Poems Read Online

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XXVII

And, when he saw beneath the sunset's planet

A black ship walk over the crimson ocean, –

Its pennon streaming on the blasts that fan it,

Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,

Like the dark ghost of the unburied even

Striding athwart the orange-coloured heaven, –

XXVIII

The thought of his own kind who made the soul

Which sped that winged shape through night and day, –

The thought of his own country ...

. . . . . . .

Sonnet

Lift not the painted veil which those who live

Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,

And it but mimic all we would believe

With colours idly spread, – behind, lurk Fear

And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave

Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.

I knew one who had lifted it – he sought,

For his lost heart was tender, things to love,

But found them not, alas! nor was there aught

The world contains, the which he could approve.

Through the unheeding many he did move,

A splendour among shadows, a bright blot

Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove

For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

Fragment: to Byron

O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age

Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,

Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?

Fragment: Apostrophe to Silence

Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou

Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged

Of one abyss, where life, and truth, and joy

Are swallowed up – yet spare me, Spirit, pity me,

Until the sounds I hear become my soul,

And it has left these faint and weary limbs,

To track along the lapses of the air

This wandering melody until it rests

Among lone mountains in some ...

Fragment: the Lake's Margin

The fierce beasts of the woods and wildernesses

Track not the steps of him who drinks of it;

For the light breezes, which for ever fleet

Around its margin, heap the sand thereon.

Fragment: »My Head Is Wild with Weeping«

My head is wild with weeping for a grief

Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.

I walk into the air (but no relief

To seek, – or haply, if I sought, to find;

It came unsought); – to wonder that a chief

Among men's spirits should be cold and blind.

Fragment: the Vine-Shroud

Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow

Beneath the autumnal sun, none taste of thee;

For thou dost shroud a ruin, and below

The rotting bones of dead antiquity.

Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration

I

Corpses are cold in the tomb;

Stones on the pavement are dumb;

Abortions are dead in the womb,

And their mothers look pale – like the death-white shore

Of Albion, free no more.

II

Her sons are as stones in the way –

They are masses of senseless clay –

They are trodden, and move not away, –

The abortion with which she travaileth

Is Liberty, smitten to death.

III

Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor!

For thy victim is no redresser;

Thou art sole lord and possessor

Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions – they pave

Thy path to the grave.

IV

Hearest thou the festival din

Of Death, and Destruction, and Sin,

And Wealth crying Havoc! within?

'Tis the bacchanal triumph that makes Truth dumb,

Thine Epithalamium.

V

Ay, marry thy ghastly wife!

Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife

Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life!

Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant! and Hell be thy guide

To the bed of the bride!

Song to the Men of England

I

Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear?

II

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,

From the cradle to the grave,

Those ungrateful drones who would

Drain your sweat – nay, drink your blood?

III

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge

Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,

That these stingless drones may spoil

The forced produce of your toil?

IV

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,

Shelter, food, love's gentle balm?

Or what is it ye buy so dear

With your pain and with your fear?

V

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

VI

Sow seed, – but let no tyrant reap;

Find wealth, – let no impostor heap;

Weave robes, – let not the idle wear;

Forge arms, – in your defence to bear.

VII

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;

In halls ye deck another dwells.

Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see

The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

VIII

With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,

Trace your grave, and build your tomb,

And weave your winding-sheet, till fair

England be your sepulchre.

Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819

I

As from an ancestral oak

Two empty ravens sound their clarion,

Yell by yell, and croak by croak,

When they scent the noonday smoke

Of fresh human carrion: –

II

As two gibbering night-birds flit

From their bowers of deadly yew

Through the night to frighten it,

When the moon is in a fit,

And the stars are none, or few: –

III

As a shark and dog-fish wait

Under an Atlantic isle,

For the negro-ship, whose freight

Is the theme of their debate,

Wrinkling their red gills the while –

IV

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,

Two scorpions under one wet stone,

Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,

Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,

Two vipers tangled into one.

