Like strength from slumber, from the When once from our possession they prison, In which he vainly hoped the soul to bind must pass; But love, though among misdirected, is Which on the chains must prey that The things which are immortal, and fetter humankind. FRAGMENT: LOVE IMMORTAL WEALTH and dominion fade into the mass THE fight was o'er: the flashing through the gloom Which robes the cannon as he wings a tomb Had ceased. A HATE-SONG A HATER he came and sat by a ditch, And he took an old cracked lute; And he sang a song which was more of a screech 'Gainst a woman that was a brute. LINES TO A CRITIC I HONEY from silkworms who can gather, Of the great sea of human right and The grass may grow in winter weather wrong, As soon as hate in me. A II Hate men who cant, and men who pray, And men who rail like thee; An equal passion to repay III Or seek some slave of power and gold, IV A passion like the one I prove I hate thy want of truth and love- OZYMANDIAS I MET a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, NOTE ON POEMS OF 1817, BY THE very illness that oppressed, and the In addition to such poems as have an He projected also translating the Hymns of Homer; his version of several of the Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose shorter ones remains, as well as that to frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions Mercury already published in the Posthumous Poems. His readings this year were chiefly Greek. Besides the Hymns Dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles, the of Homer and the Iliad, he read the Symposium of Plato, and Arrian's Historia Indica. In Latin, Apuleius alone is named. In English, the Bible was his The hand that mocked them and the constant study; he read a great portion of read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, heart that fed: it aloud in the evening. Among these His life was now spent more in thought versation. He was playful; and indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others- not in bitterness, but in sport. The author of Nightmare Abbey seized on some points of his character and some habits of his life when he painted Scythrop. He was not addicted to "port or madeira," but in youth he had read of “ Illuminati and Eleutherarchs," and believed that he possessed the power of operating an immediate change in the minds of men and the state of society. These wild dreams had faded; sorrow and adversity had struck home; but he struggled with despondency as he did with physical pain. There are few who remember him sailing paper boats, and watching the navigation of his tiny craft with eagerness - --or repeating with wild energy The Ancient Mariner, and Southey's Old Woman of Berkeley; but those who do will recollect that it was in such, and in the creations of his own fancy when that was most over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart. I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen. When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, àpropos of the English burying-ground in that city: "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections." POEMS WRITTEN IN 1818 TO THE NILE daring and ideal, that he sheltered himself MONTH after month the gathered rains from the storms and disappointments, the pain and sorrow, that beset his life. descend Drenching yon secret Æthiopian dells, And from the desert's ice-girt pinnacles Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the passing of the decree, he had written a curse, On Atlas, fields of moist snow half in which there breathes, besides haughty depend. Tempest dwells indignation, all the tenderness of a father's Girt there with blasts and meteors love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences. At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared that our infant son would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom after This By Nile's aërial urn, with rapid spells Urging those waters to their mighty end. O'er Egypt's land of Memory floods are level And they are thine O Nile-and well thou knowest That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest. Beware O Man-for knowledge must to thee wards we lost at Rome, written under the Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be. idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES LISTEN, listen, Mary mine, It bursts on the roof like the thunder's As twilight to the western star, MANY a green isle needs must be Closing round his vessel's track; Weltering through eternity; And the dim low line before In friendship's smile, in love's caress? That from bitter words did swerve One white skull and seven dry bones, Who once clothed with life and thought Ay, many flowering islands lie In the waters of wide Agony : Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven So their plumes of purple grain, Beneath is spread like a green sea { |