Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

with unseen showers.

      And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;

      And from the moss violets and jonquils peep,

      And dart their arrowy odour through the brain

      Till you might faint with that delicious pain.

      And every motion, odour, beam and tone,

      With that deep music is in unison:

      Which is a soul within the soul—they seem

      Like echoes of an antenatal dream.—

      It is an isle ’twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,

      Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;

      Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer,

      Washed by the soft blue Oceans of young air.

      It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight,

      Pestilence, War and Earthquake, never light

      Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they

      Sail onward far upon their fatal way:

      The winged storms, chanting their thunder-psalm

      To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm

      Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew,

      From which its fields and woods ever renew

      Their green and golden immortality.

      And from the sea there rise, and from the sky

      There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright.

      Veil after veil, each hiding some delight,

      Which Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside,

      Till the isle’s beauty, like a naked bride

      Glowing at once with love and loveliness,

      Blushes and trembles at its own excess:

      Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less

      Burns in the heart of this delicious isle,

      An atom of th’ Eternal, whose own smile

      Unfolds itself, and may be felt, not seen

      O’er the gray rocks, blue waves, and forests green,

      Filling their bare and void interstices.—

      But the chief marvel of the wilderness

      Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how

      None of the rustic island-people know:

      ’Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height

      It overtops the woods; but, for delight,

      Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime

      Had been invented, in the world’s young prime,

      Reared it, a wonder of that simple time,

      An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house

      Made sacred to his sister and his spouse.

      It scarce seems now a wreck of human art,

      But, as it were Titanic; in the heart

      Of Earth having assumed its form, then grown

      Out of the mountains, from the living stone,

      Lifting itself in caverns light and high:

      For all the antique and learned imagery

      Has been erased, and in the place of it

      The ivy and the wild-vine interknit

      The volumes of their many-twining stems;

      Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems

      The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky

      Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery

      With moonlight patches, or star atoms keen,

      Or fragments of the day’s intense serene;—

      Working mosaic on their Parian floors.

      And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers

      And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem

      To sleep in one another’s arms, and dream

      Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we

      Read in their smiles, and call reality.

      This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed

      Thee to be lady of the solitude.—

      And I have fitted up some chambers there

      Looking towards the golden Eastern air,

      And level with the living winds, which flow

      Like waves above the living waves below.—

      I have sent books and music there, and all

      Those instruments with which high Spirits call

      The future from its cradle, and the past

      Out of its grave, and make the present last

      In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,

      Folded within their own eternity.

      Our simple life wants little, and true taste

      Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste

      The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,

      Nature with all her children haunts the hill.

      The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet

      Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit

      Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance

      Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;

      The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight

      Before our gate, and the slow, silent night

      Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep.

      Be this our home in life, and when years heap

      Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,

      Let us become the overhanging day,

      The living soul of this Elysian isle,

      Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile

      We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,

      Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,

      And wander in the meadows, or ascend

      The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend

      With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;

      Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,

      Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea

      Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,—

      Possessing and possessed by all that is

      Within that calm circumference of bliss,

      And by each other, till to love and live

      Be one:—or, at the noontide hour, arrive

      Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep

      The moonlight of the expired night asleep,

      Through which the awakened day can never peep;

      A veil for our seclusion, close as night’s,

      Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights:

      Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain