3 Oh, weep for Adonais-he is dead!

Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed

Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep

For he is gone, where all things wise and fair

Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous Deep

Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.

4 Most musical of mourners, weep again! Lament anew, Urania!-He died,1

Who was the sire of an immortal strain, Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,

The priest, the slave, and the liberticide, Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite

Of lust and blood;2 he went, unterrified, Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite Yet reigns o'er earth, the third among the sons of light.3

5 Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Not all to that bright station dared to

climb;

And happier they their happiness who knew,

Whose tapers yet burn through that night

of time

In which suns perished; others more sublime,

Struck by the envious wrath of man or God,

Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime;

And some yet live, treading the thorny road,

Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.

6 But now, thy youngest, dearest one has perished,

The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,

Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,

And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew:4

Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,

The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew,

1 Milton.

1 Hours less memorable than the one which marked the death of Keats.

2 Urania, the muse of astronomy. Probably Shelley identifies her with the highest spirit of lyrical poetry.

3 One echo.

tion period.

The other two may be Homer and Shakspere; or, if epic poets are meant, Homer and Dante. See Shelley's A Defense of Poetry (ed. Cook, p. 31).

A reference to Keats's Isabella (p. 818). 5 last

Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste; The broken lily lies-the storm is overpast.

7 To that high Capital, where kingly Death Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came; and bought, with price of pur

est breath,

A grave among the eternal.-Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;
Awake him not! surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.

8 He will awake no more, oh, never more! Within the twilight chamber spreads apace The shadow of white Death, and at the door

Invisible Corruption waits to trace

His extreme way2 to her dim dwelling

place;

11

But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot

Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,*

They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.

10 And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head,

And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries;

"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;

See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies

A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."

13

sound,

Lamented Adonais. Morning sought

By sightless lightning?-the intense atom glows

A moment, then is quenched in a most cold

repose.

And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they,

Rent the soft Form they never could repel, Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,

Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.

what scene

Shamed by the presence of that living

Might,

Blushed to annihilation, and the breath Revisited those lips, and Life's pale light Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.

"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,

As silent lightning leaves the starless night!

Leave me not!" cried Urania: her distress Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.

"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again ; Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live; And in my heartless1 breast and burning brain

That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,

With food of saddest memory kept alive,
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained to Time, and cannot
thence depart!

springs

Out of the East, and follows wild and drear

The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
Had left the Earth a corpse;-sorrow and
fear

So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;
So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais
lay.

24 Out of her secret paradise she sped. Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,

And human hearts, which to her airy tread
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where'er they
fell:

Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of

men

Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart

Dare the unpastured dragon2 in his den? Defenceless as thou wert, oh, where was

then

Wisdom the mirrored shield,3 or scorn the spear?

Or hadst thou waited the full cycle when Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,1

The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.

1 Her heart had been given to Adonais.

2 The unfed and ravenous critic. See Scott's Marmion, 6, 432.

3A reference to the shield which protected Perseus from the fatal gaze of the Gorgons, and which enabled him to cut off the head of Medusa as he saw it by reflection. Attained maturity of power.

28 "The herded wolves,1 bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the
dead;

The vultures to the conqueror's banner
true

Who feed where Desolation first has fed, 32
And whose wings rain contagion;-how
they fled,

When, like Apollo, from his golden bow
The Pythian of the age2 one arrow sped
And smiled!-The spoilers tempt no sec-
ond blow,

They fawn on the proud feet that spurn
them lying low.

29 "The sun comes forth, and many reptiles
spawn;

He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered into death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again;
So is it in the world of living men:

A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and
when

It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared
its light

Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's
awful night."

30 Thus ceased she: and the mountain shep-
herds came,

Their garlands sere, their magic mantles
rent;3

The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame.
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,"
And love taught grief to fall like music
from his tongue.

31 Midst others of less note, came one frail
Form,&

A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actæon-like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilder- 35

ness,

1 The banded critics.

2 Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (p. 485), by allusion to the Pythian Apollo, slayer of the Python.

See The Tempest, 1, 2, 24.

Byron. A reference to his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (p. 523).

Thomas Moore. A reference to his Irish Melodies (p. 425), and probably to the suppression of the insurrection of 1803 and to the execution of the Irish leader, Robert Emmet. Shelley himself.

gentle band

Who in another's fate now wept his own,
As in the accents of an unknown land⭑
He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned
The stranger's mien, and murmured:
"Who art thou?"

He answered not, but with a sudden hand Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,

Which was like Cain's or Christ's-oh! that it should be so !5

What softer voice is hushed over the dead? Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?

1 leopard-like

2 The pansy is a symbol of thought; the violet, of modesty; the cypress, of mourning; the ivy, of constancy in friendship. See Shelley's Epipsychidion, 272 ff. (p. 723); also, Cowper's The Task, 3, 108 ff.

4 That is, he wrote in the language of England, a land unknown to the Greek muse, Urania. Shelley means that he bore marks of cruel treatment such as the world gave to Cain, an enemy of the race, or to Christ, a benefactor.