IN THE GRAVE, WHITHER THOU GOEST. — Ecclesiastes.
The pale, the cold, and the moony smile
Which the meteor beam of a starless night
Sheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,
Ere the dawning of morn’s undoubted light,
Is the flame of life so fickle and wan
That flits round our steps till their strength is gone. 5
O man! hold thee on in courage of soul
Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way,
And the billows of cloud that around thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day, 10
Where Hell and Heaven shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.
This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel,
And the coming of death is a fearful blow 15
To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;
When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.
The secret things of the grave are there,
Where all but this frame must surely be, 20
Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear
No longer will live to hear or to see
All that is great and all that is strange
In the boundless realm of unending change.
Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death? 25
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?
Who painteth the shadows that are beneath
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?
Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be
With the fears and the love for that which we see? 30
A SUMMER EVENING CHURCHYARD.
LECHLADE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE.
(Composed September, 1815. Published with “Alastor”, 1816.)
The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere
Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men, 5
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
They breathe their spells towards the departing day,
Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
Responding to the charm with its own mystery. 10
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
Thou too, aereal Pile! whose pinnacles
Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells, 15
Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
Around whose lessening and invisible height
Gather among the stars the clouds of night.
The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:
And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound, 20
Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,
And mingling with the still night and mute sky
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.
Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild 25
And terrorless as this serenest night:
Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep. 30
TO — .
(Published with “Alastor”, 1816. See Editor’s Note.)
DAKRTSI DIOISO POTMON ‘APOTMON.
Oh! there are spirits of the air,
And genii of the evening breeze,
And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair
As star-beams among twilight trees: —
Such lovely ministers to meet 5
Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.
With mountain winds, and babbling springs,
And moonlight seas, that are the voice
Of these inexplicable things,
Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice 10
When they did answer thee; but they
Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.
And thou hast sought in starry eyes
Beams that were never meant for thine,
Another’s wealth: — tame sacrifice
To a fond faith! still dost thou pine? 15
Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,
Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?
Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope
Did thine own mind afford no scope
Of love, or moving thoughts to thee?
That natural scenes or human smiles
Could steal the power to wind thee in their wiles?
Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled 25
Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;
The glory of the moon is dead;
Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed;
Thine own soul still is true to thee,
But changed to a foul fiend through misery. 30
This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever
Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,
Dream not to chase; — the mad endeavour
Would scourge thee to severer pangs.
Be as thou art. Thy settled fate,
Dark as it is, all change would aggravate. 35
TO WORDSWORTH.
(Published with “Alastor”, 1816.)
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine 5
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude: 10
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
FEELINGS OF A REPUBLICAN ON THE FALL OF BONAPARTE.
(Published with “Alastor”, 1816.)
I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer 5
A frail and bloody pomp which Time has swept
In fragments towards Oblivion. Massacre,
For this I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,
And stifled thee, their minister. I know 10
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.
LINES.
(Published in Hunt’s “Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823, where it is headed
“November, 1815”. Reprinted in the “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. See
Editor’s Note.)
1.
The cold earth slept below,
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around, with a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow,
The breath of night like death did flow 5
Beneath the sinking moon.
2.
The wintry hedge w
as black,
The green grass was not seen,
The birds did rest on the bare thorn’s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track, 10
Had bound their folds o’er many a crack
Which the frost had made between.
3.
Thine eyes glowed in the glare
Of the moon’s dying light;
As a fen-fire’s beam on a sluggish stream 15
Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there,
And it yellowed the strings of thy raven hair,
That shook in the wind of night.
4.
The moon made thy lips pale, beloved —
The wind made thy bosom chill — 20
The night did shed on thy dear head
Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie
Where the bitter breath of the naked sky
Might visit thee at will.
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1816.
THE SUNSET.
(Written at Bishopsgate, 1816 (spring). Published in full in the
“Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Lines 9-20, and 28-42, appeared in Hunt’s
“Literary Pocket-Book”, 1823, under the titles, respectively, of
“Sunset. From an Unpublished Poem”, And “Grief. A Fragment”.)
There late was One within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate cloud
That fades amid the blue noon’s burning sky,
Genius and death contended. None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath 5
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the Lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o’er, 10
But to the west was open to the sky.
There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers
And the old dandelion’s hoary beard, 15
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods — and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead. — 20
‘Is it not strange, Isabel,’ said the youth,
‘I never saw the sun? We will walk here
To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’
That night the youth and lady mingled lay
In love and sleep — but when the morning came 25
The lady found her lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on — in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles, 30
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,
If madness ‘tis to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale
Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts 35
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief; —
Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan:
Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,
Her lips and cheeks were like things dead — so pale;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins 40
And weak articulations might be seen
Day’s ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self
Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,
Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!
‘Inheritor of more than earth can give, 45
Passionless calm and silence unreproved,
Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were — Peace!’ 50
This was the only moan she ever made.
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.
(Composed, probably, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. Published in Hunt’s “Examiner”, January 19, 1817, and with “Rosalind and Helen”, 1819.)
1.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us, — visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, —
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, 5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening, —
Like clouds in starlight widely spread, —
Like memory of music fled, — 10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
2.
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, — where art thou gone? 15
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, 20
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, — why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
3.
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever 25
To sage or poet these responses given —
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven.
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells — whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see, 30
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone — like mist o’er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream, 35
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.
4.
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 40
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes —
Thou — that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame! 45
Depart not as thy shadow came
Depart not — lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
5.
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, 50
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard — I saw them not —
When musing deeply on the lot 55
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming, —
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! 60
6.
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand h
ours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers 65
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night —
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, 70
That thou — O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.
7.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past — there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 75
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply 80
Its calm — to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
MONT BLANC.
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.
(Composed in Switzerland, July, 1816 (see date below). Printed at the end of the “History of a Six Weeks’ Tour” published by Shelley in 1817, and reprinted with “Posthumous Poems”, 1824. Amongst the Boscombe manuscripts is a draft of this Ode, mainly in pencil, which has been collated by Dr. Garnett.)
1.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark — now glittering — now reflecting gloom —
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings 5
Of waters, — with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river 10
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
2.
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve — dark, deep Ravine —
Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, 15
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest; — thou dost lie,