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Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.

O, for Medea's wondrous alchemy,1 Which wheresoe 'er it fell made the earth gleam With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale

From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God,

Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice Which but one living man2 has drained, who

now

Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
H bears, over the world wanders for ever,
Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream3
Of dark magician in his visioned cave,
Raking the cinders of a crucible

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For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law
Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled
Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams,-ah! thou hast fled!
The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
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The child of grace and genius. Heartless things
Are done and said i' the world, and many worms
And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth
From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,
In vesper low or joyous orison,

Lifts still its solemn voice:-but thou art fled;
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee
Been purest ministers, who are, alas!
Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips
So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes 700
That image sleep in death, upon that form

Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear Be shed-not even in thought. Nor, when those hues

Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,
Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone
In the frail pauses of this simple strain,
Let not high verse, mourning the memory
Of that which is no more, or painting's woe
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence, 710
And all the shows o' the world are frail and
vain

To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.
It is a woe too "deep for tears,''4 when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,

1 magic decoction (For example of Medea's witchcraft, see the story of Jason.)

2 Ahasuerus, the legendary Wandering Jew, said to have been condemned by Christ, for his insolence, to wander till Christ's second com ing.

81. e., immortal youth, the elixir vitae

4 Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality, last line.

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I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.5

And on the pedestal these words appear—
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!''
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

ODE TO THE WEST WIND*

I

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

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed.

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

5 That is, they survived both him who imaged them and him who nursed them.

*Note by Shelley: "This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it."

The poem has something of the impetuosity of the wind-a breathless swiftness which seems almost to scorn rhyme, and which is characteristic of many of Shelley's longer poems. Characteristically, too, it breathes his intense "passion for reforming the world," the combination of which with lyric delicacy,, as here, is exceedingly rare.

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, Oh hear!

II

10 | The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have
striven

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

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

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Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
Ocean,
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and
proud.

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
20 What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Of some fierce Mænad,1 even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

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Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

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Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70

THE INDIAN SERENADE

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me-who knows how?
To thy chamber window, sweet!
The wandering airs, they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak1 odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,

It dies upon her heart,

As I must die on thine,

8

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On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast,
Oh! press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last.

FROM PROMETHEUS UNBOUND
SONG*

Life of Life, thy lips enkindle

With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle

Make the cold air fire; then screen them

In those looks, where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.

Child of Light! thy limbs are burning

Through the vest which seems to hide them; As the radiant lines of morning

Through the clouds, ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe 'er thou shinest.

Fair are others; none beholds thee,

But thy voice sounds low and tender Like the fairest, for it folds thee

From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never, As I feel now, lost forever.

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest

Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest

Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!

ASIA'S RESPONSE

My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside a helm conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, forever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around, Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.

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We have passed Age's icy caves,

And Manhood's dark and tossing waves, And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray; Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee

Of shadow-peopled Infancy,

Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;*

A paradise of vaulted bowers

Lit by downward-gazing flowers,
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,

12 Peopled by shapes too bright to see,

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And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee; Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously!

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.

24 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.

10

Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions In music's most serene dominions; Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.

This is the song of an unseen spirit to Asia, who is the dramatic embodiment of the spirit of love working through all nature.

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 skyey 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,

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20

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, *In imagination reversing the course of nature, she passes back through the portals of earthly being to the spirit's condition of primordial immortality.

The Spirit he loves remains;

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex 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.

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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 airy 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,

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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; 60 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,

gleams

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,1 And out of the caverns of rain,

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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
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud

When the powers of the air are chained to my The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is

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30

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,

1 An empty tomb.

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Go thou to Rome,-at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; "John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth [twenty-sixth] year, on the [220] day of [February], 1821; and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in So sweet a place."-From Shelley's Preface. "Adonais" is of course a poetical name for Keats. The elegy was the outcome of Shelley's noble indignation over a death which he somewhat mistakenly supposed was immediately due to the savage criticism of Keats's reviewers-"Wretched men," as he characterized them, who "know not what they do," murderers who had "spoken daggers but used none.' See Eng. Lit., p. 258. The especially beautiful concluding stanzas, which are given here, are almost purely personal; Shelley is communing with himself, and thinking of his own troubled life.

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