.


734 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON


74


585 But let me change this theme, which grows too sad,


And lay this sheet of sorrows on the shelf;


I don't much like describing people mad,


For fear of seeming rather touch'd myself�


Besides Fve no more on this head to add;


590 And as my Muse is a capricious elf,


We'll put about, and try another tack


With Juan, left half-kill'd some stanzas back.6 1818-23 1819-24


Stanzas Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa


Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story�


The days of our youth are the days of our glory;


And the myrtle and ivy1 of sweet two-and-twenty


Are worth all your laurels,2 though ever so plenty. 5 What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled?


'Tis but as a dead-flower with May-dew besprinkled:


Then away with all such from the head that is hoary!3


What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory? Oh FAME!�if I e'er took delight in thy praises,


10 'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases,


Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover


She thought that I was not unworthy to love her. There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee;


Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;


15 When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story,


I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory. Nov. 1821 1830


6. Juan's adventures continue. He is sold as a slave in Constantinople to an enamored sultana; she dis


guises him as a girl and adds him to her husband's


harem for convenience of access. Juan escapes,


joins the Russian army that is besieging Ismail, and


so well distinguishes himself in the capture of the


town that he is sent with dispatches to St. Peters


burg. There he becomes "man-mistress" to the


insatiable empress Catherine the Great. As the


result of her assiduous attentions, he falls into a


physical decline and, for a salutary change of scene


and climate, is sent on a diplomatic mission to


England. In canto 16, the last that Byron finished,


he is in the middle of an amorous adventure while


a guest at the medieval country mansion of an


English nobleman, Lord Henry Amundeville, and


his very beautiful wife.


1. Sacred to Bacchus, god of wine and revelry. "Myrtle": sacred to Venus, goddess of love.


2. A laurel crown was awarded by the Greeks as a mark of high honor.


3. White or gray with age.


.


JANUAR Y 22ND . MISSOLONGH I / 73 5 January 22nd. Missolonghi On this day I complete my thirty sixth year 'Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it hath ceased to move: Yet though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love! 5 My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; The worm�the canker, and the grief Are mine alone! 10The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some Volcanic Isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze A funeral pile! 15The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of Love I cannot share, But wear the chain. But 'tis not thus�and 'tis not here 20Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now Where Glory decks the hero's bier Or binds his brow. The Sword, the Banner, and the Field, Glory and Greece around us see! The Spartan borne upon his shield Was not more free! 25 Awake (not Greece�she is awake!) Awake, my Spirit! think through whom Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake And then strike home! 30Tread those reviving passions down Unworthy Manhood�unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of Beauty be. If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live? The land of honourable Death 35 Is here:�up to the Field, and give Away thy Breath! 40Seek out�less often sought than found� A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy Ground, And take thy Rest! Jan.1824 1824


.


736 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON


LETTERS'


To Thomas Moore1


[CHILDE HAROLD. A VENETIAN ADVENTURE]


Venice, January 28th, 1817 Your letter of the 8th is before me. The remedy for your plethora is simple�


abstinence. I was obliged to have recourse to the like some years ago, I mean in point of diet, and, with the exception of some convivial weeks and days, (it might be months, now and then), have kept to Pythagoras2 ever since. For all this, let me hear that you are better. You must not indulge in "filthy beer," nor in porter, nor eat suppers�the last are the devil to those who swallow dinner.


I am truly sorry to hear of your father's misfortune4�cruel at any time, but


doubly cruel in advanced life. However, you will, at least, have the satisfaction


of doing your part by him, and, depend upon it, it will not be in vain. Fortune,


to be sure, is a female, but not such a b * * as the rest (always excepting your


wife and my sister from such sweeping terms); for she generally has some


justice in the long run. I have no spite against her, though between her and


Nemesis I have had some sore gauntlets to run�but then I have done my best


to deserve no better. But to you, she is a good deal in arrear, and she will come


round�mind if she don't: you have the vigour of life, of independence, of


talent, spirit, and character all with you. What you can do for yourself, you


have done and will do; and surely there are some others in the world who


would not be sorry to be of use, if you would allow them to be useful, or at


least attempt it. I think of being in England in the spring. If there is a row, by the sceptre


of King Ludd,5 but I'll be one; and if there is none, and only a continuance of


"this meek, piping time of peace,"6 I will take a cottage a hundred yards to the


south of your abode, and become your neighbour; and we will compose such


canticles, and hold such dialogues, as shall be the terror of the Times (includ


ing the newspaper of that name), and the wonder, and honour, and praise, of


the Morning Chronicle and posterity. I rejoice to hear of your forthcoming in February7�though I tremble for


the "magnificence," which you attribute to the new Childe Harold.8 I am glad


you like it; it is a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite.


I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics,


mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the night


1. Three thousand of Byron's letters have survived� a remarkable number for so short a life. In


general they are our best single biographical source


for the poet, providing running commentary on his


day-to-day concerns and activities and giving us


the clearest possible picture of his complex per


sonality, a picture relatively (but not entirely) free


of the posturings that pervade both the romantic


poems and the satires. The texts of our small sam


ple here are from Leslie A. Marchand's twelve- volume edition, Byro?i's Letters and Journals (1973-82).


1. Irish poet and a good friend of Byron since they met in 1811. Moore's Life of Byron in 1830 is the


sole source for many of Byron's letters, including


this one.


2. I.e., have eaten no flesh (the disciples of the Greek philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras


were strict vegetarians).


3. These asterisks (as well as those in the next paragraph and near the end of the letter) are Moore's,


representing omissions in his printed text.


4. Moore's father had been dismissed from his post as barrack master at Dublin.


5. A mythical king of Britain. 6. Shakespeare's Richard III 1.1.24. 7. Moore's Oriental romance Lalla Rookh. 8. Canto 3 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1816).


.


LETTERS / 737


mare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my


brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my


mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her�but


I won't dwell upon these trifling family matters.


Venice is in the estro of her carnival, and I have been up these last two nights at the ridotto9 and the opera, and all that kind of thing. Now for an adventure. A few days ago a gondolier brought me a billet without a subscription, intimating a wish on the part of the writer to meet me either in gondola or at the island of San Lazaro, or at a third rendezvous, indicated in the note. "I know the country's disposition well"�in Venice "they do let Heaven see those tricks they dare not show," &c. &c.;' so, for all response, I said that neither of the three places suited me; but that I would either be at home at ten at night alone, or at the ridotto at midnight, where the writer might meet me masked. At ten o'clock I was at home and alone (Marianna was gone with her husband to a conversazione2), when the door of my apartment opened, and in walked a well-looking and (for an Italian) bionda3 girl of about nineteen, who informed me that she was married to the brother of my amorosa, and wished to have some conversation with me. I made a decent reply, and we had some talk in Italian and Romaic (her mother being a Greek of Corfu), when lo! in a very few minutes, in marches, to my very great astonishment, Marianna S[egati], in propria persona, and after making polite courtesy to her sister-inlaw and to me, without a single word seizes her said sister-in-law by the hair, and bestows upon her some sixteen slaps, which would have made your ear ache only to hear their echo. I need not describe the screaming which ensued. The luckless visitor took flight. I seized Marianna, who, after several vain efforts to get away in pursuit of the enemy, fairly went into fits in my arms; and, in spite of reasoning, eau de Cologne, vinegar, half a pint of water, and God knows what other waters beside, continued so till past midnight.


After damning my servants for letting people in without apprizing me, I found that Marianna in the morning had seen her sister-in-law's gondolier on the stairs, and, suspecting that his apparition boded her no good, had either


returned of her own accord, or been followed by her maids or some other spy


of her people to the conversazione, from whence she returned to perpetrate


this piece of pugilism. I had seen fits before, and also some small scenery of


the same genus in and out of our island: but this was not all. After about an


hour, in comes�who? why, Signor S[egati], her lord and husband, and finds


me with his wife fainting upon the sofa, and all the apparatus of confusion,


dishevelled hair, hats, handkerchiefs, salts, smelling-bottles�and the lady as


pale as ashes without sense or motion. His first question was, "What is all


this?" The lady could not reply�so I did. I told him the explanation was the


easiest thing in the world; but in the mean time it would be as well to recover


his wife�at least, her senses. This came about in due time of suspiration and respiration.


You need not be alarmed�jealousy is not the order of the day in Venice, and daggers are out of fashion; while duels, on love matters, are unknown� at least, with the husbands. But, for all this, it was an awkward affair; and though he must have known that I made love to Marianna, yet I believe he


9. An Italian social gathering. "Estro": fire, fervor. 2. An evening party. Marianna Segati, wife of a 1. Shakespeare's Othello 3.3.206-07. The passage Venetian draper, was Byron's current amorosa. continues: "dare not show their husbands." 3. Blonde (Italian).


.


738 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON


was not, till that evening, aware of the extent to which it had gone. It is very well known that almost all the married women have a lover; but it is usual to keep up the forms, as in other nations. I did not, therefore, know what the devil to say. I could not out with the truth, out of regard to her, and I did not choose to lie for my sake;�besides, the thing told itself. I thought the best way would be to let her explain it as she chose (a woman being never at a loss�the devil always sticks by them)�only determining to protect and carry her off, in case of any ferocity on the part of the Signor. I saw that he was quite calm. She went to bed, and next day�how they settled it, I know not, but settle it they did. Well�then I had to explain to Marianna about this never to be sufficiently confounded sister-in-law; which I did by swearing innocence, eternal constancy, &c. &c. * * * But the sister-in-law, very much discomposed with being treated in such wise, has (not having her own shame before her eyes) told the affair to half Venice, and the servants (who were summoned by the fight and the fainting) to the other half. But, here, nobody minds such trifles, except to be amused by them. I don't know whether you will be so, but I have scrawled a long letter out of these follies.


Believe me ever. &c.


To Douglas Kinnaird1


[DON JUAN: "IS IT NOT LIFE?"]


Venice. Octr. 26th. [1819]


My dear Douglas�My late expenditure has arisen from living at a distance from Venice and being obliged to keep up two establishments, from frequent journeys�and buying some furniture and books as well as a horse or two� and not from any renewal of the EPICUREAN system2 as you suspect. I have been faithful to my honest liaison with Countess Guiccioli3�and I can assure you that She has never cost me directly or indirectly a sixpence�indeed the circumstances of herself and family render this no merit.�I never offered her but one present�a broach of brilliants�and she sent it back to me with her own hair in it (I shall not say of what part but that is an Italian custom) and a note to say that she was not in the habit of receiving presents of that value� but hoped that I would not consider her sending it back as an affront�nor the value diminished by the enclosure.�I have not had a whore this halfyear� confining myself to the strictest adultery. Why should you prevent Hanson from making a peer4 if he likes it�I think the "Garretting" would be by far the best parliamentary privilege�I know of. Damn your delicacy.� It is a low commercial quality�and very unworthy a man who prefixes "honourable" to his nomenclature. If you say that I must sign the bonds�I suppose that I must�but it is very iniquitous to make me pay my debts�you have no idea of the pain it gives one.�Pray do three things�get my property out of


1. Kinnaird, a friend from Cambridge days, was relationship lasted until Byron set sail for Greece Byron's banker and literary agent in London. in the summer of 1823.


2. I.e., money spent on pleasures of the senses. 4. I.e., being made a peer (of the realm). John 3. Byron mentions having fallen in love with Hanson, Byron's solicitor and agent before Kin- Teresa Guiccioli ("a Romagnuola Countess from naird took over his principal business affairs, never Ravenna�who is nineteen years old & has a realized this ambition.


Count of fifty") in a letter of April 6, 1819. Their


.


LETTERS / 739


the funds�get Rochdale5 sold�get me some information from Perry about South America6�and 4thly. ask Lady Noel not to live so very long. As to Subscribing to Manchester�if I do that�I will write a letter to Burdett7� for publication�to accompany the Subscription�which shall be more radical than anything yet rooted�but I feel lazy.�I have thought of this for some time�but alas! the air of this cursed Italy enervates�and disfranchises the thoughts of a man after nearly four years of respiration�to say nothing of emission.�As to "Don Juan"�confess�confess�you dog�and be candid� that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing�it may be bawdy�but is it not good English?�it may be profligate�but is it not life, is it not the thing?� Could any man have written it�who has not lived in the world?�and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis?8�on a table?�and under it?�I have written about a hundred stanzas of a third Canto�but it is damned modest�the outcry has frightened me.�I had such projects for the Don�but the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt�now a days,�that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighed the worth of both monosyllables�must be lost to despairing posterity.�After all what stuff this outcry is�Lalla Rookh and Little�are more dangerous than my burlesque poem can be�Moore has been here�we got tipsy together�and were very amicable�he is gone on to Rome�I put my life (in M.S.) into his hands9�(not for publication) you�or any body else may see it�at his return.�It only comes up to 1816. He is a noble fellow�and looks quite fresh and poetical�nine years (the age of a poem's education) my Senior�he looks younger�this comes of marriage and being settled in the Country. I want to go to South America�I have written to Hobhouse all about it.�I wrote to my wife�three months ago�under care to Murray�has she got the letter�or is the letter got into Rlackwood's magazine? You ask after my Christmas pye�Remit it any how�Circulars' is the best�you are right about income�I must have it all�how the devil do I know that I may live a year or a month?�I wish I knew that I might regulate my spending in more ways than one.�As it is one always thinks that there is but a span.�A man may as well break or be damned for a large sum as a small one�I should be loth to pay the devil or any other creditor more than sixpence


in the pound.�


[scrawl for signature]


P.S.�I recollect nothing of "Davies's landlord"�but what ever Davies says�I will swear to�and that's more than he would.�So pray pay�has he a landlady too?�perhaps I may owe her something. With regard to the bonds I will sign them but�it goes against the grain. As to the rest�you can't err�so long as you don't pay. Paying is executor's or executioner's work. You may write somewhat oftener�Mr. Galignani's messenger2 gives the outline of your public affairs�but I see no results�you have no man yet�(always excepting Burdett�& you & H[obhouse] and the Gentlemanly leaven of your two-penny loaf of rebellion) don't forget however my charge of


5. An estate that Byron had inherited in Lanca-face. shire. 9. Byron's famous memoirs, which were later sold 6. Byron was considering the possibility of emi-to John Murray and burned in the publisher's grating to South America, specifically to Vene-office.


zuela. 1. Letters of credit that could be exchanged for


7. Sir Francis Burdett, member of Parliament for cash. Westminster, a reformer and leader of opposition 2. Galignani's Messenger, an English newspaper to the Tories. published in Paris. 8. A light carriage for two persons sitting face to


.


