Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Spirit’s plastic stress

      Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there

      All new successions to the forms they wear;

      Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight

      To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;

      And bursting in its beauty and its might

      From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.

      XLIV

      The splendours of the firmament of time

      May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;

      Like stars to their appointed height they climb,

      And death is a low mist which cannot blot

      The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought

      Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,

      And love and life contend in it, for what

      Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there

      And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

      XLV

      The inheritors of unfulfilled renown

      Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,

      Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton

      Rose pale,—his solemn agony had not

      Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought

      And as he fell and as he lived and loved

      Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,

      Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:

      Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.

      XLVI

      And many more, whose names on Earth are dark,

      But whose transmitted effluence cannot die

      So long as fire outlives the parent spark,

      Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.

      ‘Thou art become as one of us,’ they cry,

      ‘It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long

      Swung blind in unascended majesty,

      Silent alone amid a Heaven of Song.

      Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!’

      XLVII

      Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,

      Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.

      Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;

      As from a centre, dart thy spirit’s light

      Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might

      Satiate the void circumference: then shrink

      Even to a point within our day and night;

      And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink

      When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.

      XLVIII

      Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,

      Oh, not of him, but of our joy: ’tis nought

      That ages, empires and religions there

      Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;

      For such as he can lend,—they borrow not

      Glory from those who made the world their prey;

      And he is gathered to the kings of thought

      Who waged contention with their time’s decay,

      And of the past are all that cannot pass away.

      XLIX

      Go thou to Rome,—at once the Paradise,

      The grave, the city, and the wilderness;

      And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,

      And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress

      The bones of Desolation’s nakedness

      Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead

      Thy footsteps to a slope of green access

      Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead

      A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;

      L

      And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time

      Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;

      And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,

      Pavilioning the dust of him who planned

      This refuge for his memory, doth stand

      Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,

      A field is spread, on which a newer band

      Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death,

      Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.

      LI

      Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet

      To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned

      Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,

      Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,

      Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find

      Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,

      Of tears and gall. From the world’s bitter wind

      Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.

      What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

      LII

      The One remains, the many change and pass;

      Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

      Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

      Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

      Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,

      If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

      Follow where all is fled!—Rome’s azure sky,

      Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

      The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

      LIII

      Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

      Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here

      They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!

      A light is passed from the revolving year,

      And man, and woman; and what still is dear

      Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.

      The soft sky smiles,—the low wind whispers near:

      ’Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,

      No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

      LIV

      That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

      That Beauty in which all things work and move,

      That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse

      Of