Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

can quench not, that sustaining Love

      Which through the web of being blindly wove

      By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

      Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

      The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,

      Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

      LV

      The breath whose might I have invoked in song

      Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,

      Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

      Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

      The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

      I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

      Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

      The soul of Adonais, like a star,

      Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

      ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE

      PREFACE.

      The poem entitled “Alastor,” may be considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents I a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by I an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that I is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into I the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.

      The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tenderhearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

      “The good die first,

      And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust.

      Burn to the socket!”

      December 14, 1815.

      ALASTOR: OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE

      Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quærebam quid amarem, amans amare.—Confess. St. August.

      Earth, Ocean, Air, beloved brotherhood!

      If our great Mother has imbued my soul

      With aught of natural piety to feel

      Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;

      If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,

      With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,

      And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness;

      If Autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood,

      And Winter robing with pure snow and crowns

      Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs;

      If Spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes

      Her first sweet kisses,—have been dear to me;

      If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast

      I consciously have injured, but still loved

      And cherished these my kindred; then forgive

      This boast, belovèd brethren, and withdraw

      No portion of your wonted favor now!

      Mother of this unfathomable world!

      Favor my solemn song, for I have loved

      Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched

      Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,

      And my heart ever gazes on the depth

      Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed

      In charnels and on coffins, where black death

      Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,

      Hoping to still these obstinate questionings

      Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,

      Thy messenger, to render up the tale

      Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,

      When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,

      Like an inspired and desperate alchemist

      Staking his very life on some dark hope,

      Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks

      With my most innocent love, until strange tears,

      Uniting with those breathless kisses, made

      Such magic as compels the charmed night

      To render up thy charge; and, though ne’er yet

      Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,

      Enough from incommunicable dream,

      And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,

      Has shone within me, that serenely now

      And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre

      Suspended in the solitary dome

      Of some mysterious and deserted fane,

      I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain

      May modulate with murmurs of the air,

      And motions of the forests and the sea,

      And voice of living beings, and woven hymns

      Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.

      There was a Poet whose untimely tomb

      No human hands