Speak, I pray:
Thy simple talk once solaced, now delights.
Spirit of the Earth
Mother, I am grown wiser, though a child
Cannot be wise like thee, within this day;
35And happier too; happier and wiser both.
Thou knowest that toads, and snakes, and loathly worms,
And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs
That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever
An hindrance to my walks o’er the green world:
40And that, among the haunts of humankind,
Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks,
Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles,
Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance,
Or other such foul masks, with which ill thoughts
45Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man;
And women too, ugliest of all things evil,
(Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair,
When good and kind, free and sincere like thee),
When false or frowning made me sick at heart
50To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen.
Well, my path lately lay through a great city
Into the woody hills surrounding it.
A sentinel was sleeping at the gate:
When there was heard a sound, so loud, it shook
55The towers amid the moonlight, yet more sweet
Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all;
A long, long sound, as it would never end:
And all the inhabitants leapt suddenly
Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets,
60Looking in wonder up to Heaven, while yet
The music pealed along. I hid myself
Within a fountain in the public square,
Where I lay like the reflex of the moon
Seen in a wave under green leaves; and soon
65Those ugly human shapes and visages
Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain,
Past floating through the air, and fading still
Into the winds that scattered them; and those
From whom they past seemed mild and lovely forms
70After some foul disguise had fallen, and all
Were somewhat changed; and after brief surprise
And greetings of delighted wonder, all
Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn
Came—wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes, and efts,
75Could e’er be beautiful? yet so they were,
And that with little change of shape or hue:
All things had put their evil nature off.
I cannot tell my joy, when o’er a lake,
Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined,
80I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward
And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries
With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay
Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky.
So with my thoughts full of these happy changes,
85We meet again, the happiest change of all.
Asia
And never will we part, till thy chaste sister
Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon
Will look on thy more warm and equal light
Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow,
90And love thee.
Spirit of the Earth
What; as Asia loves Prometheus?
Asia
Peace, wanton, thou art yet not old enough.
Think ye, by gazing on each other’s eyes
To multiply your lovely selves, and fill
With sphered fires the interlunar air?
Spirit of the Earth
95Nay, Mother, while my sister trims her lamp
’Tis hard I should go darkling.
Asia
Listen! look!
[The SPIRIT OF THE HOUR enters.
Prometheus
We feel what thou hast heard and seen: yet speak.
Spirit of the Hour
Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the sky, and the wide earth,
100There was a change … the impalpable thin air
And the all-circling sunlight were transformed,
As if the sense of love, dissolved in them,
Had folded itself round the sphered world.
My vision then grew clear, and I could see
105Into the mysteries of the universe.
Dizzy as with delight I floated down,
Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes,
My coursers sought their birth-place in the sun,
Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil,
110Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire;
And where my moonlike car will stand within
A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms
Of thee, and Asia, and the Earth, and me,
And you fair nymphs, looking the love we feel,
115In memory of the tidings it has borne;
Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers,
Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone,
And open to the bright and liquid sky.
Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake
120The likeness of those winged steeds will mock
The flight from which they find repose. Alas,
Whither has wandered now my partial tongue
When all remains untold which ye would hear?
As I have said, I floated to the earth:
125It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss
To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went
Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind,
And first was disappointed not to see
Such mighty change as I had felt within
130Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked,
And behold! thrones were kingless, and men walked
One with the other even as spirits do:
None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear,
Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows
135No more inscribed, as o’er the gate of hell,
‘All hope abandon ye who enter here’;
None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear
Gazed on another’s eye of cold command,
Until the subject of a tyrant’s will
140Became, worse fate, the abject of his own,
Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death.
None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines
Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak;
None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart
145The sparks of love and hope till there remained
Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed,
And the wretch crept, a vampire among men,
Infecting all with his own hideous ill.
None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk
150Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes,
Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy
With such a self-mistrust as has no name.
And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind
As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew
155On the wide earth, past; gentle, radiant forms,
From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel,
And changed to all which once they dared not be,
160Yet being now, made earth like Heaven; nor pride,
Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill shame,
The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,
Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.
Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons—wherein,
165And beside which, by wretched men were borne
Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,
Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes,
The ghosts of a no more remembered fame,
170Which from their unworn obelisks look forth
In triumph o’er the palaces and tombs
Of those who were their conquerors, mouldering round.
These imaged to the pride of Kings and Priests
A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide
175As is the world it wasted, and are now
But an astonishment; even so the tools
And emblems of its last captivity,
Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth,
Stand, not o’erthrown, but unregarded now.
