgon
Thou Earth, calm empire of a happy soul,
520 Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies,
Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll
The Love which paves thy path a
long the skies:
The Earth
I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies!
Demogorgon
Thou Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth
525 With wonder, as it gazes upon thee,
Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth
Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony:
The Moon
I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee!
Demogorgon
Ye Kings of suns and stars, Daemons and Gods,
530 Etherial Dominations, who possess
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes
Beyond Heaven’s constellated wilderness:
A Voice from Above
Our great Republic hears: we are blest, and bless.
Demogorgon
Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse
535 Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray,
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered—
A Voice from Beneath
Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
Demogorgon
Ye elemental Genii, who have homes
540 From man’s high mind even to the central stone
Of sullen lead; from Heaven’s star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on:
A Confused Voice
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
Demogorgon
Spirits whose homes are flesh: ye beasts and birds,
545 Ye worms and fish; ye living leaves and buds;
Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air’s solitudes:
A Voice
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
Demogorgon
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
550 A dupe and a deceiver; a decay;
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
All
Speak! thy strong words may never pass away.
Demogorgon
This is the day, which down the void abysm
555At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for Heaven’s despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep;
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
560And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance:
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength;
565And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to re-assume
An empire o’er the disentangled Doom.
570To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
575 Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent:
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
THE CENCI
A TRAGEDY, IN FIVE ACTS
DEDICATION
TO
LEIGH HUNT, Esq.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
I inscribe with your name, from a distant country, and after an absence whose months have seemed years, this the latest of my literary efforts.
Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been.
Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and how to confer a benefit though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list.
In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated, and which, had I health and talents should illustrate mine, let us, comforting each other in our task, live and die.
All happiness attend you!
Your affectionate friend,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Rome, May 29, 1819.
PREFACE
A Manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy which was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which shewed itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion, aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common tyrant. The young maiden who was urged to this tremendous deed by an impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered and, in spite of the most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome, the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue.* Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions and opinions acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.
On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her, who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in the human heart. I had a copy of Guido’s picture of Beatrice which is preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized it as the portrait of La Cenci.
This national and universal interest which the story produces and has produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, f
irst suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose. In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters of popular belief and interest, before Shakespeare and Sophocles made them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: any thing like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind. If dogmas can do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement of them. Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character: the few whom such an exhibition would have interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge; that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists.