AN old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,— Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, THIRD SPIRIT. Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn What are suns and spheres which flee Of which ye are but a part? Drops which Nature's mighty heart What is heaven? a globe of dew, Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken On an unimagined world: Constellated suns unshaken, ODE TO THE WEST WIND.* I. 0 WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; II. Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's com- Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours from whose solid atmosphere All overgrown with azure moss and flowers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, IV. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; The impulse of thy strength, only less free The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed V. Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: Oh hear! And, by the incantation of this verse, III. Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay, *This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. 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, sympathises with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it. Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, AN EXHORTATION. CAMELEONS feed on light and air: Poets could but find the same Would they ever change their hue 250 Poets are on this cold earth, As cameleons might be, Hidden from their early birth In a cave beneath the sea; Where light is, cameleons change! Where love is not, poets do: Fame is love disguised: if few Find either, never think That poets range. strange Yet dare not stain with wealth or power TO WILLIAM SHELLEY. (With what truth I may say Roma! Roma! Roma! Non è piu come era prima!) My lost William, thou in whom Some bright spirit lived, and did That decaying robe consume Which its lustre faintly hid, Here its ashes find a tomb, But beneath this pyramid Thou art not-if a thing divine Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine Is thy mother's grief and mine. Where art thou, my gentle child? Let me think that through low seeds June, 1819. ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY. Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine, Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone; Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise "Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror thereA woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks. FLORENCE, 1819. 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 and wrongs—he wrote a few, but in those days of prosecution for libel they could not be printed. 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, See, she comes throned on high, God save the Queen! Millions on millions wait God save the Queen! |