Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

      Ruin on ruin:—Thou art slow, my son;

      The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep

      A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies

      Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou,

      Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,

      The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now—

      Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,

      And hopes that sate themselves on dust, and die!—

      Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.

      Islam must fall, but we will reign together

      Over its ruins in the world of death:—

      And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed

      Unfold itself even in the shape of that

      Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!

      To the weak people tangled in the grasp

      Of its last spasms.

      MAHMUD. Spirit, woe to all!

      Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe

      To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed!

      Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!

      Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor!

      Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;

      Those who are born and those who die! but say,

      Imperial shadow of the thing I am,

      When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish

      Her consummation!

      PHANTOM. Ask the cold pale Hour,

      Rich in reversion of impending death,

      When HE shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs

      Sit Care, and Sorrow, and Infirmity—

      The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,

      Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart

      Over the heads of men, under which burthen

      They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!

      He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years

      To come, and how in hours of youth renewed

      He will renew lost joys, and—

      VOICE WITHOUT. Victory! Victory!

      [The Phantom vanishes.]

      MAHMUD. What sound of the importunate earth has broken

      My mighty trance?

      VOICE WITHOUT. Victory! Victory!

      MAHMUD. Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile

      Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response

      Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?

      Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,

      Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,

      Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?

      It matters not!—for nought we see or dream,

      Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth

      More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,

      The Future must become the Past, and I

      As they were to whom once this present hour,

      This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,

      Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy

      Never to be attained.—I must rebuke

      This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,

      And dying, bring despair. Victory! poor slaves! [Exit MAHMUD.

      VOICE WITHOUT. Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks

      Are as a brood of lions in the net

      Round which the kingly hunters of the earth

      Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food

      Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death,

      From Thule to the girdle of the world,

      Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;

      The cup is foaming with a nation’s blood,

      Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!

      SEMICHORUS I.

      Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream,

      Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day!

      I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant’s dream,

      Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,

      Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay

      In visions of the dawning undelight.—

      Who shall impede her flight?

      Who rob her of her prey?

      VOICE WITHOUT. Victory! Victory! Russia’s famished eagles

      Dare not to prey beneath the crescent’s light.

      Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil!

      Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!

      SEMICHORUS II.

      Thou voice which art

      The herald of the ill in splendour hid!

      Thou echo of the hollow heart

      Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode

      When desolation flashes o’er a world destroyed.

      Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud

      Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid

      The momentary oceans of the lightning,

      Or to some toppling promontory proud

      Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,

      Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright’ning

      Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire

      Before their waves expire,

      When heaven and earth are light, and only light

      In the thunder-night!

      VOICE WITHOUT. Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England,

      And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,

      Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.

      Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes,

      These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners

      Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.

      SEMICHORUS I.

      Alas! for Liberty!

      If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,

      Or fate, can quell the free!

      Alas! for Virtue, when

      Torments, or contumely, or the sneers

      Of erring judging men

      Can break the heart where it abides.

      Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid,

      Can change with its false times and tides,