740 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON


horse�and commission for the Midland Counties and by the holies!�You shall have your account in decimals.�Love to Hobby�but why leave the Whigs?


To Percy Bysshe Shelley


[KEATS AND SHELLEY]


Ravenna, April 26th, 1821


The child continues doing well, and the accounts are regular and favourable. It is gratifying to me that you and Mrs. Shelley do not disapprove of the step which I have taken, which is merely temporary.'


I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats2�is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I read the review of "Endymion" in the Quarterly. It was severe,�but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.


I recollect the effect on me of the Edinburgh on my first poem;3 it was rage, and resistance, and redress�but not despondency nor despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but, in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena.


"Expect not life from pain nor danger free, Nor deem the doom of man reversed for thee."4


You know my opinion of that second-hand school of poetry. You also know my high opinion of your own poetry,�because it is of no school. I read Cenci�but, besides that I think the subject essentially un dramatic, I am not an admirer of our old dramatists as models. I deny that the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your Cenci, however, was a work of power, and poetry. As to my drama,5 pray revenge yourself upon it, by being as free as I have been with yours.


I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see. I have heard nothing of mine, and do not know that it is yet published. I have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will not like. Had I known that Keats was dead�or that he was alive and so sensitive�I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope,6 and my disapprobation of his own style of writing.


1. Byron had recently placed his four-year-old major satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers daughter, Allegra, in a convent school near (1809). Ravenna, against the wishes of her mother, Mary 4. Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, lines Shelley's stepsister Claire Clairmont. 155�56 (Byron is quoting from memory). 2. In a letter to Byron, April 17, 1821: "Young 5. Marino Faliero, published in London on April Keats, whose 'Hyperion' showed so great a prom-21, 1821. Shelley's The Cenci and Prometheus ise, died lately at Rome from the consequences of Unbonnd (next paragraph) were written in 1819 breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at and published in 1820.


the contemptuous attack on his book in the Quar-6. Keats attacked Augustan poetry (but not nec


terly Review" (see Shelley's Adonais, p. 822). essarily Pope) in "Sleep and Poetry," lines 181�


3. The review of Byron's Hours of Idleness in the 206. Byron's pamphlet, Letter to ********[John Edinburgh Revieiv prompted him to write his first Murray], on the Rev. W. L. Bowles' Strictures on


.


PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY / 74 1


You want me to undertake a great Poem�I have not the inclination nor the


power. As I grow older, the indifference�not to life, for we love it by instinct�


but to the stimuli of life, increases. Besides, this late failure of the Italians7


has latterly disappointed me for many reasons,�some public, some personal.


My respects to Mrs. S.


Yours ever, B


P.S.�Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer? Could not you take a run alone?


the Life and Writings of Pope, had just appeared in be snuffed out by an Article." London. His best-known comment on Keats, writ-7. A planned uprising by the Carbonari, a secret


ten a year and a half later, is canto 11, stanza 60 revolutionary society into which Byron had been in Don Juan, beginning "John Keats, who was initiated by the father and brother of his mistress


killed off by one critique" and ending " Tis strange Teresa Guiccioli, failed in Feb. 1821.


the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself


PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1792-1822


Percy Bysshe Shelley, radical in every aspect of his life and thought, emerged from a solidly conservative background. His ancestors had been Sussex aristocrats since early in the seventeenth century; his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, made himself the richest man in Horsham, Sussex; his father, Timothy Shelley, was a hardheaded and conventional member of Parliament. Percy Shelley was in line for a baronetcy and, as befitted his station, was sent to be educated at Eton and Oxford. As a youth he was slight of build, eccentric in manner, and unskilled in sports or fighting and, as a consequence, was mercilessly bullied by older and stronger boys. He later said that he saw the petty tyranny of schoolmasters and schoolmates as representative of man's general inhumanity to man, and dedicated his life to a war against injustice and oppression. As he described the experience in the Dedication to Laon and Cythna:


So without shame, I spake:�"I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannise Without reproach or check." 1 then controuled My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.


At Oxford in the autumn of 1810, Shelley's closest friend was Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a self-centered, self-confident young man who shared Shelley's love of philosophy and scorn of orthodoxy. The two collaborated on a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which claimed that God's existence cannot be proved on empirical grounds, and, provocatively, they mailed it to the bishops and heads of the colleges at Oxford. Shelley refused to repudiate the document and, to his shock and grief, was peremptorily expelled, terminating a university career that had lasted only six months. This event opened a breach between Shelley and his father that widened over the years.


Shelley went to London, where he took up the cause of Harriet Westbrook, the pretty and warmhearted daughter of a well-to-do tavern keeper, whose father, Shelley


.


74 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


wrote to Hogg, "has persecuted her in a most horrible way by endeavoring to compel her to go to school." Harriet threw herself on Shelley's protection, and "gratitude and admiration," he wrote, "all demand that I shall love her forever." He eloped with Harriet to Edinburgh and married her, against his conviction that marriage was a tyrannical and degrading social institution. He was then eighteen years of age; his bride, sixteen. The couple moved restlessly from place to place, living on a small allowance granted reluctantly by their families. In February 1812, accompanied by Harriet's sister Eliza, they traveled to Dublin to distribute Shelley's Address to the Irish People and otherwise take part in the movement for Catholic emancipation and for the amelioration of that oppressed and poverty-stricken people.


Back in London, Shelley became a disciple of the radical social philosopher William Godwin, author of the Inquiry Concerning Political Justice. In 1813 he printed privately his first important work, Queen Mah, a long poem set in the fantastic frame of the journey of a disembodied soul through space, to whom the fairy Mab reveals in visions the woeful past, the dreadful present, and a Utopian future. Announcing that "there is no God!" Mab decries institutional religion and codified morality as the roots of social evil, prophesying that all institutions will wither away and humanity will return to its natural condition of goodness and felicity.


In the following spring Shelley, who had drifted apart from Harriet, fell in love with the beautiful Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Convinced that cohabitation without love is immoral, he abandoned Harriet, fled to France with Mary (taking along her stepsister, Claire Clairmont), and�in accordance with his belief in nonexclusive love�invited Harriet to come live with them in the relationship of a sister. Shelley's elopement with Mary outraged her father, despite the facts that his own views of marriage had been no less radical than Shelley's and that Shelley, himself in financial difficulties, had earlier taken over Godwin's very substantial debts. When he returned to London, Shelley found that the general public, his family, and most of his friends regarded him as not only an atheist and a revolutionary but also a gross immoralist. When two years later Harriet, pregnant by an unknown lover, drowned herself in a fit of despair, the courts denied Shelley the custody of their two children. (His first child with Mary Godwin, a girl born prematurely, had died earlier, only twelve days after her birth in February 1815.) Percy and Mary married in December 1816, and in spring 1818 they moved to Italy. Thereafter he envisioned himself as an alien and outcast, rejected by the human race to whose welfare he had dedicated his powers and his life.


In Italy he resumed his restless way of life, evading the people to whom he owed money by moving from town to town and house to house. His health was usually bad. Although the death of his grandfather in 1815 had provided a substantial income, he dissipated so much of it by his warmhearted but imprudent support of William God- win, Leigh Hunt, and other needy acquaintances that he was constantly short of funds. Within nine months, in 1818-19, both Clara and William, the children Mary had borne in 1815 and 1817, died. Grief over these deaths destroyed the earlier harmony of the Shelleys' marriage; the birth in November 1819 of another son, Percy Florence (their only child to survive to adulthood), was not enough to mend the rift.


In these circumstances, close to despair and knowing that he almost entirely lacked an audience, Shelley wrote his greatest works. In 1819 he completed Prometheus Unbound and a tragedy, The Cenci. He wrote also numerous lyric poems; a visionary call for a proletarian revolution, "The Mask of Anarchy"; a witty satire on Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third; and a penetrating political essay, "A Philosophical View of Reform." His works of the next two years include "A Defence of Poetry"; Epipsychidion, a rhapsodic vision of love as a spiritual union beyond earthly limits; Adonais, his elegy on the death of Keats; and Hellas, a lyrical drama evoked by the Greek war for liberation from the Turks. These writings, unlike the early Queen Mab, are the products of a mind chastened by tragic experience, deepened by philosophical speculation, and stored with the harvest of his reading�which Shelley carried on, as his friend


.


PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY / 74 3


Hogg said, "in season and out of season, at table, in bed, and especially during a walk," until he became one of the most erudite of poets. His delight in scientific discoveries and speculations continued, but his earlier zest for Gothic terrors and the social theories of the radical eighteenth-century optimists gave way to an absorption in Greek tragedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and the Bible. Although he did not give up his hopes for a millennial future (he wore a ring with the motto II buon tempo verra� "the good time will come"), he now attributed the evils of society to humanity's own


moral failures and grounded the possibility of radical social reform on a reform of the moral and imaginative faculties through the redeeming power of love. Though often represented as a simpleminded doctrinaire, Shelley in fact possessed a complex and energetically inquisitive intelligence that never halted at a fixed mental position; his writings reflect stages in a ceaseless exploration.


The poems of Shelley's maturity also show the influence of his study of Plato and the Neoplatonists. Shelley found congenial the Platonic division of the cosmos into two worlds�the ordinary world of change, mortality, evil, and suffering and an ideal world of perfect and eternal Forms, of which the world of sense experience is only a distant and illusory reflection. The earlier interpretations of Shelley as a downright Platonic idealist, however, have been drastically modified by modern investigations of his reading and writings. He was a close student of British empiricist philosophy, which limits knowledge to valid reasoning on what is given in sense experience, and within this tradition he felt a special affinity to the radical skepticism of David Hume. A number of Shelley's works, such as "Mont Blanc," express his view of the narrow limits of what human beings can know with certainty and exemplify his refusal to let his hopes harden into a philosophical or religious creed. To what has been called the "skeptical idealism" of the mature Shelley, hope in a redemption from present social ills is not an intellectual certainty but a moral obligation. Despair is self-fulfilling; we must continue to hope because, by keeping open the possibility of a better future, hope releases the imaginative and creative powers that are the only means of achieving that end.


When in 1820 the Shelleys settled finally at Pisa, he came closer to finding contentment than at any other time in his adult life. A group of friends, Shelley's "Pisan Circle," gathered around them, including for a while Lord Byron and the swashbuckling young Cornishman Edward Trelawny. Chief in Shelley's affections were Edward Williams, a retired lieutenant of a cavalry regiment serving in India, and his charming common-law wife, Jane, with whom Shelley became infatuated and to whom he addressed some of his best lyrics and verse letters. The end came suddenly, and in a way prefigured uncannily in the last stanza of Adonais, in which he had described his spirit as a ship driven by a violent storm out into the dark unknown. On July 8, 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams were sailing their open boat, the Don Juan, on the Gulf of Spezia. A violent squall swamped the boat. When several days later the bodies were washed ashore, they were cremated, and Shelley's ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, near the graves of John Keats and William Shelley, the poet's young son.


Both Shelley's character and his poetry have been the subject of violently contradictory, and often partisan, estimates. His actions according to his deep convictions often led to disastrous consequences for himself and those near to him; and even recent scholars, while repudiating the vicious attacks by Shelley's contemporaries, attribute some of those actions to a self-assured egotism that masked itself as idealism. Yet Byron, who knew Shelley intimately and did not pay moral compliments lightly, wrote to his publisher John Murray, in response to attacks on Shelley at the time of his death: "You are all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew." Shelley's politics, vilified during his lifetime, made him a literary hero to later political radicals: the Chartists in the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels at the end, and for much of the twentieth century, many of the guiding lights of the British Labour Party. As a poet Shelley was


.


74 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


greatly admired by Robert Browning, Swinburne, and other Victorians; but in the mid-twentieth century he was repeatedly charged with intellectual and emotional immaturity, shoddy workmanship, and incoherent imagery by influential writers such as F. R. Leavis and his followers in Britain and the New Critics in America. More recently, however, many sympathetic studies have revealed the coherent intellectual understructure of his poems and have confirmed Wordsworth's early recognition that "Shelley is one of the best artists of Us all: I mean in workmanship of style." Shelley, it has become clear, greatly expanded the metrical and stanzaic resources of English versification. His poems exhibit a broad range of voices, from the high but ordered passion of "Ode to the West Wind," through the heroic dignity of the utterances of Prometheus, to the approximation of what is inexpressible in the description of Asia's transfiguration and in the visionary conclusion of Adonais. Most surprising, for a poet who almost entirely lacked an audience, is the urbanity, the assured command of the tone and language of a cultivated man of the world, exemplified in passages that Shelley wrote all through his mature career and especially in the lyrics and verse letters that he composed during the last year of his life.


The texts printed here are those prepared by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat for Shelley's Poetry and Prose, a Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. (2001); Reiman has also edited for this anthology a few poems not included in that edition.


Mutability We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly!�yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost for ever: 5 Or like forgotten lyres,0 whose dissonant stringsGive various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last. wind harps ioWe rest.�A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.�One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast Our cares away: 15It is the same!�For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability. ca. 1814-15 1816


To Wordsworth1


Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know


That things depart which never may return:


1. Shelley's grieved comment on the poet of nature and of social radicalism after his views had become conservative.


.