Fragment: to the People of England

People of England, ye who toil and groan,

Who reap the harvests which are not your own,

Who weave the clothes which your oppressors wear,

And for your own take the inclement air;

Who build warm houses ...

And are like gods who give them all they have,

And nurse them from the cradle to the grave ...

. . . . . . .

Fragment: »What Men Gain Fairly«

What men gain fairly – that they should possess,

And children may inherit idleness,

From him who earns it – This is understood;

Private injustice may be general good.

But he who gains by base and armed wrong,

Or guilty fraud, or base compliances,

May be despoiled; even as a stolen dress

Is stripped from a convicted thief, and he

Left in the nakedness of infamy.

A New National Anthem

I

God prosper, speed, and save,

God raise from England's grave

Her murdered Queen!

Pave with swift victory

The steps of Liberty,

Whom Britons own to be

Immortal Queen.

II

See, she comes throned on high,

On swift Eternity!

God save the Queen!

Millions on millions wait,

Firm, rapid, and elate,

On her majestic state!

God save the Queen!

III

She is Thine own pure soul

Moulding the mighty whole, –

God save the Queen!

She is Thine own deep love

Rained down from Heaven above, –

Wherever she rest or move,

God save our Queen!

IV

'Wilder her enemies

In their own dark disguise, –

God save our Queen!

All earthly things that dare

Her sacred name to bear,

Strip them, as kings are, bare;

God save the Queen!

V

Be her eternal throne

Built in our hearts alone –

God save the Queen!

Let the oppressor hold

Canopied seats of gold;

She sits enthroned of old

O'er our hearts Queen.

VI

Lips touched by seraphim

Breathe out the choral hymn

»God save the Queen!«

Sweet as if angels sang,

Loud as that trumpet's clang

Wakening the world's dead gang, –

God save the Queen!

Sonnet: England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, –

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn, – mud from a muddy spring, –

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, –

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field, –

An army, which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield, –

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless – a book sealed;

A Senate, – Time's worst statute unrepealed, –

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

An Ode

Written October, 1819, Before the Spaniards Had Recovered Their Liberty

Arise, arise, arise!

There is blood on the earth that denies ye bread;

Be your wounds like eyes

To weep for the dead, the dead, the dead.

What other grief were it just to pay?

Your sons, your wives, your brethren, were they;

Who said they were slain on the battle day?

Awaken, awaken, awaken!

The slave and the tyrant are twin-born foes;

Be the cold chains shaken

To the dust where your kindred repose, repose:

Their bones in the grave will start and move,

When they hear the voices of those they love,

Most loud in the holy combat above.

Wave, wave high the banner!

When Freedom is riding to conquest by:

Though the slaves that fan her

Be Famine and Toil, giving sigh for sigh.

And ye who attend her imperial car,

Lift not your hands in the banded war,

But in her defence whose children ye are.

Glory, glory, glory,

To those who have greatly suffered and done!

Never name in story

Was greater than that which ye shall have won.

Conquerors have conquered their foes alone,

Whose revenge, pride, and power they have overthrown:

Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.

Bind, bind every brow

With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine:

Hide the blood-stains now

With hues which sweet Nature has made divine:

Green strength, azure hope, and eternity

But let not the pansy among them be;

Ye were injured, and that means memory.

Cancelled Stanza

Gather, O gather,

Foeman and friend in love and peace!

Waves sleep together

When the blasts that called them to battle, cease.

For fangless Power grown tame and mild

Is at play with Freedom's fearless child –

The dove and the serpent reconciled!

Ode to Heaven

Chorus of Spirits

First Spirit.

Palace-roof of cloudless nights!

Paradise of golden lights!

Deep, immeasurable, vast,

Which art now, and which wert then

Of the Present and the Past,

Of the eternal Where and When,

Presence-chamber, temple, home,

Ever-canopying dome,

Of acts and ages yet to come!