180And those foul shapes, abhorred by God and man,
Which under many a name and many a form
Strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable,
Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world;
And which the nations, panic-stricken, served
185With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love
Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless,
And slain among men’s unreclaiming tears,
Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate,
Frown, mouldering fast, o’er their abandoned shrines:
190The painted veil, by those who were, called life,
Which mimick’d, as with colours idly spread,
All men believed and hoped, is torn aside;
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed:—but man:
195Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree,—the King
Over himself; just, gentle, wise:—but man:
Passionless? no—yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made, or suffered them,
200Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended Heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.
End of the Third Act
ACT IV
Scene,—A part of the Forest near the Cave of PROMETHEUS. PANTHEA and IONE are sleeping: they awaken gradually during the first Song.
Voice of Unseen Spirits
The pale stars are gone!
For the Sun, their swift Shepherd,
To their folds them compelling
In the depths of the dawn,
5Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard,
But where are ye?
A Train of dark Forms and Shadows passes by confusedly, singing.
Here, oh here!
10 We bear the bier
Of the Father of many a cancelled year!
Spectres we
Of the dead Hours be,
We bear Time to his tomb in eternity.
15 Strew, oh strew
Hair, not yew!
Wet the dusty pall with tears, not dew!
Be the faded flowers
Of Death’s bare bowers
20Spread on the corpse of the King of Hours!
Haste, oh haste!
As shades are chased,
Trembling, by day, from Heaven’s blue waste,
We melt away,
25 Like dissolving spray,
From the children of a diviner day,
With the lullaby
Of winds that die
On the bosom of their own harmony!
Ione
30 What dark forms were they?
Panthea
The past Hours weak and grey,
With the spoil which their toil
Raked together
From the conquest but One could foil.
Ione
35Have they past?
Panthea
They have past;
They outspeeded the blast;
While ’tis said, they are fled—
Ione
Whither, oh whither?
Panthea
To the dark, to the past, to the dead.
Voice of Unseen Spirits
40 Bright clouds float in heaven,
Dew-stars gleam on earth,
Waves assemble on ocean,
They are gathered and driven
By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee!
45 They shake with emotion,
They dance in their mirth—
But where are ye?
The pine boughs are singing
Old songs with new gladness,
50 The billows and fountains
Fresh music are flinging,
Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;
The storms mock the mountains
With thunder of gladness.
55 But where are ye?
Ione
What charioteers are these?
Panthea
Where are their chariots?
Semichorus of Hours I
The voice of the Spirits of Air and of Earth
Have drawn back the figured curtain of sleep
Which covered our being and darkened our birth
60 In the deep—
A Voice
In the deep?
Semichorus II
Oh, below the deep.
Semichorus I
An hundred ages we had been kept
Cradled in visions of hate and care,
And each one who waked as his brother slept,
Found the truth—
Semichorus II
Worse than his visions were!
Semichorus I
65We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep;
We have known the voice of Love in dreams;
We have felt the wand of Power, and leap—
Semichorus II
As the billows leap in the morning beams.
Chorus
Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze,
70 Pierce with song Heaven’s silent light,
Enchant the day that too swiftly flees,
To check its flight ere the cave of Night.
Once the hungry Hours were hounds
Which chased the Day like a bleeding deer,
75And it limped and stumbled with many wounds
Through the nightly dells of the desert year.
But now—oh weave the mystic measure
Of music and dance and shapes of light,
Let the Hours, and the Spirits of might and pleasure,
80 Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite.
A Voice
Unite!
Panthea
See, where the Spirits of the human mind
Wrapt in sweet sounds, as in bright veils, approach.
Chorus of Spirits
We join the throng
Of the dance and the song,
85By the whirlwind of gladness borne along;
As the flying-fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the sea-birds, half asleep.
Chorus of Hours
Whence come ye, so wild and so fleet,
90For sandals of lightning are on your feet,
And your wings are soft and swift as thought,
And your eyes are as Love which is veiled not?
Chorus of Spirits
We come from the mind
Of human kind,
95Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind;
Now ’tis an ocean
Of clear emotion,
A Heaven of serene and mighty motion.
From that deep abyss
100 Of wonder and bliss,
Whose caverns are crystal palaces;
From those skiey towers
Where Thought’s crowned Powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
105 From the dim recesses
Of woven caresses,
Where lovers catch ye by your loose tresses;
From the azure isles
Where sweet Wisdom smiles,
110Delaying your ships with her syren wiles.