ALASTO R / 75 1 5Childhood 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 10Which 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: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,2 � Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be. small ship ca. 1814-15 1816


Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude Shelley wrote Alastor in the fall and early winter of 1815 and published it in March 1816. According to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, the poet was "at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted: Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. The Greek word Alastor is an evil genius. ... I mention the true meaning of the word because many have supposed Alastor to be the name of the hero" [Memoirs of Shelley). Peacock's definition of an alastor as "an evil genius" has compounded the problems in interpreting this work: the term evil does not seem to fit the attitude expressed within the poem toward the protagonist's solitary quest, the poem seems to clash with statements in Shelley's preface, and the first and second paragraphs of the preface seem inconsistent with each other. These problems, however, may be largely resolved if we recognize that, in this early achievement (he was only twenty-three when he wrote Alastor), Shelley established his characteristic procedure of working with multiple perspectives. Both preface and poem explore alternative and conflicting possibilities in what Shelley calls "doubtful knowledge"� matters that are humanly essential but in which no certainty is humanly possible.


By the term allegorical in the opening sentence of his preface, Shelley seems to mean that his poem, like medieval and Renaissance allegories such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Spenser's Faerie Queene, represents an aspiration in the spiritual realm by the allegorical vehicle of a journey and quest in the material world. As Shelley's first paragraph outlines, the poem's protagonist, for whom objects in the natural world "cease to suffice," commits himself to the search for a female Other who will fulfill his intellectual, imaginative, and sensuous needs. The second paragraph of the preface, by contrast, passes judgment on the visionary protagonist in terms of the values of "actual men"�that is, the requirements of human and social life in this world. From this point of view, the visionary has been "avenged" (punished) for turning away from community in pursuit of his individual psychic needs. The diversity of attitudes expressed within the poem becomes easier to understand if, on the basis of the many echoes of Wordsworth in the opening invocation, we identify the narrator of the story as a Wordsworthian poet for whom the natural world is sufficient to satisfy both the demands of his imagination and his need for community. This narrative poet, it can be assumed, undertakes to tell compassionately, but from his own perspective, the history of a nameless visionary who has surrendered everything in the quest for a goal beyond possibility.


In this early poem Shelley establishes a form, a conceptual frame, and the imagery


2. Perhaps an allusion to "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty," the title that Wordsworth gave to the section of sonnets such as "London, 1802" when he republished them in his Poenis of 1807.


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746 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


for the Romantic quest that he reiterated in his later poems and that also served as a paradigm for many other poems, from Byron's Manfred and Keats's Endymion to the quest poems of Shelley's later admirer William Butler Yeats.


Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude


Preface


The poem entitled "ALASTOR," may be considered as allegorical of one of


the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents a youth of


uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination


inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majes


tic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of


knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external


world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their


modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his


desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous,


and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects


cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for inter


course with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being


whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most per


fect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all


of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the


lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the func


tions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corre


sponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting


these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image.1 He seeks in vain for


a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to


an untimely grave. The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-


centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing


him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world


with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a


perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those


meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject


and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They


who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful


knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth,


and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their


kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these,


and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none


feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither


friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of


their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy,


the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their


1. Shelley's view that the object of love is an ide-belonging to the nature of men. . . . [This is] a soul alized projection of all that is best within the self within our soul. . . . The discovery of its anti-type is clarified by a passage in his "Essay on Love," .. . in such proportion as the type within demands; which may have been written at about the time of this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Alastor: "We dimly see within our intellectual Love tends; and . . . without the possession of nature . . . the ideal prototype of every thing excel-which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over lent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as which it rules."


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ALASTOR / 75 1


search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.


"The good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, Burn to the socket!"2


December 14, 1815


Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude Nondwn amabam, et amare amabam, qaeurebam quid amarem, amans amare.�Confess. St. August.3 Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood! 510If our great Mother4 has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety' to feel Your love, and recompense the boon" with mine;6 If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,� With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,7 And solemn midnight's tingling silentness; If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; giftevening If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; isIf no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred; then forgive This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw No portion of your wonted0 favour now! customary Mother of this unfathomable world! 20Favour my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death 25 Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings8


Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,


2. Wordsworth's The Excursion 1.519�21; the 4. Nature, invoked as the common mother of both passage occurs also in The Ruined Cottage 96�98, the elements and the poet. which Wordsworth reworked into the first book of 5. Wordsworth, "My heart leaps up," lines 8-9: The Excursion (1814). "And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to


3. St. Augustine's Confessions 3.1: "Not yet did each by natural piety." Wordsworth also used these 1 love, though 1 loved to love, seeking what 1 might lines as the epigraph to his "Ode: Intimations of love, loving to love." Augustine thus describes Immortality."


his state of mind when he was addicted to illicit 6. I.e., with my love.


sexual love; the true object of his desire, which 7. The sunset colors.


compels the tortuous spiritual journey of his life, 8. Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortal- he later discovered to be the infinite and transcen-ity," lines 141�42: "those obstinate questionings/


dent God. Of sense and outward things."


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74 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Thy messenger, to render up the tale


Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,


30 When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,


Like an inspired and desperate alchymist


Staking his very life on some dark hope,


Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks


With my most innocent love, until strange tears


35 Uniting with those breathless kisses, made


Such magic as compels the charmed night


To render up thy charge: . . . and, though ne'er yet


Thou hast unveil'd thy inmost sanctuary,


Enough from incommunicable dream,


40 And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,


Has shone within me, that serenely now


And moveless,0 as a long-forgotten lyre motionless


Suspended in the solitary dome


Of some mysterious and deserted fane,9


45 I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain


May modulate with murmurs of the air,


And motions of the forests and the sea,


And voice of living beings, and woven hymns


Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.1


50 There was a Poet whose untimely tomb


No human hands with pious reverence reared,


But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds


Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid


Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:�


55 A lovely youth,�no mourning maiden decked


With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,2


The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:�


Gentle, and brave, and generous,�no lorn� bard abandoned


Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:


60 He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.


Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,


And virgins, as unknown he past, have pined


And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.


The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,


65 And Silence, too enamoured of that voice,


Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.


By solemn vision, and bright silver dream,


His infancy was nurtured. Every sight


And sound from the vast earth and ambient air,


70 Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.


The fountains of divine philosophy


Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great


Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past


9. Temple. The narrator calls on the Mother, his "A presence . . . / Whose dwelling is . . . the round natural muse, to make him her wind harp. Cf. the ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in opening passage of Wordsworth's Prelude, Cole-the mind of man: / A motion and a spirit."


ridge's "Dejection: An Ode," and the conclusions 2. The cypress represented mourning. "Votive":


of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Adonais. offered to fulfill a vow to the gods.


1. Cf. Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," lines 94ff.:


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ALASTOR / 75 1


In truth or fable consecrates, he felt 75 And knew. When early youth had past, he left His cold fireside and alienated home so8590To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness Has lured his fearless steps; and he has bought With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men, His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps He like her shadow has pursued, where'er The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes' On black bare pointed islets ever beat With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves Rugged and dark, winding among the springs Of fire and poison, inaccessible To avarice or pride, their starry domes Of diamond and of gold expand above Numberless and immeasurable halls, 95Frequent0 with crystal column, and clear shrinesOf pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.4 Nor had that scene of ampler majesty crowded IOOThan gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven And the green earth lost in his heart its claims To love and wonder; he would linger long In lonesome vales, making the wild his home, Until the doves and squirrels would partake From his innocuous hand his bloodless food,5 105Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks, And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er The dry leaf rustles in the brake,0 suspend Her timid steps to gaze upon a form More graceful than her own. thicket I ioHis wandering step Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful0 ruins of the days of old: Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec,6 and the waste Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers awe-inspiring 115Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes,7 and whatsoe'er of strange Sculptured on alabaster obelisk, Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx, Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images Of more than man, where marble daemons watch The Zodiac's8 brazen mystery, and dead men


3. Lakes of pitch, flowing from a volcano. is the ruined capital of Lower Egypt. 4. An olive-green semiprecious stone. 8. In the temple of Isis at Denderah, Egypt, the 5. Shelley was himself a vegetarian. Zodiac is represented on the ceiling. Journeying 6. An ancient city in what is now Lebanon. Tyre among the great civilizations of the past has taken was once an important commercial city on the the Poet backward in time to older and older cul-


Phoenician coast. tures�from the Greeks to the Phoenicians, the


7. The ancient capital of Upper Egypt. Memphis Jews, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians. Finally


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75 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


120 Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,9


He lingered, poring on memorials


Of the world's youth, through the long burning day


Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon


Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades


125 Suspended he that task, but ever gazed


And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind


Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw


The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.


Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,


130 Her daily portion, from her father's tent,


And spread her matting for his couch, and stole


From duties and repose to tend his steps:�


Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe


To speak her love:�and watched his nightly sleep,


135 Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips


Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath


Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn


Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home


Wildered,� and wan, and panting, she returned. bewildered.


140 The Poet wandering on, through Arabie


And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,1


And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down


Indus and Oxus2 from their icy caves,


In joy and exultation held his way;


145 Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within


Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine


Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,


Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched


His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep


150 There came, a dream of hopes that never yet


Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid


Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.


Her voice was like the voice of his own soul


Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,


155 Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held


His inmost sense suspended in its web


Of many-coloured woof� and shifting hues. weave


Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,


And lofty hopes of divine liberty,


160 Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,


Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood


Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame


A permeating fire: wild numbers" then verse


She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs


165 Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands


Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp


he reaches Ethiopia (line 115), which had been 9. I.e., by quotations inscribed in the stone,


described as the "cradle of the sciences." "Dae- 1. A desert in southern Persia,


mons": in Greek mythology, not evil spirits but 2. Rivers in Asia,


minor deities or attendant spirits.


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ALASTOR / 75 1


Strange symphony, and in their branching veins


The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.


The beating of her heart was heard to fill


170 The pauses of her music, and her breath


Tumultuously accorded with those fits


Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,


As if her heart impatiently endured


Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,


175 And saw by the warm light of their own life


Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil


Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,


Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,


Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips


180 Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.


His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess


Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled


His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet


Her panting bosom: . . . she drew back a while,


185 Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,


With frantic gesture and short breathless cry


Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.


Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night


Involved" and swallowed up the vision; sleep, wrapped up


190 Like a dark flood suspended in its course,


Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.


Roused by the shock he started from his trance�


The cold white light of morning, the blue moon


Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,


195 The distinct valley and the vacant woods,


Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled


The hues of heaven that canopied his bower


Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,


The mystery and the majesty of Earth,


200 The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes


Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly


As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.


The spirit of sweet human love has sent


A vision to the sleep of him who spurned


205 Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues


Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;0 phantom


He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!


Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined


Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost,


210 In the wide pathless desart of dim sleep,


That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death


Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,


O Sleep?3 Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds,


And pendent0 mountains seen in the calm lake, jutting, overhanging


215 Lead only to a black and watery depth,


While death's blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung,


3. I.e., is death the only access to this maiden of his dream?


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75 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Where every shade which the foul grave exhales


Hides its dead eye from the detested day,


Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?


220 This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart,


The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung


His brain even like despair.


While day-light held


The sky, the Poet kept mute conference


With his still soul. At night the passion came,


225 Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,


And shook him from his rest, and led him forth


Into the darkness.�As an eagle grasped


In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast


Burn with the poison, and precipitates0 hastens


230 Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud,


Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight


O'er the wide aery wilderness:4 thus driven


By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,


Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,


235 Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells,


Startling with careless step the moon-light snake,


He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight,


Shedding the mockery of its vital hues


Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on


240 Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's5 steep


Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud;


Through Balk,6 and where the desolated tombs


Of Parthian kings7 scatter to every wind


Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on,


245 Day after day, a weary waste of hours,


Bearing within his life the brooding care


That ever fed on its decaying flame.


And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair


Sered by the autumn of strange suffering


250 Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand


Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;


Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone


As in a furnace burning secretly


From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,


255 Who ministered with human charity


His human wants, beheld with wondering awe


Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer,


Encountering on some dizzy precipice


That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind


260 With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet


Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused


In its career: the infant would conceal


His troubled visage in his mother's robe


4. The eagle and serpent locked in mortal combat ancient Arabia. Aornos is a high mountain. is a recurrent image in Shelley's poems (see Pro-6. Bactria, in ancient Persia, is now part of metheus Unbound 3.1.72-73, p. 811). Afghanistan.


5. The rock (literal trans.); "Petra's steep" is a 7. The Parthians inhabited northern Persia. mountain stronghold in the northern part of


.


ALASTOR / 75 1


In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,


265 To remember their strange light in many a dream


Of after-times; but youthful maidens, taught


By nature, would interpret half the woe That wasted him, would call him with false0 names mistaken


Brother, and friend, would press his pallid hand


270 At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path


Of his departure from their father's door. At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore8


He paused, a wide and melancholy waste


Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged


275 His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there,


Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.


It rose as he approached, and with strong wings


Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course


High over the immeasurable main.


280 His eyes pursued its flight.�"Thou hast a home,


Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home,


Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck


With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes


Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy.


285 And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,


Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned


To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers


In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven


290 That echoes not my thoughts?" A gloomy smile


Of desperate hope convulsed his curling lips


For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly


Its precious charge,9 and silent death exposed,


Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure,


295 With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. Startled by his own thoughts he looked around.


There was no fair fiend1 near him, not a sight


Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind.


A little shallop2 floating near the shore


300 Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze.


It had been long abandoned, for its sides


Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints


Swayed with the undulations of the tide.


A restless impulse urged him to embark


305 And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste;


For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves


The slimy caverns of the populous deep. The day was fair and sunny; sea and sky


Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind


8. The shore of Lake Aral, about 175 miles east of external agent luring him to the death described in the Caspian Sea. the preceding lines.


9. I.e., the maiden in the sleeper's dream. 2. A small open boat. 1. Apparently he suspects there may have been an


.