Glorious shapes have life in thee,

Earth, and all earth's company;

Living globes which ever throng

Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;

And green worlds that glide along;

And swift stars with flashing tresses;

And icy moons most cold and bright,

And mighty suns beyond the night,

Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,

Heaven! for thou art the abode

Of that Power which is the glass

Wherein man his nature sees.

Generations as they pass

Worship thee with bended knees.

Their unremaining gods and they

Like a river roll away:

Thou remainest such – alway! –

Second Spirit.

Thou art but the mind's first chamber,

Round which its young fancies clamber,

Like weak insects in a cave,

Lighted up by stalactites;

But the portal of the grave,

Where a world of new delights

Will make thy best glories seem

But a dim and noonday gleam

From the shadow of a dream!

Third Spirit.

Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn

At your presumption, atom-born!

What is Heaven? and what are ye

Who its brief expanse inherit?

What are suns and spheres which flee

With the instinct of that Spirit

Of which ye are but a part?

Drops which Nature's mighty heart

Drives through thinnest veins! Depart!

What is Heaven? a globe of dew,

Filling in the morning new

Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken

On an unimagined world:

Constellated suns unshaken,

Orbits measureless, are furled

In that frail and fading sphere,

With ten millions gathered there,

To tremble, gleam, and disappear.

Cancelled Fragments of the Ode to Heaven

The [living frame which sustains my soul]

Is [sinking beneath the fierce control]

Down through the lampless deep of song

I am drawn and driven along –

When a Nation screams aloud

Like an eagle from the cloud

When a ...

. . . . . .

When the night ...

. . . . . .

Watch the look askance and old –

See neglect, and falsehood fold . ...

Ode to the West Wind15

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystàlline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

An Exhortation

Chameleons feed on light and air:

Poets' food is love and fame:

If in this wide world of care

Poets could but find the same

With as little toil as they,

Would they ever change their hue

As the light chameleons do,

Suiting it to every ray

Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,

As chameleons might be,

Hidden from their early birth

In a cave beneath the sea;

Where light is, chameleons change:

Where love is not, poets do:

Fame is love disguised: if few

Find either, never think it strange

That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power

A poet's free and heavenly mind:

If bright chameleons should devour

Any food but beams and wind,

They would grow as earthly soon

As their brother lizards are.

Children of a sunnier star,

Spirits from beyond the moon,

Oh, refuse the boon!

The Indian Serenade

I

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night.

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me – who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!

II

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream –

The Champak odours fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale's complaint,

It dies upon her heart; –

As I must on thine,

Oh, beloved as thou art!

III

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast; –

Oh! press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.

To Sophia [Miss Stacey]

I

Thou art fair, and few are fairer

Of the Nymphs of earth or ocean;

They are robes that fit the wearer –

Those soft limbs of thine, whose motion

Ever falls and shifts and glances

As the life within them dances.

II

Thy deep eyes, a double Planet,

Gaze the wisest into madness

With soft clear fire, – the winds that fan it

Are those thoughts of tender gladness

Which, like zephyrs on the billow,

Make thy gentle soul their pillow.

III

If, whatever face thou paintest

In those eyes, grows pale with pleasure,

If the fainting soul is faintest

When it hears thy harp's wild measure,

Wonder not that when thou speakest

Of the weak my heart is weakest.

IV

As dew beneath the wind of morning,

As the sea which whirlwinds waken,

As the birds at thunder's warning,

As aught mute yet deeply shaken,

As one who feels an unseen spirit

Is my heart when thine is near it.

To William Shelley

(With what truth may I say –

Roma! Roma! Roma!

Non e più come era prima!)

I

My lost William, thou in whom

Some bright spirit lived, and did

That decaying robe consume

Which its lustre faintly hid, –

Here its ashes find a tomb,

But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not – if a thing divine

Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine

Is thy mother's grief and mine.