From the temples high
Of Man’s ear and eye,
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy;
From the murmurings
115 Of the unsealed springs
Where Science bedews his Daedal wings.
Years after years,
Through blood and tears,
And a thick hell of hatreds, and hopes, and fears,
120 We waded and flew,
And the islets were few
Where the bud-blighted flowers of happiness grew.
Our feet now, every palm,
Are sandalled with calm,
125And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
And, beyond our eyes,
The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.
Chorus of Spirits and Hours
Then weave the web of the mystic measure;
130From the depths of the sky and the ends of the Earth,
Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure,
Fill the dance and the music of mirth,
As the waves of a thousand streams rush by
To an Ocean of splendour and harmony!
Chorus of Spirits
135 Our spoil is won,
Our task is done,
We are free to dive, or soar, or run;
Beyond and around,
Or within the bound
140Which clips the world with darkness round.
We’ll pass the eyes
Of the starry skies
Into the hoar deep to colonize:
Death, Chaos, and Night,
145 From the sound of our flight,
Shall flee, like mist from a tempest’s might.
And Earth, Air, and Light,
And the Spirit of Might,
Which drives round the stars in their fiery flight;
150 And Love, Thought, and Breath,
The powers that quell Death,
Wherever we soar shall assemble beneath.
And our singing shall build
In the void’s loose field
155A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield;
We will take our plan
From the new world of man,
And our work shall be called the Promethean.
Chorus of Hours
Break the dance, and scatter the song;
160Let some depart, and some remain.
Semichorus I
We, beyond heaven, are driven along—
Semichorus II
Us, the enchantments of earth retain—
Semichorus I
Ceaseless and rapid and fierce and free
With the Spirits which build a new earth and sea,
165And a Heaven where yet Heaven could never be—
Semichorus II
Solemn, and slow, and serene, and bright,
Leading the Day, and outspeeding the Night,
With the Powers of a world of perfect light—
Semichorus I
We whirl, singing loud, round the gathering sphere,
170Till the trees, and the beasts, and the clouds appear
From its chaos made calm by love, not fear—
Semichorus II
We encircle the Oceans and Mountains of Earth,
And the happy forms of its death and birth
Change to the music of our sweet mirth.
Chorus of Hours and Spirits
175Break the dance, and scatter the song—
Let some depart, and some remain;
Wherever we fly we lead along
In leashes, like star-beams, soft and yet strong,
The clouds that are heavy with Love’s sweet rain.
Panthea
180Ha! They are gone!
Ione
Yet feel you no delight
From the past sweetness?
Panthea
As the bare green hill
When some soft cloud vanishes into rain,
Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water
To the unpavilioned sky!
Ione
Even whilst we speak
185New notes arise. What is that awful sound?
Panthea
’Tis the deep music of the rolling world,
Kindling within the strings of the waved air
Aeolian modulations.
Ione
Listen too,
How every pause is filled with under-notes,
190Clear, silver, icy, keen awakening tones,
Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul,
As the sharp stars pierce winter’s crystal air
And gaze upon themselves within the sea.
Panthea
But see where, through two openings in the forest
195Which hanging branches overcanopy,
And where two runnels of a rivulet,
Between the close moss, violet-interwoven,
Have made their path of melody, like sisters
Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles,
200Turning their dear disunion to an isle
Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts;
Two visions of strange radiance float upon
The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound,
Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet
205Under the ground and through the windless air.
Ione
I see a chariot like that thinnest boat
In which the Mother of the Months is borne
By ebbing light into her western cave,
When she upsprings from interlunar dreams,
210O’er which is curved an orblike canopy
Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods,
Distinctly seen through that dusk airy veil,
Regard like shapes in an enchanter’s glass;
Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold,
215Such as the genii of the thunder-storm
Pile on the floor of the illumined sea
When the sun rushes under it; they roll
And move and grow as with an inward wind.
Within it sits a winged infant, white
220Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow,
Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost,
Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds
Of its white robe, woof of aetherial pearl.
Its hair is white,—the brightness of white light
225Scattered in strings; yet its two eyes are Heavens
Of liquid darkness, which the Deity
Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured
From jagged clouds, out of their arrowy lashes,
Tempering the cold and radiant air around
230With fire that is not brightness; in its hand
It sways a quivering moon-beam, from whose point
A guiding power directs the chariot’s prow
Over its wheeled clouds, which as they roll
Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds
235Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew.