754 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


310 Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. Following his eager soul, the wanderer Leaped in the boat, he spread his cloak aloft On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat, And felt the boat speed o'er the tranquil sea


315 Like a torn cloud before the hurricane.3


As one that in a silver vision floats Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly Along the dark and ruffled waters fled The straining boat.�A whirlwind swept it on, With fierce gusts and precipitating force, Through the white ridges of the chafed sea. The waves arose. Higher and higher still Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest's scourge Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp. Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war Of wave ruining" on wave, and blast on blast crashingDescending, and black flood on whirlpool driven With dark obliterating course, he sate: As if their genii were the ministers Appointed to conduct him to the light Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate Holding the steady helm. Evening came on, The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray That canopied his path o'er the waste deep; Twilight, ascending slowly from the east, Entwin'd in duskier wreaths her braided locks O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day; Night followed, clad with stars. On every side More horribly the multitudinous streams Of ocean's mountainous waste to mutual war Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock The calm and spangled sky. The little boat Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam Down the steep cataract of a wintry river; Now pausing on the edge of the riven" wave; torn asunder Now leaving far behind the bursting mass That fell, convulsing ocean. Safely fled� As if that frail and wasted human form, Had been an elemental god.4


At midnight The moon arose: and lo! the etherial cliffs5 Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone Among the stars like sunlight, and around


3. If the Poet's boat is being carried upstream on human race. But it is also possible that the starting the Oxus River from the Aral Sea to the river's point for this journey is the Caspian Sea, in which


headwaters in the Hindu Kush Mountains (the case the journey would end near the traditional site "Indian Caucasus" that is the setting for Prome-of the Garden of Eden. theus Unbound), then the journey is taking him to 4. A god of one of the natural elements (see


a region that the naturalist Buffon (whom Shelley line 1).


often read) had identified as the cradle of the 5. I.e., cliffs high in the air.


.


ALASTOR / 75 1


355 Whose cavern'd base the whirlpools and the waves


Bursting and eddying irresistibly


Rage and resound for ever.�Who shall save?�


The boat fled on,�the boiling torrent drove,�


The crags closed round with black and jagged arms,


360 The shattered mountain overhung the sea,


And faster still, beyond all human speed,


Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave,


The little boat was driven. A cavern there


Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths


365 Ingulphed the rushing sea. The boat fled on


With unrelaxing speed.�"Vision and Love!"


The Poet cried aloud, "I have beheld


The path of thy departure. Sleep and death


Shall not divide us long!"


The boat pursued


370 The winding of the cavern. Day-light shone


At length upon that gloomy river's flow;


Now, where the fiercest war among the waves


Is calm, on the unfathomable stream


The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven,


375 Exposed those black depths to the azure sky,


Ere yet the flood's enormous volume fell


Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound


That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass


Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm;


380 Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, Circling immeasurably fast, and laved0 washed


With alternating dash the knarled roots


Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms


In darkness over it. I' the midst was left,


385 Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud, A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm.


Seized by the sway of the ascending stream,


With dizzy swiftness, round, and round, and round,


Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose,


390 Till on the verge of the extremest curve, Where, through an opening of the rocky bank,


The waters overflow, and a smooth spot


Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides


Is left, the boat paused shuddering.�Shall it sink


395 Down the abyss? Shall the reverting stress


Of that resistless gulph embosom it?


Now shall it fall?�A wandering stream of wind,


Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail,


And, lo! with gentle motion, between banks


400 Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream,


Beneath a woven grove it sails, and, hark!


The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar,


With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods.


Where the embowering trees recede, and leave


405 A little space of green expanse, the cove


.


75 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers


For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes,


Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave


Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task,


410 Which nought but vagrant bird, or wanton wind,


Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay


Had e'er disturbed before. The Poet longed


To deck with their bright hues his withered hair,


But on his heart its solitude returned,


415 And he forbore.6 Not the strong impulse hid In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame,


Had yet performed its ministry: it hung


Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud


Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods


Of night close over it.


420 The noonday sun Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass


Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence


A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves,


Scooped in the dark base of their aery rocks


425 Mocking7 its moans, respond and roar for ever. The meeting boughs and implicated0 leaves intertwined Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as led


By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death,


He sought in Nature's dearest haunt, some bank,


430 Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark


And dark the shades accumulate. The oak,


Expanding its immense and knotty arms,


Embraces the light beech. The pyramids


Of the tall cedar overarching, frame


435 Most solemn domes within, and far below.


Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,


The ash and the acacia floating hang


Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed


In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,


440 Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around


The grey trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes,


With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,


Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,


These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs


445 Uniting their close union; the woven leaves


Make net-work of the dark blue light of day,


And the night's noontide clearness, mutable


As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns


Beneath these canopies extend their swells,


450 Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms


Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen


Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine,


6. The "yellow flowers" overhanging their own strong impulse" (line 415) drives him on. reflection (lines 406�08), probably narcissus, may 7. As often in Shelley, "mocking" has a double


signify the narcissistic temptation of the Poet to be sense: mimicking as well as ridiculing the sounds


satisfied with a projection of his own self. But his of the forest (line 421).


need for an unearthly Other revives, and "the


.


ALASTOR / 75 1


A soul-dissolving odour, to invite


To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell,


455 Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep


Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades,


Like vaporous shapes half seen; beyond, a well,


Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave,


Images all the woven boughs above,


460 And each depending leaf, and every speck


Of azure sky, darting between their chasms;


Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves


Its portraiture, but some inconstant star


Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,


465 Or, painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon,


Or gorgeous insect floating motionless,


Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings


Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld


470 Their own wan light through the reflected lines


Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth


Of that still fountain; as the human heart,


Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,


Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard


475 The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprung


Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel


An unaccustomed presence, and the sound


Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs


Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed


480 To stand beside him�clothed in no bright robes


Of shadowy silver or enshrining light,


Borrowed from aught the visible world affords


Of grace, or majesty, or mystery;�


But, undulating woods, and silent well,


485 And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming


Held commune with him, as if he and it


Were all that was,�only . . . when his regard


Was raised by intense pensiveness, . . . two eyes,


490 Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought,


And seemed with their serene and azure smiles


To beckon him. Obedient to the light


That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing


The windings of the dell.�The rivulet


495 Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine


Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell


Among the moss with hollow harmony


Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones


It danced; like childhood laughing as it went:


500 Then, through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept,


Reflecting every herb and drooping bud


That overhung its quietness.�"O stream!


.


75 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Whose source is inaccessibly profound,


Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?


50? Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness,


Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulphs,


Thy searchless" fountain, and invisible course undiscoverahle Have each their type in me: and the wide sky,


And measureless ocean may declare as soon


510 What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud


Contains thy waters, as the universe


Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched


Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste


I' the passing wind!"


Beside the grassy shore


515 Of the small stream he went; he did impress


On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught


Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one


Roused by some joyous madness from the couch


Of fever, he did move; yet, not like him,


520 Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame


Of his frail exultation shall be spent,


He must descend. With rapid steps he went


Reneath the shade of trees, beside the flow


Of the wild babbling rivulet; and now


525 The forest's solemn canopies were changed For the uniform and lightsome0 evening sky. luminous


Grey rocks did peep from the spare, moss, and stemmed


The struggling brook: tall spires of windlestrae8


Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope,


530 And nought but knarled roots9 of antient pines Rranchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots


The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here,


Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away,


The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin


535 And white, and where irradiate0 dewy eyes illumined Had shone, gleam stony orbs:�so from his steps


Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade


Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds


And musical motions. Calm, he still pursued


540 The stream, that with a larger volume now Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there


Fretted a path through its descending curves


With its wintry speed. On every side now rose


Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms,


545 Lifted their black and barren pinnacles


In the light of evening, and its precipice1


Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above,


Mid toppling stones, black gulphs and yawning caves,


Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues


8. Windlestraw (Scottish dial.); tall, dried stalks of 9. Probably an error for "stumps" or "trunks." grass. 1. Headlong fall (of the stream, line 540).


.


ALASTOR / 75 1


550 To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands


Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,


And seems, with its accumulated crags,


To overhang the world: for wide expand


Beneath the wan stars and descending moon


555 Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams,


Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom


Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills


Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge


Of the remote horizon. The near0 scene, nearby


560 In naked and severe simplicity,


Made contrast with the universe. A pine,2


Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy


Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast


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 etherially 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,


2. Pine trees in Shelley often signify persistence and steadfastness amid change and vicissitudes.


.


76 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss,


6oo Commit the colours of that varying cheek,


That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.


The dim and horned3 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!


6io Whose sightless4 speed divides this sullen night:


And thou, colossal Skeleton,0 that, still Death


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 obscurest0 chasm;�and thus he lay, darkest


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


3. The moon is crescent shaped with the points new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms." rising, as in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode": "the 4. Invisible, or perhaps "unseeing."


.


ALASTOR / 75 1


Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,


With whose dun� beams inwoven darkness seemed darkened


To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills


650 It rests, and still as the divided frame Of the vast meteor5 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:6�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 vapour0 fed with golden beams cloud That ministered on7 sunlight, ere the west


665 Eclipses it, was now that wonderous 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-voiced waves�a dream


670 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!8 O, that God,


Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice


Which but one living man9 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,1


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;0 which the dawn mist Robes in its golden beams,�ah! thou hast fled!


The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,


5. I.e., the moon. "Meteor" was once used for any ses 7.275ff.). phenomenon in the skies, as our modern term 9. The Wandering Jew. According to a medieval


"meteorology" suggests. legend, he had taunted Christ on the way to the


6. The ebbing of the Poet's life parallels the crucifixion and was condemned to wander the descent of the "horned moon," to the moment world, deathless, until Christ's second coming.


when only the two "points of light"�its horns� 1. Cave in which he has visions. "Dark magician":


show above the hills. an alchemist attempting to produce the elixir of


7. Attended, acted as a servant to. enduring life. Alchemy intrigued both Shellieys. 8. Medea brewed a magic potion to rejuvenate the See Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal" dying Aeson; where some of the potion spilled on (p. 960). the ground, flowers sprang up (Ovid, Metamorpho


.


762 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


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 vesper2 low or joyous orison,0 prayer


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 senseless0 wind, shall live alone unfeelingIn 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 shews 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,"3 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.


1815 1816


Mont Blanc1


Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni


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


2. Evening prayer. France. That valley lies at the foot of Mont Blanc, 3. From the last line of Wordsworth's "Ode: Inti-the highest mountain in the Alps and in all Europe. mations of Immortality": "Thoughts that do often In the History Percy Shelley commented on his lie too deep for tears." poem: "It was composed under the immediate 1. "Mont Blanc," in which Shelley both echoes impression of the deep and powerful feelings and argues with the poetry of natural description excited by the objects it attempts to describe; and, written by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was first as an indisciplined overflowing of the soul rests its published as the conclusion to the History of a Six claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the Weeks' Tour. This was a book that Percy and Mary untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity Shelley wrote together detailing the excursion that from which those feelings sprang." He was inspired they and Claire Clairmont took in July 1816 to the to write the poem while standing on a bridge span- valley of Chamonix, in what is now southeastern ning the river Arve, which flows through the valley


.


MONT BLANC / 763


5 The source of human thought its tribute brings


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 forever,


10 Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river


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


is Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams: awfuP scene, awe-inspiringWhere Power in likeness of the Arve comes down


From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne,


Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame


Of lightning through the tempest;�thou dost lie,


20 Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder0 time, in whose devotion earlier, ancient The chainless winds still come and ever came


To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging


To hear�an old and solemn harmony;


25 Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep


Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil


Robes some unsculptured2 image; the strange sleep


Which when the voices of the desart fail


Wraps all in its own deep eternity;�


30 Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,


A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;


Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,


Thou art the path of that unresting sound�


Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee


35 I seem as in a trance sublime and strange


To muse on my own separate phantasy,


My own, my human mind, which passively


Now renders and receives fast influencings,


Holding an unremitting interchange


40 With the clear universe of things around;3 One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings


Now float above thy darkness, and now rest


Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,


of Chamonix and is fed from above by the meltoff powers, and the limits of knowledge. "All things


of the glacier, the Mer de Glace. exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to


In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock drafted in the percipient," Shelley would later write in "A


the same week as "Mont Blanc," Shelley had Defence of Poetry" (p. 837). In "Mont Blanc" the


recalled that the count de Buffon, a French pio-priority that this statement gives to the mind over


neer of the science we now know as geology, had the external world is challenged by the sheer


proposed a "sublime but gloomy theory�that this destructive power of the mountain.


globe which we inhabit will at some future period 2. I.e., not formed by humans.


be changed to a mass of frost." This sense, which 3. This passage is remarkably parallel to a passage


Shelley takes from Buffon, of a Nature that is Shelley could not have read in The Prelude, first


utterly alien and indifferent to human beings (and published in 1850, in which Wordsworth discov


whose history takes shape on a timescale of incom-ers, in the landscape viewed from Mount Snow


prehensible immensity) is counterposed through-don, the "type" or "emblem" of the human mind in


out "Mont Blanc" with Shelley's interest, fueled by its interchange with nature (see The Prelude


his reading of 1 8th-century skeptics such as David 14.63ft"., p. 386).


Hume, in questions about the human mind, its


.


76 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


In the still cave of the witch Poesy,4


45 Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!5


3


Some say that gleams of a remoter world


50 Visit the soul in sleep,�that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.�I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? or do I lie


55 In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly Its circles? For the very spirit fails, Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep That vanishes among the viewless0 gales! invisible


60 Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears,�still, snowy, and serene� Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,


65 Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desart peopled by the storms alone, Save� when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, exceptAnd the wolf tracts0 her there�how hideously tracks


70 Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.0�Is this the scene splitWhere the old Earthquake-daemon6 taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire, envelope once this silent snow?


75 None can reply�all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be But for such faith7 with nature reconciled;


so Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which8 the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.