II

Where art thou, my gentle child?

Let me think thy spirit feeds,

With its life intense and mild,

The love of living leaves and weeds

Among these tombs and ruins wild; –

Let me think that through low seeds

Of sweet flowers and sunny grass

Into their hues and scents may pass

A portion –

To William Shelley

Thy little footsteps on the sands

Of a remote and lonely shore;

The twinkling of thine infant hands,

Where now the worm will feed no more;

Thy mingled look of love and glee

When we returned to gaze on thee –

To Mary Shelley

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,

And left me in this dreary world alone?

Thy form is here indeed – a lovely one –

But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,

That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode;

Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,

Where

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.

To Mary Shelley

The world is dreary,

And I am weary

Of wandering on without thee, Mary;

A joy was erewhile

In thy voice and thy smile,

And 'tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.

On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery

I

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,

Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;

Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie

Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,

Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

The agonies of anguish and of death.

II

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone,

Whereon the lineaments of that dead face

Are graven, till the characters be grown

Into itself, and thought no more can trace;

'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown

Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,

Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

III

And from its head as from one body grow,

As grass out of a watery rock,

Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow

And their long tangles in each other lock,

And with unending involutions show

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock

The torture and the death within, and saw

The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

IV

And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft

Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;

Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise

Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,

And he comes hastening like a moth that hies

After a taper; and the midnight sky

Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

V

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;

For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare

Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air

Become a and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there –

A woman's countenance, with serpent-locks,

Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.

Love's Philosophy

I

The fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the Ocean,

The winds of Heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle.

Why not I with thine? –

II

See the mountains kiss high Heaven

And the waves clasp one another;

No sister-flower would be forgiven

If it disdained its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth

And the moonbeams kiss the sea:

What is all this sweet work worth

If thou kiss not me?

Fragment: »Follow to the Deep Wood's Weeds«

Follow to the deep wood's weeds,

Follow to the wild-briar dingle,

Where we seek to intermingle,

And the violet tells her tale

To the odour-scented gale,

For they two have enough to do

Of such work as I and you.

The Birth of Pleasure

At the creation of the Earth

Pleasure, that divinest birth,

From the soil of Heaven did rise,

Wrapped in sweet wild melodies –

Like an exhalation wreathing

To the sound of air low-breathing

Through Aeolian pines, which make

A shade and shelter to the lake

Whence it rises soft and slow;

Her life-breathing [limbs] did flow

In the harmony divine

Of an ever-lengthening line

Which enwrapped her perfect form

With a beauty clear and warm.

Fragment: Love the Universe To-Day

And who feels discord now or sorrow?

Love is the universe to-day –

These are the slaves of dim to-morrow,

Darkening Life's labyrinthine way.

Fragment: »A Gentle Story of Two Lovers Young«

A gentle story of two lovers young,

Who met in innocence and died in sorrow,

And of one selfish heart, whose rancour clung

Like curses on them; are ye slow to borrow

The lore of truth from such a tale?

Or in this world's deserted vale,

Do ye not see a star of gladness

Pierce the shadows of its sadness, –

When ye are cold, that love is a light sent

From Heaven, which none shall quench, to cheer the innocent?

Fragment: Love's Tender Atmosphere

There is a warm and gentle atmosphere

About the form of one we love, and thus

As in a tender mist our spirits are

Wrapped in the of that which is to us

The health of life's own life –

Fragment: Wedded Souls

I am as a spirit who has dwelt

Within his heart of hearts, and I have felt

His feelings, and have thought his thoughts, and known

The inmost converse of his soul, the tone

Unheard but in the silence of his blood,

When all the pulses in their multitude

Image the trembling calm of summer seas.

I have unlocked the golden melodies

Of his deep soul, as with a master-key,

And loosened them and bathed myself therein –

Even as an eagle in a thunder-mist

Clothing his wings with lightning.

Fragment: »Is It That in Some Brighter Sphere«

Is it that in some brighter sphere

We part from friends we meet with here?