Panthea
And from the other opening in the wood
Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony,
A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,
Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass
240Flow, as through empty space, music and light:
Ten thousand orbs involving and involved,
Purple and azure, white and green and golden,
Sphere within sphere; and every space between
Peopled with unimaginable shapes,
245Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep,
Yet each inter-transpicuous; and they whirl
Over each other with a thousand motions,
Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning,
And with the force of self-destroying swiftness,
250Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on,
Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones,
Intelligible words and music wild.
With mighty whirl the multitudinous Orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist
255Of elemental subtlety, like light;
And the wild odour of the forest flowers,
The music of the living grass and air,
The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams,
Round its intense yet self-conflicting speed,
260Seem kneaded into one aerial mass
Which drowns the sense. Within the Orb itself,
Pillowed upon its alabaster arms,
Like to a child o’erwearied with sweet toil,
On its own folded wings, and wavy hair,
265The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep,
And you can see its little lips are moving
Amid the changing light of their own smiles,
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream.
Ione
’Tis only mocking the Orb’s harmony …
Panthea
270And from a star upon its forehead, shoot,
Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears
With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined,
Embleming Heaven and Earth united now,
Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel
275Which whirl as the Orb whirls, swifter than thought,
Filling the abyss with sunlike lightnings,
And perpendicular now, and now transverse,
Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass,
Make bare the secrets of the Earth’s deep heart;
280Infinite mine of adamant and gold,
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems,
And caverns on crystalline columns poised
With vegetable silver overspread;
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs
285Whence the great sea, even as a child is fed,
Whose vapours clothe Earth’s monarch mountain-tops
With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships,
290Planks turned to marble, quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which Death laughed, sepulchred emblems
295Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the Earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,
300Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in grey annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these
The anatomies of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
305And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags;—and over these
The jagged alligator, and the might
310Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores
And weed-overgrown continents of Earth
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe
315Wrapt deluge round it like a cloke, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God
Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried
‘Be not!’—and like my words they were no more.
The Earth
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
320The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!
Ha! ha! The animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!
The Moon
325 Brother mine, calm wanderer,
Happy globe of land and air,
Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee,
Which penetrates my frozen frame,
And passes with the warmth of flame,
330With love, and odour, and deep melody
Through me, through me!
The Earth
Ha! ha! The caverns of my hollow mountains,
My cloven fire-crags, sound exulting fountains,
Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter.
335 The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses
Of the deep air’s unmeasured wildernesses
Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I do:—‘Sceptred Curse,
Who all our green and azure universe
340Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending
A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones,
And splinter and knead down my children’s bones,
All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending.
‘Until each crag-like tower, and storied column,
345 Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn,
My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire;
My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom
Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom,
Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire.
350 ‘How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered—drunk up
By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup
Drain’d by a desert-troop, a little drop for all!
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, Love
355Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball.’
The Moon
The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
360 It clothes with unexpected birth
My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
On mine, on mine!
Gazing on thee I feel, I know,
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow,
365And living shapes upon my bosom move:
Music is in the sea and air,
Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
’Tis Love, all Love!
The Earth
370 It interpenetrates my granite mass,
Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass
Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;
Upon the winds, among the clouds ’tis spread,
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead—
375They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers—
And like a storm, bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being,
With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver
380 Thought’s stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever
Till Hate, and Fear, and Pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,
Leave Man, who was a many sided mirror
Which could distort to many a shape of error
This true fair world of things—a sea reflecting Love;
385 Which over all his kind as the Sun’s Heaven
Gliding o’er ocean, smooth, serene, and even,
Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move;
Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left
Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft
390Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured;
Then when it wanders home with rosy smile,
Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile
It is a Spirit—then weeps on her child restored.
Man, oh, not men! A chain of linked thought,
395 Of love and might to be divided not,
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the Sun rules, even with a tyrant’s gaze,
The unquiet Republic of the maze
Of Planets, struggling fierce towards Heaven’s free wilderness:
400 Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour and Pain and Grief in life’s green grove
405Sport like tame beasts—none knew how gentle they could be!
His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm
410 Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm,
Forcing Life’s wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.
All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his dreams pass—
Bright threads, whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
415 Language is a perpetual Orphic song,
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The Lightning is his slave; Heaven’s utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
420They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The Tempest is his steed,—he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
‘Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.’
