Poems Read Online

Meanwhile, from the hold,

One deck is burst up by the waters below,

And it splits like the ice when the thaw-breezes blow

O'er the lakes of the desert! Who sit on the other?

Is that all the crew that lie burying each other,

Like the dead in a breach, round the foremast? Are those

Twin tigers, who burst, when the waters arose,

In the agony of terror, their chains in the hold;

(What now makes them tame, is what then made them bold;)

Who crouch, side by side, and have driven, like a crank,

The deep grip of their claws through the vibrating plank: –

Are these all? Nine weeks the tall vessel had lain

On the windless expanse of the watery plain,

Where the death-darting sun cast no shadow at noon,

And there seemed to be fire in the beams of the moon,

Till a lead-coloured fog gathered up from the deep,

Whose breath was quick pestilence; then, the cold sleep

Crept, like blight through the ears of a thick field of corn,

O'er the populous vessel. And even and morn,

With their hammocks for coffins the seamen aghast

Like dead men the dead limbs of their comrades cast

Down the deep, which closed on them above and around,

And the sharks and the dogfish their grave-clothes unbound,

And were glutted like Jews with this manna rained down

From God on their wilderness. One after one

The mariners died; on the eve of this day,

When the tempest was gathering in cloudy array,

But seven remained. Six the thunder has smitten,

And they lie black as mummies on which Time has written

His scorn of the embalmer; the seventh, from the deck

An oak-splinter pierced through his breast and his back.

And hung out to the tempest, a wreck on the wreck.

No more? At the helm sits a woman more fair

Than Heaven, when, unbinding its star-braided hair,

It sinks with the sun on the earth and the sea.

She clasps a bright child on her upgathered knee;

It laughs at the lightning, it mocks the mixed thunder

Of the air and the sea, with desire and with wonder

It is beckoning the tigers to rise and come near,

It would play with those eyes where the radiance of fear

Is outshining the meteors; its bosom beats high,

The heart-fire of pleasure has kindled its eye,

While its mother's is lustreless. »Smile not, my child,

But sleep deeply and sweetly, and so be beguiled

Of the pang that awaits us, whatever that be,

So dreadful since thou must divide it with me!

Dream, sleep! This pale bosom, thy cradle and bed,

Will it rock thee not, infant? 'Tis beating with dread!

Alas! what is life, what is death, what are we,

That when the ship sinks we no longer may be?

What! to see thee no more, and to feel thee no more?

To be after life what we have been before?

Not to touch those sweet hands? Not to look on those eyes,

Those lips, and that hair, – all the smiling disguise

Thou yet wearest, sweet Spirit, which I, day by day,

Have so long called my child, but which now fades away

Like a rainbow, and I the fallen shower?« – Lo! the ship

Is settling, it topples, the leeward ports dip;

The tigers leap up when they feel the slow brine

Crawling inch by inch on them; hair, ears, limbs, and eyne,

Stand rigid with horror; a loud, long, hoarse cry

Bursts at once from their vitals tremendously,

And 'tis borne down the mountainous vale of the wave,

Rebounding, like thunder, from crag to cave,

Mixed with the clash of the lashing rain,

Hurried on by the might of the hurricane:

The hurricane came from the west, and passed on

By the path of the gate of the eastern sun,

Transversely dividing the stream of the storm;

As an arrowy serpent, pursuing the form

Of an elephant, bursts through the brakes of the waste.

Black as a cormorant the screaming blast,

Between Ocean and Heaven, like an ocean, passed,

Till it came to the clouds on the verge of the world

Which, based on the sea and to Heaven upcurled,

Like columns and walls did surround and sustain

The dome of the tempest; it rent them in twain,

As a flood rends its barriers of mountainous crag:

And the dense clouds in many a ruin and rag,

Like the stones of a temple ere earthquake has passed,

Like the dust of its fall, on the whirlwind are cast;

They are scattered like foam on the torrent; and where

The wind has burst out through the chasm, from the air

Of clear morning the beams of the sunrise flow in,

Unimpeded, keen, golden, and crystalline,

Banded armies of light and of air; at one gate

They encounter, but interpenetrate.