Or do we see the Future pass

Over the Present's dusky glass?

Or what is that that makes us seem

To patch up Fragments of a dream,

Part of which comes true, and part

Beats and trembles in the heart?

Fragment: Sufficient Unto the Day

Is not to-day enough? Why do I peer

Into the darkness of the day to come?

Is not to-morrow even as yesterday?

And will the day that follows change thy doom?

Few flowers grow upon thy wintry way;

And who waits for thee in that cheerless home

Whence thou hast fled, whither thou must return

Charged with the load that makes thee faint and mourn?

Fragment: »Ye Gentle Visitations of Calm Thought«

Ye gentle visitations of calm thought –

Moods like the memories of happier earth,

Which come arrayed in thoughts of little worth,

Like stars in clouds by the weak winds enwrought, –

But that the clouds depart and stars remain,

While they remain, and ye, alas, depart!

Fragment: Music and Sweet Poetry

How sweet it is to sit and read the tales

Of mighty poets and to hear the while

Sweet music, which when the attention fails

Fills the dim pause –

Fragment: The Sepulchre of Memory

And where is truth? On tombs? for such to thee

Has been my heart – and thy dead memory

Has lain from childhood, many a changeful year,

Unchangingly preserved and buried there.

Fragment: »When a Lover Clasps His Fairest«

I

When a lover clasps his fairest,

Then be our dread sport the rarest,

Their caresses were like the chaff

In the tempest, and be our laugh

His despair – her epitaph!

II

When a mother clasps her child,

Watch till dusty Death has piled

His cold ashes on the clay;

She has loved it many a day –

She remains, – it fades away.

Fragment: »Wake the Serpent Not«

Wake the serpent not – lest he

Should not know the way to go, –

Let him crawl which yet lies sleeping

Through the deep grass of the meadow!

Not a bee shall hear him creeping,

Not a may-fly shall awaken

From its cradling blue-bell shaken,

Not the starlight as he's sliding

Through the grass with silent gliding.

Fragment: Rain

The fitful alternations of the rain,

When the chill wind, languid as with pain

Of its own heavy moisture, here and there

Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.

Fragment: A Tale Untold

One sung of thee who left the tale untold,

Like the false dawns which perish in the bursting;

Like empty cups of wrought and daedal gold,

Which mock the lips with air, when they are thirsting.

Fragment: To Italy

As the sunrise to the night,

As the north wind to the clouds,

As the earthquake's fiery flight,

Ruining mountain solitudes,

Everlasting Italy,

Be those hopes and fears on thee.

Fragment: Wine of the Fairies

I am drunk with the honey wine

Of the moon-unfolded eglantine,

Which fairies catch in hyacinth bowls.

The bats, the dormice, and the moles

Sleep in the walls or under the sward

Of the desolate castle yard;

And when 'tis spilt on the summer earth

Or its fumes arise among the dew,

Their jocund dreams are full of mirth,

They gibber their joy in sleep; for few

Of the fairies bear those bowls so new!

Fragment: A Roman's Chamber

I

In the cave which wild weeds cover

Wait for thine aethereal lover;

For the pallid moon is waning,

O'er the spiral cypress hanging

And the moon no cloud is staining.

II

It was once a Roman's chamber,

Where he kept his darkest revels,

And the wild weeds twine and clamber,

It was then a chasm for devils.

Fragment: Rome and Nature

Rome has fallen, ye see it lying

Heaped in undistinguished ruin:

Nature is alone undying.

Variation of the Song of the Moon

(Prometheus Unbound, Act IV.)

As a violet's gentle eye

Gazes on the azure sky

Until its hue grows like what it beholds;

As a gray and empty mist

Lies like solid amethyst

Over the western mountain it enfolds,

When the sunset sleeps

Upon its snow;

As a strain of sweetest sound

Wraps itself the wind around

Until the voiceless wind be music too;

As aught dark, vain, and dull,

Basking in what is beautiful,

Is full of light and love –

The Sensitive Plant

Part First

A sensitive Plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,

And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,

And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,

Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;

And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast

Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss

In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,

Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,

As the companionless Sensitive Plant.

