Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

      X.

      Thou huntress swifter than the Moon! thou terror

      Of the world’s wolves! thou bearer of the quiver,

      Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-winged Error,

      As light may pierce the clouds when they dissever

      In the calm regions of the orient day!

      Luther caught thy wakening glance;

      Like lightning, from his leaden lance

      Reflected, it dissolved the visions of the trance

      In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay;

      And England’s prophets hailed thee as their queen,

      In songs whose music cannot pass away,

      Though it must flow forever: not unseen

      Before the spirit-sighted countenance

      Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene

      Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien.

      XI.

      The eager hours and unreluctant years

      As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood.

      Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,

      Darkening each other with their multitude,

      And cried aloud, ‘Liberty!’ Indignation

      Answered Pity from her cave;

      Death grew pale within the grave,

      And Desolation howled to the destroyer, Save!

      When like Heaven’s Sun girt by the exhalation

      Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise.

      Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation

      Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies

      At dreaming midnight o’er the western wave,

      Men started, staggering with a glad surprise,

      Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes.

      XII.

      Thou Heaven of earth! what spells could pall thee then

      In ominous eclipse? a thousand years

      Bred from the slime of deep Oppression’s den.

      Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears.

      Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away;

      How like Bacchanals of blood

      Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood

      Destruction’s sceptred slaves, and Folly’s mitred brood!

      When one, like them, but mightier far than they,

      The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers,

      Rose: armies mingled in obscure array,

      Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred bowers

      Of serene Heaven. He, by the past pursued,

      Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,

      Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers.

      XIII.

      England yet sleeps: was she not called of old?

      Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder

      Vesuvius wakens Aetna, and the cold

      Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder:

      O’er the lit waves every Aeolian isle

      From Pithecusa to Pelorus

      Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus:

      They cry, ‘Be dim; ye lamps of Heaven suspended o’er us!’

      Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile

      And they dissolve; but Spain’s were links of steel,

      Till bit to dust by virtue’s keenest file.

      Twins of a single destiny! appeal

      To the eternal years enthroned before us

      In the dim West; impress us from a seal,

      All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal.

      XIV.

      Tomb of Arminius! render up thy dead

      Till, like a standard from a watch-tower’s staff,

      His soul may stream over the tyrant’s head;

      Thy victory shall be his epitaph,

      Wild Bacchanal of truth’s mysterious wine,

      King-deluded Germany,

      His dead spirit lives in thee.

      Why do we fear or hope? thou art already free!

      And thou, lost Paradise of this divine

      And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness!

      Thou island of eternity! thou shrine

      Where Desolation, clothed with loveliness,

      Worships the thing thou wert! O Italy,

      Gather thy blood into thy heart; repress

      The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces.

      XV.

      Oh, that the free would stamp the impious name

      Of KING into the dust! or write it there,

      So that this blot upon the page of fame

      Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air

      Erases, and the flat sands close behind!

      Ye the oracle have heard:

      Lift the victory-flashing sword.

      And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word,

      Which, weak itself as stubble, yet can bind

      Into a mass, irrefragably firm,

      The axes and the rods which awe mankind;

      The sound has poison in it, ’tis the sperm

      Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred;

      Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term,

      To set thine armed heel on this reluctant worm.

      XVI.

      Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle

      Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,

      That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle

      Into the hell from which it first was hurled,

      A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure;

      Till human thoughts might kneel alone,

      Each before the judgement-throne

      Of its own aweless soul, or of the Power unknown!

      Oh, that the words which make the thoughts obscure

      From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew

      From a white lake blot Heaven’s blue portraiture,

      Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue

      And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own,

      Till in the nakedness of false