The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

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80 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind The disunited tendrils of that vine

65 Which bears the wine of life, the human heart; And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey, Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath The frown of man, and tortured to his will Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,

70 And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms, Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves. He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the Universe; And Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven

75 Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song, And music lifted up the listening spirit Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound;

80 And human hands first mimicked and then mocked9 With moulded limbs more lovely than its own The human form, till marble grew divine, And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race, behold, and perish.1�

85 He told the hidden power of herbs and springs, And Disease drank and slept�Death grew like sleep.� He taught the implicated0 orbits woven intertwined Of the wide-wandering stars, and how the Sun Changes his lair, and by what secret spell

90 The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eye Gazes not on the interlunar2 sea; He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs, The tempest-winged chariots of the Ocean, And the Celt knew the Indian.3 Cities then

95 Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed The warm winds, and the azure aether shone, And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen . . . Such the alleviations of his state Prometheus gave to man�for which he hangs

IOO Withering in destined pain�but who rains down Evil, the immedicable plague, which while Man looks on his creation like a God And sees that it is glorious, drives him on, The wreck of his own will, the scorn of Earth,

105 The outcast, the abandoned, the alone?� Not Jove: while yet his frown shook Heaven, aye when His adversary from adamantine0 chains unbreakable

9. I.e., sculptors first merely reproduced but later beholders die of love. improved on and heightened the beauty of the 2. The phase between old and new moons, when human form, so that the original was inferior to, the moon is invisible. and hence "mocked" by, the copy. 3. The reference is to the ships in which the Celtic 1. Expectant mothers looked at the beautiful (here, non-Greco-Roman) races of Europe were statues so that their children might, by prenatal able to sail to India. influence, be born with the beauty that makes

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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 80 5

Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare Who is his master? Is he too a slave? 110 DEMOGORGON All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil:

Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no. ASIA Whom calledst thou God? DEMOGORGON I spoke but as ye speak�

For Jove is the supreme of living things. ASIA Who is the master of the slave? DEMOGORGON �If the Abysm

115 Could vomit forth its secrets:�but a voice Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless; For what would it avail to bid thee gaze On the revolving world? what to bid speak Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change? To these

120 All things are subject but eternal Love.

ASIA So much I asked before, and my heart gave The response thou hast given; and of such truths Each to itself must be the oracle.� One more demand . . . and do thou answer me

i25 As my own soul would answer, did it know That which I ask.�-Prometheus shall arise Henceforth the Sun of this rejoicing world: When shall the destined hour arrive?

DEMOGORGON Behold!4 ASIA The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night

130 I see Cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds Which trample the dim winds�in each there stands A wild-eyed charioteer, urging their flight. Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:

135 Others with burning eyes lean forth, and drink With eager lips the wind of their own speed, As if the thing they loved fled on before, And now�even now they clasped it; their bright locks Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all Sweep onward.�

140 DEMOGORGON These are the immortal Hours Of whom thou didst demand.�One waits for thee.

ASIA A Spirit with a dreadful countenance Checks its dark chariot by the craggy gulph. Unlike thy brethren, ghastly charioteer,

145 What art thou? whither wouldst thou bear me? Speak!

SPIRIT I am the shadow of a destiny More dread than is my aspect�ere yon planet Has set, the Darkness which ascends with me Shall wrap in lasting night Heaven's kingless throne.

ASIA What meanest thou? 150 PANTHEA That terrible shadow5 floats Up from its throne, as may the lurid0 smoke red-glaring

4. Demogorgon's answer is a gesture: he points to 5. Demogorgon (the "Darkness" of line 148), who the approaching chariots ("Cars"). is ascending (lines 150�55) to dethrone Jupiter.

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80 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Of earthquake-ruined cities o'er the sea.� Lo! it ascends the Car . . . the coursers fly Terrified; watch its path among the stars Blackening the night!

155 ASIA Thus I am answered�strange!

PANTHEA See, near the verge0 another chariot stays; horizon An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim Of delicate strange tracery�the young Spirit

160 That guides it, has the dovelike eyes of hope. How its soft smiles attract the soul!�as light Lures winged insects6 through the lampless air.

SPIRIT

My coursers are fed with the lightning, They drink of the whirlwind's stream

165 And when the red morning is brightning They bathe in the fresh sunbeam; They have strength for their swiftness, I deem:

Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.

I desire�and their speed makes night kindle; 170 I fear�they outstrip the Typhoon;

Ere the cloud piled on Atlas7 can dwindle We encircle the earth and the moon: We shall rest from long labours at noon:

Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.

SCENE

5�The Car -pauses within a Cloud on the Top of a snowy Mountain, ASIA,

PANTHEA, and the SPIRIT OF THE HOUR.

SPIRIT

On the brink of the night and the morning My coursers are wont to respire,8 But the Earth has just whispered a warning That their flight must be swifter than fire: 5 They shall drink the hot speed of desire!

ASIA Thou breathest on their nostrils�but my breath

Would give them swifter speed. SPIRIT Alas, it could not. PANTHEA O Spirit! pause and tell whence is the light

Which fills the cloud? the sun is yet unrisen.

io SPIRIT The sun will rise not until noon.9�Apollo Is held in Heaven by wonder�and the light Which fills this vapour, as the aerial hue Of fountain-gazing roses fills the water,

6. The ancient image of the soul, or psyche, was a regarded as so high that it supported the heavens, moth. The chariot described here will carry Asia to 8. Catch their breath. a reunion with Prometheus. 9. The time of the reunion of Prometheus and 7. A mountain in North Africa that the Greeks Asia.

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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 80 7

Flows from thy mighty sister. PANTHEA Yes, I feel. . . ASIA What is it with thee, sister? Thou art pale. PANTHEA How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee;

I feel, but see thee not. I scarce endure The radiance of thy beauty.1 Some good change Is working in the elements which suffer Thy presence thus unveiled.�The Nereids tell That on the day when the clear hyaline0 glassy sea Was cloven at thy uprise, and thou didst stand Within a veined shell,2 which floated on Over the calm floor of the chrystal sea, Among the /Egean isles, and by the shores Which bear thy name, love, like the atmosphere Of the sun's fire filling the living world, Burst from thee, and illumined Earth and Heaven And the deep ocean and the sunless caves, And all that dwells within them; till grief cast Eclipse upon the soul from which it came: Such art thou now, nor is it I alone, Thy sister, thy companion, thine own chosen one, But the whole world which seeks thy sympathy. Hearest thou not sounds i' the air which speak the love Of all articulate beings? Feelest thou not The inanimate winds enamoured of thee?�List! [Music.]

ASIA Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his Whose echoes they are�yet all love is sweet, Given or returned; common as light is love And its familiar voice wearies not ever. Like the wide Heaven, the all-sustaining air, It makes the reptile equal to the God . . . They who inspire it most are fortunate As I am now; but those who feel it most Are happier still, after long sufferings As I shall soon become.

PANTHEA List! Spirits speak.

VOICE

(in the air, singing)3

Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them And thy smiles before they dwindle

Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes.

1. In an earlier scene Panthea had envisioned in a dream the radiant and eternal inner form of Prometheus emerging through his "wound-worn limbs." The corresponding transfiguration of Asia, prepared for by her descent to the underworld to question Demogorgon, now takes place. 2. The story told by the Nereids (sea nymphs) serves to associate Asia with Aphrodite, goddess of love, emerging (as in Botticelli's painting) from the Mediterranean on a seashell.

3. The voice attempts to describe, in a dizzying whirl of optical paradoxes, what it feels like to look on the naked essence of love and beauty.

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80 8 / PERC Y BYSSH E SHELLE Y Child of Light! thy limbs are burning 55 Through the vest which seems to hide them As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds ere they divide them, And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 60 Fair are others;�none beholds thee But thy voice sounds low and tender Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never 65 As I feel now, lost forever! Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness 70 Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost . . . yet unbewailing! ASIA My soul is an enchanted Boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing, 75 And thine doth like an Angel sit Beside the helm conducting it Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. It seems to float ever�forever� Upon that many winding River so Between mountains, woods, abysses, A Paradise of wildernesses, Till like one in slumber bound Borne to the Ocean, I float down, around, Into a Sea profound, of ever-spreading sound. Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions0 In Music's most serene dominions, Catching the winds that fan that happy Heaven. And we sail on, away, afar, Without a course�without a star� 90 But by the instinct of sweet Music driven Till, through Elysian garden islets By thee, most beautiful of pilots, Where never mortal pinnace0 glided, The boat of my desire is guided� Bealms where the air we breathe is Love Which in the winds and on the waves doth move, Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above. We have past Age's icy caves, And Manhood's dark and tossing waves

wings

small boat

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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 80 9

And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray;

Beyond the glassy gulphs we flee

Of shadow-peopled Infancy,

Through Death and Birth to a diviner day,4

A Paradise of vaulted bowers

Lit by downward-gazing flowers

And watery paths that wind between

Wildernesses calm and green,

Peopled by shapes too bright to see,

And rest, having beheld�somewhat like thee,

Which walk upon the sea, and chaunt melodiously!

From Act 3

SCENE 1�Heaven, on his Throne; THETIS and the other Deities assem

JUPITER

bled.

JUPITE R Ye congregated Powers of Heaven who share The glory and the strength of him ye serve, Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent. All else had been subdued to me�alone The soul of man, like unextinguished fire, Yet burns towards Heaven with fierce reproach and doubt And lamentation and reluctant prayer, Hurling up insurrection, which might make Our antique empire insecure, though built On eldest faith, and Hell's coeval,3 fear. And though my curses through the pendulous0 air overhanging Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake And cling to it6�though under my wrath's night It climb the crags of life, step after step, Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet, It yet remains supreme o'er misery, Aspiring . . . unrepressed; yet soon to fall: Even now have I begotten a strange wonder, That fatal Child,7 the terror of the Earth, Who waits but till the destined Hour arrive, Bearing from Demogorgon's vacant throne The dreadful might of ever living limbs Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld� To redescend, and trample out the spark8 . . .

Pour forth Heaven's wine, Idaean Ganymede,

And let it fill the daedal9 cups like fire

And from the flower-inwoven soil divine

4. Asia is describing what it feels like to be trans-that he has begotten a child who will assume the figured�in the image of moving backward in the bodily form of the conquered Demogorgon and stream of time, through youth and infancy and then return to announce his victory and the defeat birth, in order to die to this life and be born again of the resistance of Prometheus. to a "diviner" existence. 8. Of Prometheus's defiance. 5. Of the same age. 9. Skillfully wrought (from the name of the Greek 6. "It" (as also in lines 14 and 16) is "the soul of craftsman Daedalus). Ganymede (line 25) had man" (line 5). been seized on Mount Ida by an eagle and carried 7. The son of Jupiter and Thetis. Jupiter believes to heaven to be Jupiter's cupbearer.

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81 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Ye all triumphant harmonies arise As dew from Earth under the twilight stars; Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins The soul of joy, ye everliving Gods, Till exultation burst in one wide voice Like music from Elysian winds.�

And thou Ascend beside me, veiled in the light Of the desire which makes thee one with me, Thetis, bright Image of Eternity!� When thou didst cry, "Insufferable might!1 God! spare me! I sustain not the quick flames, The penetrating presence; all my being, Like him whom the Numidian seps2 did thaw Into a dew with poison, is dissolved, Sinking through its foundations"�even then Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third Mightier than either�which unbodied now Between us, floats, felt although unbeheld, Waiting the incarnation, which ascends� Hear ye the thunder of the fiery wheels Griding3 the winds?�from Demogorgon's throne.� Victory! victory! Feel'st thou not, O World, The Earthquake of his chariot thundering up Olympus?

[The Car of the HOUR arrives, DEMOGORGON descends and moves towards the Throne of JUPITER.]

Awful Shape, what art thou? Speak!

DEMOGORGON Eternity�demand no direr name. Descend, and follow me down the abyss; I am thy child,4 as thou wert Saturn's child, Mightier than thee; and we must dwell together Henceforth in darkness.�Lift thy lightnings not. The tyranny of Heaven none may retain, Or reassume, or hold succeeding thee . . . Yet if thou wilt�as 'tis the destiny Of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead� Put forth thy might.

JUPITE R Detested prodigy! Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons5 I trample thee! . . . thou lingerest?

Mercy! mercy! No pity�no release, no respite! . . . Oh, That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge. Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge On Caucasus�he would not doom me thus.�

1. This description of Jupiter's rape of Thetis is a 4. Ironically, and in a figurative sense: Demogorgrotesque parody of the reunion of Prometheus gon's function follows from Jupiter's actions. and Asia. 5. After they overthrew the Titans, Jupiter and the 2. A serpent of Numidia (North Africa) whose bite Olympian gods imprisoned them in Tartarus, deep was thought to cause putrefaction. beneath the earth. 3. Cutting with a rasping sound.

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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 811

Gentle and just and dreadless, is he not

The monarch of the world? what then art thou? . . .

No refuge! no appeal� . . .

Sink with me then�

We two will sink in the wide waves of ruin

Even as a vulture and a snake outspent

Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,6

Into a shoreless sea.�Let Hell unlock

Its mounded Oceans of tempestuous fire,

And whelm on them� into the bottomless void wash them

The desolated world and thee and me,

The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck

Of that for which they combated.

Ai! Ai!7

The elements obey me not ... I sink . . .