The snowdrop, and then the violet,

Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,

And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent

From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,

And narcissi, the fairest among them all,

Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,

Till they die of their own dear loveliness,

And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,

Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale

That the light of its tremulous bells is seen

Through their pavilions of tender green;

And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,

Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew

Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,

It was felt like an odour within the sense;

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addressed,

Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,

Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air

The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,

As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup,

Till the fiery star, which is its eye,

Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,

The sweetest flower for scent that blows;

And all rare blossoms from every clime

Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

And on the stream whose inconstant bosom

Was pranked, under boughs of embowering blossom,

With golden and green light, slanting through

Their heaven of many a tangled hue,

Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,

And starry river-buds glimmered by,

And around them the soft stream did glide and dance

With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.

And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,

Which led through the garden along and across,

Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,

Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,

Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells

As fair as the fabulous asphodels,

And flow'rets which, drooping as day drooped too,

Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,

To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.

And from this undefiled Paradise

The flowers (as an infant's awakening eyes

Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet

Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),

When Heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them,

As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,

Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one

Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;

For each one was interpenetrated

With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,

Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear

Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.

But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit

Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,

Received more than all, it loved more than ever,

Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver, –

For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;

Radiance and odour are not its dower;

It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,

It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!

The light winds which from unsustaining wings

Shed the music of many murmurings;

The beams which dart from many a star

Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;

The plumed insects swift and free,

Like golden boats on a sunny sea,

Laden with light and odour, which pass

Over the gleam of the living grass;

The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie

Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,

Then wander like spirits among the spheres,

Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;

The quivering vapours of dim noontide,

Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide,

In which every sound, and odour, and beam,

Move, as reeds in a single stream;

Each and all like ministering angels were

For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,

Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by

Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky.

And when evening descended from Heaven above,

And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love,

And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,

And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep,

And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned

In an ocean of dreams without a sound;

Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress

The light sand which paves it, consciousness;

(Only overhead the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,

And snatches of its Elysian chant

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant); –

The Sensitive Plant was the earliest

Upgathered into the bosom of rest;

A sweet child weary of its delight,

The feeblest and yet the favourite,

Cradled within the embrace of Night.

Part Second

There was a Power in this sweet place,

An Eve in this Eden; a ruling Grace

Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,

Was as God is to the starry scheme.

A Lady, the wonder of her kind,

Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind

Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion

Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,

Tended the garden from morn to even:

And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven,

Like the lamps of the air when Night walks forth,

Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!

She had no companion of mortal race,

But her tremulous breath and her flushing face

Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes,

That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:

As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake

Had deserted Heaven while the stars were awake,

As if yet around her he lingering were,

Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her.

Her step seemed to pity the grass it pressed;

You might hear by the heaving of her breast,

That the coming and going of the wind

Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.

And wherever her aëry footstep trod,

Her trailing hair from the grassy sod

Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,

Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep.

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet

Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;

I doubt not they felt the spirit that came

From her glowing fingers through all their frame.

She sprinkled bright water from the stream

On those that were faint with the sunny beam;

And out of the cups of the heavy flowers

She emptied the rain of the thunder-showers.

She lifted their heads with her tender hands,

And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;

If the flowers had been her own infants, she

Could never have nursed them more tenderly.

And all killing insects and gnawing worms,

And things of obscene and unlovely forms,

She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,

Into the rough woods far aloof, –

In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,

The freshest her gentle hands could pull

For the poor banished insects, whose intent,

Although they did ill, was innocent.

But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris

Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that kiss

The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she

Make her attendant angels be.

And many an antenatal tomb,

Where butterflies dream of the life to come,

She left clinging round the smooth and dark

Edge of the odorous cedar bark.