And that breach in the tempest is widening away,

And the caverns of cloud are torn up by the day,

And the fierce winds are sinking with weary wings,

Lulled by the motion and murmurings

And the long glassy heave of the rocking sea,

And overhead glorious, but dreadful to see,

The wrecks of the tempest, like vapours of gold,

Are consuming in sunrise. The heaped waves behold

The deep calm of blue Heaven dilating above,

And, like passions made still by the presence of Love,

Beneath the clear surface reflecting it slide

Tremulous with soft influence; extending its tide

From the Andes to Atlas, round mountain and isle,

Round sea-birds and wrecks, paved with Heaven's azure smile,

The wide world of waters is vibrating. Where

Is the ship? On the verge of the wave where it lay

One tiger is mingled in ghastly affray

With a sea-snake. The foam and the smoke of the battle

Stain the clear air with sunbows; the jar, and the rattle

Of solid bones crushed by the infinite stress

Of the snake's adamantine voluminousness;

And the hum of the hot blood that spouts and rains

Where the gripe of the tiger has wounded the veins

Swollen with rage, strength, and effort; the whirl and the splash

As of some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash

The thin winds and soft waves into thunder; the screams

And hissings crawl fast o'er the smooth ocean-streams,

Each sound like a centipede. Near this commotion,

A blue shark is hanging within the blue ocean,

The fin-winged tomb of the victor. The other

Is winning his way from the fate of his brother

To his own with the speed of despair. Lo! a boat

Advances; twelve rowers with the impulse of thought

Urge on the keen keel, – the brine foams. At the stern

Three marksmen stand levelling. Hot bullets burn

In the breast of the tiger, which yet bears him on

To his refuge and ruin. One Fragment alone, –

'Tis dwindling and sinking, 'tis now almost gone, –

Of the wreck of the vessel peers out of the sea.

With her left hand she grasps it impetuously,

With her right she sustains her fair infant. Death, Fear,

Love, Beauty, are mixed in the atmosphere,

Which trembles and burns with the fervour of dread

Around her wild eyes, her bright hand, and her head,

Like a meteor of light o'er the waters! her child

Is yet smiling, and playing, and murmuring; so smiled

The false deep ere the storm. Like a sister and brother

The child and the ocean still smile on each other,

Whilst –

The Cloud

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid

In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken

The sweet buds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,

As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,

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;

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,

It struggles and howls at fits;

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;

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,

Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

And his burning plumes outspread,

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,

When the morning star shines dead;

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,

Its ardours of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of Heaven above,

With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest,

As still as a brooding dove.

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,

Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,

The stars peep behind her and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees,

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.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,

And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;

The volcanoes 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,

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,

Is the million-coloured bow;

The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,

While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

And the nursling of the Sky;

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

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

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.

To a Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

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,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run;

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight;

Like a star of Heaven,

In the broad daylight

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere,

Whose intense lamp narrows

In the white dawn clear

Until we hardly see – we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air

With6 thy voice is loud,

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud

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

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

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace-tower,

Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering unbeholden

Its aëreal hue

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

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,

Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What 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?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest – but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We 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.

Yet 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.

Better 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!

Teach 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.

Ode to Liberty

Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,

Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind. –

Byron.

I

A glorious people vibrated again

The lightning of the nations: Liberty

From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er Spain,

Scattering contagious fire into the sky,

Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay,

And in the rapid plumes of song

Clothed itself, sublime and strong,

(As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,)

Hovering in verse o'er its accustomed prey;

Till from its station in the Heaven of fame

The Spirit's whirlwind rapped it, and the ray

Of the remotest sphere of living flame

Which paves the void was from behind it flung,

As foam from a ship's swiftness, when there came

A voice out of the deep: I will record the same.