4. I.e., in the part of the mind that creates poetry. balance of possibilities, the landscape is equally 5. I.e., the thoughts (line 41) seek, in the poet's capable either of instilling such a Wordsworthian creative faculty, some shade, phantom, or image of faith (in the possibility of reconciling humans and the Ravine of the Arve; and when the breast, which nature, lines 78�79) or of producing the "awful" has forgotten these images, recalls them again� (i.e., "awesome") doubt (that nature is totally alien there, suddenly, the Arve exists. to human needs and values). For Wordsworth's 6. A supernatural being, halfway between mortals faith in the correspondence of Nature and human and the gods. Here it represents the force that thoughts and his conviction that "Nature never did


makes earthquakes. Shelley views this landscape betray / The heart that loved her," see "Tintern as the product of violent geological upheavals in Abbey," lines 122-23.


the past. 8. The reference is to "voice," line 80.


7. I.e., "simply by holding such faith." In Shelley's


.


MONT BLANC / 765


4


The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, 85 Ocean, and all the living things that dwell


Within the daedal9 earth; lightning, and rain,


Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,


The torpor of the year when feeble dreams


Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep 90 Holds every future leaf and flower;�the bound With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and birth, And that of him and all that his may be; All things that move and breathe with toil and sound 95 Are born and die; revolve, subside and swell.


Power dwells apart in its tranquillity


Remote, serene, and inaccessible:


And this, the naked countenance of earth,


On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains IOO Teach the adverting0 mind. The glaciers creep observant Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice, Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, 105 A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing 110 Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand: the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place lis Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man, flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream, 120 And their place is not known. Below, vast caves Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling' Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,2 The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever 125 Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.


5


Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:�the power is there,


The still and solemn power of many sights,


9. Intricately formed; derived from Daedalus, lished "Kubla Khan," lines 12-24. builder of the labyrinth in Crete. 2. The Arve, which flows into Lake Geneva. 1. This description (as well as that in lines 9�11) Nearby the river Rhone flows out of Lake Geneva seems to be an echo of Coleridge's description of to begin its course through France and into the the chasm and sacred river in the recently pub-Mediterranean.


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76 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


And many sounds, and much of life and death. 130 In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,


In the lone glare of day, the snows descend


Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,


Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,


Or the star-beams dart through them:�Winds contend 135 Silently there, and heap the snow with breath


Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home


The voiceless lightning in these solitudes


Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods


Over the snow. The secret strength of things 140 Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome


Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou,� and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? Mont Blanc 1816 1817


Hymn to Intellectual Beauty1


The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen amongst 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,2 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,� 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?


Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,


This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not forever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river,


Why aught� should fail and fade that once is shewn, anything 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?


1. "Intellectual" means nonmaterial, that which is lend splendor, grace, and truth both to the natural beyond access to the human senses. In this poem world and to people's moral consciousness, intellectual beauty is something postulated to 2. Used as a verb, account for occasional states of awareness that


.


HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY / 76 7


3


25 No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given� Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven,


Remain the records of their vain endeavour,3 Frail spells�whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, 30


From all we hear and all we see, 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,0 wind harp


35 Or moonlight on a midnight stream, 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,


40 Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,


Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.4 Thou messenger of sympathies, That wax and wane in lovers' eyes�


Thou�that to human thought art nourishment,


45 Like darkness to a dying flame!5 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 50 Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,


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;6


I was not heard�I saw them not� 55 When musing deeply on the lot


Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of buds and blossoming,� Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;


60 I shrieked, and clasped my hands in extacy!


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 hours 65 Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers


3. The names (line 27) represent nothing better than the feeble guesses that philosophers and poets have made in attempting to answer the questions posed in stanza 2, but these guesses also delude us as though they were magic spells. 4. I.e., "man would be immortal .. . if thou didst keep." 5. Darkness may be said to nourish the dying flame by providing the contrast that offsets its light. 6. Lines 49�52 refer to Shelley's youthful experiments with magic. The "poisonous names" may be the religious terms ("God and ghosts and Heaven") of line 27.


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76 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Of studious zeal or love's delight Outwatched with me the envious night7�


They know that never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, 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


75 In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 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


so Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm�to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind


To fear8 himself, and love all human kind.


1816 1817


Ozymandias1


I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said�"Two vast and trunkless0 legs of stone without a torso Stand in the desart. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,


5 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive,0 stamped on these lifeless things, outlive The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;2 And on the pedestal, these words appear:


10 My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."


1817 1818


7. I.e., stayed up until the night, envious of their delight, had reluctantly departed. 8. Probably in the old sense: "to stand in awe of." 1. According to Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian of the 1st century B.C.E., the largest statue in Egypt had the inscription "I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits." Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramses II of Egypt, 13th century B.C.E.


2. "The hand" is the sculptor's, who had "mocked" (both imitated and satirized) the sculptured passions; "the heart" is the king's, which has "fed" his passions.


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STANZAS WRITTE N I N DEJECTIO N / 76 9 Stanzas Written in Dejection- December 1818, near Naples' 5The Sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent might, The breath of the moist earth is light Around its unexpanded buds; Like many a voice of one delight The winds, the birds, the Ocean-floods; The City's voice itself is soft, like Solitude's. iois I see the Deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown; I sit upon the sands alone; The lightning of the noontide Ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion. 2025Alas, I have nor hope nor health Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage2 in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned; Nor fame nor power nor love nor leisure� Others I see whom these surround, Smiling they live and call life pleasure: To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. 30Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child 35And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear Till Death like Sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the Sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. 40Some might lament that I were cold, As I, when this sweet day is gone,3 Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, Insults with this untimely moan�


1. Shelley's first wife, Harriet, had drowned her-2. Probably the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius self; Clara, his baby daughter with Mary Shelley, (2nd century C.E.) , Stoic philosopher who wrote had just died; and he was plagued by ill health, twelve books of Meditations. pain, financial worries, and the sense that he had 3. I.e., as I will lament this sweet day when it has failed as a poet. gone.


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77 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


They might lament,�for I am one Whom men love not, and yet regret; Unlike this day, which, when the Sun Shall on its stainless glory set,


45 Will linger though enjoyed, like joy in Memory yet.


1818 1824


A Song: "Men of England"1


Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear?


5 Wherefore feed and clothe and save From the cradle to the grave Those ungrateful drones who would Drain your sweat�1nay, drink your blood?


Wherefore, Bees of England, forge


10 Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, That these stingless drones may spoil The forced produce of your toil?


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?


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.


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.


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.


With plough and spade and hoe and loom 30 Trace your grave and build your tomb


1. This and the two following poems were written ing Shelley's hope for a proletarian revolution, was at a time of turbulent unrest, after the return of originally planned as one of a series for workers. It troops from the Napoleonic Wars had precipitated has become, as the poet wished, a hymn of the a great economic depression. The "Song," express-British labor movement.


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TO SlDMOUTH AND CASTLEREAGH / 77 1


And weave your winding-sheet�till fair England be your Sepulchre.


1819 1839


England in 1819


An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;1 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,


s But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed in th' unfilled field;2 An army, whom liberticide3 and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;


10 Golden and sanguine laws4 which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless�a book sealed; A senate, Time's worst statute, unrepealed� Are graves from which a glorious Phantom5 may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.


1819 1839


To Sidmouth and Castlereagh1


As from their ancestral oak


Two empty ravens wind their clarion, Yell by yell, and croak by croak, When they scent the noonday smoke


5 Of fresh human carrion:�


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,


io And the stars are none, or few:�


As a shark and dogfish wait Under an Atlantic isle


1. George 111, who had been declared insane in I. Shelley's powerful satire is directed against Vis1811. He died in 1820. count Castlereagh, foreign secretary during 1812� 2. Alluding to the Peterloo Massacre on August 22, who took a leading part in the European 16, 1819. In St. Peter's field, near Manchester, a settlement after the Battle of Waterloo, and Vis- troop of cavalry had charged into a crowd attending count Sidmouth (1757�1844), the home secrea peaceful rally in support of parliamentary reform. tary, whose cruelly coercive measures (supported "Peterloo" is an ironic combination of "St. Peter's" by Castlereagh) against unrest in the laboringclasand "Waterloo." ses were in large part responsible for the Peterloo 3. The killing of liberty. Massacre. 4. Laws bought with gold and leading to blood-When this poem was reprinted by Mary Shelley shed. in 1839, it was given the title "Similes for Two 5. I.e., a revolution. Political Characters of 1819."


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77 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


15For the Negro-ship, whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red gills the while� 20Are ye�two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained2 cattle, Two vipers tangled into one. 1819 1832


To William Shelley1


i My lost William, thou in whom Some bright spirit lived, and did That decaying robe consume Which its lustre faintly hid,� 5 Here its ashes find a tomb, But beneath this pyramid2 Thou art not�if a thing divine Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine Is thy mother's grief and mine.


2


io Where art thou, my gentle child? Let me think thy spirit feeds, With its life intense and mild, The love of living leaves and weeds Among these tombs and ruins wild;�


15 Let me think that through low seeds Of sweet flowers and sunny grass Into their hues and scents may pass A portion


1819 1824


Ode to the West Wind1


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,


2. A murrain is a malignant disease of domestic 2. The Shelleys, who left Rome shortly after Wilanimals. liam's death, ordered the construction of a small 1. The Shelleys' son William, who died of malaria stone pyramid to mark his grave. This is not, except in June 1819, age three and a half years, was bur-perhaps obliquely, a reference to the famous tomb, ied in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. These a 150-foot pyramid, of the Ist-century B.C.E . unfinished lines were discovered among the poet's Roman magistrate Caius Cestius just outside the papers by his widow, Mary Shelley (the grieving cemetery. mother of line 9), who published them in her hus-1. This poem was conceived and chiefly written in band's Posthumous Poems (1824). a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on


.


ODE TO THE WEST WIND / 773


Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic2 red, 5


Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed


The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring3 shall blow


10 Her clarion4 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;5 hear, O hear!


2


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,


Angels6 of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aery surge, 20 Like the bright hair uplifted from the head


Of some fierce Maenad,7 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,0 from whose solid atmosphere clouds Black rain and fire and hail will burst: O hear!


3


Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 30 The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams,8


a day when that tempestuous wind, whose tem-Shelley's sonnet-length stanza, developed from perature is at once mild and animating, was col-the interlaced three-line units of the Italian terza lecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rima (aba bcb cdc, etc.), consists of a set of four rains [Shelley's note]. As in other major Romantic such tercets, closed by a couplet rhyming with the poems�for example, the opening of Wordsworth's middle line of the preceding tercet: aba bcb cdc ded Prelude, Coleridge's "'Dejection: An Ode," and the ee. conclusion to Shelley's Adonais�the rising wind, 2. Referring to the kind of fever that occurs in linked with the cycle of the seasons, is presented tuberculosis. as the correspondent in the external world to an 3. The west wind that will blow in the spring. inner change, a burst of creative power that is par-4. A high, shrill trumpet. alleled to the inspiration of prophets. In many lan-5. Refers to the Hindu gods Siva the Destroyer guages the words for wind, breath, sold, and and Vishnu the Preserver. inspiration are identical or related. Thus Shelley's 6. In the old sense of messengers. west wind is a "spirit" (the Latin spiritus: wind, 7. A female worshipper who danced frenziedly in breath, soul, and the root word for inspiration), the the worship of Dionysus (Bacchus), the Greek god "breath of Autumn's being," which on earth, sky, of wine and vegetation. As vegetation god he was and sea destroys in autumn to revive in the spring. fabled to die in the fall and to be resurrected in the In some philosophical histories of the period, the spring. spirit of liberty was said to have deserted Europe 8. The currents that flow in the Mediterranean for the Americas. In blowing from the west, the Sea, sometimes with a visible difference in color.


wind may carry liberty back again.


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77 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Beside a pumice isle in Baise's bay,9 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


Cleave 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 grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves:1 O hear!


4


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.


5


Make me thy lyre,2 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, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!


Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!3 65 And, by the incantation of this verse,


9. West of Naples, the locale of imposing villas seasons, and is consequently influenced by the built in the glory days of imperial Rome. Their winds which announce it [Shelley's note]. ruins are reflected in the waters of the bay, a sight 2. The Eolian lyre, which responds to the wind Mary Shelley also describes in the Introduction to with rising and falling musical chords. The Last Man (see p. 957). 3. This line may play on the secondary sense of 1. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea . . . "leaves" as pages in a book. sympathizes with that of the land in the change of


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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND / 77 5


Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened Earth


The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, 70 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?


1819 1820


Prometheus Unbound Shelley composed this work in Italy between the autumn of 1818 and the close of 1819 and published it the following summer. Upon its completion he wrote in a letter, "It is a drama, with characters and mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts." It is based on the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, which dramatizes the sufferings of Prometheus, unrepentant champion of humanity, who, because he had stolen fire from heaven, was condemned by Zeus to be chained to Mount Caucasus and to be tortured by a vulture feeding on his liver; in a lost sequel Aeschylus reconciled Prometheus with his oppressor. Shelley continued Aeschylus's story but transformed it into a symbolic drama about the origin of evil and the possibility of overcoming it. In such early writings as Queen Mab, Shelley had expressed his belief that injustice and suffering could be eliminated by an external revolution that would wipe out or radically reform the causes of evil, attributed to existing social, political, and religious institutions. Implicit in Prometheus Unbound, on the other hand, is the view that both evil and the possibility of reform are the moral responsibility of men and women. Social chaos and wars are a gigantic projection of human moral disorder and inner division and conflict; tyrants are the outer representatives of the tyranny of our baser over our better elements; hatred for others is a product of self-contempt; and external political reform is impossible unless we have first reformed our own nature at its roots, by substituting selfless love for divisive hatred. Shelley thus incorporates into his secular myth�of universal regeneration by a triumph of humanity's moral imagination�the ethical teaching of Christ on the Mount, together with the classical morality represented in the Prometheus of Aeschylus.


