Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

her pure mind kindled through all her frame

      A permeating fire; wild numbers then

      She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs

      Subdued by its own pathos; her fair hands

      Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp

      Strange symphony, and in their branching veins

      The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.

      The beating of her heart was heard to fill

      The pauses of her music, and her breath

      Tumultuously accorded with those fits

      Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,

      As if her heart impatiently endured

      Its bursting burden; at the sound he turned,

      And saw by the warm light of their own life

      Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil

      Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,

      Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,

      Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips

      Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.

      His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess

      Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs, and quelled

      His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet

      Her panting bosom:—she drew back awhile,

      Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,

      With frantic gesture and short breathless cry

      Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.

      Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night

      Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,

      Like a dark flood suspended in its course,

      Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

      Roused by the shock, he started from his trance—

      The cold white light of morning, the blue moon

      Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,

      The distinct valley and the vacant woods,

      Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled

      The hues of heaven that canopied his bower

      Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,

      The mystery and the majesty of Earth,

      The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes

      Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly

      As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven.

      The spirit of sweet human love has sent

      A vision to the sleep of him who spurned

      Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues

      Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;

      He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!

      Were limbs and breath and being intertwined

      Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, forever lost

      In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep,

      That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death

      Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,

      O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds

      And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake

      Lead only to a black and watery depth,

      While death’s blue vault with loathliest vapors hung,

      Where every shade which the foul grave exhales

      Hides its dead eye from the detested day,

      Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?

      This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart;

      The insatiate hope which it awakened stung

      His brain even like despair.

      While daylight held

      The sky, the Poet kept mute conference

      With his still soul. At night the passion came,

      Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,

      And shook him from his rest, and led him forth

      Into the darkness. As an eagle, grasped

      In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast

      Burn with the poison, and precipitates

      Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud,

      Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight

      O’er the wide aëry wilderness: thus driven

      By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,

      Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,

      Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells,

      Startling with careless step the moon-light snake,

      He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight,

      Shedding the mockery of its vital hues

      Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on

      Till vast Aornos seen from Petra’s steep

      Hung o’er the low horizon like a cloud;

      Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs

      Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind

      Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on,

      Day after day, a weary waste of hours,

      Bearing within his life the brooding care

      That ever fed on its decaying flame.

      And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair,

      Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,

      Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand

      Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;

      Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone,

      As in a furnace burning secretly,

      From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,

      Who ministered with human charity

      His human wants, beheld with wondering awe

      Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer,

      Encountering on some dizzy precipice

      That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of Wind,

      With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet

      Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused

      In its career; the infant would conceal

      His troubled visage in his mother’s robe

      In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,

      To remember their strange light in many a dream

      Of after times; but youthful maidens, taught

      By nature, would interpret half the woe

      That wasted him, would call him with false names

      Brother and friend, would press his pallid hand

      At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path

      Of