II

The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth:

The burning stars of the abyss were hurled

Into the depths of Heaven. The daedal earth,

That island in the ocean of the world,

Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air:

But this divinest universe

Was yet a chaos and a curse,

For thou wert not: but, power from worst producing worse,

The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,

And of the birds, and of the watery forms,

And there was war among them, and despair

Within them, raging without truce or terms:

The bosom of their violated nurse

Groaned, for beasts warred on beasts, and worms on worms,

And men on men; each heart was as a hell of storms.

III

Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied

His generations under the pavilion

Of the Sun's throne: palace and pyramid,

Temple and prison, to many a swarming million

Were, as to mountain-wolves their ragged caves.

This human living multitude

Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude,

For thou wert not; but o'er the populous solitude,

Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves,

Hung Tyranny; beneath, sate deified

The sister-pest, congregator of slaves;

Into the shadow of her pinions wide

Anarchs and priests, who feed on gold and blood

Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed,

Drove the astonished herds of men from every side.

IV

The nodding promontories, and blue isles,

And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves

Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles

Of favouring Heaven: from their enchanted caves

Prophetic echoes flung dim melody.

On the unapprehensive wild

The vine, the corn, the olive mild,

Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled;

And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,

Like the man's thought dark in the infant's brain,

Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,

Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein

Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child,

Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain

Her lidless eyes for thee; when o'er the Aegean main

V

Athens arose: a city such as vision

Builds from the purple crags and silver towers

Of battlemented cloud, as in derision

Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors

Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it;

Its portals are inhabited

By thunder-zoned winds, each head

Within its cloudy wings with sun-fire garlanded, –

A divine work! Athens, diviner yet,

Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will

Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;

For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill

Peopled, with forms that mock the eternal dead

In marble immortality, that hill

Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.

VI

Within the surface of Time's fleeting river

Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay

Immovably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it cannot pass away!

The voices of thy bards and sages thunder

With an earth-awakening blast

Through the caverns of the past:

(Religion veils her eyes; Oppression shrinks aghast:)

A winged sound of joy, and love, and wonder,

Which soars where Expectation never flew,

Rending the veil of space and time asunder!

One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew;

One Sun illumines Heaven; one Spirit vast

With life and love makes chaos ever new,

As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew.

VII

Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest,

Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmaean Maenad16,

She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest

From that Elysian food was yet unweaned;

And many a deed of terrible uprightness

By thy sweet love was sanctified;

And in thy smile, and by thy side,

Saintly Camillus lived, and firm Atilius died.

But when tears stained thy robe of vestal whiteness,

And gold profaned thy Capitolian throne,

Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness,

The senate of the tyrants: they sunk prone

Slaves of one tyrant: Palatinus sighed

Faint echoes of Ionian song; that tone

Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown.

VIII

From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,

Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,

Or utmost islet inaccessible,

Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,

Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks,

And every Naiad's ice-cold urn,

To talk in echoes sad and stern

Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?

For neither didst thou watch the wizard flocks

Of the Scald's dreams, nor haunt the Druid's sleep.

What if the tears rained through thy shattered locks

Were quickly dried? for thou didst groan, not weep,

When from its sea of death, to kill and burn,

The Galilean serpent forth did creep,

And made thy world an undistinguishable heap.

IX

A thousand years the Earth cried, »Where art thou?«

And then the shadow of thy coming fell

On Saxon Alfred's olive-cinctured brow:

And many a warrior-peopled citadel.

Like rocks which fire lifts out of the flat deep,

Arose in sacred Italy,

Frowning o'er the tempestuous sea

Of kings, and priests, and slaves, in tower-crowned majesty;

That multitudinous anarchy did sweep

And burst around their walls, like idle foam,

Whilst from the human spirit's deepest deep

Strange melody with love and awe struck dumb

Dissonant arms; and Art, which cannot die,

With divine wand traced on our earthly home

Fit imagery to pave Heaven's everlasting dome.

X

Thou huntress swifter than the Moon! thou terror

Of the world's wolves! thou bearer of the quiver,

Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-winged Error,

As light may pierce the clouds when they dissever

In the calm regions of the orient day!