FROM PROMETHEUS UNBOUND


A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts


Audisne hsec Amphiarae, sub terram abdite?1


Preface


The Greek tragic writers, in selecting as their subject any portion of their national history or mythology, employed in their treatment of it a certain arbi


1. Cicero, Tusculan Disputatiotis 2.60: "Do you fering. He quotes this line (a Latin translation from hear this, O Amphiaraus, concealed under the Aeschylus's lost drama Epigoni) in the course of an earth?" In Greek myth Amphiaraus was a seer. anecdote about Dionysius of Heraclea, who, tor- Fleeing from an unsuccessful assault on Thebes, mented by kidney stones, abjures the doctrine of he was saved from his pursuers by Zeus, who by a his Stoic teacher Zeno that pain is not an evil. By thunderbolt opened a cleft in the earth that swal-way of reproof his fellow-Stoic Cleanthes strikes lowed him up. his foot on the ground and utters this line. Cicero In his Disputations Cicero is arguing for the interprets it as an appeal to Zeno the Stoic master Stoic doctrine of the need to master pain and suf-(under the name of Amphiaraus).


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77 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


trary discretion. They by no means conceived themselves bound to adhere to the common interpretation or to imitate in story as in title their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would have amounted to a resignation of those claims to preference over their competitors which incited the composition. The Agamemnonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many variations as dramas.


I have presumed to employ a similar licence.�The Prometheus Unbound of ^Eschylus, supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis. Thetis, according to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus by the permission of Jupiter delivered from his captivity by Hercules.2�Had I framed my story on this model I should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost drama of /Eschylus; an ambition, which, if my preference to this mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparison such an attempt would challenge, might well abate. But in truth I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language, and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan because, in addition to courage and majesty and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry3 which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling, it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.


This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.


The imagery which I have employed will be found in many instances to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed. This is unusual in modern Poetry; although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power, and it is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be denied


2. Shelley's description of the subject of Aeschy- ulation based on surviving fragments. Ius's lost drama, Prometheus Unbound, is a spec- 3. Slippery reasoning.


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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND / 77 7


me) to which I am willing that my readers should impute this singularity.


One word is due in candour to the degree in which the study of contemporary writings may have tinged my composition, for such has been a topic of censure with regard to poems far more popular, and indeed more deservedly popular than mine. It is impossible that any one who inhabits the same age with such writers as those who stand in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientiously assure himself, that his language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of those extraordinary intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit of their genius, but the forms in which it has manifested itself, are due, less to the peculiarities of their own minds, than to the peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition of the minds among which they have been produced. Thus a number of writers possess the form, whilst they want the spirit of those whom, it is alleged, they imitate; because the former is the endowment of the age in which they live, and the latter must be the uncommunicated lightning of their own mind.


The peculiar style of intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England, has not been, as a general power, the product of the imitation of any particular writer. The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change. If England were divided into forty republics, each equal in population and extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose but that, under institutions not more perfect than those of Athens, each would produce philosophers and poets equal to those who (if we except Shakespeare) have never been surpassed. We owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian Religion. We owe Milton to the progress and developement of the same spirit; the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a Republican,4 and a bold enquirer into morals and religion. The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored.5


As to imitation; Poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them: one great poet is a masterpiece of nature, which another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe, as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The pretence of doing it would be a presumption in any but the greatest; the effect, even in him, would be strained, unnatural and ineffectual. A Poet, is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others, and of such external influences as excite and sustain


4. I.e., Milton hoped that the overthrow of the 5. See Shelley's similar tribute to his great con- monarchy during the Civil War would lead to temporaries in the concluding paragraph of his England's rebirth as a republic. "Defence of Poetry" (p. 849).


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77 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man's mind is in this respect modified by all the objects of nature and art, by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are in one sense the creators and in another the creations of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape. There is a similarity between Homer and Hesiod, between ^Eschylus and Euripides, between Virgil and Horace, between Dante and Petrarch, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Dryden and Pope; each has a generic resemblance under which their specific distinctions are arranged. If this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willing to confess that I have imitated.


Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have, what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms, "a passion for reforming the world:"6 what passion incited him to write and publish his book, he omits to explain. For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus.7 But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. Should I live to accomplish what 1 purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society,8 let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take/Eschylus rather than Plato as my model.


The having spoken of myself with unaffected freedom will need little apology with the candid; and let the uncandid consider that they injure me less than their own hearts and minds by misrepresentation. Whatever talents a person may possess to amuse and instruct others, be they ever so inconsiderable, he is yet bound to exert them: if his attempt be ineffectual, let the punishment of an unaccomplished purpose have been sufficient; let none trouble themselves to heap the dust of oblivion upon his efforts; the pile they raise will betray his grave which might otherwise have been unknown.


6. This is the title of chap. 16 in The Principles of Moral Science (1 805), by the Scottish writer Robert Forsyth. 7. Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued that the rate of increase in population will soon exceed the rate of increase in the food supply necessary to sustain it. William Paley wrote Evidences of Christianity (1794), which undertakes to prove that the design apparent in natural phenomena, and especially in the human body, entails the existence of God as the great Designer. Shelley ironically expresses his contempt for the doctrines of both these thinkers, which he conceives as arguments for accepting uncomplainingly the present state of the world.


8. Shelley did not live to write this history.


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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 77 9


Prometheus Unbound


Act 1


SCENE: A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. PROMETHEUS is discovered bound to the Precipice, PANTHEA and are seated at his feet. Time, Night.


IONE1


During the Scene, Morning slowly breaks.


PROMETHEUS Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits


But One,2 who throng those bright and rolling Worlds


Which Thou and I alone of living things


Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth


Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou


Requitest for knee-worship, prayer and praise,


And toil, and hecatombs3 of broken hearts,


With fear and self contempt and barren hope;


Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless0 in hate, blinded


Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,


O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.�


Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours


And moments�aye� divided by keen pangs always


Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,


Scorn and despair,�these are mine empire:�


More glorious far than that which thou surveyest


From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!


Almighty, had I deigned4 to share the shame


Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here


Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain.


Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,0 vegetation


Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.


Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever!


No change, no pause, no hope!�Yet I endure.


I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?


I ask yon Heaven�the all-beholding Sun,


Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,


Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below�


Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?


Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever!


The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears


Of their moon-freezing chrystals; the bright chains


Eat with their burning cold into my bones.


Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips


His beak in poison not his own, tears up


My heart;5 and shapeless sights come wandering by,


1. lone, Panthea, and Asia (introduced in the fol-3. Large sacrificial offerings. lowing scene) are sisters and Oceanids�i.e., 4. I.e., you would have been all-powerful, if I had daughters of Oceanus. deigned. 2. Demogorgon (see 2.4). "Daemons": super-5. The vulture, tearing daily at Prometheus's natural beings, intermediary between gods and heart, was kissed by Jupiter by way of reward. mortals. Prometheus is addressingjupiter.


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78 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


The ghastly people of the realm of dream, Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind; While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. And yet to me welcome is Day and Night, Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs The leaden-coloured East; for then they lead Their wingless, crawling Hours,6 one among whom �As some dark Priest hales0 the reluctant victim� drags Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood From these pale feet,7 which then might trample thee If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. Disdain? Ah no! I pity thee.8�What Ruin Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven! How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, Gape like a Hell within! I speak in grief, Not exultation, for I hate no more, As then, ere misery made me wise.�The Curse Once breathed on thee I would recall.9 Ye Mountains, Whose many-voiced Echoes, through the mist Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell! Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost, Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air, Through which the Sun walks burning without beams! And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poised wings Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss, As thunder louder than your own made rock The orbed world! If then my words had power �Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within, although no memory be Of what is hate�let them not lose it now!1 What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.


FIRST VOICE:


from the Mountains


Thrice three hundred thousand years O'er the Earthquake's couch we stood; Oft as men convulsed with fears We trembled in our multitude.


SECOND


VOICE: from the Springs


Thunderbolts had parched out water, We had been stained with bitter blood,


6. The Hours were represented in Greek myth and heart from hate to compassion, consummated in art by human figures with wings. lines 303-05. 7. One of a number of implied parallels between 9. I.e., remember. But the word's alternative the agony of Prometheus and the passion of Christ. sense, "revoke," will later become crucial. 8. At this early point occurs the crisis of the 1. Let my words not lose their power now. action: the beginning of Prometheus's change of


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PROMETHEU S UNBOUND , AC T 1 / 78 1 so And had run mute 'mid shrieks of slaughter Through a city and a solitude! 85THIRD VOICE: from the Air I had clothed since Earth uprose Its wastes in colours not their own, And oft had my serene repose Been cloven by many a rending groan. 90FOURTH VOICE: from theWe had soared beneath these mountains Unresting ages;�nor had thunder Nor yon Volcano's flaming fountains Nor any power above or under Ever made us mute with wonder! Whirlwinds FIRST VOICE But never bowed our snowy crest As at the voice of thine unrest. 95SECOND VOICE Never such a sound before To the Indian waves we bore.� A pilot asleep on the howling sea Leaped up from the deck in agony And heard, and cried, "Ah, woe is me!" And died as mad as the wild waves be. IOOTHIRD VOICE By such dread words from Earth to Heaven My still realm was never riven; When its wound was closed, there stood Darkness o'er the Day, like blood. 105FOURTH VOICE And we shrank back�for dreams of ruin To frozen caves our flight pursuing Made us keep silence�thus�and thus� Though silence is as hell to us. 110THE EARTH The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hills Cried "Misery!" then; the hollow Heaven replied, "Misery!" And the Ocean's purple waves, Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds. And the pale nations heard it,�"Misery!" 115PROMETHEUS I hear a sound of voices�not the voice Which I gave forth.�Mother,0 thy sons and thouScorn him, without whose all-enduring will Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove Earth


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78 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Both they and thou had vanished like thin mist Unrolled on the morning wind!�Know ye not me, The Titan, he who made his agony The barrier to your else all-conquering foe?


120 O rock-embosomed lawns and snow-fed streams Now seen athwart frore vapours2 deep below, Through whose o'er-shadowing woods I wandered once With Asia, drinking life from her loved eyes; Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now


125 To commune with me? me alone, who checked� As one who checks a fiend-drawn charioteer� The falshood and the force of Him who reigns Supreme, and with the groans of pining slaves Fills your dim glens and liquid wildernesses? Why answer ye not, still? brethren!


THE EARTH


130 They dare not.


PROMETHEUS


Who dares? for I would hear that curse again. . . . Ha, what an awful whisper rises up! 'Tis scarce like sound, it tingles through the frame As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike.�


135 Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice I only know that thou art moving near And love. How cursed I him?


THE EARTH


How canst thou hear Who knowest not the language of the dead?


PROMETHEUS


Thou art a living spirit�speak as they.


THE EARTH


140 I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven's felF King cruel Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain More torturing than the one whereon I roll.� Subtle thou art and good, and though the Gods Hear not this voice�yet thou art more than God


145 Being wise and kind�earnestly hearken now.�


PROMETHEUS


Obscurely through my brain like shadows dim Sweep awful� thoughts, rapid and thick.�I feel axve-inspiring Faint, like one mingled in entwining love, Yet 'tis not pleasure.


2. Through frosty vapors.


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PROMETHEU S UNBOUND , AC T 1 / 78 3 THE EARTH No, thou canst not hear: 150 Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known Only to those who die . . . PROMETHEUS And what art thou, O melancholy Voice? THE EARTH I am the Earth, Thy mother, she within whose stony veins To the last fibre of the loftiest tree 155 Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air Joy ran, as blood within a living frame, When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy! And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted 160 Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread Grew pale�until his thunder chained thee here.� Then�see those million worlds which burn and roll Around us: their inhabitants beheld 165 My sphered light wane in wide Heaven; the sea Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven's frown; Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains; 170 Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled; When Plague had fallen on man and beast and worm, And Famine,�and black blight on herb and tree, And in the corn and vines and meadow-grass 175 Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry With grief,�and the thin air, my breath, was stained With the contagion of a mother's hate Breathed on her child's destroyer�aye, I heard 180 Thy curse, the which if thou rememberest not Yet my innumerable seas and streams, Mountains and caves and winds, and yon wide Air And the inarticulate people of the dead Preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate 185 In secret joy and hope those dreadful words But dare not speak them. PROMETHEUS Venerable Mother! All else who live and suffer take from thee Some comfort; flowers and fruits and happy sounds


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78 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


And love, though fleeting; these may not be mine. 190 But mine own words, I pray, deny me not.


THE EARTH


They shall be told.�Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster,3 my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw.


195 For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest, but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them, and they part no more;


200 Dreams and the light imaginings of men And all that faith creates, or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes. There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade 'Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains; all the Gods


205 Are there, and all the Powers of nameless worlds, Vast, sceptred Phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts; And Demogorgon,4 a tremendous Gloom; And he, the Supreme Tyrant,5 on his throne Of burning Gold. Son, one of these shall utter


210 The curse which all remember. Call at will Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter, Hades or Typhon,6 or what mightier Gods From all-prolific Evil, since thy ruin Have sprung, and trampled on my prostrate sons.�


215 Ask and they must reply�so the revenge Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades As rainy wind through the abandoned gate Of a fallen palace.


PROMETHEUS


Mother, let not aught Of that which may be evil, pass again 220 My lips, or those of aught resembling me.� Phantasm of Jupiter, arise, appear!


IONE


My wings are folded o'er mine ears, My wings are crossed over mine eyes,


3. Zoroaster founded in ancient Persia a dualistic otic elements, and surrounded the earth with the religion that worshiped fire and light in opposition heavens. In addition to Pan and the Fates, his chilto the evil principle of darkness. Priests of the reli-dren were Uranus, Titaea, Pytho, Eris, and Eregion were called Magi (singular: Magus). bus." Thus, in Peacock's account, Demogorgon is 4. In a note to the name in a poem published in the father of the Sky, the Earth, and the Under1817, Thomas Love Peacock alludes to Milton's world, as well as the Fates. mention of Demogorgon (Paradise Lost, 2.965) and 5. The shade or simulacrum of Jupiter. explains: "He was the Genius of the Earth, and the 6. Hades (Pluto), king of the underworld; Typhon, Sovereign Power of the Terrestrial Daemons. He a hundred-headed giant, imprisoned beneath voldwelt originally with Eternity and Chaos, till, canic Mount Aetna. becoming weary of inaction, he organised the cha


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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 78 5


Yet through their silver shade appears And through their lulling plumes arise A Shape, a throng of sounds: May it be, no ill to thee7


O thou of many wounds! Near whom for our sweet sister's sake Ever thus we watch and wake.