The Moon
The shadow of white Death has past
425 From my path in Heaven at last,
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep;
And through my newly-woven bowers,
Wander happy paramours,
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep
430 Thy vales more deep.
The Earth
As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold
A half-unfrozen dew-globe, green and gold
And crystalline, till it becomes a winged mist,
And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
435 Outlives the noon, and on the sun’s last ray
Hangs o’er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst—
The Moon
Thou art folded, thou art lying
In the light which is undying
Of thine own joy, and Heaven’s smile divine;
440 All suns and constellations shower
On thee a light, a life, a power
Which doth array thy sphere—thou pourest thine
On mine, on mine!
The Earth
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
445 Which points into the heavens, dreaming delight,
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams, faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.
The Moon
450 As in the soft and sweet eclipse,
When soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull;
So, when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
455Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,
Full, oh, too full!
Thou art speeding round the sun,
Brightest world of many a one,
Green and azure sphere which shinest
460 With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy crystal paramour,
Borne beside thee by a power
465 Like the polar Paradise,
Magnet-like, of lovers’ eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
470 Maniac-like around thee move,
Gazing, an insatiate bride,
On thy form from every side,
Like a Maenad, round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
475 In the weird Cadmaean forest.
Brother, whersoe’er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow
Through the heavens wide and hollow,
Sheltered by the warm embrace
480 Of thy soul from hungry space,
Drinking from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty, and might,
As a lover or cameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
485 As a violet’s gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a grey and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
490Athwart the western mountain it enfolds
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow—
The Earth
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.
495O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night
Through isles for ever calm;
Oh gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce
500The caverns of my pride’s deep universe,
Charming the tiger Joy, whose tramplings fierce
Made wounds which need thy balm.
Panthea
I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,
A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,
505Out of the stream of sound.
Ione
Ah me! sweet sister,
The stream of sound has ebbed away from us,
And you pretend to rise out of its wave,
Because your words fall like the clear soft dew
Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph’s limbs and hair.
Panthea
510Peace! peace! A mighty Power, which is as darkness,
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight—the bright Visions,
515Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone,
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.
Ione
There is a sense of words upon mine ear—
Panthea
A universal sound like words: O, list!
Demogorgon
Thou Earth, calm empire of a happy soul,
520 Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies,
Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll
The Love which paves thy path along the skies:
The Earth
I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies!
Demogorgon
Thou Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth
525 With wonder, as it gazes upon thee,
Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth
Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony:
The Moon
I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee!
Demogorgon
Ye Kings of suns and stars, Daemons and Gods,
530 Etherial Dominations, who possess
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes
Beyond Heaven’s constellated wilderness:
A Voice from Above
Our great Republic hears: we are blest, and bless.
Demogorgon
Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse
535 Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray,
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered—
A Voice from Beneath
Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
Demogorgon
Ye elemental Genii, who have homes
540 From man’s high mind even to the central stone
Of sullen lead; from Heaven’s star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on:
A Confused Voice
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
Demogorgon
Spirits whose homes are flesh: ye beasts and birds,
545 Ye worms and fish; ye living leaves and buds;
Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air’s solitudes:
A Voice
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
Demogorgon
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
550 A dupe and a deceiver; a decay;
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
All
Speak! thy strong words may never pass away.
Demogorgon
This is the day, which down the void abysm
555At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for Heaven’s despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep;
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
560And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance:
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength;
565And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to re-assume
An empire o’er the disentangled Doom.
570To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
575 Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent:
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
THE CENCI
A TRAGEDY, IN FIVE ACTS
DEDICATION
TO
LEIGH HUNT, Esq.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
I inscribe with your name, from a distant country, and after an absence whose months have seemed years, this the latest of my literary efforts.
Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been.
Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and how to confer a benefit though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list.
In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated, and which, had I health and talents should illustrate mine, let us, comforting each other in our task, live and die.
All happiness attend you!
Your affectionate friend,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Rome, May 29, 1819.
PREFACE
A Manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy which was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which shewed itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion, aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common tyrant. The young maiden who was urged to this tremendous deed by an impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered and, in spite of the most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome, the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue.* Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions and opinions acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.
On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her, who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in the human heart. I had a copy of Guido’s picture of Beatrice which is preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized it as the portrait of La Cenci.
This national and universal interest which the story produces and has produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, first suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose. In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters of popular belief and interest, before Shakespeare and Sophocles made them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: any thing like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind. If dogmas can do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement of them. Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes.
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