Percy Bysshe Shelley

“ By my window bowered round with leaves,
And down my cheeks the quick tears ran
Like twinkling rain-drops from the eaves,
When warm spring showers are passing o'er
Helen, none can ever tell
The joy it was to weep once more!
I wept to think how hard it were
To kill my babe, and take from it
The sense of light, and the warm air,
And my own fond and tender care,
And love and smiles; ere I knew yet
That these for it might, as for me,
Be the masks of a grinning mockery. ”

“ With amaranth flowers, which, in the clime's despite,
Filled the frore air with unaccustomed light:
Such flowers, as in the wintry memory bloom
Of one friend left, adorned that frozen tomb.
Helen, whose spirit was of softer mould,
Whose sufferings too were less, death slowlier led
Into the peace of his dominion cold:
She died among her kindred, being old.
And know, that if love die not in the dead
As in the living, none of mortal kind
Are blest, as now Helen and Rosalind. ”

“ Above the curve of the new bent moon,
And light and sound ebbed from the earth,
Like the tide of the full and weary sea
To the depths of its tranquillity,
Our natures to its own repose
Did the earth's breathless sleep attune:
Like flowers, which on each other close
Their languid leaves when day-light's gone,
We lay, till new emotions came,
Which seemed to make each mortal frame
One soul of interwoven flame,
A life in life, a second birth
In worlds diviner far than earth,
Which, like two strains of harmony
That mingle in the silent sky
Then slowly disunite, past by ”

“ Circles of life-dissolving [28] sound,
Yet faint: in aery rings they bound
My Lionel, who, [29] as every strain
Grew fainter but more sweet, his mien
Sunk with the sound relaxedly;⁠1170
And slowly now he turned to me,
As slowly faded from his face
That awful joy: with looks serene
He was soon drawn to my embrace,
And my wild song then died away⁠1175
In murmurs: words I dare not say [30]
We mixed, and on his lips mine fed
Till they methought felt still and cold:
"What is it with thee, love?" I said:
No word, no look, no motion! ”

“ Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not forever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river;
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shewn;
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope? ”

“ The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past : there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which thro' the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind. ”

“ If some invisible breeze might stir
It's marble calm: and Helen smiled
Thro' tears of awe on the gay child,
To think that a boy as fair as he,
In years which never more may be,
By that same fount, in that same wood,
The like sweet fancies had pursued ”

“ His face, and so his opening lashes shone
With tears unlike his own, as he did leap
In sudden wonder from his innocent sleep.
So Rosalind and Helen lived together
Thenceforth, changed in all else, yet friends again,
Such as they were, when o'er the mountain heather
They wandered in their youth, through sun and rain. ”

“ Creeps here his noontide thirst to slake,⁠115
Is beaming with many a mingled hue,
Shed from yon dome's eternal blue,
When he floats on that dark and lucid flood
In the light of his own loveliness;
And the birds that in the fountain dip⁠120
Their plumes, with fearless fellowship
Above and round him wheel and hover.
The fitful wind is heard to stir
One solitary leaf on high;
The chirping of the grasshopper⁠125
Fills every pause. There is emotion
In all that dwells at noontide here:
Then, thro' the intricate wild wood,
A maze of life and light and motion
Is woven. ”

“ If the latter, then the incompleted sense is that each child, as it came, weaned Rosalind from the thirst of death,—that the first child not only closed the gate through which the mother looked towards "that dark refuge," but also almost burst the seal of the fountain of forgetfulness,—that then came fresh grief and shame, reimposing (but this is where the sense is incomplete) the thirst of death, to slake which "these fair shadows" (the remembered other children) interposed. ”

“ Thro' which they took their way;
And the grey shades of evening
O'er that green wilderness did fling
Still deeper solitude.
Pursuing still the path that wound
The vast and knotted trees around
Thro' which slow shades were wandering,
To a deep lawny dell they came,
To a stone seat beside a spring,
O'er which the columned wood did frame
A roofless temple, like the fane
Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain,
Man's early race once knelt beneath
The overhanging deity. ”

“ The liquid marble of the windless lake;
And where the aged forest's limbs look hoar,
Under the leaves which their green garments make,
They come: 'tis Helen's home, and clean and white,
Like one which tyrants spare on our own land ”

“ Circling, like the breath of life,
All things in that sweet abode
With its own mild brotherhood:
They, not it would change; and soon
Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again. ”

“ Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o'er-brimming deep
And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity ”

“ Clouds which stain truth's rising day
By her sun consumed away,
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
With more kindly blossoming. ”

“ Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night wind sent
Thro' strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. ”

“ As the carriage drove thro' the streets apace;
And we looked upon each other's face;
And the blood in our fingers intertwined
Ran like the thoughts of a single mind,
As the swift emotions went and came
Thro' the veins of each united frame.
So thro' the long long streets we past
Of the million-peopled City vast ”

“ And the blue mountains, shapes which seem
Like wrecks of childhood's sunny dream:
Which that we have abandoned now,
Weighs on the heart like that remorse
Which altered friendship leaves. I seek
No more our youthful intercourse. ”

“ Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region's foizon,
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction's harvest home:
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse ”

“ Palgrave's proposal (Golden Treasury,—Notes) , to substitute sea-girt, "may look plausible, but the new epithet is feeble, inadequate, inaccurate. Venice is not a sea-girt city ; it is interlaced and interwoven with sea, but not girdled; pierced through with water, but not ringed about. Seen by noon from the Euganean heights, clothed as with the very and visible glory of Italy, it might seem to Shelley a city girdled with the sunlight, as some Nereid with the arms of the sun-god."—Essays and Studies, p. ”