Dizzily down�ever, forever, down�

And, like a cloud, mine enemy above

Darkens my fall with victory!�Ai! Ai!

From SCENE 4� A Forest. In the Background a Cave. PROMETHEUS, ASIA,

PAN

THEA, IONE, and the SPIRIT OF THE EARTH.8

$ $ *

[The enters.]

SPIRIT OF THE HOUR

PROMETHEUS We feel what thou hast heard and seen�yet speak.

SPIRIT OF THE HOUR Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled

The abysses of the sky, and the wide earth,

There was a change . . . the impalpable thin air

And the all-circling sunlight were transformed

As if the sense of love dissolved in them

Had folded itself round the sphered world.

My vision then grew clear and I could see

Into the mysteries of the Universe.9

Dizzy as with delight I floated down,

Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes,

My coursers sought their birthplace in the sun

Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil,

Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire�

And where my moonlike car will stand within

A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms,1

Of thee, and Asia and the Earth, and me

And you fair nymphs, looking the love we feel,

In memory of the tidings it has borne,

6. The eagle (or vulture) and the snake locked in what happened in the human world when he equal combat�a favorite Shelleyan image (cf. sounded the apocalyptic trumpet. Alastor, lines 227-32, p. 752). 9. I.e., the earth's atmosphere clarifies, no longer 7. Traditional Greek cry of sorrow. refracting the sunlight, and so allows the Spirit of 8. After Jupiter's annihilation (described in scene the Hour to see what is happening on earth. 2), Hercules unbinds Prometheus, who is reunited I. The crescent-shaped ("moonlike") chariot, its with Asia and retires to a cave "where we will apocalyptic mission accomplished, will be frozen sit and talk of time and change /. . . ourselves to stone and will be surrounded by the sculptured unchanged." In the speech that concludes the act forms of other agents in the drama. Phidias (5th (reprinted here) the Spirit of the Hour describes century B.C.E.) was the noblest of Greek sculptors.

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81 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers, Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone And open to the bright and liquid sky. Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake2

120 The likeness of those winged steeds will mock3 The flight from which they find repose.�Alas, Whither has wandered now my partial4 tongue When all remains untold which ye would hear!� As I have said, I floated to the Earth:

125 It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind And first was disappointed not to see SuCh mighty change as I had felt within

130 Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked, And behold! thrones were kingless, and men walked One with the other even as spirits do, None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain or fear, Self-love or self-contempt on human brows

135 No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here";5 None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear Gazed on another's eye of cold command Until the subject of a tyrant's will

140 Became, worse fate, the abject of his own6 Which spurred him, like an outspent� horse, to death. exhausted None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak; None with firm sneer trod out in his own heart

145 The sparks of love and hope, till there remained Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed, And the wretch crept, a vampire among men, Infecting all with his own hideous ill. None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk

i 50 Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy With such a self-mistrust as has no name. And women too, frank, beautiful and kind As the free Heaven which rains fresh light and dew

155 On the wide earth, past: gentle, radiant forms, From custom's evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel And changed to all which once they dared not be,

160 Yet being now, made Earth like Heaven�nor pride Nor jealousy nor envy nor ill shame,

2. A mythical snake with a head at each end; it 4. Biased or, possibly, telling only part of the story. serves here as a symbolic warning that a reversal 5. The inscription over the gate of hell in Dante's of the process is always possible. Inferno 3.9. 3. "Imitate" and also, in their immobility, "mock 6. I.e., he was so abjectly enslaved that his own at" the flight they represent. will accorded with the tyrant's will.

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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, ACT 1 / 81 3

The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall, Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe,7 love.

Thrones, altars, judgement-seats and prisons; wherein

165 And beside which, by wretched men were borne Sceptres, tiaras, swords and chains, and tomes Of reasoned wrong glozed on8 by ignorance, Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes, The ghosts of a no more remembered fame,

170 Which from their unworn obelisks9 look forth In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs Of those who were their conquerors, mouldering round. Those imaged to the pride of Kings and Priests A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide

175 As is the world it wasted, and are now But an astonishment; even so the tools And emblems of its last captivity Amid the dwellings of the peopled Earth, Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.

180 And those foul shapes, abhorred by God and man� Which under many a name and many a form Strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable Were Jupiter,1 the tyrant of the world; And which the nations panic-stricken served

185 With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless And slain amid men's unreclaiming tears, Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate� Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines.

190 The painted veil, by those who were, called life,2 Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside� The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed�but man:

195 Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree,�the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise�but man: Passionless? no�yet free from guilt or pain Which were, for his will made, or suffered them,

200 Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance and death and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.3

7. A drug (probably opium) that brings forgetful-gods who, whatever their names, were all really ness of pain and sorrow. manifestations of Jupiter. 8. Annotated, explained. 2. I.e., which was thought to be life by humans as 9. The Egyptian obelisks (tapering shafts of they were before their regeneration. stone), brought to Rome by its conquering armies, 3. I.e., a dim point in the extreme of empty space. included hieroglyphs that�because they were still The sense of lines 198�204 is if regenerate man undeciphered in Shelley's time�seemed "mon-were to be released from all earthly and biological strous and barbaric shapes" (line 168). impediments ("clogs"), he would become what I. The "foul shapes" (line 180) were statues of the even the stars are not�a pure ideal.

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81 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

From Act 44 SCENE�A Part of the Forest near the Cave of PROMETHEUS.

DEMOGORGON

This is the Day which down the void Abysm 555 At the Earth-born's spell5 yawns for Heaven's Despotism,

And Conquest is dragged Captive through the Deep;6 Love from its awful0 throne of patient power axvesome In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour

Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, 560 And narrow verge of crag-like Agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings.

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance,� These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength; 565 And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free

The serpent that would clasp her with his length7� These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o'er the disentangled Doom.8

570 To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;

To defy Power which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

575 Neither to change nor falter nor repent: This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.

1818-19 1820

4. The original drama, completed in the spring of an infant whose hour has come round at last. Shel1819, consisted of three acts. Later that year Shel-ley based this description in part on Ezekiel 1, the ley added a jubilant fourth act. In Revelation 21 vision of the chariot of divine glory, which had trathe apocalyptic replacement of the old world by "a ditionally been interpreted as a portent of apocanew heaven and new earth" had been symbolized lypse. The third episode (lines 319�502) is the by the marriage of the Lamb with the New Jeru-bacchanalian dance of the love-intoxicated Moon salem. Shelley's fourth act, somewhat like the con-around her brother and paramour, the rejuvenesclusion of Blake's Jerusalem, expands this figure cent Earth. into a cosmic epithalamion, representing a union 5. Prometheus's spell�the magically effective of divided elements that enacts everywhere the words of pity, rather than vengefulness, that he reunion of Prometheus and Asia taking place off-spoke in act 1. stage. 6. Ephesians 4.8: "When [Christ} ascended up on Shelley's model is the Renaissance masque, high, he led captivity captive." which combines song and dance with spectacular 7. A final reminder that the serpent incessantly displays. Panthea and lone serve as commentators struggles to break loose and start the cycle of on the action, which is divided into three episodes. humanity's fall all over again. In the first episode the purified "Spirits of the 8. Shelley's four cardinal virtues (line 562), which human mind" unite in a ritual dance with the seal the serpent in the pit, also constitute the Hours of the glad new day. In the second episode magic formulas ("spells") by which to remaster (lines 194�318), there appear emblematic repre-him, should he again break loose. sentations of the moon and the earth, each bearing

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THE CLOUD / 815

The Cloud I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noon-day dreams. 5 From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's0 breast, earth's As she dances about the Sun. I wield the flail1 of the lashing hail, 10 And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; 15 And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, 20 It struggles and howls at fits;0 fitfully Over Earth and Ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea;2 25 Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,3 30 Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread,4 Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,5 When the morning star shines dead; 35 As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit Sea beneath, 40 Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall� of eve may fall rich coverlet From the depth of Heaven above,

1. Either a weapon fashioned as a ball and chain 3. The upper part of the cloud remains exposed to or a tool for threshing grain. the sun. 2. I.e., atmospheric electricity, guiding the cloud 4. The sun's corona. "Meteor eyes": as bright as a (line 18), discharges as lightning when "lured" by burning meteor. the attraction of an opposite charge. 5. High, broken clouds, driven by the wind.

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81 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,

As still as a brooding dove.6

45 That orbed maiden with white fire laden

Whom mortals call the Moon,

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,

By the midnight breezes strewn;

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,

50 Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof,� of my tent's thin roof, texture

The stars peep behind her, and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees,

55 When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,

Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,

Are each paved with the moon and these.7

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone0 belt, sash 60 And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;

The volcanos are dim and the stars reel and swim

When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,

Over a torrent sea,

65 Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof�

The mountains its columns be!

The triumphal arch, through which I march

With hurricane, fire, and snow,

When the Powers of the Air, are chained to my chair,0 chariot

70 Is the million-coloured Bow; The sphere-fire� above its soft colours wove sunlight

While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

And the nursling of the Sky;

75 I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;

I change, but I cannot die�

For after the rain, when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,

so Build up the blue dome of Air8�

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,9

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise, and unbuild it again.�

1820 1820

6. An echo of Milton's description of his Muse, Shelley indicates, results from the way "sunbeams" identified with the Holy Spirit, who "with mighty are filtered by the earth's atmosphere. wings outspread / Dove-like sat'st brooding on the 9. The memorial monument of the dead cloud is vast abyss" (Paradise Lost 1.20-21). the cloudless blue dome of the sky. (The point is 7. The stars reflected in the water. that a cenotaph is a monument that does not con8. The blue color of the sky. The phenomenon, as tain a corpse.)

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To A SKY-LARK / 817

To a Sky-Lark1

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert� That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart 5 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, 10 And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning Of the sunken Sun� O'er which clouds are brightning, Thou dost float and run; is Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even0 evening Melts around thy flight, Like a star of Heaven In the broad day-light 20 Thou art unseen,�but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere,2 Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear 25 Until we hardly see�we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As when Night is bare From one lonely cloud 30 The moon rains out her beams�and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see 35 As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought 40 To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

1. The European skylark is a small bird that sings 2. The morning star, Venus. only in flight, often when it is too high to be visible.

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81 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour, 45 With music sweet as love�which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aerial hue 50 Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves� By warm winds deflowered� Till the scent it gives 55 Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:3

60Sound of vernal" showersOn the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass. springtime 65Teach us, Sprite" or Rird, What sweet thoughts are thine; I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine: spirit 70Chorus Hymeneal4 Or triumphal chaunt Matched with thine would be all Rut an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 75What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? soWith thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be� Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee; Thou Iovest�but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

3. The "warm winds," line 53. 4. Marital (from Hymen, Greek god of marriage).

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T o NIGH T / 81 9 85Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal stream? 90We look before and after, And pine for what is not� Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught� Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 95Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. IOOBetter than all measures Of delightful sound� Better than all treasures That in books are found� Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground! 105Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then�as I am listening now. 1820 1820 To Night 5Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, Swift be thy flight! 10Wrap thy form in a mantle grey, Star-inwrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of day, Kiss her until she be wearied out Then wander o'er City and sea and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand� Come, long-sought! 15 When I arose and saw the dawn I sighed for thee; When Light rode high, and the dew was gone, And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,

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82 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

And the weary Day1 turned to his rest,

20 Lingering like an unloved guest,

I sighed for thee. Thy brother Death came, and cried,

Wouldst thou me?

Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,

25 Murmured like a noontide bee,

Shall I nestle near thy side?

Wouldst thou me? and I replied,

No, not thee! Death will come when thou art dead,

30 Soon, too soon�

Sleep will come when thou art fled;

Of neither would I ask the boon

I ask of thee, beloved Night�

Swift be thine approaching flight,

35 Come soon, soon! 1820 1824

To [Music, when soft voices die]1

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory.�

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.0� enliven

5 Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved's bed2�

And so thy thoughts,3 when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on. 1821 1824

O World, O Life, O Time1

O World, O Life, O Time,

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before,

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more, O never more!

1. Here the "Day" is the male sun, not the female notebook of Percy Shelley's now housed in the "day" with whom the Spirit of Night dallies in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. preceding stanza. 2. The bed of the dead rose. 1. This poem was first published under the title 3. I.e., my thoughts of thee. "Memory" in Mary Shelley's edition of her hus-1. For the author's revisions while composing this band's Posthumous Poems in 1824, with the two poem, see "Poems in Process," in the appendices stanzas in the reverse order from what we give to this volume. here. Our text is based on a version found in a

.