This fairest creature from earliest Spring

Thus moved through the garden ministering

All the sweet season of Summertide,

And ere the first leaf looked brown – she died!

Part Third

Three days the flowers of the garden fair,

Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,

Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous

She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.

And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant

Felt the sound of the funeral chant,

And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,

And the sobs of the mourners, deep and low;

The weary sound and the heavy breath,

And the silent motions of passing death,

And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,

Sent through the pores of the coffin-plank;

The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,

Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;

From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,

And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,

Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,

Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,

Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap

To make men tremble who never weep.

Swift Summer into the Autumn flowed,

And frost in the mist of the morning rode,

Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,

Mocking the spoil of the secret night.

The rose-leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,

Paved the turf and the moss below.

The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,

Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

And Indian plants, of scent and hue

The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,

Leaf by leaf, day after day,

Were massed into the common clay.

And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red,

And white with the whiteness of what is dead,

Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind passed;

Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.

And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds,

Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,

Till they clung round many a sweet flower's stem,

Which rotted into the earth with them.

The water-blooms under the rivulet

Fell from the stalks on which they were set;

And the eddies drove them here and there,

As the winds did those of the upper air.

Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks

Were bent and tangled across the walks;

And the leafless network of parasite bowers

Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.

Between the time of the wind and the snow

All loathliest weeds began to grow,

Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,

Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back.

And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,

And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,

Stretched out its long and hollow shank,

And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.

And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,

Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,

Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,

Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.

And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould

Started like mist from the wet ground cold;

Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead

With a spirit of growth had been animated!

Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,

Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,

And at its outlet flags huge as stakes

Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.

And hour by hour, when the air was still,

The vapours arose which have strength to kill;

At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,

At night they were darkness no star could melt.

And unctuous meteors from spray to spray

Crept and flitted in broad noonday

Unseen; every branch on which they alit

By a venomous blight was burned and bit.

The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,

Wept, and the tears within each lid

Of its folded leaves, which together grew,

Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon

By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;

The sap shrank to the root through every pore

As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

For Winter came: the wind was his whip:

One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills

And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;

His breath was a chain which without a sound

The earth, and the air, and the water bound;

He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne

By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living death

Fled from the frost to the earth beneath.

Their decay and sudden flight from frost

Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant

The moles and the dormice died for want:

The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air

And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

First there came down a thawing rain

And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;

Then there steamed up a freezing dew

Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about

Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,

Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy, and stiff,

And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

When Winter had gone and Spring came back

The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;

But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,

Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

Conclusion

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that

Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,

Ere its outward form had known decay,

Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that Lady's gentle mind,

No longer with the form combined

Which scattered love, as stars do light,

Found sadness, where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life

Of error, ignorance, and strife,

Where nothing is, but all things seem,

And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be,

Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,

And all sweet shapes and odours there,

In truth have never passed away:

'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,

There is no death nor change: their might

Exceeds our organs, which endure

No light, being themselves obscure.

A Vision of the Sea

'Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail

Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale:

From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven,

And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from Heaven,

She sees the black trunks of the waterspouts spin

And bend, as if Heaven was ruining in,

Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible mass

As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they pass

To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound,

And the waves and the thunders, made silent around,

Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now tossed

Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost

In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down the sweep

Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep

It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale

Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by the gale,

Dim mirrors of ruin, hang gleaming about;

While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like a rout

Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire-flowing iron,

With splendour and terror the black ship environ,

Or like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of pale fire

In fountains spout o'er it. In many a spire

The pyramid-billows with white points of brine

In the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine,

As piercing the sky from the floor of the sea.

The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree,

While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere the blast

Of the whirlwind that stripped it of branches has passed.

The intense thunder-balls which are raining from Heaven

Have shattered its mast, and it stands black and riven.

The chinks suck destruction. The heavy dead hulk

On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk,

Like a corpse on the clay which is hungering to fold

Its corruption around it.