“ And towns, and villages, and towers,
Day after day of happy hours.
It was the azure time of June,
When the skies are deep in the stainless noon,
And the warm and fitful breezes shake
The fresh green leaves of the hedge-row briar. ”

“ Rossetti reads wood for woods, which, I have little doubt, is a safe emendation. As however the mere absence of a rhyme does not condemn a passage according to the standard of this poem, and woods is intrinsically as good as wood, I leave it as I find it. ↑ Mrs. Shelley omits steep, no doubt accidentally, though, by accenting the ed of shadowed, the line still reads as a full line, without the word steep. ”

“ And the light and smell divine
Of all flowers that breathe and shine:
We may live so happy there,
That the spirits of the air,
Envying us, may even entice
To our healing paradise
The polluting multitude ”

“ Thou knowest what a thing is Poverty
Among the fallen on evil days:
'Tis Crime, and Fear, and Infamy,⁠475
And houseless Want in frozen ways
Wandering ungarmented, and Pain,
And, worse than all, that inward stain
Foul Self-contempt, which drowns in sneers
Youth's starlight smile, and makes its tears⁠480
First like hot gall, then dry for ever! ”

“ When, for my child's beloved sake,
I mixed with slaves, to vindicate
The very laws themselves do make:
Let me not say scorn is my fate,
Lest I be proud, suffering the same
With those who live in deathless fame.
She ceased.—"Lo, where red morning thro' the woods
Is burning o'er the dew;" said Rosalind.
And with these words they rose, and towards the flood
Of the blue lake, beneath the leaves now wind
With equal steps and fingers intertwined:
Thence to a lonely dwelling, where the shore
Is shadowed with steep rocks, and cypresses
Cleave with their dark green cones the. ”

“ I find the whole line,
Whilst animal life many long years,
bafflingly unlike Shelley; and it does not strike me as much more characteristic when we reduce it to sense by substituting Which for Whilst.
↑ As this passage is punctuated in Shelley's and Mrs. Shelley's editions, namely with the comma at bereft instead of me, bereft is intransitive and befall transitive, so that the sense would stand—"it might well befall my child and me that the ready lies of law bereft of all"; but the sense is doubtless—"it might well befall that the ready lies of law bereft my child and me of all." ”

“ Shelley has indulged in a loose and obsolete construction which may or may not be defensible; I should not at the present day permit it to myself, or condone it in another; and had the editor been engaged in the revision of a schoolboy's theme, he would certainly have done right to correct such a phrase, and as certainly would not have done wrong to add such further correction as he might deem desirable; but the task here undertaken is not exactly comparable to the revision of a schoolboy's theme. ”

“ In reading this beside the two stanzas in the Hymn, allowance must of course be made for the difference between a poet's conception of incidents in his sensitive and persecuted boyhood, and another man's conception of those same incidents as seen by a schoolfellow, who probably, like most of the schoolfellows that any of us can recall, would have no sympathy whatever with a boy like Shelley. ”

“ It has always, as far as I am aware, been printed songs; and it certainly is songs in Mr. Locker's MS. This, however, is somewhat hastily written; and Shelley might easily have made such a clerical mistake as I suspect; but in the absence of any other MS. the text must of course remain as it is,—the expression a swan of the songs of Albion being conceivable, and indeed being considered, by some critics with whom I have discussed this point, more probable than a swan of the sons of Albion. ↑ There is no hyphen to connect harvest and shining in Shelley's edition ”

“ Mr. Frederick Locker possesses a copy of Rosalind and Helen, &c., containing the MS. interpolation sent after the poem had gone to the publisher; and with his kind permission I have followed that in preference to the printed text. The variations, though numerous, are very slight, being confined to matters of pointing and "capitalling." Shelley heads the passage thus: "After the lines
From thy dust shall nations spring
With more kindly blossoming." ”

“ In this case there could have been no possible difficulty (as there sometimes would be in the complex stanzas of Laon and Cythna) ; and I should look upon it as almost certain that here, at all events, the repetition of the word was well considered with regard to effect. ”

“ If the editor finds the license of such a phrase ... too 'annoying' to be endured by a scholastic sense of propriety, the annoyance is far keener which will be inflicted on others by his substituted reading ... ”

“ To fear himself, and love all human kind.
↑ This poem was published in The Examiner for 19 January, 1817 (No. 473) , having been, as the Editor remarks, "originally announced under the signature of the Elfin Knight." In the meantime the authorship had become known to the editor; and the poem was duly signed, on its appearance, with the name Percy B. Shelley. I suspect that Shelley read a proof of this poem before it appeared in The Examiner, or else that it was pretty correctly printed from a very careful copy. ”

“ Rossetti suggests the substitution of weighed for lay. ↑ In Shelley’s edition prophecy. ↑ This stanza occurs with some slight variations in the poem to William Shelley, written when Shelley feared the Lord Chancellor might seek to deprive him of that child also, after having taken away Charles and Ianthe. The variations are will for shall in line 894, evil for bloody in line 895, raging for mighty in line 896, depth for depths in line 898; and line 899 has no commas in it in that version. In Shelley's edition there is a comma after Fear not, which Mrs. ”