CHORU S FRO M HELLAS / 82 1 10Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight� Fresh spring and summer [ ] and winter hoar Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more, O never more! 1824 Chorus from Hellas1 5io1520The world's great age2 The world's great age begins anew, The golden years3 return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds4 outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far, A new Peneus5 rolls his fountains Against the morning-star, Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads6 on a sunnier deep. A loftier Argo7 cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus8 sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies; A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso9 for his native shore. O, write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death's scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian1 rage the joy

1. Hellas, a closet drama written in the autumn of return of the golden age, when "all the earth will 1821, was inspired by the Greek war for indepen-produce all things." dence against the Turks. ("Hellas" is another name 3. In Greek myth the first period of history, when for Greece.) In his preface Shelley declared that Saturn reigned. he viewed this revolution as foretelling the final 4. Clothes (especially mourning garments) as well overthrow of all tyramy. The choruses throughout as dead vegetation. are sung by enslaved Greek women. We give the 5. The river in northeast Greece that flows chorus that concludes the drama. through the beautiful vale of Tempe (line 11). 2. Prophecies of wars, and rumours of wars, etc., 6. The Cyclades, islands in the Aegean Sea. may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, 7. On which Jason sailed in his quest for the but to anticipate however darkly a period of regen-Golden Fleece. eration and happiness is a more hazardous exercise 8. The legendary player on the lyre who was torn of the faculty which bards possess or fain. It will to pieces by the frenzied Thracian women while he remind the reader .. . of Isaiah and Virgil, whose was mourning the death of his wife, Eurydice. ardent spirits . . . saw the possible and perhaps 9. The nymph deserted by Ulysses on his voyage approaching state of society in which the "lion back from the Trojan War to his native Ithaca. shall lie down with the lamb," and "otnnis feret 1. King Laius of Thebes was killed in a quarrel by omnia tellus." Let these great names be my author-his son Oedipus, who did not recognize his father. ity and excuse [Shelley's note]. The quotations are Shortly thereafter Oedipus delivered Thebes from from Isaiah's millennial prophecy (e.g., chaps. 25, the ravages of the Sphinx by answering its riddle 45), and Virgil's prediction, in Eclogue 4, of a (lines 23-24).

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82 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Which dawns upon the free; Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

25 Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime, And leave, if nought so bright may live, 30 All earth can take or Heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdued;2 35 Not gold, not blood their altar dowers0 gifts But votive tears and symbol flowers.

O cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn

40 Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, O might it die or rest at last!

1821 1822

Adonais John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. Shelley had met Keats, had invited him to be his guest at Pisa, and had gradually come to realize that he was "among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age" (Preface to Adonais). The name "Adonais" is derived from Adonis, the handsome youth who had been loved by the goddess Venus and slain by a wild boar. He was restored to life on the condition that he spend only part of every year with Venus in heaven and the other part with Proserpine in the underworld. This cycle of rebirth and death, symbolic of the alternate return of summer and winter, suggests why Adonis was central to ancient fertility myths. Shelley in his poem gives the role of the boar to the anonymous author of a vituperative review of Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Review, April 1818 (now known to be John Wilson Croker), whom Shelley mistakenly believed to be responsible for Keats's illness and death.

Shelley in a letter described Adonais, which he wrote in April�June 1821 and had printed in Pisa in July, as a "highly wrought piece of art." Its artistry consists in part in the care with which it follows the conventions of the pastoral elegy, established more than two thousand years earlier by the Greek Sicilian poets Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus�Shelley had translated into English Bion's Lament for Adonis and Moschus's Lament for Bion. We recognize the centuries-old poetic ritual in many verbal echoes and in devices such as the mournful and accusing invocation to a muse (stanzas 2�4), the sympathetic participation of nature in the grieving (stanzas 14� 17), the procession of appropriate mourners (stanzas 30�35), the denunciation of

2. Saturn and Love were among the deities of a Christ . . . and the "many unsubdued" [are] the real or imaginary' state of innocence and happiness. monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, "All" those "who fell" fare] the Gods of Greece, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of Asia, and Egypt; the "One who rose" [is] Jesus America [Shelley's note].

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ADONAIS / 823

unworthy practitioners of the pastoral or literary art (stanzas 17, 27�29, 36�37), and above all, in the turn from despair at the finality of human death (lines 1, 64, 190: "He will awake no more, oh, never more!") to consolation in the sudden and contradictory discovery that the grave is a gate to a higher existence (line 343: "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep").

Published first in Pisa, Italy, in 1821, Adonais was not issued in England until 1829, in an edition sponsored by the so-called Cambridge Apostles (the minor poet

R. M. Milnes and the more famous poets Alfred Tennyson and A. H. Hallam). The appearance of this edition marked the beginning of Keats's posthumous emergence from obscurity. Adonais

An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc.

[Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled� Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendour to the dead.]'

1 I weep for Adonais�he is dead! O, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour,2 selected from all years 5 To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,0 companions And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!

2

io Where wert thou mighty Mother,3 when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies In darkness?4 where was lorn� Urania forlorn When Adonais died? With veiled eyes, 'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise

is She sate, while one,' with soft enamoured breath, Rekindled all the fading melodies, With which, like flowers that mock the corse0 beneath, corpse

He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.

3

O, weep for Adonais�he is dead!

20 Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep

1. Shelley prefixed to Adonais a Greek epigram attributed to Plato; this is Shelley's translation of the Greek. The planet Venus appears both as the morning star, Lucifer, and as the evening star, Hesperus or Vesper. Shelley makes of this phenomenon a key symbol for Adonais's triumph over death, in stanzas 44�46. 2. Shelley follows the classical mode of personifying the hours, which mark the passage of time and turn of the seasons.

3. Urania. She had originally been the Muse of astronomy, but the name was also an epithet for Venus. Shelley converts Venus Urania, who in Greek myth had been the lover of Adonis, into the mother of Adonais. 4. Alludes to the anonymity of the review of Endymion.

5. I.e., the echo of Keats's voice in his poems.

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82 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;

For he is gone, where all things wise and fair

Descend;�oh, dream not that the amorous Deep0 abyss

Will yet restore him to the vital air;

Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.

4

Most musical of mourners, weep again!

Lament anew, Urania!�He6 died,

Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,

Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,

The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,

Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite

Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,

Into the gulph of death; but his clear Sprite0 spirit

Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light.7

5

Most musical of mourners, weep anew!

Not all to that bright station dared to climb;

And happier they their happiness who knew,

Whose tapers0 yet burn through that night of time candles

In which suns perished; others more sublime,

Struck by the envious wrath of man or God,

Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent0 prime; radiant

And some yet live, treading the thorny road,

Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.

6

But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished�

The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,

Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,

And fed with true love tears, instead of dew;8

Most musical of mourners, weep anew!

Thy extreme9 hope, the loveliest and the last,

The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew0 bloomed

Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;

The broken lily lies�the storm is overpast.

7

To that high Capital,0 where kingly Death Rome

Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,

He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,

A grave among the eternal.�Come away!

Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day

Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still

He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;

6. Milton, regarded as precursor of the great ton was the third great epic poet, along with poetic tradition in which Keats wrote. He had Homer and Dante. The stanza following describes adopted Urania as the muse of Paradise Lost. Lines the lot of other poets, up to Shelley's own time. 31�35 describe Milton's life during the restoration 8. An allusion to an incident in Keats's Isabella. of the Stuart monarchy. 9. Last, as well as highest. 7. In "A Defence of Poetry," Shelley says that Mil

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ADONAIS / 825

Awake him not! surely he takes his fill

Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.

8

He will awake no more, oh, never more!�

65 Within the twilight chamber spreads apace,

The shadow of white Death, and at the door

Invisible Corruption waits to trace

His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;

The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe

70 Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface

So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law

Of change, shall 'oer his sleep the mortal curtain draw. 9

O, weep for Adonais!�The quick0 Dreams,

living

The passion-winged Ministers of thought,

75 Who were his flocks,1 whom near the living streams

Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught

The love which was its music, wander not,�

Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,

But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot

so Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,

They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.

10

And one2 with trembling hands clasps his cold head,

And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries;

"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;

85 See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,

Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies

A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."

Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!

She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain

90 She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

11

One from a lucid0 urn of starry dew

luminous

Washed his light limbs as if embalming them;

Another clipt her profuse locks, and threw

The wreath upon him, like an anadem,0

rich garland

95 Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;

Another in her wilful grief would break

Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem

A greater loss with one which was more weak;

And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.

12

IOO Another Splendour on his mouth alit,

That mouth, whence it was wont0 to draw the breath accustomed Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,3

1. The products of Keats's imagination, figura- 2. One of the Dreams (line 73). tively represented (according to the conventions of 3. The cautious intellect (of the listener), the pastoral elegy) as his sheep.

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82 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

And pass into the panting heart beneath

With lightning and with music: the damp death

105 Quenched its caress upon his icy lips;

And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath

Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips,

It flushed through his pale limbs, and past to its eclipse.

13

And others came . . . Desires and Adorations,

110 Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,

Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations

Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;

And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,

And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam

115 Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,

Came in slow pomp;�the moving pomp might seem

Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

14

All he had loved, and moulded into thought,

From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,

120 Lamented Adonais. Morning sought

Her eastern watchtower, and her hair unbound,

Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,

Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;

Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,

125 Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,

And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.

15

Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,

And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,� song

And will no more reply to winds or fountains,

130 Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,

Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;

Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear

Than those for whose disdain she pined away

Into a shadow of all sounds:4�a drear

135 Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.

16 Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were, Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown For whom should she have waked the sullen year? 140 To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear5 Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both Thou Adonais: wan they stand and sere6 Amid the faint companions of their youth, With dew all turned to tears; odour, to sighing ruth.0 pity

4. Because of her unrequited love for Narcissus, Apollo, who accidentally killed him in a game of who was enamored of his own reflection (line 141), quoits. Apollo made the hyacinth flower spring the nymph Echo pined away until she was only a from his blood. reflected sound. 6. Dried, withered. 5. Young Hyacinthus was loved by Phoebus

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ADONAIS / 827

145 Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale7

Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;

Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale

Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain

Her mighty youth with morning,8 doth complain,0 lament 150 Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,

As Albion0 wails for thee: the curse of Cain England

Light on his head9 who pierced thy innocent breast,

And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!

18

Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone, 155 But grief returns with the revolving year; The airs and streams renew their joyous tone; The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear; Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier; The amorous birds now pair in every brake,0 thicket

160 And build their mossy homes in field and brere;0 briar And the green lizard, and the golden snake, Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

19

Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean

A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst 165 As it has ever done, with change and motion, From the great morning of the world when first God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light; All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst; 170 Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight,

The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

20

The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender

Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;

Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour 175 Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death

And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;

Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows

Be as a sword consumed before the sheath1

By sightless0 lightning?�th' intense atom glows invisible i8o A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.

21

Alas! that all we loved of him should be,

But for our grief, as if it had not been,

And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!

Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene 185 The actors or spectators? Great and mean0 low

Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.

7. To whom Keats had written "Ode to a Night-is burned off and the film cleared from his eyes. ingale." 9. The reviewer of Endymion. 8. In the legend the aged eagle, to renew his I. The "sword" is the mind that knows; the youth, flies toward the sun until his old plumage "sheath" is its vehicle, the material body.

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82 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.

22

190 He will awake no more, oh, never more! "Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise Out of thy sleep, and slake,� in thy heart's core, assuage A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs." And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,

195 And all the Echoes whom their sister's song2 Had held in holy silence, cried: "Arise!" Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung,

From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour0 sprung. Urania

23 She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs

200 Out of the East, and follows wild and drear The golden Day, which, on eternal wings, Even as a ghost abandoning a bier, Had left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;

205 So saddened round her like an atmosphere Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.

24

Out of her secret Paradise she sped, Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,

210 And human hearts, which to her aery tread Yielding not, wounded the invisible Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell: And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they Rent0 the soft Form they never could repel, tore

215 Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May, Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.

25 In the death chamber for a moment Death Shamed by the presence of that living Might Blushed to annihilation, and the breath

220 Revisited those lips, and life's pale light Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight. "Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless, As silent lightning leaves the starless night! Leave me not!" cried Urania: her distress

225 Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.

26

"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again; Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live; And in my heartless' breast and burning brain

2. I.e., the Echo in line 127. 3. Because her heart had been given to Adonais.

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ADONAIS / 829

That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive

230 With food of saddest memory kept alive, Now thou art dead, as if it were a part Of thee, my Adonais! I would give All that I am to be as thou now art!

But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!

27

235 "Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart Dare� the unpastured dragon in his den?4 challenge Defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then

240 Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?5 Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,6

The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.

28

"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;

245 The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead; The vultures to the conqueror's banner true Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion;�how they fled, When like Apollo, from his golden bow,

250 The Pythian of the age7 one arrow sped And smiled!�The spoilers tempt no second blow, They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.

"The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn; He sets, and each ephemeral insect8 then

255 Is gathered into death without a dawn, And the immortal stars awake again; So is it in the world of living men: A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight Making earth bare and veiling heaven,9 and when

260 It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light Leave to its kindred lamps' the spirit's awful night."

3� Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came, Their garlands sere, their magic mantles0 rent; cloaks The Pilgrim of Eternity,2 whose fame 265 Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument,

4. I.e., the hostile reviewers. "the Pythian" because he had slain the dragon 5. The allusion is to Perseus, who had cut off Python. Medusa's head while avoiding the direct sight of 8. Insect that lives and dies in a single day. her (which would have turned him to stone) by 9. As the sun reveals the earth but veils the other looking only at her reflection in his shield. stars. 6. I.e., when thy spirit, like the full moon, should 1. The other stars (i.e., creative minds), of lesser have reached its maturity. brilliance than the sun. 7. Byron, who had directed against critics of the 2. Byron, who had referred to his Childe Harold age his satiric poem English Bards and Scotch as one of the "wanderers o'er Eternity" (3.669). Reviewers (1809). The allusion is to Apollo, called

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83 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent The sweetest lyrist' of her saddest wrong, 270 And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue. 3 1 Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,4 A phantom among men; companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Whose thunder is its knell;� he, as I guess, funeral bell 275 Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.5 3 2 280 A pardlike0 Spirit beautiful and swift� leopardlike A Love in desolation masked;�a Power Girt round with weakness;�it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour;6 It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, 285 A breaking billow;�even whilst we speak Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek

The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.

