Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub

NOTE ON THE POEMS OF 1819.

BY THE EDITOR.

THOUGH Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during "the good old times" had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature, the necessaries of life, when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism, that looked upon the people as not to be consulted or protected from want and ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing The Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it roused in him

violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Masque of Anarchy, which he sent to his friend, Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor. "I did not insert it," Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, "because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of his spirit, that walked in this flaming robe of verse." Days of outrage have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would cause such an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day; but they rose when human life was respected by the minister in power; such was not the case during the administration which excited Shelley's abhorrence.

The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual; portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired those beginning,

My Father Time is old and grey,

before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; they might make a patriot of any man, whose heart was not wholly closed against his humbler fellow-crea

tures.

Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and, therefore, more deserving of sympathy, than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people's side. He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their circumstances prosecution for libel they could not be printed. and wrongs he wrote a few, but in those days of They are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they show his earnestness, and with what heartfelt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury-that oppression is detestable, as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph-such is the scope of the Ode to the Assertors of Liberty. He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

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!

Shelley had suffered severely from the death of our son during this summer. His heart, attuned to every kindly affection, was full of burning love for his offspring. No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the passing of the decree, he had written a curse, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father's love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences. It is as follows:

TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR.

THY Country's curse is on thee, darkest Crest
Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm,
Which rends our Mother's bosom-Priestly Pest!
Masked Resurrection of a buried form! *

Thy country's curse is on thee! Justice sold,
Truth trampled, Nature's land-marks overthrown,
And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,

Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction's throne. And whilst that slow sure Angel, which aye stands, Watching the beck of Mutability,

Delays to execute her high commands,

And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee;

O let a father's curse be on thy soul,

And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb, And both on thy grey head, a leaden cowl,

To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom!

* The Star Chamber.

I curse thee by a parent's outraged love,

By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never pr ve,
By griefs which thy stern nature never crost:
By those infantine smiles of happy light,

Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth,
Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night,
Hiding the promise of a lovely birth:

By those unpractised accents of young speech,
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teach;
Thou strike the lyre of mind! O grief and shame!

By all the happy see in children's growth,
That undeveloped flower of budding years,
Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,

Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears:

By all the days under a hireling's care
Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,--
O wretched ye, if ever any were,

Sadder than orphans, yet not fatherless!

By the false cant, which on their innocent lips, Must hang like poison on an opening bloom, By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb:

By thy most impious Hell, and all its terrors,
By all the grief, the madness, and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be their errors,
That sand on which thy crumbling Power is built;

By thy complicity with lust and hate,

Thy thirst for tears, thy hunger after gold, The ready frauds which ever on thee wait, The servile arts in which thou hast grown old;

By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile,

By all the acts and snares of thy black den, And-for thou canst outweep the crocodile,By thy false tears-those millstones braining men ;

By all the hate which checks a father's love,
By all the scorn which kills a father's care,
By those most impious hands that dared remove
Nature's high bounds-by thee-and by despair!

Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,

And cry, my children are no longer mine; The blood within those veins may be mine own, But, Tyrant, their polluted souls are thine.

I curse thee, though I hate thee not; O slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming hell
Of which thou art a dæmon, on thy grave
This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well!

At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared that our infant son would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom

afterwards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart :

The billows on the beach are leaping around it, The bark is weak and frail,

The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it
Darkly strew the gale.

Come with me, thou delightful child,
Come with me, though the wave is wild,
And the winds are loose, we must not stay,
Or the slaves of law may rend thee away.

They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear,
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly time,
And they will curse my name and thee,
Because we fearless are and free.

Come thou, beloved as thou art,

Another sleepeth still,

Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart,
Which thou with joy wilt fill;
With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,

And which in distant lands will be
The dearest playmate unto thee.

Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river,
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks on the surge of eternity.

Rest, rest, shriek not, thou gentle child!
The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?
There sit between us two, thou dearest ;
Me and thy mother-well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves

Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves.

This hour will in thy memory

Be a dream of days forgotten;

We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,
Or Greece, the Mother of the free.
And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon their heroes old
In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame

Of Grecian lore; that by such name
A patriot's birthright thou mayst claim.

I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen.

When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, apropos of the English burying-ground in that city, "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic ; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections." In this new edition I have added to the poems of this year, "Peter Bell the Third." A critique on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley exceedingly and suggested this poem.

I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the Author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more; he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet-a man of lofty and creative genius, quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind; but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted even as transcendantly as the Author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written, as a warning-not as a narration of the reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth or with Coleridge, (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem,) and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal ;-it contains something of criticism on the compositions of these great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views, with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written-and though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry-so much of himself in it, that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.

POEMS WRITTEN IN MDCCCXX.

THE SENSITIVE PLANT.

PART L

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,
And the Spirit of Love fell 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 windflowers 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 addrest,
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 Manad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,

Gazed through the 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 prankt, 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 flowrets 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
In an ocean of dreams without a sound; [drowned
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
Up-gathered 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 II.

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 prest:
You might hear, by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and the going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.

And wherever her airy 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 summer tide,

And ere the first leaf looked brown-she died!

PART III.

THREE days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the noon is awakened, were,
Or the waves of the Baiæ, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.

And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant
Felt the sound of the funeral chaunt,
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;

« PředchozíPokračovat »