PANTHEA


The sound is of whirlwind underground, Earthquake and fire, and mountains cloven,� The Shape is awful like the sound, Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven.


A sceptre of pale gold To stay steps proud, o'er the slow cloud His veined hand doth hold.


Cruel he looks but calm and strong Like one who does, not suffers wrong.


PHANTASM OF JUPITER


Why have the secret powers of this strange world Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk In darkness? And, proud Sufferer, who art thou?


PROMETHEUS


Tremendous Image! as thou art must be He whom thou shadowest forth. I am his foe The Titan. Speak the words which I would hear, Although no thought inform thine empty voice.


THE EARTH


Listen! and though your echoes must be mute, Grey mountains and old woods and haunted springs, Prophetic caves and isle-surrounding streams Rejoice to hear what yet ye cannot speak.


PHANTASM


A spirit seizes me, and speaks within: It tears me as fire tears a thunder-cloud!


PANTHEA


See how he lifts his mighty looks, the Heaven Darkens above.


IONE


He speaks! O shelter me�


7. Shelley uses the comma in the middle of lines like these to emphasize the internal rhymes.


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78 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


PROMETHEUS I see the curse on gestures proud and cold, And looks of firm defiance, and calm hate, 260 And such despair as mocks itself with smiles, Written as on a scroll. . . yet speak�O speak! PHANTASM Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind, All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do; Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Humankind, 265 One only being shalt thou not subdue. Rain then thy plagues upon me here, Ghastly disease and frenzying fear; And let alternate frost and fire Eat into me, and be thine ire 270 Lightning and cutting hail and legioned forms Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms. Aye, do thy worst. Thou art Omnipotent. O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power, And my own will. Be thy swift mischiefs sent 275 To blast mankind, from yon etherial tower. Let thy malignant spirit move Its darkness over those I love: On me and mine I imprecate" call down The utmost torture of thy hate 280 And thus devote to sleepless agony This undeclining head while thou must reign on high. But thou who art the God and Lord�O thou Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe, To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow 285 In fear and worship�all-prevailing foe! I curse thee! let a sufferer's curse Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse, Till thine Infinity shall be A robe of envenomed agony;s 290 And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain. Heap on thy soul by virtue of this Curse 111 deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good, Both infinite as is the Universe, 295 And thou, and thy self-torturing solitude. An awful Image of calm power Though now thou sittest, let the hour Come, when thou must appear to be


8. Like the poisoned shirt of the centaur Nessus, which consumed Hercules' flesh when he put it on. The next two lines allude to the mock crowning of Christ with a crown of thorns.


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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 78 7


That which thou art internally. 300 And after many a false and fruitless crime Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and time.


[The Phantasm vanishes. ]


PROMETHEUS Were these my words, O Parent? THE EARTH They were thine. PROMETHEUS It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;


Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. 305 I wish no living thing to suffer pain.


THE EARTH


Misery, O misery to me, That Jove at length should vanquish thee. Wail, howl aloud, Land and Sea, The Earth's rent heart shall answer ye.


3io Howl, Spirits of the living and the dead, Your refuge, your defence lies fallen and vanquished.


FIRST ECHO


Lies fallen and vanquished?


SECOND ECHO


Fallen and vanquished!


IONE


Fear not�'tis but some passing spasm, 315 The Titan is unvanquished still. But see, where through the azure chasm Of yon forked and snowy hill, Trampling the slant winds on high With golden-sandalled feet, that glow 320 Under plumes of purple dye Like rose-ensanguined9 ivory, A Shape comes now, Stretching on high from his right hand A serpent-cinctured1 wand.


PANTHEA


325 'Tis Jove's world-wandering Herald, Mercury.


IONE And who are those with hydra tresses2 And iron wings that climb the wind,


Whom the frowning God represses Like vapours steaming up behind, 330 Clanging loud, an endless crowd�


9. Stained blood color. cury as the messenger of the Gods. I. Mercury carries a caduceus, a staff encircled by 2. Locks of hair resembling the many-headed two snakes with their heads facing each other, a snake, the hydra, symbol of peace befitting the role of Hermes/Mer


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78 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


PANTHEA


These are Jove's tempest-walking hounds,3 Whom he gluts with groans and blood, When charioted on sulphurous cloud He bursts Heaven's bounds.


IONE


Are they now led, from the thin dead On new pangs to be fed?


PANTHEA


The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud.


FIRST FURY


Ha! I scent life!


SECOND FURY


Let me but look into his eyes!


THIRD FURY


The hope of torturing him smells like a heap Of corpses to a death-bird after battle!


FIRST FURY


Darest thou delay, O Herald! take cheer, Hounds Of Hell�what if the Son of Maia� soon Mercury Should make us food and sport? Who can please long The Omnipotent?


MERCURY


Back to your towers of iron And gnash, beside the streams of fire, and wail Your foodless teeth! . . . Geryon, arise! and Gorgon, Chimaera,4 and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends, Who ministered to Thebes Heaven's poisoned wine, Unnatural love and more unnatural hate:5 These shall perform your task.


FIRST FURY


O mercy! mercy! We die with our desire�drive us not back!


3. I.e., the Furies, avengers of crimes committed and a dragon's tail. against the gods. 5. The Sphinx, a monster with the body of a lion, 4. Geryon, a monster with three heads and three wings, and the face and breasts of a woman, bodies; the Gorgons, three mythical personages, besieged Thebes by devouring those who could not with snakes for hair, who turned beholders into answer her riddle. Oedipus solved the riddle (causstone; the Chimera, a fabled fire-breathing mon-ing the Sphinx to kill herself), only to marry his ster of Greek mythology with three heads (lion, mother ("unnatural love"), leading to the tragic goat, and dragon), the body of a lion and a goat, events depicted in the Greek Theban plays.


.


PROMETHEUS


MERCURY


Crouch then in silence.�


Awful0 Sufferer! To thee unwilling, most unwillingly I come, by the great Father's will driven down


To execute a doom of new revenge. Alas! I pity thee, and hate myself That I can do no more.�Aye from thy sight Returning, for a season, Heaven seems Hell, So thy worn form pursues me night and day,


UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 789


awe-inspiring


360 Smiling reproach. Wise art thou, firm and good, But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife Against the Omnipotent, as yon clear lamps That measure and divide the weary years From which there is no refuge, long have taught


365 And long must teach.�Even now thy Torturer arms


With the strange might of unimagined pains The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell, And my commission is, to lead them here, Or what more subtle,0 foul or savage


370 People0 the abyss, and leave them to their task. Be it not so! . . . There is a secret known To thee and to none else of living things Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven, The fear of which perplexes the Supreme . . .


375 Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane0Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart; For benefits and meek submission tame The fiercest and the mightiest.


PROMETHEUS


380 Evil minds Change good to their own nature. I gave all He has; and in return he chains me here Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun Split my parched skin, or in the moony night


fiends artful populate


temple


385 The chrystal-winged snow cling round my hair� Whilst my beloved race is trampled down By his thought-executing ministers. Such is the tyrant's recompense�'tis just: He who is evil can receive no good;


390 And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost, He can feel hate, fear, shame�not gratitude: He but requites me for his own misdeed. Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge.


395 Submission, thou dost know, I cannot try: For what submission but that fatal word, The death-seal of mankind's captivity�


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79 0 / PERC Y BYSSH E SHELLE Y 400405Like the Sicilian's hair-suspended sword6 Which trembles o'er his crown�would he accept, Or could I yield?�which yet I will not yield. Let others flatter Crime where it sits throned In brief Omnipotence; secure are they: For Justice when triumphant will weep down Pity not punishment on her own wrongs, Too much avenged by those who err. I wait, Enduring thus the retributive hour7 Which since we spake is even nearer now.�� But hark, the hell-hounds clamour. Fear delay! Behold! Heaven lowers0 under thy Father's frown. cowers 410MERCURY O that we might be spared�I to inflict And thou to suffer! Once more answer me: Thou knowest not the period8 of Jove's power? PROMETHEUS I know but this, that it must come. MERCURY Alas! Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain? 415PROMETHEUS They last while Jove must reign, nor more nor less Do I desire or fear. 420MERCURY Yet pause, and plunge Into Eternity, where recorded time, Even all that we imagine, age on age, Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind Flags wearily in its unending flight Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless; Perchance it has not numbered the slow years Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved. PROMETHEUS Perchance no thought can count them�yet they pass. 425MERCURY If thou might'st dwell among the Gods the while Lapped in voluptuous joy?� 6. I.e., the sword of Damocles, suspended by athread above the throne of Damocles, ruler of Syracuse in Sicily. 7. Time of retribution, 8. The end or conclusion,


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PROMETHEU S UNBOUND, AC T 1 / 79 1 PROMETHEUS I would not quit This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains. MERCURY Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee. 430PROMETHEUS Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven, Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene As light in the sun, throned. . . . How vain is talk! Call up the fiends. IONE O sister, look! White fire Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded Cedar; How fearfully God's thunder howls behind! 435MERCURY I must obey his words and thine�alas! Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart! PANTHEA See where the child of Heaven with winged feet Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn. 440IONE Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes Lest thou behold and die�they come, they come Blackening the birth of day with countless wings, And hollow underneath, like death. FIRST FURY Prometheus! Immortal Titan! SECOND FURY THIRD FURY Champion of Heaven's slaves! 445 450 PROMETHEUS He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here, Prometheus, the chained Titan.�Horrible forms, What and who are ye? Never yet there came Phantasms0 so foul through monster-teeming HellFrom the all-miscreative brain of Jove; Whilst I behold such execrable shapes, Methinks I grow like what I contemplate And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy. apparitions


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79 2 / PERC Y BYSSH E SHELLE Y 455FIRST FURY We are the ministers of pain and fear And disappointment and mistrust and hate And clinging" crime; and as lean dogs pursue Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, We track all things that weep and bleed and live When the great King betrays them to our will. clasping 460PROMETHEUS 0 many fearful natures in one name! 1 know ye, and these lakes and echoes know The darkness and the clangour of your wings. But why more hideous than your loathed selves Gather ye up in legions from the deep? SECOND FURY We knew not that�Sisters, rejoice, rejoice! PROMETHEUS Can aught exult in its deformity? SECOND FURY The beauty of delight makes lovers glad Gazing on one another�so are we. As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels To gather for her festal0 crown of flowersThe aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek� So from our victim's destined agony The shade which is our form invests us round, Else we are shapeless as our Mother Night. festive PROMETHEUS I laugh0 your power and his who sent you hereTo lowest scorn.�Pour forth the cup of pain. mock 475FIRS T FURY Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone? And nerve from nerve, working like fire within? PROMETHEUS Pain is my element as hate is thine; Ye rend me now: I care not. SECOND FURY Dost imagine We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes? 480PROMETHEUS I weigh0 not what ye do, but what ye sufferBeing evil. Cruel was the Power which called You, or aught else so wretched, into light. consider


.


PROMETHEU S UNBOUND , AC T 1 / 79 3 THIRD FURY Thou think'st we will live through thee, one by one, Like animal life, and though we can obscure not 485 The soul which burns within, that we will dwell Beside it, like a vain loud multitude Vexing the self-content of wisest men� That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain And foul desire round thine astonished heart 490 And blood within thy labyrinthine veins Crawling like agony. PROMETHEUS Why, ye are thus now; Yet am I king over myself, and rule The torturing and conflicting throngs within As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous. CHORUS OF FURIES 495 From the ends of the Earth, from the ends of the Earth, Where the night has its grave and the morning its birth, Come, Come, Come! O yet who shake hills with the scream of your mirth When cities sink howling in ruin, and ye 500 Who with wingless footsteps trample the Sea, And close upon Shipwreck and Famine's track Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wrack; Come, Come, Come! Leave the bed, low, cold and red, 505 Strewed beneath a nation dead; Leave the hatred�as in ashes Fire is left for future burning,� It will burst in bloodier flashes When ye stir it, soon returning; 510 Leave the self-contempt implanted In young spirits sense-enchanted, Misery's yet unkindled fuel; Leave Hell's secrets half-unchanted To the maniac dreamer: cruel 515 More than ye can be with hate, Is he with fear. Come, Come, Come! We are steaming up from Hell's wide gate And we burthen the blasts of the atmosphere, 520 But vainly we toil till ye come here. IONE Sister, I hear the thunder of new wings. PANTHEA These solid mountains quiver with the sound Even as the tremulous air:�their shadows make The space within my plumes more black than night.


.


79 4 / PERC Y BYSSH E SHELLE Y FIRST FURY Your call was as a winged car Driven on whirlwinds fast and far; It rapt� us from red gulphs of war� carried SECOND FURY From wide cities, famine-wasted� THIRD FURY Groans half heard, and blood untasted� FOURTH FURY Kingly conclaves, stern and cold, Where blood with gold is bought and sold� FIFTH FURY From the furnace, white and hot, In which� 535A FURY Speak not�whisper not! I know all that ye would tell, But to speak might break the spell Which must bend the Invincible, The stern of thought; He yet defies the deepest power of Hell. Tear the veil!� A FURY It is torn! ANOTHER FURY 540545550555CHORUS The pale stars of the morn Shine on a misery dire to be borne. Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn. Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man? Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran Those perishing waters: a thirst of fierce fever, Hope, love, doubt, desire�which consume him forever. One� came forth, of gentle worth, Smiling on the sanguine earth; His words outlived him, like swift poison Withering up truth, peace and pity. Look! where round the wide horizon Many a million-peopled city Vomits smoke in the bright air.� Hark that outcry of despair! 'Tis his mild and gentle ghost Wailing for the faith he kindled. Christ


.


PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 79 5


Look again,�the flames almost To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled: The survivors round the embers Gather in dread.


560 Joy, Joy, Joy! Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers, And the future is dark, and the present is spread Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.


SEMICHORUS I


Drops of bloody agony flow


565 From his white and quivering brow. Grant a little respite now� See! a disenchanted Nation9 Springs like day from desolation; To truth its state, is dedicate,


570 And Freedom leads it forth, her mate; A legioned band of linked brothers Whom Love calls children�


SEMICHORUS II


'Tis another's� See how kindred murder kin! Tis the vintage-time for Death and Sin:


575 Blood, like new wine, bubbles within Till Despair smothers The struggling World�which slaves and tyrants win.


[All the Furies vanish, except one.]


IONE


Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart


580 Of the good Titan�as storms tear the deep And beasts hear the Sea moan in inland caves. Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him?


PANTHEA


Alas, I looked forth twice, but will no more.


IONE


What didst thou see?


PANTHEA A woeful sight�a youth0 Christ With patient looks nailed to a crucifix.


IONE


What next?


9. Usually identified as France, breaking the spell of monarchy at the time of the Revolution.


.


79 6 / PERC Y BYSSH E SHELLE Y PANTHEA The Heaven around, the Earth below Was peopled with thick shapes of human death, All horrible, and wrought by human hands, And some appeared the work of human hearts, 590 For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles: And other sights too foul to speak and live Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear By looking forth�those groans are grief enough. FURY Behold, an emblem�those who do endure 595 Deep wrongs for man, and scorn and chains, but heap Thousand-fold torment on themselves and him. PROMETHEUS Bemit the anguish of that lighted stare� Close those wan lips�let that thorn-wounded brow Stream not with blood�it mingles with thy tears 6oo Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix, So those pale fingers play not with thy gore.-�O horrible! Thy name I will not speak, It hath become a curse.1 I see, I see 605 The wise, the mild, the lofty and the just, Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee, Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home, An early-chosen, late-lamented home, As hooded ounces2 cling to the driven hind," doe 6io Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells: Some�hear I not the multitude laugh loud?� Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms Float by my feet like sea-uprooted isles Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood 6i5 By the red light of their own burning homes. FURY Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans; Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind. PROMETHEUS Worse? FURY In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged:3 the loftiest fear 620 All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes0 of many a worship, now outworn. temples They dare not devise good for man's estate And yet they know not that they do not dare. 625 The good want power, but to weep barren tears.4 The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill.


1. I.e., the name "Christ" has become, literally, a curse word, and metaphorically, a curse to humankind, in that His religion of love is used to justify religious wars and bloody oppression. 2. Cheetahs, or leopards, used in hunting (hoods were sometimes placed over their eyes to make them easier to control).


3. The prey that it has greedily devoured. 4. I.e., the good lack ("want") power except to weep "barren tears."


.


PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 79 7


Many are strong and rich,�and would be just,� 630 But live among their suffering fellow men As if none felt: they know not what they do.5 PROMETHEUS Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes


And yet, I pity those they torture not. FURY Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! [Vanishes.] PROMETHEUS Ah woe!


635 Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, forever! I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear Thy works within my woe-illumed mind, Thou subtle Tyrant!6 . . . Peace is in the grave� The grave hides all things beautiful and good�


640 I am a God and cannot find it there, Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce King, not victory. The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul With new endurance, till the hour arrives


645 When they shall be no types of things which are. PANTHEA Alas! what sawest thou? PROMETHEUS There are two woes:


To speak and to behold; thou spare me one.7 Names are there, Nature's sacred watchwords�they Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry.8


650 The nations thronged around, and cried aloud As with one voice, "Truth, liberty and love!" Suddenly fierce confusion fell from Heaven Among them�there was strife, deceit and fear; Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil.


655 This was the shadow of the truth I saw.


THE EARTH I felt thy torture, Son, with such mixed joy As pain and Virtue give.�To cheer thy state I bid ascend those subtle and fair spirits Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought


660 And who inhabit, as birds wing the wind, Its world-surrounding ether;9 they behold Beyond that twilight realm, as in a glass,0 mirror The future�may they speak comfort to thee!


PANTHEA


Look, Sister, where a troop of spirits gather 665 Like flocks of clouds in spring's delightful weather, Thronging in the blue air!


IONE


And see! more come Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb,


5. The Fury ironically echoes Christ's plea for for-7. I.e., spare me the woe of speaking (about what giveness of his crucifiers: "Father, forgive them: for I have beheld). they know not what they do" (Luke 23.34). 8. As in a brilliant display of banners. 6. Jupiter (also addressed as "fierce King," line 9. A medium, weightless and infinitely elastic, 642). once supposed to permeate the universe.


.


840 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


That climb up the ravine in scattered lines. And hark! is it the music of the pines? Is it the lake? is it the waterfall?


PANTHEA


Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all.


CHORUS OF SPIRITS1


From unremembered ages we Gentle guides and guardians be Of Heaven-oppressed mortality� And we breathe, and sicken not, The atmosphere of human thought: Be it dim and dank and grey Like a storm-extinguished day Travelled o'er by dying gleams;


Be it bright as all between Cloudless skies and windless streams, Silent, liquid and serene� As the birds within the wind, As the fish within the wave, As the thoughts of man's own mind


Float through all above the grave, We make there, our liquid lair, Voyaging cloudlike and unpent0 Through the boundless element� Thence we bear the prophecy Which begins and ends in thee!


IONE


More yet come, one by one: the air around them Looks radiant as the air around a star.


FIRST SPIRIT


On a battle-trumpet's blast I fled hither, fast, fast, fast, Mid the darkness upward cast� From the dust of creeds outworn, From the tyrant's banner torn, Gathering round me, onward borne, There was mingled many a cry� Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory! Till they faded through the sky And one sound�above, around, One sound beneath, around, above, Was moving; 'twas the soul of love; 'Twas the hope, the prophecy, Which begins and ends in thee.


1. Identified by Earth at lines 658-63.


.


PROMETHEU S UNBOUND , AC T 1 / 79 9 SECOND SPIRI T A rainbow's arch stood on the sea, Which rocked beneath, immoveably; 710 And the triumphant Storm did flee, Like a conqueror swift and proud Between, with many a captive cloud A shapeless, dark and rapid crowd, Each by lightning riven in half.� 715 I heard the thunder hoarsely laugh.� Mighty fleets were strewn like chaff And spread beneath, a hell of death O'er the white waters. I alit On a great ship lightning-split 720 And speeded hither on the sigh Of one who gave an enemy His plank�then plunged aside to die. THIR D SPIRI T I sate beside a sage's bed And the lamp was burning red 725 Near the book where he had fed, When a Dream with plumes of flame To his pillow hovering came, And I knew it was the same Which had kindled long ago 730 Pity, eloquence and woe; And the world awhile below Wore the shade its lustre made. It has borne me here as fleet As Desire's lightning feet: 735 I must ride it back ere morrow, Or the sage will wake in sorrow. FOURTH SPIRI T On a Poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept; Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses But feeds on the aerial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees i' the ivy-bloom Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings0 of immortality!� children One of these awakened me And I sped to succour thee.


.


80 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


IONE


Behold'st thou not two shapes from the East and West Come, as two doves to one beloved nest, Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air,


755 On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere? And hark! their sweet, sad voices! 'tis despair Mingled with love, and then dissolved in sound.�


PANTHEA


Canst thou speak, sister? all my words are drowned.


IONE


Their beauty gives me voice. See how they float


760 On their sustaining wings of skiey grain, Orange and azure, deepening into gold: Their soft smiles light the air like a star's fire.


CHORUS OF SPIRITS


Hast thou beheld the form of Love?


FIFTH SPIRIT


As over wide dominions I sped, like some swift cloud that wings the wide air's wildernesses. 765 That planet-crested Shape swept by on lightning-braided pinions,0 wings Scattering the liquid joy of life from his ambrosial0 tresses: heavenly


His footsteps paved the world with light�but as I past 'twas fading And hollow Ruin yawned behind. Great Sages bound in madness And headless patriots and pale youths who perished unupbraiding,


770 Gleamed in the Night I wandered o'er�till thou, O King of sadness, Turned by thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness.


SIXTH SPIRIT


Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing: It walks not on the Earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with silent footstep, and fans with silent wing


775 The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear, Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dreams visions of aerial joy, and call the monster, Love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain�as he whom now we greet.


CHORUS


780 Though Ruin now Love's shadow be, Following him destroyingly On Death's white and winged steed, Which the fleetest cannot flee� Trampling down both flower and weed, 785 Man and beast and foul and fair,


2. Without uttering reproaches.


.


PROMETHEU S UNBOUND , AC T 1 / 80 1 Like a tempest through the air; Thou shalt quell this Horseman grim, Woundless though in heart or limb.� PROMETHEU S Spirits! how know ye this shall be? CHORUS 790795 In the atmosphere we breathe� As buds grow red when snow-storms flee From spring gathering up beneath, Whose mild winds shake, the elder brake0And the wandering herdsmen know That the white-thorn soon will blow� thicket Wisdom, Justice, Love and Peace, When they struggle to increase, Are to us as soft winds be sooTo shepherd-boys�the prophecy Which begins and ends in thee. IONE Where are the Spirits fled? PANTHEA 805Only a sense Remains of them, like the Omnipotence Of music when the inspired voice and lute Languish, ere yet the responses are mute Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul, Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll. PROMETHEU S 8io815How fair these air-born shapes! and yet I feel Most vain all hope but love, and thou art far, Asia! who when my being overflowed Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust. All things are still�alas! how heavily This quiet morning weighs upon my heart; Though I should dream, I could even sleep with grief If slumber were denied not .. . I would fain 820Be what it is my destiny to be, The saviour and the strength of suffering man, Or sink into the original gulph of things. . . . There is no agony and no solace left; Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more. PANTHEA Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when The shadow of thy spirit falls on her?


.


80 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


PROMETHEUS


I said all hope was vain but love�thou lovest . . .


PANTHEA


Deeply in truth�but the Eastern star looks white,


And Asia waits in that far Indian vale,


The scene of her sad exile�rugged once


And desolate and frozen like this ravine;


But now invested with fair flowers and herbs


And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow


Among the woods and waters, from the ether" purer air


Of her transforming presence�which would fade


If it were mingled not with thine.�Farewell!


From Act 2


SCENE 4�The Cave of DEMOGORGON. ASLA AND PANTHEA.3


PANTHEA What veiled form sits on that ebon throne? ASLA The veil has fallen! . . . PANTHEA I see a mighty Darkness


Filling the seat of power; and rays of gloom


Dart round, as light from the meridian Sun,


Ungazed upon and shapeless�neither limb


Nor form�nor outline;4 yet we feel it is


A living Spirit.


DEMOGORGON Ask what thou wouldst know. ASIA What canst thou tell? DEMOGORGON All things thou dar'st demand. ASIA Who made the living world? DEMOGORGON God . ASIA Who made all


That it contains�thought, passion, reason, will,


Imagination? DEMOGORGON God, Almighty God. ASIA Who made that sense5 which, when the winds of Spring


In rarest visitation, or the voice


Of one beloved heard in youth alone,


Fills the faint eyes with falling tears, which dim


The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,


And leaves this peopled earth a solitude


When it returns no more?


3. Act 2 has opened with Asia�the feminine principle and embodiment of love, who was separated from Prometheus at the moment of his fall into divisive hate�in a lovely Indian valley at the first hour of the dawn of the spring season of redemption. Asia and her sister Panthea have been led, by a sweet and irresistible compulsion, first to the portal and then down into the depths of the cave of Demogorgon�the central enigma of Shelley's poem. As the father of all that exists, Demogorgon may represent the ultimate reason for the way things


are. As such, Shelley appears to argue, Demogorgon must be a mystery inaccessible to knowledge and must be ignorant of the principle controlling him. In this scene Demogorgon can give only riddling answers to Asia's questions about the "why" of creation, good, and evil.


4. Echoing Milton's description of Death, Paradise Lost 2.666-73. 5. Presumably the sense by which one is aware of the "unseen Power" that Shelley calls "Intellectua1 Beauty" (see "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," stanza 2, p. 766).


.


PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 80 3


DEMOGORGON Merciful God.


ASIA And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse, Which from the links of the great chain of things To every thought within the mind of man Sway and drag heavily�and each one reels Under the load towards the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate; And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood; Pain whose unheeded and familiar speech Is howling and keen shrieks, day after day; And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?6


DEMOGORGON He reigns. ASIA Utter his name�a world pining in pain


Asks but his name; curses shall drag him down. DEMOGORGON He reigns. ASIA I feel, I know it�who? DEMOGORGON He reigns. ASIA Who reigns? There was the Heaven and Earth at first


And Light and Love;�then Saturn,7 from whose throne Time fell, an envious shadow; such the state Of the earth's primal spirits beneath his sway As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves Before the wind or sun has withered them And semivital worms; but he refused The birthright of their being, knowledge, power, The skill which wields the elements, the thought Which pierces this dim Universe like light, Self-empire and the majesty of love, For thirst of which they fainted. Then Prometheus Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter And with this law alone: "Let man be free," Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven. To know nor faith nor love nor law, to be Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign; And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man First famine, and then toil, and then disease, Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before, Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove, With alternating shafts of frost and fire, Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves; And in their desart0 hearts fierce wants he sent empty And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle Of unreal good, which levied mutual war, So ruining the lair wherein they raged. Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers, Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth,8 fadeless blooms;


6. The nouns "hope," "love," etc. (lines 24�28) are human needs remained unfulfilled. all objects of the verb "made" (line 19). 8. These are medicinal drugs and flowers in Greek 7. In Greek myth Saturn's reign was the golden myth. Asia is describing (lines 59-97) the various age. In Shelley's version Saturn refused to grant sciences and arts given to humans by Prometheus, mortals knowledge and science, so that it was an the culture bringer. age of ignorant innocence in which the deepest

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