33

His head was bound with pansies overblown,

290 And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew7 Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew, Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart

295 Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew He came the last, neglected and apart; A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.

34

All stood aloof, and at his partial moan

Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band

300 Who in another's fate now wept his own; As in the accents of an unknown land, He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned The Stranger's mien, and murmured: "who art thou?" He answered not, but with a sudden hand

3. Thomas Moore (1779-1852), from Ireland into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. ("lerne"), who had written poems about the 6. The heavy, overhanging hour of Keats's death. oppression of his native land. 7. Like the thyrsus, the leaf-entwined and cone4. Shelley, represented in one of his aspects� topped staff carried by Dionysus, to whom leopards such as the Poet in Alastor, rather than the author (see line 280) are sacred. The pansies, which are of Prometheus Unbound. "overblown," i.e., past their bloom, are emblems of 5. Actaeon, while hunting, came upon the naked sorrowful thought. The cypress is an emblem of Diana bathing and, as a punishment, was turned mourning.

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ADONAIS / 831

305 Made bare his branded and ensanguined0 brow, bloodied Which was like Cain's or Christ's8�Oh! that it should be so!

35

What softer voice is hushed over the dead? Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown? What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,

310 In mockery of monumental stone,9 The heavy heart heaving without a moan? If it be He,1 who, gentlest of the wise, Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one; Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs

315 The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.

36 Our Adonais has drunk poison�oh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life's early cup with such a draught of woe? The nameless worm2 would now itself disown:

320 It felt, yet could escape the magic tone Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong, But what was howling in one breast alone, Silent with expectation of the song,3

Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.

37

325 Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me, Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! But be thyself, and know thyself to be! And ever at thy season be thou free

330 To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow: Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee; Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,

And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt�as now.

38 Nor let us weep that our delight is fled

335 Far from these carrion kites4 that scream below; He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead; Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.� Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came,

340 A portion of the Eternal,5 which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same, Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.

8. His bloody ("ensanguined") brow bore a mark like that with which God had branded Cain for murdering Abel�or like that left by Christ's crown of thorns. 9. In imitation of a memorial statue. 1. Leigh Hunt, close friend of both Keats and Shelley. 2. Snake�the anonymous reviewer. 3. The promise of later greatness in Keats's early poems "held . . . silent" the expression of "all envy, hate, and wrong" except the reviewer's. 4. A species of hawk that feeds on dead flesh. 5. Shelley adopts for this poem the Neoplatonic view that all life and all forms emanate from the Absolute, the eternal One. The Absolute is imaged as both a radiant light source and an overflowing

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39

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep� He hath awakened from the dream of life�

345 Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings.�We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

350 Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

4�

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;6 Envy and calumny0 and hate and pain, slander And that unrest which men miscall delight,

355 Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,

360 With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

41

He lives, he wakes�'tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais.�Thou young Dawn Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;

365 Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare

Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!7

42

370 He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;8 He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

375 Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never wearied love,

Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

43

He is a portion of the loveliness

380 Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic9 stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,

fountain, which circulates continuously through the dross of matter (stanza 43) and back to its source.

6. He has soared beyond the shadow cast by the earth as it intercepts the sun's light. 7. Shelley's science is, as usual, accurate: it is the envelope of air around the earth that, by diffusing and reflecting sunlight, veils the stars so that they are invisible during the day.

8. The nightingale, in allusion to Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." 9. Formative, shaping.

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ADONAIS / 833

All new successions to the forms they wear;

Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight

To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;1

And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

44

The splendours of the firmament of time

May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;

Like stars to their appointed height they climb

And death is a low mist which cannot blot

The brightness it may veil.2 When lofty thought

Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what0 whatever Shall be its earthly doom,0 the dead live there3 destiny

And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

45

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown4

Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,

Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton

Rose pale, his solemn agony had not

Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought

And as he fell and as he lived and loved

Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,

Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:0 justified

Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.

46

And many more, whose names on Earth are dark

But whose transmitted effluence cannot die

So long as fire outlives the parent spark,

Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.

"Thou art become as one of us," they cry,

"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long

Swung blind in unascended majesty,

Silent alone amid an Heaven of song.

Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!"5

47

Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth

Fond� wretch! and know thyself and him aright. foolish

Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous6 Earth;

As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light

Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might0 power

Satiate the void circumference: then shrink

1. I.e., to the degree that a particular substance of despair over his poverty and lack of recognition, will permit. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) died in battle at 2. The radiance of stars (i.e., of poets) persists, thirty-two, and the Roman poet Lucan (39�65 even when they are temporarily "eclipsed" by c.E.) killed himself at twenty-six to escape a senanother heavenly body, or obscured by the veil of tence of death for having plotted against the tyrant the earth's atmosphere. Nero. 3. I.e., in the thought of the "young heart." 5. Adonais assumes his place in the sphere of Ves4. Poets who (like Keats) died young, before per, the evening star, hitherto unoccupied ("kingachieving their full measure of fame: the less"), hence also "silent" amid the music of the seventeen-year-old Thomas Chatterton (1752� other spheres. 1770) was believed to have committed suicide out 6. Suspended, floating in space.

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Even to a point within our day and night;7 And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.

48 Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre

425 O, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought That ages, empires, and religions there Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; For such as he can lend,�they8 borrow not Glory from those who made the world their prey;

430 And he is gathered to the kings of thought Who waged contention with their time's decay, And of the past are all that cannot pass away.

49

Go thou to Rome,�at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness;

435 And where its wrecks0 like shattered mountains rise, ruins And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses9 dress The bones of Desolation's nakedness Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access1

440 Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead, A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.

50 And grey walls moulder round,2 on which dull Time Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;3 And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,4

445 Pavilioning the dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory, doth stand Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath, A field is spread, on which a newer band Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death5

450 Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.

51

Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned Its charge to each; and if the seal is set, Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,6

455 Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind

7. The poet bids the mourner to stretch his imag-The next line is a glancing allusion to Shelley's ination so as to reach the poet's own cosmic view-three-year-old son, William, also buried there. point and then allow it to contract ("shrink") back 2. The wall of ancient Rome formed one boundary to its ordinary vantage point on Earth�where, of the cemetery. unlike Adonais in his heavenly place, we have an 3. A burning log, white with ash. alternation of day and night. 4. The tomb of Caius Cestius, a Roman tribune, 8. Poets such as Keats. just outside the cemetery. 9. Undergrowth. In Shelley's time the ruins of 5. A common name for a cemetery in Italy is cam- ancient Rome were overgrown with weeds and posatito, "holy camp or ground." Shelley is punning shrubs, almost as if the ground were returning to seriously on the Italian word. its natural state. 6. Shelley's mourning for his son. 1. The Protestant Cemetery, Keats's burial place.

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ADONAIS / 835

Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

52

460 The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.7�Die,

465 If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled!�Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

53

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

470 Thy hopes are gone before; from all things here They have departed; thou shouldst now depart! A light is past0 from the revolving year, passed And man, and woman; and what still is dear Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.

475 The soft sky smiles,�the low wind whispers near: 'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither, No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

54

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Reauty in which all things work and move,

480 That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of"

485 The fire for which all thirst;9 now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

55

The breath whose might I have invoked in song1 Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

490 Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!2 I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star,

495 Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

1821 1821

7. Earthly life colors ("stains") the pure white light the fountain and fire (the "burning fountain," line of the One, which is the source of all light (see 339) that are its source. lines 339-40, n. 5). The azure sky, flowers, etc., of 1. Two years earlier Shelley had "invoked" (prayed lines 466-6 8 exemplify earthly colors that, how-to, and also asked for) "the breath of Autumn's ever beautiful, fall far short of the "glory" of the being" in his "Ode to the West Wind" (p. 772). pure Light that they transmit but also refract 2. In her 1839 edition of her husband's works, ("transfuse"). Mary Shelley asked: "who but will regard as a 8. I.e., according to the degree that each reflects. prophecy the last stanza of the 'Adonais'?" 9. The "thirst" of the human spirit is to return to

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When the lamp is shattered

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead� When the cloud is scattered

The rainbow's glory is shed� When the lute is broken Sweet tones are remembered not� When the lips have spoken Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour 10 Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute� No song�but sad dirges Like the wind through a ruined cell is Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell.

When hearts have once mingled Love first leaves the well-built nest� The weak one is singled 20 To endure what it once possest. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home and your bier?

25 Its passions will rock thee As the storms rock the ravens on high� Bright Reason will mock thee Like the Sun from a wintry sky� From thy nest every rafter 30 Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter When leaves fall and cold winds come.

1822 1824

To Jane1 (The keen stars were twinkling)

The keen stars were twinkling And the fair moon was rising among them, Dear Jane. The guitar was tinkling But the notes were not sweet 'till you sung them Again.�

1. Jane Williams, the common-law wife of Shelley's close friend Edward Williams.

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A DEFENCE OF POETRY / 83 7

As the moon's soft splendour O'er the faint cold starlight of Heaven Is thrown� 10 So your voice most tender To the strings without soul had then given Its own.

The stars will awaken, Though the moon sleep a full hour later, 15 Tonight; No leaf will be shaken While the dews of your melody scatter Delight. Though the sound overpowers 20 Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.

1822 1832

A Defenc e of Poetr y In 1820 Shelley's good friend Thomas Love Peacock published an ironic essay, "The Four Ages of Poetry," implicitly directed against the towering claims for poetry and the poetic imagination made by his Romantic contemporaries. In this essay, which is available at Norton Literature Online, Peacock adopted the premise of Wordsworth and some other Romantic critics�that poetry in its origin was a primitive use of language and mind�but from this premise he proceeded to draw the conclusion that poetry had become a useless anachronism in his own Age of Bronze, a time defined by new sciences (including economics and political theory) and technologies that had the potential to improve the world. Peacock was a poet as well as an excellent prose satirist, and Shelley saw the joke; but he also recognized that the view that Peacock, as a satirist, had assumed was very close to that actually held in his day by Utilitarian philosophers and the material- minded public, which either attacked or contemptuously ignored the imaginative faculty and its achievements. He therefore undertook, as he good-humoredly wrote to Peacock, "to break a lance with you .. . in honor of my mistress Urania" (giving the cause for which he battled the name that Milton had used for the muse inspiring Paradise Lost), even though he was only "the knight of the shield of shadow and the lance of gossamere." The result was "A Defence of Poetry," planned to consist of three parts. The last two parts were never written, and even the existing section, written in 1821, remained unpublished until 1840, eighteen years after Shelley's death.

Shelley's emphasis in this essay is not on the particularity of individual poems but on the universal and permanent qualities and values that, he believes, all great poems, as products of imagination, have in common. Shelley in addition extends the term poet to include all creative minds that break out of the conditions of their historical time and place in order to envision such values. This category includes not only writers in prose as well as verse but also artists, legislators, prophets, and the founders of new social and religious institutions.

The "Defence" is an eloquent and enduring claim for the indispensability of the visionary and creative imagination in all the great human concerns. Few later social

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critics have equaled the cogency of Shelley's attack on our acquisitive society and its narrowly material concepts of utility and progress. Such a bias has opened the way to enormous advances in the physical sciences and our material well-being, but without a proportionate development of our "poetic faculty," the moral imagination. The result, Shelley says, is that "man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."

From A Defence of Poetry

or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled "The Four Ages of Poetry"

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one1 is the to -poiein,2 or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the to logizein,3 or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Beason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the Imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an /Eolian lyre,4 which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to

1. The imagination. "The other" (later in the sen-Defence of Poesy, which Shelley had carefully studtence) is the reason. ied. 2. Making. The Greek word from which the 3. Calculating, reasoning. English term poet derives means "maker," and 4. A wind harp (see Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp," "maker" was often used as equivalent to "poet" by p. 426). Renaissance critics such as Sir Philip Sidney in his

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A DEFENCE OF POETRY / 839

the objects which delight a child, these expressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic5 or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develope themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an enquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing6 in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called taste, by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible,7 except in those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts8 instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language

5. Sculptural. 7. Discernible. 6. Following, obeying. 8. I.e., abstract concepts.

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will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world"9�and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem:1 the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of Poetry.

But Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.2 Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and like Janus3 have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets:4 a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons and the distinction of place are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry, and the choruses of /Eschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.

Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonime of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense5 expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from

9. Francis Bacons The Advancement of Learning represented by two heads facing opposite direc3.1. tions. 1. A group of poems (e.g., "the Arthurian cycle") 4. Sir Philip Sidney had pointed out, in his that deal with the same subject. Defence of Poesy, that votes, the Roman term for 2. Here Shelley enlarges the scope of the term "poet," signifies "a diviner, fore-seer, or Prophet." poetry to denote all the creative achievements, or 5. I.e., restricted to specifically verbal poetry, as imaginative breakthroughs, of humankind, includ-against the inclusive sense in which Shelley has ing noninstitutional religious insights. been applying the term. 3. Roman god of beginnings and endings, often

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A DEFENCE OF POETRY / 841

the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the controul of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. The former6 is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts, may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.