Luther caught thy wakening glance;

Like lightning, from his leaden lance

Reflected, it dissolved the visions of the trance

In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay;

And England's prophets hailed thee as their queen,

In songs whose music cannot pass away,

Though it must flow forever: not unseen

Before the spirit-sighted countenance

Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene

Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien.

XI

The eager hours and unreluctant years

As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood,

Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,

Darkening each other with their multitude,

And cried aloud, »Liberty!« Indignation

Answered Pity from her cave;

Death grew pale within the grave,

And Desolation howled to the destroyer, Save!

When like Heaven's Sun girt by the exhalation

Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise,

Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation

Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies

At dreaming midnight o'er the western wave,

Men started, staggering with a glad surprise,

Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes.

XII

Thou Heaven of earth! what spells could pall thee then

In ominous eclipse? a thousand years

Bred from the slime of deep Oppression's den,

Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears,

Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away;

How like Bacchanals of blood

Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood

Destruction's sceptred slaves, and Folly's mitred brood!

When one, like them, but mightier far than they,

The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers,

Rose: armies mingled in obscure array,

Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred bowers

Of serene Heaven. He, by the past pursued,

Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,

Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers.

XIII

England yet sleeps: was she not called of old?

Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder

Vesuvius wakens Aetna, and the cold

Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder:

O'er the lit waves every Aeolian isle

From Pithecusa to Pelorus

Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus:

They cry, »Be dim; ye lamps of Heaven suspended o'er us!«

Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile

And they dissolve; but Spain's were links of steel,

Till bit to dust by virtue's keenest file.

Twins of a single destiny! appeal

To the eternal years enthroned before us

In the dim West; impress us from a seal,

All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal.

XIV

Tomb of Arminius! render up thy dead

Till, like a standard from a watch-tower's staff,

His soul may stream over the tyrant's head;

Thy victory shall be his epitaph,

Wild Bacchanal of truth's mysterious wine,

King-deluded Germany,

His dead spirit lives in thee.

Why do we fear or hope? thou art already free!

And thou, lost Paradise of this divine

And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness!

Thou island of eternity! thou shrine

Where Desolation, clothed with loveliness,

Worships the thing thou wert! O Italy,

Gather thy blood into thy heart; repress

The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces.

XV

Oh, that the free would stamp the impious name

Of KING into the dust! or write it there,

So that this blot upon the page of fame

Were as a serpent's path, which the light air

Erases, and the flat sands close behind!

Ye the oracle have heard:

Lift the victory-flashing sword,

And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word,

Which, weak itself as stubble, yet can bind

Into a mass, irrefragably firm,

The axes and the rods which awe mankind;

The sound has poison in it, 'tis the sperm

Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred;

Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term,

To set thine armed heel on this reluctant worm.

XVI

Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle

Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,

That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle

Into the hell from which it first was hurled,

A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure;

Till human thoughts might kneel alone,

Each before the judgement-throne

Of its own aweless soul, or of the Power unknown!

Oh, that the words which make the thoughts obscure

From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew

From a white lake blot Heaven's blue portraiture,

Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue

And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own,

Till in the nakedness of false and true

They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due!

XVII

He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever

Can be between the cradle and the grave

Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavour!

If on his own high will, a willing slave,

He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor.

What if earth can clothe and feed

Amplest millions at their need,

And power in thought be as the tree within the seed?

Or what if Art, an ardent intercessor,

Driving on fiery wings to Nature's throne,

Checks the great mother stooping to caress her,

And cries: »Give me, thy child, dominion

Over all height and depth«? if Life can breed

New wants, and wealth from those who toil and groan,

Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousandfold for one!

XVIII

Come thou, but lead out of the inmost cave

Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star

Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,

Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car

Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;

Comes she not, and come ye not,

Rulers of eternal thought,

To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned lot?

Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame

Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?

