Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

would be torn from us. He did not trollable emotions of his heart. I ought hesitate to resolve, if such were me- to observe that the fourth verse of this naced, to abandon country, fortune, effusion is introduced in Rosalind and everything, and to escape with his child; Helen. When afterwards this child and I find some unfinished stanzas ad- died at Rome, he wrote, à propos of the dressed to this son, whom afterwards English burying-ground in that city: we lost at Rome, written under the idea This spot is the repository of a sacred that we might suddenly be forced to loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's cross the sea, so to preserve him. This heart are now prophetic; he is rendered poem, as well as the one previously immortal by love, as his memory is by quoted, were not written to exhibit the death. My beloved child lies buried pangs of distress to the public; they here. I envy death the body far less were the spontaneous outbursts of a than the oppressors the minds of those man who brooded over his wrongs and whom they have torn from me. The woes, and was impelled to shed the one can only kill the body, the other grace of his genius over the uncon- crushes the affections.'

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1818

TO THE NILE

['Found by Mr. Townshend Meyer among the papers of Leigh Hunt, [and] published in the St. James's Magazine for March, 1876.' (Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B.; P. W. of P. B. S., Library Edition, 1876, vol. iii, p. 410.) First included among Shelley's poetical works in Mr. Forman's Library Edition, where a facsimile of the MS. is given. Composed February 4, 1818. See Complete Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Glasgow, 1901, vol. iv, p. 76.] 4/

[ocr errors]

MONTH after month the gathered rains descend

Drenching yon secret Aethiopian dells,

And from the desert's ice-girt pinnacles

Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend

On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.

5

Girt there with blasts and meteors Tempest dwells

By Nile's aëreal urn, with rapid spells

Urging those waters to their mighty end.

O'er Egypt's land of Memory floods are level

And they are thine, O Nile-and well thou knowest
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil

And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest.
Beware, O Man-for knowledge must to thee,
Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES

[ocr errors]

[Composed May 4, 1818. Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824. There is a copy amongst the Shelley MSS. at the Bodleian Library, which supplies the last word of the fragment.]

LISTEN, listen, Mary mine,

To the whisper of the Apennine,

It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,
Or like the sea on a northern shore,

Heard in its raging ebb and flow
By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,

Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,
Shrouding.

THE PAST

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.]

I

WILT thou forget the happy hours

Which we buried in Love's sweet bowers,
Heaping over their corpses cold

Blossoms and leaves, instead of mould?
Blossoms which were the joys that fell,
And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.

II

Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet

There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,

Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom,
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain.

[blocks in formation]

5

ΤΟ

5

ΤΟ

ΤΟ

O Mary dear, that you were here; 15
The Castle echo whispers 'Here!'

ON A FADED VIOLET

[Published by Hunt, Literary Pocket-Book, 1821. Reprinted by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824. Again reprinted, with several variants, P. W., 1839, 1st ed. Our text is that of the editio princeps, 1821. A transcript is extant in a letter from Shelley to Sophia Stacey, dated March 7, 1820.]

I

THE odour from the flower is gone
Which like thy kisses breathed on me;
The colour from the flower is flown
Which glowed of thee and only thee!

On a Faded Violet-1 odour] colour 1839. 2 kisses breathed] sweet eyes smiled 1839. 3 colour] odour 1839. 4 glowed] breathed 1839.

[blocks in formation]

[Composed at Este, October, 1818. Published with Rosalind and Helen, 1819. Amongst the late Mr. Fredk. Locker-Lampson's collections at Rowfant there is a MS. of the lines (167-205) on Byron, interpolated after the completion of the poem.]

MANY a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of Misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on-

Day and night, and night and day, 5 Then 'twill wreak him little woe

10

Drifting on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel's track;
Whilst above the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily,
And behind the tempest fleet
Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank 14
Death from the o'er-brimming deep;
And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore
Still recedes, as ever still
Longing with divided will,
But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever drifted on
O'er the unreposing wave
To the haven of the grave.
What, if there no friends will greet;
What, if there no heart will meet
His with love's impatient beat;

20

30

Wander wheresoe'er he may,
Can he dream before that day
To find refuge from distress
In friendship's smile, in love's caress?
Whether such there be or no:
Senseless is the breast, and cold,
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve

35

40

That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortured lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December's bough.

45

On the beach of a northern sea
Which tempests shake eternally,
As once the wretch there lay to
sleep,

Lies a solitary heap,

One white skull and seven dry
bones,

On the margin of the stones,
25 Where a few gray rushes stand,

Boundaries of the sea and land:
Nor is heard one voice of wail
But the sea-mews, as they sail
O'er the billows of the gale;

50

55

8 cold and silent all edd. ; its cold, silent Stacey MS.

5 shrivelled] withered 1839. 54 seamews 1819; seamew's Rossetti,

[blocks in formation]
[merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

115

120

Sun-girt City, thou hast been
Ocean's child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew 125
Flies, as once before it flew,
O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of Ocean's own,
Topples o'er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day, 135
Will spread his sail and seize his

oar

131

[blocks in formation]

115 Sun-girt] Sea-girt cj. Palgrave.

150

190

Scarce can for this fame repay
Aught thine own? oh, rather say
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's wasting springs;
As divinest Shakespeare's might 196
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power which he
155 Imaged 'mid mortality;

Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch's hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously,
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they!- 160
Clouds which stain truth's rising day
By her sun consumed away-
Earth can spare ye: while like
flowers,

In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
With more kindly blossoming. 166

[blocks in formation]

As the love from Petrarch's urn, 200
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp by which the
heart

Sees things unearthly; so thou art,
Mighty spirit-so shall be
The City that did refuge thee.

205

215

220

Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-winged Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread, 210
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that gray cloud
Many-domed Padua proud
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest-shining plain,
Where the peasant heaps his grain
In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow
With the purple vintage strain,
Heaped upon the creaking wain,
That the brutal Celt may swill
Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword
Lies unchanged, though many a lord,
Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region's foison,
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction's harvest-home: 230
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot's rage, the slave's revenge.

225

165 From your dust new 1819; From thy dust shall Rowfant MS. (heading of U. 167

205).

175 songs 1819; sons cj. Forman.

« AnteriorContinua »