We have thus circumscribed the meaning of the word Poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary however to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language; 7 for the popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed or it will bear no flower�and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.8

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of this harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony of language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony which is its spirit, be observed. The practise is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as includes much form and action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure

6. I.e., language, as opposed to the media of sculp-Babel, which would reach heaven, God cut short ture, painting, and music. the attempt by multiplying languages so that the 7. I.e., in meter versus in prose. builders could no longer communicate (see Gen8. When the descendants of Noah, who spoke a esis 11.1-9). single language, undertook to build the Tower of

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of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated.9 Plato was essentially a poet�the truth and splendour of his imagery and the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero1 sought to imitate the cadence of his periods but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.2 His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the hearer's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stript of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of Poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes3 have been called the moths of just history;4 they eat out the poetry of it. The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole though it be found in a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,5 were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest

9. I.e., in what Shelley has already said. 2.2.4. 1. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator 5. Titus Livius (59 B.C.E.�17 c.E.) wrote an of the 1st century B.C.E. immense history of Rome. Herodotus (ca. 480�ca. 2. See the Filium Lahyrinthi and the Essay on 425 B.C.E.) wTote the first systematic history of Death particularly [Shelley's note]. Greece. Plutarch (ca. 46�ca. 120 C.E.) wrote Par3. Abstracts, summaries. allel Lives (of eminent Greeks and Romans). 4. Ry Racon in The Advancement of Learning

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degree, they make copious and ample amends for their subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.

Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to estimate its effects upon society.

Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations. A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns for general imitation. Every epoch under names more or less specious has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked Idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled Image of unknown evil before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the antient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music6 for mortal ears.

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry7 rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral

6. The music made by the revolving crystalline implicitly dealing with the charge, voiced by Plato spheres of the planets, inaudible to human ears. in his Republic, that poetry is immoral because it 7. In the preceding paragraph Shelley has been represents evil characters acting evilly.

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improvement of man. Ethical science8 arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But Poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces9 all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content1 which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination;2 and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign the glory in a participation in the cause.3 There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal Poets, should

have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso,4 Spenser, have frequently affected5 a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.6

* # *

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow,

8. Moral philosophy. 9. Produces anew, re-creates. 1. Contentment. 2. Central to Shelley's theory is the concept (developed by 18th-century philosophers) of the sympathetic imagination�the faculty by which an individual is enabled to identify with the thoughts and feelings of others. Shelley insists that the faculty in poetry that enables us to share the joys and sufferings of invented characters is also the basis of all morality, for it compels us to feel for others as we feel for ourselves. 3. The "effect," or the explicit moral standards into which imaginative insights are translated at a particular time or place, is contrasted to the "cause" of all morality, the imagination itself.

4. Tasso Torquato (1544-1595), Italian poet, author of Jerusalem Delivered, an epic poem about a crusade. Euripides (ca. 484�406 B.C.E.), Greek writer of tragedies. Lucan (39�65 C.E.) , Roman poet, author of the Pharsalia. 5. Assumed, adopted. 6. In the following, omitted passage, Shelley reviews the history of drama and poetry in relation to civilization and morality and proceeds to refute the charge that poets are less useful than "reasoners and merchants." He begins by defining utility in terms of pleasure and then distinguishes between the lower (physical and material) and the higher (imaginative) pleasures.

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terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, "It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of mirth."7 Not that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily finked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and still more of the creation of poetry is often wholly unalloyed.

The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are Poets or poetical philosophers.

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,8 and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain.9 But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of antient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the antient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let "I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat i' the adage."1 We want2 the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportion

7. Ecclesiastes 7.2. Shelley wrote this essay; it was not abolished per8. I follow the classification adopted by the author manently until 1834. of Four Ages of Poetry. But Rousseau was essen-1. The words with which Lady Macbeth encourtially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere ages her husband's ambition (Shakespeare, Mac- reasoners [Shelley's note]. beth 1.7.44-45). 9. The Inquisition had been suspended following 2. Lack. the Spanish Revolution of 1820, the year before

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ally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that these inventions which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?3 Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.4

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and the splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were Virtue, Love, Patriotism, Friendship etc.�what were the scenery of this beautiful Universe which we inhabit�what were our consolations on this side of the grave�and what were our aspirations beyond it�if Poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet. I appeal to the greatest Poets of the present day, whether it be not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of con

3. God says to Adam: "cursed is the ground forthy 3.17-19). sake. . . . Thorns also and thistles shall it bring 4. Matthew 6.24: "Ye cannot serve God and Mamforth. .. . In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat mon." bread, till thou return unto the ground" (Genesis

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ventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself. For Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the Muse having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song,"5 and let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso.6 Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts: a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest7 moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over a sea, where the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility8 and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with these emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a Universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this etherial world; a word, or a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations9 of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide�abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold1 the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient.

5. Paradise Lost 9.21�24. 9. The dark intervals between the old and new 6. The epic poem by the 16th-century Italian poet moons. Ariosto, noted for his care in composition. 1. Alchemists aimed to produce a drinkable 7. In the double sense of "most joyous" and "most ("potable") form of gold that would be an elixir of apt or felicitous in invention." life, curing all diseases. 8. Sensitivity, capacity for sympathetic feeling.

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"The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."2 But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.3 It justifies that bold and true word of Tasso: Non merita nome di creatore, se non lddio ed il Poeta.4

A Poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let Time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we could look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confirm rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge and executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form that certain motives of those who are "there sitting where we dare not soar"5 are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate.6 It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but Posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins "were as scarlet, they are now white as snow";7 they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets;8 consider how little is, as it appears�or appears, as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.9

Poetry, as has been said, in this respect differs from logic, that it is not

2. Satan's speech, Paradise Lost 1.254-55. 3. Shelley's version of a widespread Romantic doctrine that the poetic imagination transforms the familiar into the miraculous and re-creates the old world into a new world. See, e.g., Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, chap. 4: "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar; . . . this is the character and privilege of genius" (p. 474). 4. "No one merits the name of Creator except God and the Poet." Quoted by Pierantonio Serassi in his Life ofTorquato Tasso (1785). 5. Satan's scornful words to the angels who discover him after he has surreptitiously entered Eden: "Ye knew me once no mate / For you, sitting where ye durst not soar" (Paradise Lost 4.828�29).

6. Charges that had in fact been made against these men. The use of "poet laureate" as a derogatory term was a dig at Robert Southey, who held that honor at the time Shelley was writing. "Peculator": an embezzler of public money. Raphael is the 16th-century Italian painter. 7. Isaiah 1.18. 8. Shelley alludes especially to the charges of immorality by contemporary reviewers against Lord Byron and himself. 9. Christ's warning in Matthew 7.1.

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A DEFENCE OF POETRY / 849

subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence has no necessary connexion with consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these' are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects are experienced insusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind an habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately organized than other men, and sensible2 to pain and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, 3 when he neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments.

But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.

I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of following that of the treatise that excited me to make them public.4 Thus although devoid of the formality of a polemical reply; if the view they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the doctrines of the Four Ages of Poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of the learned and intelligent author of that paper; I confess myself, like him, unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Maevius5 undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound.

The first part of these remarks has related to Poetry in its elements and principles; and it has been shewn, as well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order and of beauty according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.

The second part6 will have for its object an application of these principles to the present state of the cultivation of Poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of

1. I.e., consciousness or will. Shelley again pro-4. Peacock's "Four Ages of Poetry." poses that some mental processes are uncon-5. Would-be poets satirized by Virgil and Horace. scious�outside our control or awareness. "Theseids": epic poems about Theseus. Codrus 2. I.e., sensitive to, conscious of. Cf. Words-(plural "Codri") was the Roman author of a long, worth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (p. 269): "What dull Tlieseid attacked by Juvenal and others. In is a poet? . . . He is a man speaking to men: a man, 1794 and 1795 the conservative critic William Gifit is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more ford had borrowed from Virgil and Horace and enthusiasm, and tenderness, who has a greater published the Baviad and the Maeviad, hard- knowledge of human nature, and a more compre-hitting and highly influential satires on popular hensive soul, than are supposed to be common poetry and drama. among mankind." 6. Shelley, however, completed only the first part.

3. Exposed to slander.

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England, an energetic developement of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free developement of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty.7 The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is seated upon the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants8 of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves.9 Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.

1821 1840

7. In the age of Milton and the English Civil Wars. 9. Aristotle had said that God is the "Unmoved 8. Priests who are expositors of sacred mysteries. Mover" of the universe. JOHN CLARE

1793-1864

Since the mid-eighteenth century, when critics had begun to worry that the authentic vigor of poetry was being undermined in their age of modern learning and refinement, they had looked for untaught primitive geniuses among the nation's peasantry. In the early-nineteenth-century literary scene, John Clare was the nearest thing to a "natural poet" there was. An earlier and greater peasant poet, Robert Burns, had managed to acquire a solid liberal education. Clare, however, was born at Helpston, a Northamptonshire village, the son of a field laborer and a mother who was entirely illiterate, and he obtained only enough schooling to enable him to read and write. Although he was a sickly and fearful child, he had to work hard in the field, where he found himself composing verse "for downright pleasure in giving vent to my feelings." The fragments of an autobiography that he wrote later in life describe movingly, and with humor, the stratagems that as a young man he devised in order to find the time and the materials for writing. A blank notebook could cost him a week's wages. In 1820 publication of his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery attracted critical attention, and on a trip to London, he was made much of by leading writers of the day.

.

THE NIGHTINGALE'S NEST / 851

But his celebrity soon dimmed, and his three later books of verse were financial failures. Under these and other disappointments his mind gave way in 1837, and he spent almost all the rest of his life in an asylum. The place was for him a refuge as well as a confinement, for he was treated kindly, allowed to wander about the countryside, and encouraged to go on writing his verses. Some of his best achievements are the poems composed during his madness.

Clare did not, of course, write independently of literary influences, for he had studied the poetry of James Thomson, William Cowper, Burns, Milton, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. But he stayed true to his own experience of everyday country sights and customs. His nightingale poem, written in a long-established literary tradition, has many more particulars of nature than any of those by his predecessors, and his homely mouse, in the third poem printed below, is a bit of pure rustic impressionism in a way that even Burns's moralized mouse is not (see "To a Mouse," p. 135). Some of Clare's introspective asylum poems achieve so haunting a poignancy and are spoken in so quietly distinctive a voice that they have made the great mass of manuscripts he left at his death an exciting place of discovery for recent scholars.

Those same manuscripts are a site of contention among current textual theorists. Words are everywhere misspelled in them, standard syntax is regularly ignored, and there is almost no punctuation in the lines. In his own day Clare was respelled, punctuated, and otherwise made presentable by his publisher, John Taylor (who did the same for John Keats, another of his poets who took a casual view of such matters). Modern scholars, eager to recover exactly what Clare wrote�in effect, to free him from the impositions and constraints of well-intentioned nineteenth-century editors� are restoring the idiosyncrasies but, in the process, are constructing a poet who is so full of what we would normally call mistakes as to be, for all practical purposes, inaccessible to the general reader. (For example, the manuscripts have "were" for "where," "your" for "you're," "anker" for "hanker," "hugh" for "huge.") The texts printed below, which are presented as "reading" versions of Clare's own words, are the product of a principled modernization by the editors of this anthology. They are based, where the materials are available, on authoritative manuscript versions recovered and now made standard by Eric Robinson and his associates in a succession of editions published by Oxford University Press.

The Nightingale's Nest

Up this green woodland ride� let's softly rove, riding path And list� the nightingale�she dwelleth here. listen to Hush! let the wood gate softly clap, for fear The noise may drive her from her home of love; s For here I've heard her many a merry year� At morn and eve, nay, all the livelong day, As though she lived on song. This very spot, Just where that old man's beard1 all wildly trails Rude arbours o'er the road and stops the way � io And where that child its blue-bell flowers hath got, Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails0 � fence rails There have I hunted like a very boy, Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorns To find her nest and see her feed her young. 15 And vainly did I many hours employ:

1. Clematis vitalba, a vine.

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85 2 / JOHN CLARE

All seemed as hidden as a thought unborn. And where these crimping0 fern leaves ramp0 among curling / shoot up The hazel's under-boughs, I've nestled down And watched her while she sung; and her renown

20 Hath made me marvel that so famed a bird2 Should have no better dress than russet brown. Her wings would tremble in her ecstasy, And feathers stand on end, as 'twere with joy, And mouth wide open to release her heart

25 Of its out-sobbing songs. The happiest part Of summer's fame she shared, for so to me Did happy fancies shapen her employ;3 But if I touched a bush or scarcely stirred, All in a moment stopt. I watched in vain:

30 The timid bird had left the hazel bush, And at a distance hid to sing again. Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves, Rich ecstasy would pour its luscious strain, Till envy spurred the emulating thrush

35 To start less wild and scarce inferior songs; For cares with him for half the year remain, To damp the ardour of his speckled breast, While nightingales to summer's life belongs, And naked trees and winter's nipping wrongs

40 Are strangers to her music and her rest. Her joys are evergreen, her world is wide� Hark! there she is as usual�let's be hush� For in this black-thorn clump, if rightly guessed, Her curious house is hidden. Part aside

45 These hazel branches in a gentle way,

And stoop right cautious 'neath the rustling boughs, For we will have another search to-day, And hunt this fern-strewn thorn clump round and round; And where this seeded wood grass idly bows,

so We'll wade right through, it is a likely nook: In such like spots, and often on the ground, They'll build where rude boys never think to look� Aye, as I live! her secret nest is here, Upon this whitethorn stulp!� I've searched about stump

55 For hours in vain. There! put that bramble by� Nay, trample on its branches and get near. How subtle is the bird! she started out And raised a plaintive note of danger nigh, Ere we were past the brambles; and now, near

60 Her nest, she sudden stops�as choking fear That might betray her home. So even now We'll leave it as we found it: safety's guard Of pathless solitude shall keep it still. See, there she's sitting on the old oak bough,

2. The nightingale had been celebrated by, among echoes lines 57�58 of Keats's "Ode to a Nightinothers, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, gale." and, closer to Clare's time, William Cowper, Char-3. Give shape to her (the nightingale's) regular lotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Coleridge, Words-activities. worth, and Keats. In lines 22, 24�25, and 33, Clare

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PASTORAL POESY / 85 3

65 Mute in her fears; our presence doth retard Her joys, and doubt turns all her rapture chill.

Sing on, sweet bird! may no worse hap� befall fate Thy visions, than the fear that now deceives. We will not plunder music of its dower,0 dowry, gift

70 Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall;0 misery For melody seems hid in every flower, That blossoms near thy home. These harebells all Seems bowing with the beautiful in song; And gaping cuckoo0 with its spotted leaves a spring flower

75 Seems blushing of the singing it has heard. How curious is the nest; no other bird Uses such loose materials, or weaves Their dwellings in such spots: dead oaken leaves Are placed without, and velvet moss within,

so And little scraps of grass, and, scant and spare, Of what seems scarce materials, down and hair; For from man's haunts she seemeth nought to win. Yet nature is the builder and contrives Homes for her children's comfort even here;

85 Where solitude's disciples spend their lives Unseen save when a wanderer passes near That loves such pleasant places. Deep adown, The nest is made an hermit's mossy cell. Snug lie her curious eggs, in number five,

90 Of deadened green, or rather olive brown; And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well. And here we'll leave them, still unknown to wrong, As the old woodland's legacy of song.

1825-30 1835

Pastoral Poesy

True poesy is not in words, But images that thoughts express, By which the simplest hearts are stirred To elevated happiness.

5 Mere books would be but useless things Where none had taste or mind to read, Like unknown lands where beauty springs And none are there to heed.

But poesy is a language meet,0 suitable, proper

10 And fields are every one's employ;0 concern The wild flower 'neath the shepherd's feet Looks up and gives him joy;

A language that is ever green, That feelings unto all impart,

.

85 4 / JOHN CLARE

IS As hawthorn blossoms, soon as seen, Give May to every heart. 20The pictures that our summer minds In summer's dwellings meet; The fancies that the shepherd finds To make his leisure sweet; The dust mills that the cowboy delves In banks for dust to run,1 Creates a summer in ourselves� He does as we have done. 25 An image to the mind is brought, Where happiness enjoys An easy thoughtlessness of thought And meets excess of joys. soThe world is in that little spot With him�and all beside Is nothing, all a life forgot, In feelings satisfied. 35And such is poesy; its power May varied lights employ, Yet to all minds it gives the dower Of self-creating joy. 40And whether it be hill or moor, I feel where'er I go A silence that discourses more That any tongue can do. Unruffled quietness hath made A peace in every place, And woods are resting in their shade Of social loneliness. 45 The storm, from which the shepherd turns To pull his beaver0 down, While he upon the heath sojourns, Which autumn pleaches0 brown, beaver hat bleaches 50Is music, aye, and more indeed To those of musing mind Who through the yellow woods proceed And listen to the wind. 55The poet in his fitful glee And fancy's many moods Meets it as some strange melody, And poem of the woods.

I. The boy tending the cows has (as an amusement) dug miniature millstreams in the dirt.

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PASTORAL POESY / 85 5

It sings and whistles in his mind, And then it talks aloud, While by some leaning tree reclined

60 He shuns a coming cloud,

That sails its bulk against the sun, A mountain in the light� He heeds not for the storm begun But dallies with delight.

65 And now a harp that flings around The music of the wind, The poet often hears the sound When beauty fills the mind.

The morn with saffron0 strips and gray, orange-yellow

7o Or blushing to the view, Like summer fields when run away In weeds of crimson hue,

Will simple shepherds' hearts imbue With nature's poesy, 75 Who inly fancy while they view How grand must heaven be.

With every musing mind she steals Attendance2 on their way; The simplest thing her heart reveals

so Is seldom thrown away.

The old man, full of leisure hours, Sits cutting at his door Rude fancy sticks to tie his flowers �They're sticks and nothing more

85 With many passing by his door� But pleasure has its bent;� inclination With him 'tis happiness and more, Heart satisfied content.

Those box-edged borders that impart

90 Their fragrance near his door Hath been the comfort of his heart For sixty years and more.

That mossy thatch above his head In winter's drifting showers 95 To him and his old partner made A music many hours.

2. She (nature) demands attention (to her beauties).

.

85 6 / JOH N CLAR E 100It patted to their hearts a joy3 That humble comfort made� A little fire to keep them dry And shelter over head. And such no matter what they call Each all are nothing less Than poesy's power that gives to all A cheerful blessedness. 105 So would I my own mind employ, And my own heart impress, That poesy's self's a dwelling joy Of humble quietness. So would I for the biding0 joy110 That to such thoughts belong, That I life's errand may employ As harmless as a song. abiding, lasting 1824-32 1935

[Mouse's Nest]

I found a ball of grass among the hay And progged0 it as I passed and went away; prodded And when I looked I fancied something stirred, And turned again and hoped to catch the bird� 5 When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat With all her young ones hanging at her teats; She looked so odd and so grotesque to me, I ran and wondered what the thing could be, And pushed the knapweed1 bunches where I stood, 10 When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood. The young ones squeaked, and when I went away She found her nest again among the hay. The water o'er the pebbles scarce could run And broad old cesspools2 glittered in the sun.

1835-37 1935

A Vision

I lost the love of heaven above; I spurn'd the lust of earth below; I felt the sweets of fancied love,� And hell itself my only foe.

3. The patter of the rain on the thatch (lines 93� 1. A plant with knobs of purple flowers. 94) enhanced the comfort of the fire and shelter 2. Low spots where water has collected, indoors.

.

I AM / 857

899 510 I lost earth's joys but felt the glow Of heaven's flame abound in me: Till loveliness and I did grow The bard of immortality. 3 I loved, but woman fell away; I hid me from her faded fame: I snatch'd the sun's eternal ray,� And wrote till earth was but a name. 154 In every language upon earth, On every shore, o'er every sea, I gave my name immortal birth, And kept my spirit with the free. Aug. 2, 1844 1924 I Am 51015I am�yet what I am, none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost:� I am the self-consumer of my woes;� They rise and vanish in oblivion's host, Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes:� And yet I am, and live�like vapours tossed 2 Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,� Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; Even the dearest that I love the best Are strange�nay, rather, stranger than the rest. 3 I long for scenes where man hath never trod, A place where woman never smiled or wept, There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below�above, the vaulted sky. 1842-46 1848

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85 8 / JOH N CLAR E An Invite to Eternity 510isi Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid, Say maiden, wilt thou go with me Through the valley depths of shade, Of night and dark obscurity, Where the path hath lost its way, Where the sun forgets the day, Where there's nor life nor light to see, Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me? 2 Where stones will turn to flooding streams, Where plains will rise like ocean waves, Where life will fade like visioned dreams And mountains darken into caves, Say maiden, wilt thou go with me Through this sad non-identity, Where parents live and are forgot And sisters live and know us not? 203 Say maiden, wilt thou go with me In this strange death of life to be, To live in death and be the same Without this life, or home, or name, At once to be and not to be, That was and is not�yet to see Things pass like shadows�and the sky Above, below, around us lie? 25304 The land of shadows wilt thou trace And look�nor know each other's face, The present mixed with reasons gone And past and present all as one? Say maiden, can thy life be led To join the living with the dead? Then trace thy footsteps on with me� We're wed to one eternity. 1847 1848

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THE PEASANT POET / 859

Clock a Clay'

In the cowslip's peeps I lie,2 Hidden from the buzzing fly, While green grass beneath me lies, Pearled wi' dew like fishes' eyes;

5 Here I lie, a Clock a Clay, Waiting for the time o' day.

2

While grassy forests quake surprise, And the wild wind sobs and sighs, My gold home rocks as like to fall

io On its pillars green and tall; When the pattering rain drives by Clock a Clay keeps warm and dry.

3

Day by day and night by night, All the week I hide from sight;

is In the cowslip's peeps I lie, In rain and dew still warm and dry; Day and night and night and day, Red black-spotted Clock a Clay.

4

My home it shakes in wind and showers,

20 Pale green pillar topped wi' flowers, Bending at the wild wind's breath, Till I touch the grass beneath; Here still I live, lone Clock a Clay, Watching for the time of day.

ca. 1848 1873

The Peasant Poet

He loved the brook's soft sound, The swallow swimming by; He loved the daisy-covered ground, The cloud-bedappled sky.

5 To him the dismal storm appeared The very voice of God, And where the evening rack0 was reared mass of clouds Stood Moses with his rod.

1. The ladybird, or ladybug. The sixth and last Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Where the bee sucks, lines allude to the children's game of telling the there suck I: / In a cowslip's bell 1 lie." "Peeps": hour by the number of taps it takes to make the i.e.. pips�single blossoms o( flowers growing in a ladybird fly away home. cluster. "Cowslip": a yellow primrose. 2. Cf. the opening lines of Ariel's song in act 5 of

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86 0 / JOHN CLARE

And everything his eyes surveyed,

10 The insects i' the brake, Were creatures God Almighty made� He loved them for His sake: A silent man in life's affairs, A thinker from a boy,

15 A peasant in his daily cares�� The poet in his joy.

1842-64 1920

Song

I hid my love when young while I Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly; I hid my love to my despite Till I could not bear to look at light.

5 I dare not gaze upon her face But left her memory in each place; Where'er I saw a wild flower lie I kissed and bade my love goodbye.

I met her in the greenest dells,

10 Where dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells; The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye, The bee kissed and went singing by. A sunbeam found a passage there, A gold chain round her neck so fair;

15 As secret as the wild bee's song She lay there all the summer long.

I hid my love in field and town Till e'en the breeze would knock me down. The bees seemed singing ballads o'er

20 The fly's buzz turned a lion's roar; And even silence found a tongue To haunt me all the summer long: The riddle nature could not prove Was nothing else but secret love.

1842-64 1920

Song

I peeled bits o' straws and I got switches too From the grey peeling willow as idlers do, And I switched at the flies as I sat all alone Till my flesh, blood, and marrow wasted to dry bone.

5 My illness was love, though I knew not the smart, But the beauty o' love was the blood o' my heart.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENTS / 861

Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude

And flew to the silence of sweet solitude,

Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades,

10 Unseen of a' shepherds and flower-loving maids.

The hermit bees find them but once and away;

There I'll bury alive and in silence decay.

I looked on the eyes o' fair woman too long,

Till silence and shame stole the use o' my tongue;

15 When I tried to speak to her I'd nothing to say,

So I turned myself round, and she wandered away.

When she got too far off�why, I'd something to tell,

So I sent sighs behind her and talked to mysel'.

Willow switches I broke, and I peeled bits o' straws,

20 Ever lonely in crowds, in nature's own laws�

My ballroom the pasture, my music the bees,

My drink was the fountain, my church the tall trees.

Who ever would love or be tied to a wife

When it makes a man mad a' the days o' his life?

1842-64 1920

Autobiographical Fragments1

[BOOKS]

My acquantance of books is not so good as later oppertunitys might have made it for I cannot and never coud plod thro every a book in a regular mecanical way as I meet with [it] I dip in to it here and there and if it does not suit I lay it down and seldom take it up again but in the same manner I read Thompsons Seasons and Miltons Paradise Lost thro when I was a boy and they are the only books of Poetry that I have reguraly read thro yet as to history I never met with the chance of getting at [it] yet and in novels my taste is very limited Tom Jones Robinson Crusoe and the Vicar of Wakefield are all that I am acquainted with they are old acquantan[ces] and I care not to make new ones tho I have often been offered the perusal of the Waverly Novels I declind it and [though] the readily remaining in ignorance of them is no trouble yet my taste may be doubted for I hear much in their praise and believe them good�I read the vicar of Wakefield over every Winter and am delighted tho I always feel disappointed at the end[ing] of it happily with the partings my mind cannot feel that it ends happily with [the] reader I usd to be uncommonly fond of looking over catalogues of books and am so still they [are] some of the earliest readings that oppertunitys allowd me to come at if ever I bought a penny worth of slate pencils or Wafers or a few sheets of Paper at Drakards they were sure to be lapt2 in a catalogue and

1. These fragments are parts of an incomplete son and David Powell in John Clare b}1 Himself manuscript autobiography that Clare undertook in (1996). We take our selections from the more the 1820s for his publisher, John Taylor. They recent collection. were published by Eric Robinson in John Clare's 2. Wrapped, folded up. Drakard was a bookseller Autobiographical Writings (1983), and a second at Stamford, half a dozen miles west of Clare's time, with slightly more accurate texts, by Robin-native village of Helpston.

