English Literature for Boys and Girls Part 75

"The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven, In the broad daylight, Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

"All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

"What thou art we know not; What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

"Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought In sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

"Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul a secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.

"Teach us, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine; I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

"We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; The sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

"Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

"Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

"Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know; Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world would listen then, as I am listening now!"

As we listen to the lark singing we look upward and see the light summer clouds driving over the blue sky. They, too, have a song which once the listening poet heard.

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsty flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shades for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pa.s.s in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast, And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While asleep in the arms of the blast.

Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits, In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean with gentle motion This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The spirit he love remains; And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

"I bind the sun's throne with the burning zone, And the moon's with a girdle of pearl: The volcanoes are dim, and the starts reel and swim When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch through which I march, With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, In the million-coloured bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist earth was laughing below.

"I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky: I pa.s.s through the pores of the ocean and sh.o.r.es; I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain, when with never a stain, The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again."

That is one of Sh.e.l.ley's happiest poems. For most of his poems have at least a tone of sadness, even the joyous song of the skylark leaves us with a sigh on our lips, "our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught." But The Cloud is full only of joy and movement, and of the laughter of innocent mischief.

It is as if we saw the boy Sh.e.l.ley again.

We find his sadness, too, in his Ode to the West Wind, but it ends on a note of hope. Here are the last verses--

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

"Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

"Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth; And by the incantation of this verse,

"Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

"The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

Sh.e.l.ley sang of Love as well as of the beauty of all things.

Here is a little poem, some lines of which are often quoted--

"One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it, One hope is too like despair For prudence to smother, And Pity from thee more dear Than that from another.

"I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not.

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion of something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?"

And when his heart was crushed with the knowledge of the wrong and cruelty in the world, it was through love alone that he saw the way to better and lovelier things. "To purify life of its misery and evil was the ruling pa.s.sion of his soul,"* said one who loved him and knew him perhaps better than any living being.

And it was through love and the beauty of love that he hoped for the triumph of human weal.

*Mary Sh.e.l.ley.

The ideas of the Revolution touched him as they had touched Byron and Wordsworth, and although Wordsworth turned away from them disappointed, Sh.e.l.ley held on hopefully.

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates: Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, t.i.tan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!"*

*Prometheus Unbound.

One of Sh.e.l.ley's last poems was an elegy called Adonais. Under the name of Adonais, he mourns for the death of another poet, John Keats, who died at twenty-six. Sh.e.l.ley believed when he wrote the poem that Keats had been done to death by the cruel criticisms of his poems, that he had died of a broken heart, because the world neither understood nor sympathized with his poetry. Sh.e.l.ley himself knew what it was to suffer from unkind criticisms, and so he understood the feelings of another poet.

But although Keats did suffer something from neglect and cruelty, he died of consumption, not of a broken heart.

Adonais ranks with Lycidas as one of the most beautiful elegies in our language. In it, Sh.e.l.ley calls upon everything, upon every thought and feeling, upon all poets, to weep for the loss of Adonais.

"All he had loved, and moulded into thought From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound, Lamented Adonais. Morning sought Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day; Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, Pale ocean in unquiet slumber lay, And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay.

"The mountain shepherds came, Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent; The Pilgrims of Eternity,* whose fame Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne** sent The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong, And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue."

*Lord Byron.

**Ierne=Ireland sends Thomas Moore to mourn.

He pictures himself, too, among the mourners--

"'Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, A phantom among men, companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell."

Sh.e.l.ley mourned for Keats, little knowing that soon others would mourn for himself. Little more than a year after writing this poem he too lay dead.

Sh.e.l.ley had pa.s.sed much of his time on the Continent, and in 1822 he was living in a lonely spot on the sh.o.r.es of the Bay of Spezia. He always loved the sea, and he here spent many happy hours sailing about the bay in his boat the Don Juan. Hearing that a friend had arrived from England he sailed to Leghorn to welcome him.

Sh.e.l.ley met his friend, and after a week spent with him and with Lord Byron, he set out for home. The little boat never reached its port, for on the journey it was wrecked, we shall never know how. A few days later Sh.e.l.ley's body was thrown by the waves upon the sandy sh.o.r.e. In his pocket was found a copy of Keats's poems doubled back, as if he had been reading to the last moment and hastily thrust the book into his pocket. The body was cremated upon the sh.o.r.e, and the ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, not far from the grave of Keats.

"It is an open s.p.a.ce among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." So Sh.e.l.ley himself had written in the preface to Adonais.

Over his grave was placed a simple stone with the date of his birth and death and the words "Cor Cordium"--heart of hearts.

Beneath these words are some lines from the Tempest which Sh.e.l.ley had loved--

"Nothing of him doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."