Percy Bysshe Shelley

“ In hues which, when through memory’s waste they flow,
Make their divided streams more bright and rapid now.
XXV
Methought that grate was lifted, and the seven
Who brought me thither four stiff corpses bare,
And from the frieze to the four winds of Heaven
Hung them on high by the entangled hair;
Swarthy were three—the fourth was very fair;
As they retired, the golden moon upsprung,
And eagerly, out in the giddy air,
Leaning that I might eat, I stretched and clung
Over the shapeless depth in which those corpses hung. ”

“ Had made a landmark; o’er its height to fly
Scarcely the cloud, the vulture, or the blast,
Has power—and when the shades of evening lie
On Earth and Ocean, its carved summits cast
The sunken daylight far through the aerial waste. ”

“ Fuel, not food. I chewed the bitter dust,
And bit my bloodless arm, and licked the brazen rust.
XXII
My brain began to fail when the fourth morn
Burst o’er the golden isles—a fearful sleep,
Which through the caverns dreary and forlorn
Of the riven soul, sent its foul dreams to sweep
With whirlwind swiftness—a fall far and deep,—
A gulf, a void, a sense of senselessness—
These things dwelt in me, even as shadows keep
Their watch in some dim charnel’s loneliness,
A shoreless sea, a sky sunless and planetless! ”

“ As dew to drooping leaves;—the chain, with sound
Like earthquake, through the chasm of that steep stair did bound,
XXX
As, lifting me, it fell!—What next I heard,
Were billows leaping on the harbour-bar,
And the shrill sea-wind, whose breath idly stirred
My hair;—I looked abroad, and saw a star
Shining beside a sail, and distant far
That mountain and its column, the known mark
Of those who in the wide deep wandering are,
So that I feared some Spirit, fell and dark,
In trance had lain me thus within a fiendish bark. ”