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86 2 / JOHN CLARE

I considered them as the most va[l]uable parts of my purchase and greedily lookd over their contents and now in cutting open a new book or Magazine31 always naturaly turn to the end first to read the book list and take the rest as a secondary pleasure

Anticipation is the sweetest of earthly pleasures it is smiling hope standing on tiptoes to look for pleasure�the cutting open a new book the watching the opening of a new planted flower at spring etc

* # # The first books I got hold of beside the bible and prayer book was an old book of Essays with no title and then a large one on Farming Robin hoods Garland and the Scotch Rogue�The old book of Farming and Essays belongd to an old Mr Gee who had been a farmer and who lived in a part of our house which once was his own�he had had a good bringing up and was a desent scholar and he was always pleasd to lend me them even before I coud read them without so much spelling and guesses at words so as to be able to make much of them or understand them

$ a *

1 became acquainted with Robinson Crusoe very early in life having borrowd it of a boy at Glinton school4 of the name of Stimson who only dare lend it me for a few days for fear of his uncles knowing of it to whom it belongd yet I had it a sufficient time to fill my fancys with new Crusoes and adventures

From these friendships I gatherd more acquaintance with books which like chances oppertunitys were but sparing

CHAPTER 5. MY FIRST ATTEMPTS AT POETRY ETC. ETC.

I now followd gardening for a while in the Farmers Gardens about the village and workd in the fields when 1 had no other employment to go too poetry was a troublsome but pleasant companion anoying and cheering me at my toils

I coud not stop my thoughts and often faild to keep them till night so when I fancyd I had hit upon a good image or natural description 1 usd to steal into a corner of the garden and clap it down5 but the appearance of my employers often put my fancys to flight and made me loose the thought and the muse together for I always felt anx[i]ous to consceal my scribbling and woud as leave have confessd to be a robber as a rhymer when I workd in the fields I had more oppertunitys to set down my thoughts and for this reason I liked to work in the fields and bye and bye forsook gardening all together till I resumd at Casterton6 I usd to drop down behind a hedge bush or dyke and write down my things upon the crown of my hat and when I was more in a hip7 for thinking then usual I usd to stop later at nights to make up my lost time in the day thus I went on writing my thoughts down and correcting them at leisure spending my sundays in the woods or heaths to be alone for that purpose and I got a bad name among the weekly church goers forsaking the "church going bell" and seeking the religion of the fields tho I did it for no dislike to church for I felt uncomfortable very often but my heart burnt over the pleasures of solitude and the restless revels of rhyme that was eternaly

3. In the early 19th century, books and magazines 5. Fix it in writing. would be bought with their pages still uncut. 6. A village a few miles northwest of Helpston. 4. Glinton was two miles east of Helpston. 7. More annoyed.

.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENTS / 86 3

sapping my memorys like the summer sun over the tinkling brook till it one day shoud leave them dry and unconsous of the thrilling joys brin[g]ing anxiety and restless cares which it had created and the praises and censures which I shall leave behind me I knew nothing of the poets experience then or I shoud have remaind a labourer on and not livd to envy the ignorance of my old companions and fellow clowns8 I wish I had never known any other

tho I was not known as a poet my odd habits did not escape notice they fancied I kept aloof from company for some sort of study others believd me crazd and some put more criminal interpretations to my rambles and said I was night walking assosiate with the gipseys robbing the woods of the hares and pheasants because I was often in their company and I must confess I found them far more honest then their callumniators whom I knew to be of that description Scandal and Fame are cheaply purchasd in a Village the first is a nimble tongud gossip and the latter a credoulous and ready believer who woud not hesitate but believd any thing I had got the fame of being a good scholar and in fact I had vanity enough to fancy I was far from a bad one my self while I coud puzzle9 the village schoolmasters over my quart for I had no tongue to brag with till I was inspird with ale with solving algebrai[c] questions for I had once struggld hard to get fame in that crabbed wilderness but my brains was not made for it and woud not reach it tho it was a mystery scarcly half unveild to my capacity yet I made enough of it to astonish their ignorance for a village schoolmaster is one of the most pretending and most ignorant of men�and their fame is often of the sort which that droll genius Peter Pindar1 describes�Whats christend merit often wants a auth[or]

MEMORYS OF LOVE CHAPTER 6

As I grew up a man I mixd more in company and frequented dancings for the sake of meeting with the lasses for I was a lover very early in life my first attachment being a school boy affection but Mary�who cost me more ballads then sighs was belovd with a romantic or platonic sort of feeling if I coud but gaze on her face or fancy a smile on her co[u]ntenance it was sufficient

I went away satisfied we playd with each other but named nothing of love yet I fancyd her eyes told me her affections we walkd togethere as school companions in leisure hours but our talk was of play and our actions the wanton innosence of children yet young as my heart was it woud turn chill when I touchd her hand and trembled and I fancyd her feelings were the same for as I gazd earnestly in her face a tear woud hang in her smiling eye and she woud turn to whipe it away her heart was as tender as a birds but when she grew up to woman hood she felt her station above mine at least I felt that she thought so for her parents were farmers and Farmers had great pretentions to somthing then so my passion coold with my reason and contented itself with another tho I felt a hopful tenderness one that I might one day renew the acqua[in]tance and disclose the smotherd passion she was a beautiful girl and as the dream never awoke into reality her beauty was always fresh in my memory she is still unmarried

8. Yokels. Lonsiad (1785�95) and other poems satirizing 9. Perplex, confound. George III. 1. The pen name of John Wolcot, author of The

.

86 4 / FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS

MY FIRST FEELINGS AND ATTEMPTS AT Po[ETRY] CHAPTER 4

I cannot say what led me to dabble in Rhy[me or] at what age I began to write it but my first r[ude attempts took the form of] imitations of my fathers Songs for he knew and sung a great many and I made a many things before I venturd to comit them to writing for I felt ashamd to expose them on paper and after I venturd to write them down my second thoughts blushd over them and [I] burnt them for a long while but as my feelings grew into song I felt a desire to preserve some and usd to correct them over and over till the last copy had lost all kindred to the first even in the title I went on some years in this way wearing it in my memory as a secret to all tho my parents usd to know that my leisure was occupyd in writing yet they had no knowledge of what I coud be doing for they never dreamd of me writing poetry at length I venturd to divulge the secret a little by reading imatations of some popular song floating among the vulgar at the markets and fairs till they were common to all but these imatations they only laughd at and told me I need never hope to make songs like them this mortified me often and almost made me desist for I knew that the excelling such doggerel woud be but a poor fame if I coud do nothing better but I hit upon an harmless deception by repeating my poems over a book as tho I was reading it this had the desird effect

they often praisd them and said if I coud write as good I shoud do I hugd my self over this deception and often repeated it and those which they praisd as superior to others I tryd to preserve in a hole in the wall but my mother found out the hurd2 and unconscously took them for kettle holders and fire lighters when ever she wanted paper not knowing that they were any thing farther then attempts at learning to write for they were writing upon shop paper of all colors and between the lines of old copy books and any paper I could get at for I was often wanting tho I saved almost every penny I had given me on sundays or holidays to buy it instead of sweet meats and fruit and I usd to feel a little mortified after I discoverd it but I dare not reveal the secret by owning to it and wishing her to desist for I feard if I did she woud have shown them to some one to judge of ther value which woud have put me to shame so I kept the secret dissapointment to myself and wrote on suffering her to destroy them as she pleasd but when I wrote any thing which I imagind better then others I preservd it in my pocket till the paper was chafd thro and destroyd by a diff[er]ent and full as vain presevation

2. Hoard. FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS 1793-1835

Born in Liverpool and brought up in Wales, Felicia Hemans published her first two volumes�Poems and England and Spain, or Valour and Patriotism�when she was fifteen. She followed these four years later with The Domestic Affections and Other Poems (1812) and from 1816 on into the 1830s produced new books of poetry almost annually: short sentimental lyrics, tales and "historic scenes," translations, songs for

.

ENGLAND'S DEAD / 86 5

music, sketches of women, hymns for children. She also published literary criticism in magazines and wrote three plays. Her work was widely read, anthologized, memorized, and set to music throughout the nineteenth century and was especially popular and influential in the United States, where the first of many collected editions of her poems appeared in 1825. When she died she was eulogized by many poets, including William Wordsworth, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett�a sign of the high regard in which she was held by her contemporaries.

A tablet erected by her brothers in the cathedral of St. Asaph, in north Wales, reads in part, "In memory of Felicia Hemans, whose character is best pourtrayed in her writings." But there are several characters in her poems, and some of them seem not entirely compatible with some of the others. She is frequently thought of as the poet (in the nineteenth century as "the poetess") of domestic affections, at the center of a cult of domesticity in which the home is conceptualized as a haven apart from the stresses of the public world, to which only men are suited. Her poems have been viewed as celebrations of a feminine ethic founded on women's�especially mothers'�capacities for forbearance, piety, and long suffering. Among her most popular pieces in this vein, "Evening Prayer, at a Girls' School" depicts the happy ignorance of schoolgirls whose enjoyment of life will end when they reach womanhood, and "Indian Woman's Death-Song" is the lament of a Native American woman whose husband has abandoned her, sung as she plunges in her canoe over a cataract to suicide with an infant in her arms.

Many of Hemans's longer narratives, by contrast, recount the exploits of women warriors who, to avenge personal, family, or national injustice or insult, destroy enemies in a manner not conventionally associated with female behavior. In The Widow of Crescentius, Stephania stalks and poisons the German emperor Otho, the murderer of her husband; in "The Wife of Asdrubal," a mother publicly kills her own children and herself to show contempt for her husband, a betrayer of the Carthaginians whom he governed; the heroine of "The Bride of the Greek Isle," boarding the ship of the pirates who have killed her husband, annihilates them (and herself) in a conflagration rivaling the monumental explosion described in "Casabianca." Among the numerous themes of her work, patriotism and military action recur frequently; there may be a biographical basis for these motifs, given that her two oldest brothers distinguished themselves in the Peninsular War and her military husband (who deserted her and their five sons in 1818) had also served in Spain. But some of her most famous patriotic and military poems are now being viewed as critiques of the virtues and ideologies they had been thought by earlier readers to inculcate. "The Homes of England," for example, has been read as both asserting and undermining the idea that all homes are equal, ancestral estates and cottages alike; and in "Casabianca," the boy's automatic steadfastness has been interpreted as empty obedience rather than admirable loyalty.

Hemans was the highest paid writer in Blackwood's Magazine during her day. Her books sold more copies than those of any other contemporary poet except Byron and Walter Scott. She was a shrewd calculator of the literary marketplace and a genius in her negotiations with publishers (which she carried on entirely through the mails). Her self-abasing women of the domestic affections and her scimitar-wielding superwomen of the revenge narratives exist side by side throughout her works. These and other seeming dissonances clearly enhanced the strong appeal of her poems to a wide range of readers, men as well as women.

England's Dead

Son of the ocean isle! Where sleep your mighty dead?

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86 6 / FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS

Show me what high and stately pile Is rear'd o'er Glory's bed.

Go, stranger! track the deep, Free, free the white sail spread! Wave may not foam, nor wild wind sweep, Where rest not England's dead.

On Egypt's burning plains, By the pyramid o'ersway'd, With fearful power the noonday reigns, And the palm trees yield no shade.1

But let the angry sun From heaven look fiercely red, Unfelt by those whose task is done!� There slumber England's dead.

The hurricane hath might Along the Indian shore, And far by Ganges' banks at night, Is heard the tiger's roar.

But let the sound roll on! It hath no tone of dread, For those that from their toils are gone;�� There slumber England's dead.

Loud rush the torrent floods The western wilds among, And free, in green Columbia's woods, The hunter's bow is strung.

But let the floods rush on! Let the arrow's flight be sped! Why should they reck whose task is done?� There slumber England's dead!

The mountain storms rise high In the snowy Pyrenees, And toss the pine boughs through the sky, Like rose leaves on the breeze.

But let the storm rage on! Let the fresh wreaths be shed! For the Roncesvalles' field2 is won,� There slumber England's dead.

1. English forces defeated the French at Alexan-more general. dria in the spring of 1801. The rest of the refer-2. Roncesvalles, the mountain pass in the Pyreences� to 18th- and early-19th-century battles in nees between France and Spain, was a scene of India (lines 17�24), America (lines 25�32), Spain action during the Peninsular War (1808�14). (lines 33-40), and on the sea (lines 41�48)�are

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THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS IN NEW ENGLAND / 867

On the frozen deep's repose 'Tis a dark and dreadful hour, When round the ship the ice-fields close, And the northern night clouds lower.

45 But let the ice drift on! Let the cold-blue desert spread! Their course with mast and flag is done,� Even there sleep England's dead.

The warlike of the isles, 50 The men of field and wave! Are not the rocks their funeral piles, The seas and shores their grave?

Go, stranger! track the deep,

Free, free the white sail spread! 55 Wave may not foam, nor wild wind sweep, Where rest not England's dead.

1822

The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England

Look now abroad�another race has fill'd Those populous borders�wide the wood recedes, And towns shoot up, and fertile realms are till'd; The land is full of harvests and green meads.

�BRYANT 1

The breaking waves dash'd high On a stern and rock-bound coast, And the woods against a stormy sky Their giant branches toss'd;

5 And the heavy night hung dark, The hills and waters o'er, When a band of exiles moor'd their bark On the wild New England shore.

Not as the conqueror comes, 10 They, the true-hearted, came; Not with the roll of the stirring drums, And the trumpet that sings of fame;

Not as the flying come, In silence and in fear;� 15 They shook the depths of the desert0 gloom desolate With their hymns of lofty cheer.