O Liberty! if such could be thy name

Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:

If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought

By blood or tears, have not the wise and free

Wept tears, and blood like tears? – The solemn harmony

XIX

Paused, and the Spirit of that mighty singing

To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn;

Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging

Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,

Sinks headlong through the aëreal golden light

On the heavy-sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;

As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain;

As a far taper fades with fading night,

As a brief insect dies with dying day, –

My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,

Drooped; o'er it closed the echoes far away

Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,

As waves which lately paved his watery way

Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous play.

To ––

I

I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,

Thou needest not fear mine;

My spirit is too deeply laden

Ever to burthen thine.

II

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion,

Thou needest not fear mine;

Innocent is the heart's devotion

With which I worship thine.

Arethusa

I

Arethusa arose

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains, –

From cloud and from crag,

With many a jag,

Shepherding her bright fountains.

She leapt down the rocks,

With her rainbow locks

Streaming among the streams; –

Her steps paved with green

The downward ravine

Which slopes to the western gleams;

And gliding and springing

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep;

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her,

As she lingered towards the deep.

II

Then Alpheus bold,

On his glacier cold,

With his trident the mountains strook;

And opened a chasm

In the rocks – with the spasm

All Erymanthus shook.

And the black south wind

It unsealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,

And earthquake and thunder

Did rend in sunder

The bars of the springs below.

And the beard and the hair

Of the River-god were

Seen through the torrent's sweep,

As he followed the light

Of the fleet nymph's flight

To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III

»Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!

And bid the deep hide me,

For he grasps me now by the hair!«

The loud Ocean heard,

To its blue depth stirred,

And divided at her prayer;

And under the water

The Earth's white daughter

Fled like a sunny beam;

Behind her descended

Her billows, unblended

With the brackish Dorian stream; –

Like a gloomy stain

On the emerald main

Alpheus rushed behind, –

As an eagle pursuing

A dove to its ruin

Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV

Under the bowers

Where the Ocean Powers

Sit on their pearled thrones;

Through the coral woods

Of the weltering floods,

Over heaps of unvalued stones;

Through the dim beams

Which amid the streams

Weave a network of coloured light;

And under the caves,

Where the shadowy waves

Are as green as the forest's night: –

Outspeeding the shark,

And the sword-fish dark,

Under the Ocean's foam,

And up through the rifts

Of the mountain clifts

They passed to their Dorian home.

V

And now from their fountains

In Enna's mountains,

Down one vale where the morning basks,

Like friends once parted

Grown single-hearted,

They ply their watery tasks.

At sunrise they leap

From their cradles steep

In the cave of the shelving hill;

At noontide they flow

Through the woods below

And the meadows of asphodel;

And at night they sleep

In the rocking deep

Beneath the Ortygian shore; –

Like spirits that lie

In the azure sky

When they love but live no more.

Song of Proserpine

While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna

I

Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,

Thou from whose immortal bosom

Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,

Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,

Breathe thine influence most divine

On thine own child, Proserpine.

II

If with mists of evening dew

Thou dost nourish these young flowers

Till they grow, in scent and hue,

Fairest children of the Hours,

Breathe thine influence most divine

On thine own child, Proserpine.

Hymn of Apollo

I

The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,

Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries

From the broad moonlight of the sky,

Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,

Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn,

Tells them that dreams and that the moon gone.

II

Then I arise, and climbing Heaven's blue dome,

I walk over the mountains and the waves,

Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;

My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves

Are filled with my bright presence, and the air

Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.

III

The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill

Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;

All men who do or even imagine ill

Fly me, and from the glory of my ray

Good minds and open actions take new might,

Until diminished by the reign of Night.

IV

I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers

With their aethereal colours; the moon's globe

And the pure stars in their eternal bowers

Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;

Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine

Are portions of one power, which is mine.

V

I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven,

Then with unwilling steps I wander down

Into the clouds of the Atlantic even;

For grief that I depart they weep and frown:

What look is more delightful than the smile

With which I soothe them from the western isle?

VI

I am the eye with which the Universe

Beholds itself and knows itself divine;

All harmony of instrument or verse,

All prophecy, all medicine is mine,

All light of art or nature; – to my song

Victory and praise in its own right belong.

