Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

      SEMICHORUS I.

      If Liberty

      Lent not life its soul of light,

      Hope its iris of delight,

      Truth its prophet’s robe to wear,

      Love its power to give and bear.

      CHORUS.

      In the great morning of the world,

      The Spirit of God with might unfurled

      The flag of Freedom over Chaos,

      And all its banded anarchs fled,

      Like vultures frighted from Imaus,

      Before an earthquake’s tread.—

      So from Time’s tempestuous dawn

      Freedom’s splendour burst and shone:—

      Thermopylae and Marathon

      Caught like mountains beacon-lighted,

      The springing Fire.—The winged glory

      On Philippi half-alighted,

      Like an eagle on a promontory.

      Its unwearied wings could fan

      The quenchless ashes of Milan.

      From age to age, from man to man,

      It lived; and lit from land to land

      Florence, Albion, Switzerland.

      Then night fell; and, as from night,

      Reassuming fiery flight,

      From the West swift Freedom came,

      Against the course of Heaven and doom.

      A second sun arrayed in flame,

      To burn, to kindle, to illume.

      From far Atlantis its young beams

      Chased the shadows and the dreams.

      France, with all her sanguine steams,

      Hid, but quenched it not; again

      Through clouds its shafts of glory rain

      From utmost Germany to Spain.

      As an eagle fed with morning

      Scorns the embattled tempest’s warning,

      When she seeks her aerie hanging

      In the mountain-cedar’s hair,

      And her brood expect the clanging

      Of her wings through the wild air,

      Sick with famine:—Freedom, so

      To what of Greece remaineth now

      Returns; her hoary ruins glow

      Like Orient mountains lost in day;

      Beneath the safety of her wings

      Her renovated nurslings prey,

      And in the naked lightenings

      Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.

      Let Freedom leave—where’er she flies,

      A Desert, or a Paradise:

      Let the beautiful and the brave

      Share her glory, or a grave.

      SEMICHORUS I.

      With the gifts of gladness

      Greece did thy cradle strew;

      SEMICHORUS II.

      With the tears of sadness

      Greece did thy shroud bedew!

      SEMICHORUS I.

      With an orphan’s affection

      She followed thy bier through Time;

      SEMICHORUS II.

      And at thy resurrection

      Reappeareth, like thou, sublime!

      SEMICHORUS I.

      If Heaven should resume thee,

      To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;

      SEMICHORUS II.

      If Hell should entomb thee,

      To Hell shall her high hearts bend.

      SEMICHORUS I.

      If Annihilation—

      SEMICHORUS II.

      Dust let her glories be!

      And a name and a nation

      Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!

      INDIAN. His brow grows darker—breathe not—move not!

      He starts—he shudders—ye that love not,

      With your panting loud and fast,

      Have awakened him at last.

      MAHMUD. [starting from his sleep.]

      Man the Seraglio-guard!—make fast the gate!

      What! from a cannonade of three short hours?

      ’Tis false! that breach towards the Bosphorus

      Cannot be practicable yet—who stirs?

      Stand to the match; that when the foe prevails

      One spark may mix in reconciling ruin

      The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower

      Into the gap—wrench off the roof!

      [Enter HASSAN.] Ha! what!

      The truth of day lightens upon my dream

      And I am Mahmud still,—

      HASSAN. Your Sublime Highness

      Is strangely moved.

      MAHMUD. The times do cast strange shadows

      On those who watch and who must rule their course,

      Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,

      Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:—and these are of them.

      Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me

      As thus from sleep into the troubled day;

      It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea,

      Leaving no figure upon memory’s glass.

      Would that—no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest

      A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle

      Of strange and secret and forgotten things.

      I bade thee summon him:—’tis said his tribe

      Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.

      HASSAN. The Jew of whom I spake is old,—so old

      He seems to have outlived a world’s decay;

      The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean

      Seem younger still than he;—his hair and beard

      Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;

      His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries

      Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct

      With light, and to the soul that quickens them

      Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift

      To the winter wind:—but from his eye looks forth

      A