1. The American poet William Cullen Bryant, The Ages (1821), lines 280-83.

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86 8 / FELICI A DOROTHE A HEMAN S 20Amidst the storm they sang, And the stars heard and the sea; And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang To the anthem of the free! The ocean eagle soar'd From his nest by the white wave's foam; And the rocking pines of the forest roar'd� This was their welcome home! 25 There were men with hoary0 hairAmidst that pilgrim band;� Why had they come to wither there, Away from their childhood's land? white 30There was woman's fearless eye, Lit by her deep love's truth; There was manhood's brow serenely high, And the fiery heart of youth. 35What sought they thus afar? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?� They sought a faith's pure shrine! 40Aye, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod. They have left unstain'd what there they found� Freedom to worship God. 1826 Casabianca1 The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck Shone round him o'er the dead. 5 Yet beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm; A creature of heroic blood, A proud, though childlike form.

1. Young Casabianca, a boy about thirteen years old, son to the Admiral of the Orient, remained at his post (in the Battle of the Nile) after the ship had taken fire, and all the guns had been abandoned; and perished in the explosion of the vessel, when the flames had reached the powder [Hemans's note]. The Battle of the Nile, in which Nelson captured and destroyed the French fleet in Aboukir Bay, took place on August 1, 1798. Admiral Casabianca and his son (who was in fact only ten) were among those killed by the British forces.

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10The flames roll'd on�he would not go Without his Father's word; That Father, faint in death below, His voice no longer heard. 15He call'd aloud:-�"Say, Father, say If yet my task is done?" He knew not that the chieftain lay Unconscious of his son. 20"Speak, Father!" once again he cried, "If I may yet be gone! And"�but the booming shots replied, And fast the flames roll'd on. Upon his brow he felt their breath, And in his waving hair,

CASABIANCA / 86 9

And look'd from that lone post of death In still, yet brave despair. 25 And shouted but once more aloud, "My Father! must I stay?" While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud, The wreathing fires made way. 30They wrapt the ship in splendour wild, They caught the flag on high, And stream'd above the gallant child, Like banners in the sky. 35There came a burst of thunder sound� The boy�oh! where was he? Ask of the winds that far around With fragments strew'd the sea!� 40With mast, and helm, and pennon fair, That well had borne their part, But the noblest thing which perish'd there Was that young faithful heart! 1826

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87 0 / FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS

The Homes of England

Where's the coward that would not dare To fight for such a land?

�Marmion'

The stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand! Amidst their tall ancestral trees, O'er all the pleasant land.

5 The deer across their greensward bound Through shade and sunny gleam, And the swan glides past them with the sound Of some rejoicing stream.

The merry Homes of England! to Around their hearths by night, What gladsome looks of household love Meet in the ruddy light! There woman's voice flows forth in song,

Or childhood's tale is told, 15 Or lips move tunefully along Some glorious page of old.

The blessed Homes of England! How softly on their bowers Is laid the holy quietness 20 That breathes from Sabbath-hours! Solemn, yet sweet, the church-bell's chime Floats through their woods at morn; All other sounds, in that still time, Of breeze and leaf are born.

25 The Cottage Homes of England! By thousands on her plains, They are smiling o'er the silvery brooks,

And round the hamlet-fanes.� village churches

Through glowing orchards forth they peep, 30 Each from its nook of leaves, And fearless there the lowly sleep, As the bird beneath their eaves.

The free, fair Homes of England! Long, long, in hut and hall, 35 May hearts of native proof be rear'd To guard each hallow'd wall! And green for ever be the groves, And bright the flowery sod, Where first the child's glad spirit loves Its country and its God!

1. From Sir Walter Scott's long poem Marmion 1827, Hemans used as epigraph a passage from the (1808), 4.633�34, a tale of betrayal and bloody work of another Scottish author, Joanna Baillie's conflict between the English and the Scots. When Ethwald: A Tragedy, part 2 (1802), 1.2.76-82. she first published the poem, in Blackwood's, April

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CORINNE AT THE CAPITOL / 871

Daughter of th' Italian heaven! Thou, to whom its fires are given, Joyously thy car� hath roll'd chariot Where the conqueror's pass'd of old; 5 And the festal sun that shone, O'er three* hundred triumphs gone, Makes thy day of glory bright, With a shower of golden light. Now thou tread'st th'ascending road, 10 Freedom's foot so proudly trode; While, from tombs of heroes borne, From the dust of empire shorn, Flowers upon thy graceful head, Chaplets0 of all hues, are shed, wreaths 15 In a soft and rosy rain, Touch'd with many a gemlike stain. Thou hast gain'd the summit now! Music hails thee from below;� Music, whose rich notes might stir 20 Ashes of the sepulchre; Shaking with victorious notes All the bright air as it floats. Well may woman's heart beat high Unto that proud harmony! 25 Now afar it rolls�it dies� And thy voice is heard to rise With a low and lovely tone In its thrilling power alone; And thy lyre's deep silvery string,

1. Hemans's poem comments on one of the most famous and controversial novels of early-19thcentury Europe, Corinne, or Italy (1807), by the Swiss-French writer Germaine de Stael, and particularly on its second book, in which Stael's heroine, an improvisatrice (a poet who speaks from rhapsodic inspiration rather than texts) is crowned at the Capitol in Rome in recognition of her genius, as Petrarch had been crowned in the 14th century. Corinne's triumph is short-lived and, at the novel's close, abandoned by her English lover, she dies of a broken heart. In hook 2 of Aurora Leigh (1857), Elizabeth Barrett Browning would again restage the scene of Corinne's coronation, marking how Stael's simultaneously inspirational and cautionary story of the unhappy female genius had come to shape women writers' understanding of poetic fame.

2. "Women must recognize that very little in this career equals in value the most obscure life of a beloved wife and happy mother." From Stael's De I 'Influence des Passions sur le Bonhenr des Individus et des Nations (On the Influence of the Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and Nations; 1796). 3. The trebly hundred triumphs�BYRON [Hemans's note]. From a stinging account in Childe Harold (4.731) of the celebrations that greeted imperial Rome's victorious heroes.

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87 2 / FELICI A DOROTHE A HEMAN S 30 Touch'd as by a breeze's wing, Murmurs tremblingly at first, Ere the tide of rapture burst. 3540All the spirit of thy sky Now hath lit thy large dark eye, And thy cheek a flush hath caught From the joy of kindled thought; And the burning words of song From thy lip flow fast and strong, With a rushing stream's delight In the freedom of its might. Radiant daughter of the sun! Now thy living wreath is won. Crown'd of Rome!�Oh! art thou not 45Happy in that glorious lot?� Happier, happier far than thou, With the laurel4 on thy brow, She that makes the humblest hearth Lovely but to one on earth! 1827 1827

A Spirit's Return

"This is to be a mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality!" �MANFRED1

Thy voice prevails�dear friend, my gentle friend! This long-shut heart for thee shall be unsealed, And though thy soft eye mournfully will bend Over the troubled stream, yet once revealed

5 Shall its freed waters flow; then rocks must close For evermore, above their dark repose.

Come while the gorgeous mysteries of the sky Fused in the crimson sea of sunset lie; Come to the woods, where all strange wandering sound

to Is mingled into harmony profound; Where the leaves thrill with spirit, while the wind Fills with a viewless" being, unconfined, invisible The trembling reeds and fountains�our own dell,

4. Wreaths of laurel were bestowed on honored be read as commentary on Byron's play, Percy poets in classical antiquity. Shelley's Alastor, and Keats's Endymion (see the 1. A spirit's verdict on Manfred's quest, spoken note to lines 216�17 below), all of which depict a just after Manfred is convulsed by the disappear-protagonist's problems in communicating with an ance of the Phantom of his beloved Astarte (Man-otherworldly lover. fred 2.4.158�59; see p. 658). Hemans's poem can

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A SPIRIT'S RETURN / 87 3

With its green dimness and Aeolian0 breath, wind-blown 15 Shall suit th' unveiling of dark records well� Hear me in tenderness and silent faith! Thou knew'st me not in life's fresh vernal morn� I would thou hadst!�for then my heart on thine Had poured a worthier love; now, all o'erworn 20 By its deep thirst for something too divine, It hath but fitful music to bestow, Echoes of harp-strings broken long ago. Yet even in youth companionless I stood, As a lone forest-bird 'midst ocean's foam; 25 For me the silver cords of brotherhood Were early loosed; the voices from my home Passed one by one, and melody and mirth Left me a dreamer by a silent hearth. But, with the fulness of a heart that burned 30 For the deep sympathies of mind, I turned From that unanswering spot, and fondly sought In all wild scenes with thrilling murmurs fraught, In every still small voice and sound of power, And flute-note of the wind through cave and bower, 35 A perilous delight!�for then first woke My life's lone passion, the mysterious quest Of secret knowledge; and each tone that broke From the wood-arches or the fountain's breast, Making my quick soul vibrate as a lyre, 40 But ministered to that strange inborn fire. 'Midst the bright silence of the mountain dells, In noon-tide hours or golden summer-eves, My thoughts have burst forth as a gale that swells Into a rushing blast, and from the leaves 45 Shakes out response. O thou rich world unseen! Thou curtained realm of spirits!�thus my cry Hath troubled air and silence�dost thou lie Spread all around, yet by some filmy screen Shut from us ever? The resounding woods, 50 Do their depths teem with marvels?-�and the floods, And the pure fountains, leading secret veins Of quenchless melody through rock and hill, Have they bright dwellers?�are their lone domains Peopled with beauty, which may never still 55 Our weary thirst of soul?�Cold, weak and cold, Is earth's vain language, piercing not one fold Of our deep being! Oh, for gifts more high! For a seer's glance to rend mortality! For a charmed rod, to call from each dark shrine 60 The oracles divine!

I woke from those high fantasies, to know My kindred with the earth�I woke to love:

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87 4 / FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS

0 gentle friend! to love in doubt and woe, Shutting the heart the worshipped name above,

65 Is to love deeply�and my spirit's dower Was a sad gift, a melancholy power Of so adoring�with a buried care, And with the o'erflowing of a voiceless prayer, And with a deepening dream, that day by day,

70 In the still shadow of its lonely sway, Folded me closer, till the world held nought Save the one being to my centred thought.

There was no music but his voice to hear, No joy but such as with his step drew near;

75 Light was but where he looked�life where he moved; Silently, fervently, thus, thus I loved. Oh! but such love is fearful!�and I knew Its gathering doom:�the soul's prophetic sight Even then unfolded in my breast, and threw

so O'er all things round a full, strong, vivid light, Too sorrowfully clear!�an undertone Was given to Nature's harp, for me alone Whispering of grief.�Of grief?�be strong, awake, Hath not thy love been victory, O, my soul?

85 Hath not its conflict won a voice to shake Death's fastnesses?�a magic to control Worlds far removed?�from o'er the grave to thee Love hath made answer; and thy tale should be Sung like a lay of triumph!�Now return,

90 And take thy treasure from its bosomed urn,2 And lift it once to light!

In fear, in pain, 1 said I loved�but yet a heavenly strain Of sweetness floated down the tearful stream, A joy flashed through the trouble of my dream!

95 I knew myself beloved!�we breathed no vow, No mingling visions might our fate allow, As unto happy hearts; but still and deep, Like a rich jewel gleaming in a grave, Like golden sand in some dark river's wave,

IOO So did my soul that costly knowledge keep So jealously!0�a thing o'er which to shed, watchfully When stars alone beheld the drooping head, Lone tears! yet ofttimes burdened with the excess Of our strange nature's quivering happiness.

105 But, oh! sweet friend! we dream not of love's might Till death has robed with soft and solemn light The image we enshrine!�Before that hour, We have but glimpses of the o'ermastering power Within us laid!�then doth the spirit-flame

110 With sword-like lightning rend its mortal frame;

2. Suggests an urn in which funerary ashes are kept.

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A SPIRIT'S RETURN / 87 5

The wings of that which pants to follow fast Shake their clay-bars, as with a prisoned blast� The sea is in our souls!

He died�he died On whom my lone devotedness was cast!

1 is I might not keep one vigil by his side, I, whose wrung heart watched with him to the last! I might not once his fainting head sustain, Nor bathe his parched lips in the hour of pain, Nor say to him, "Farewell!"�He passed away�

120 Oh! had my love been there, its conquering sway Had won him back from death! but thus removed, Borne o'er the abyss no sounding-line hath proved, Joined with the unknown, the viewless�he became Unto my thoughts another, yet the same�

125 Changed�hallowed�glorified!�and his low grave Seemed a bright mournful altar�mine, all mine:� Brother and friend soon left me that sole shrine, The birthright of the faithful!�their world's wave Soon swept them from its brink.�Oh! deem thou not

130 That on the sad and consecrated spot My soul grew weak!�I tell thee that a power There kindled heart and lip�a fiery shower My words were made�a might was given to prayer, And a strong grasp to passionate despair, 135 And a dead triumph!�Know'st thou what I sought? For what high boon my struggling spirit wrought?� Communion with the dead!�I sent a cry, Through the veiled empires of eternity, A voice to cleave them! By the mournful truth, HO By the lost promise of my blighted youth, By the strong chain a mighty love can bind On the beloved, the spell of mind o'er mind; By words, which in themselves are magic high, Armed and inspired, and winged with agony; 145 By tears, which comfort not, but burn, and seem