Hymn of Pan

I

From the forests and highlands

We come, we come;

From the river-girt islands,

Where loud waves are dumb

Listening to my sweet pipings.

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,

The bees on the bells of thyme,

The birds on the myrtle bushes,

The cicale above in the lime,

And the lizards below in the grass,

Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

II

Liquid Peneus was flowing,

And all dark Tempe lay

In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing

The light of the dying day,

Speeded by my sweet pipings.

The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,

And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves,

To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves,

And all that did then attend and follow,

Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,

With envy of my sweet pipings.

III

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the daedal Earth,

And of Heaven – and the giant wars,

And Love, and Death, and Birth, –

And then I changed my pipings, –

Singing how down the vale of Maenalus

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:

All wept, as I think both ye now would,

If envy or age had not frozen your blood,

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

The Question

I

I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,

Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,

And gentle odours led my steps astray,

Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay

Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling

Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,

But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

II

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

The constellated flower that never sets;

Faint oxslips; tender bluebells, at whose birth

The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets –

Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth –

Its mother's face with Heaven's collected tears,

When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.

III

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,

Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,

And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine

Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day;

And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray;

And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold,

Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.

IV

And nearer to the river's trembling edge

There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white,

And starry river buds among the sedge,

And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,

Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge

With moonlight beams of their own watery light;

And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green

As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.

V

Methought that of these visionary flowers

I made a nosegay, bound in such a way

That the same hues, which in their natural bowers

Were mingled or opposed, the like array

Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours

Within my hand, – and then, elate and gay,

I hastened to the spot whence I had come,

That I might there present it! – Oh! to whom?

The Two Spirits: an Allegory

First Spirit.

O thou, who plumed with strong desire

Wouldst float above the earth, beware!

A Shadow tracks thy flight of fire –

Night is coming!

Bright are the regions of the air,

And among the winds and beams

It were delight to wander there –

Night is coming!

Second Spirit.

The deathless stars are bright above;

If I would cross the shade of night,

Within my heart is the lamp of love,

And that is day!

And the moon will smile with gentle light

On my golden plumes where'er they move;

The meteors will linger round my flight,

And make night day.

First Spirit.

But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken

Hail, and lightning, and stormy rain;

See, the bounds of the air are shaken –

Night is coming!

The red swift clouds of the hurricane

Yon declining sun have overtaken,

The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain –

Night is coming!

Second Spirit.

I see the light, and I hear the sound;

I'll sail on the flood of the tempest dark,

With the calm within and the light around

Which makes night day:

And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark,

Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound,

My moon-like flight thou then mayst mark

On high, far away.

Some say there is a precipice

Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin

O'er piles of snow and chasms of ice

Mid Alpine mountains;

And that the languid storm pursuing

That winged shape, for ever flies

Round those hoar branches, aye renewing

Its aëry fountains.

Some say when nights are dry and clear,

And the death-dews sleep on the morass,

Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller,

Which make night day:

And a silver shape like his early love doth pass

Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,

And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,

He finds night day.

Ode to Naples17

Epode I a

I stood within the City disinterred18;

And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls

Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard

The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals

Thrill through those roofless halls;

The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood;

I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke –

I felt, but heard not: – through white columns glowed

The isle-sustaining ocean-flood,

A plane of light between two heavens of azure!

Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre

Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure

Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;

But every living lineament was clear

As in the sculptor's thought; and there

The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy, and pine,

Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow,

Seemed only not to move and grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine

Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.

Epode II a

Then gentle winds arose

With many a mingled close

Of wild Aeolian sound, and mountain-odours keen;

And where the Baian ocean

Welters with airlike motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,

Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves,

Even as the ever stormless atmosphere

Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me, like an Angel, o'er the waves

Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air

No storm can overwhelm.

I sailed, where ever flows

Under the calm Serene

A spirit of deep emotion

From the unknown graves

Of the dead Kings of Melody19.

Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm

The horizontal aether; Heaven stripped bare

Its depth over Elysium, where the prow

Made the invisible water white as snow;

From that Typhaean mount, Inarime,

There streamed a sunbright vapour, like the standard

Of some aethereal host;

Whilst from all the coast,

Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered

Over the oracular woods and divine sea

Prophesyings which grew articulate –

They seize me – I must speak them! – be they fate!

Strophe I

Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest

Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!

Elysian City, which to calm enchantest

The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even

As sleep round Love, are driven!

Metropolis of a ruined Paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!

Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,

Which armed Victory offers up unstained

To Love, the flower-enchained!

Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,

Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,

If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail, –

Hail, hail, all hail!

Strophe II

Thou youngest giant birth

Which from the groaning earth

Leap'st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!

Last of the Intercessors!

Who 'gainst the Crowned Transgressors

Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail,

Wave thy lightning lance in mirth

Nor let thy high heart fail,

Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors

With hurried legions move!

Hail, hail, all hail!

Antistrophe I a

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme

Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror

To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam

To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer;

A new Actaeon's error

Shall theirs have been – devoured by their own hounds!

Be thou like the imperial Basilisk

Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!

Gaze on Oppression, till at that dread risk

Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk:

Fear not, but gaze – for freemen mightier grow,

And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe: –

If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail,

Thou shalt be great – All hail!

Antistrophe II a

From Freedom's form divine,

From Nature's inmost shrine,

Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil;

O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state,

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!

And equal laws be thine,

And winged words let sail,

Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:

That wealth, surviving fate,

Be thine. – All hail!

Antistrophe I b

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paean

From land to land re-echoed solemnly,

Till silence became music? From the Aeaean20

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea

Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs

In light and music; widowed Genoa wan

By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,

Murmuring, »Where is Doria?« fair Milan,

Within whose veins long ran

The viper's21 palsying venom, lifts her heel

To bruise his head. The signal and the seal

(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)

Art thou of all these hopes. – O hail!

Antistrophe II b

Florence! beneath the sun,

Of cities fairest one,

Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation:

From eyes of quenchless hope

Rome tears the priestly cope,

As ruling once by power, so now by admiration, –

An athlete stripped to run

From a remoter station

For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore: –

As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,

So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

Epode I b

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms

Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?

The crash and darkness of a thousand storms

Bursting their inaccessible abodes

Of crags and thunder-clouds?

See ye the banners blazoned to the day,

Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?

Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide

With iron light is dyed;

The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions

Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating;

An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions

And lawless slaveries, – down the aëreal regions

Of the white Alps, desolating,

Famished wolves that bide no waiting,

Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,

Trampling our columned cities into dust,

Their dull and savage lust

On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating –

They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary

With fire – from their red feet the streams run gory!

Epode II b

Great Spirit, deepest Love!

Which rulest and dost move

All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;

Who spreadest Heaven around it,

Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;

Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor;

Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison

From the Earth's bosom chill;

Oh, bid those beams be each a blinding brand

Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!

Bid the Earth's plenty kill!

Bid thy bright Heaven above,

Whilst light and darkness bound it,

Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill

And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon

Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire –

Be man's high hope and unextinct desire

The instrument to work thy will divine!

Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,

And frowns and fears from thee,

Would not more swiftly flee

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. –

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine

Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh, let be

This city of thy worship ever free!

Autumn: A Dirge

I

The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

And the Year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,

Is lying.

Come, Months, come away,

From November to May,

In your saddest array;

Follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

II

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,

The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the Year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone

To his dwelling;

Come, Months, come away;

Put on white, black, and gray;

Let your light sisters play –

Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

The Waning Moon

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

The moon arose up in the murky East,

A white and shapeless mass –

To the Moon

I

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth, –

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

II

Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,

That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ...

Death

I

Death is here and death is there,

Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath,

Above is death – and we are death.

II

Death has set his mark and seal

On all we are and all we feel,

On all we know and all we fear,

. . . . .