Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

green sea-flowers overgrown

      Like a rock of Ocean’s own,

      Topples o’er the abandoned sea

      As the tides change sullenly.

      The fisher on his watery way,

      Wandering at the close of day,

      Will spread his sail and seize his oar

      Till he pass the gloomy shore,

      Lest thy dead should, from their sleep

      Bursting o’er the starlight deep,

      Lead a rapid masque of death

      O’er the waters of his path.

      Those who alone thy towers behold

      Quivering through aerial gold,

      As I now behold them here,

      Would imagine not they were

      Sepulchres, where human forms,

      Like pollution-nourished worms,

      To the corpse of greatness cling,

      Murder’d, and now mouldering:

      But if Freedom should awake

      In her omnipotence, and shake

      From the Celtic Anarch’s hold

      All the keys of dungeons cold,

      Where a hundred cities lie

      Chain’d like thee, ingloriously,

      Thou and all thy sister band

      Might adorn this sunny land,

      Twining memories of old time

      With new virtues more sublime;

      If not, perish thou and they,

      Clouds which stain truth’s rising day

      By her sun consumed away—

      Earth can spare ye! while like flowers,

      In the waste of years and hours,

      From your dust new nations spring

      With more kindly blossoming.

      Perish—let there only be

      Floating o’er thy hearthless sea

      As the garment of thy sky

      Clothes the world immortally,

      One remembrance, more sublime

      Than the tatter’d pall of time,

      Which scarce hides thy visage wan;—

      That a tempest-cleaving Swan

      Of the sons of Albion,

      Driven from his ancestral streams

      By the might of evil dreams,

      Found a nest in thee; and Ocean

      Welcomed him with such emotion

      That its joy grew his, and sprung

      From his lips like music flung

      O’er a mighty thunder-fit,

      Chastening terror:—what though yet

      Poesy’s unfailing river,

      Which through Albion winds forever

      Lashing with melodious wave

      Many a sacred Poet’s grave,

      Mourn its latest nursling fled!

      What though thou with all thy dead

      Scarce can for this fame repay

      Aught thine own, oh, rather say

      Though thy sins and slaveries foul

      Overcloud a sunlike soul!

      As the ghost of Homer clings

      Round Scamander’s wasting springs;

      As divinest Shakespeare’s might

      Fills Avon and the world with light

      Like omniscient power which he

      Imaged ’mid mortality;

      As the love from Petrarch’s urn

      Yet amid yon hills doth burn,

      A quenchless lamp by which the heart

      Sees things unearthly;—so thou art,

      Mighty spirit—so shall be

      The City that did refuge thee.

      Lo, the sun floats up the sky

      Like thought-winged Liberty,

      Till the universal light

      Seems to level plain and height;

      From the sea a mist has spread,

      And the beams of morn lie dead

      On the towers of Venice now,

      Like its glory long ago.

      By the skirts of that gray cloud

      Many-domed Padua proud

      Stands, a peopled solitude,

      ’Mid the harvest-shining plain,

      Where the peasant heaps his grain

      In the garner of his foe,

      And the milk-white oxen slow

      With the purple vintage strain,

      Heaped upon the creaking wain,

      That the brutal Celt may swill

      Drunken sleep with savage will;

      And the sickle to the sword

      Lies unchanged though many a lord,

      Like a weed whose shade is poison,

      Overgrows this region’s foison,

      Sheaves of whom are ripe to come

      To destruction’s harvest-home:

      Men must reap the things they sow,

      Force from force must ever flow—

      Or worse; but ’tis a bitter woe

      That love or reason cannot change

      The despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge.

      Padua, thou within whose walls

      Those mute guests at festivals,

      Son and Mother, Death and Sin,

      Play’d at dice for Ezzelin,

      Till Death cried, ‘I win, I win!’

      And Sin cursed to lose the wager,

      But Death promis’d, to assuage her,

      That he would petition for

      Her to be made Vice-Emperor,

      When the destined years were o’er,

      Over all between the Po

      And the eastern Alpine snow,

      Under the mighty Austrian.

      Sin smiled so as Sin only can,

      And since that time, ay, long before,

      Both have ruled from shore to shore,—

      That incestuous pair, who follow

      Tyrants as the sun the swallow,

      As Repentance follows Crime,

      And as changes follow