Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning;

      A Vision like incarnate April, warning,

      With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy

      Into his summer grave.

      Ah, woe is me!

      What have I dared? where am I lifted? how

      Shall I descend, and perish not? I know

      That Love makes all things equal: I have heard

      By mine own heart this joyous truth averred:

      The spirit of the worm beneath the sod

      In love and worship, blends itself with God.

      Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate

      Whose course has been so starless! O too late

      Beloved! O too soon adored, by me!

      For in the fields of Immortality

      My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,

      A divine presence in a place divine;

      Or should have moved beside it on this earth,

      A shadow of that substance, from its birth;

      But not as now:—I love thee; yes, I feel

      That on the fountain of my heart a seal

      Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright

      For thee, since in those tears thou hast delight.

      We—are we not formed, as notes of music are,

      For one another, though dissimilar;

      Such difference without discord, as can make

      Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake

      As trembling leaves in a continuous air?

      Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare

      Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wrecked.

      I never was attached to that great sect,

      Whose doctrine is, that each one should select

      Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

      And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend

      To cold oblivion, though it is in the code

      Of modern morals, and the beaten road

      Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,

      Who travel to their home among the dead

      By the broad highway of the world, and so

      With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

      The dreariest and the longest journey go.

      True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

      That to divide is not to take away.

      Love is like understanding, that grows bright,

      Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light,

      Imagination! which from earth and sky,

      And from the depths of human fantasy,

      As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills

      The Universe with glorious beams, and kills

      Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow

      Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow

      The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,

      The life that wears, the spirit that creates

      One object, and one form, and builds thereby

      A sepulchre for its eternity.

      Mind from its object differs most in this:

      Evil from good; misery from happiness;

      The baser from the nobler; the impure

      And frail, from what is clear and must endure.

      If you divide suffering and dross, you may

      Diminish till it is consumed away;

      If you divide pleasure and love and thought,

      Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not

      How much, while any yet remains unshared,

      Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:

      This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw

      The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law

      By which those live, to whom this world of life

      Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife

      Tills for the promise of a later birth

      The wilderness of this Elysian earth.

      There was a Being whom my spirit oft

      Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,

      In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn,

      Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,

      Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves

      Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves

      Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor

      Paved her light steps;—on an imagined shore,

      Under the gray beak of some promontory

      She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,

      That I beheld her not. In solitudes

      Her voice came to me through the whispering woods,

      And from the fountains, and the odours deep

      Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep

      Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there,

      Breathed but of her to the enamoured air;

      And from the breezes whether low or loud,

      And from the rain of every passing cloud,

      And from the singing of the summer-birds,

      And from all sounds, all silence. In the words

      Of antique verse and high romance,—in form,

      Sound, colour—in whatever checks that Storm

      Which with the shattered present chokes the past;

      And in that best philosophy, whose taste

      Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom

      As glorious as a fiery martyrdom;

      Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.—

      Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth

      I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,

      And towards the lodestar of my one desire,

      I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight

      Is as a dead leaf’s in the owlet light,

      When it would seek in Hesper’s setting sphere

      A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,

      As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.—

      But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame,

      Passed, like a God throned on a winged planet,

      Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it,

      Into the dreary cone of our life’s shade;

      And