Six Centuries of English Poetry Part 11

9. =paramour.= See Milton's "Ode on the Nativity," stanza i.

"It was no reason then for her To wanton with the sun, her l.u.s.ty paramour."

Milton makes the sun the paramour of the earth; Sh.e.l.ley, the earth the paramour of the sky.

A LAMENT.

Swifter far than summer's flight, Swifter far than youth's delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the heart when joy is fled, I am left alone, alone.

The swallow Summer comes again, The owlet Night resumes her reign, But the wild swan Youth is fain To fly with thee, false as thou.

My heart each day desires the morrow, Sleep itself is turned to sorrow, Vainly would my winter borrow Sunny leaves from any bough.

Lilies for a bridal bed, Roses for a matron's head, Violets for a maiden dead, Pansies let my flowers be: On the living grave I bear, Scatter them without a tear, Let no friend, however dear, Waste one hope, one fear, for me.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

PERCY BYSSHE Sh.e.l.lEY was born at Field Place, near Horsham in Suss.e.x, August 4, 1792. He was educated at Eton and at Oxford. While a student at the latter place, he wrote a pamphlet, ent.i.tled _The Necessity of Atheism_, which caused his expulsion from college. This occurred in 1811, and in the same year he married Harriet Westbrook, from whom, three years later, he separated. In 1816 he married Mary G.o.dwin. In 1818 he left England for Italy, where he remained until his death by drowning in the gulf of Spezia, July 8, 1822. His first considerable poem, "Queen Mab," was published in 1813; "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," in 1816; "The Revolt of Islam," in 1818; and "Epipsychidion" and "Adonais"

in 1821. His two dramas, the "Cenci" and "Prometheus Unbound," were issued, the former in 1819, the latter in 1821.

"Sh.e.l.ley's early rupture with the English world," says Hales, "lost him all the advantages which a fuller experience of it and a longer intercourse with it might have given. That world was no less estranged from him than he from it. It misunderstood and misinterpreted him throughout his career. It covered him with its opprobrium. a.s.suredly, he was not the man that world painted. It by no means follows that because Sh.e.l.ley did not repeat the ordinary creeds, and even mocked at them, that he believed nothing. Sh.e.l.ley was never in his soul an atheist: it was simply impossible with his nature that he should be; what he did deny and defy was a deity whose worship seemed, as he saw the world, consistent with the reign of selfishness and bigotry."

Lord Macaulay says: "We doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree some of the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. The words _bard_ and _inspiration_, which seem so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to him. He was not an author, but a bard. His poetry seems not to have been an art, but an inspiration. Had he lived to the full age of man, he might not improbably, have given to the world some great work of the very highest rank in design and execution."

Leigh Hunt says: "a.s.suredly, had he lived, he would have been the greatest dramatic writer since the days of Elizabeth. In general, if Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Sh.e.l.ley is at once the most ethereal and most gorgeous--the one who has clothed his thoughts in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery.

His poetry is as full of mountains, seas, and skies, of light, and darkness, and the seasons, and all the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had written it, with the Creation and its hopes newly cast around her, not, it must be confessed, without too indiscriminate a mixture of great and small, and a want of sufficient shade--a certain chaotic brilliancy, 'dark with excess of light.'"

Another English poet says: "Sh.e.l.ley outsang all poets on record but some two or three throughout all time; his depths and heights of inner and outer music are as divine as nature's, and not sooner exhaustible. He was alone the perfect singing-G.o.d; his thoughts, words, deeds, all sang together."

"The poet who creates a new ideal, and fills men's hearts with the flame of a divine desire, is a practical force in the stream of human development--and this Sh.e.l.ley has done. So much of his poetry is full of the tender melancholy of the moonlight he loved, that the world is still half blind to his highest bardic character, as the poet of a spiritual dawn, the eager spirit who flies forward--

"Calling the lapsed soul, And weeping in the morning dew."

Even his moonlight seems to reflect the beams of some unrisen sun; and his sunlight has all the ethereal exhilaration of that of the first hours of a glorious day."--_John Todhunter._

=Other Poems to be Read:= Adonais; The Sensitive Plant; The Cloud; Mount Blanc; To Wordsworth; The Euganean Hills; Liberty; Alastor; Prometheus Unbound.

REFERENCES: De Quincey's _Essays_; Jeaffreson's _The Real Sh.e.l.ley_; _Sh.e.l.ley_ (English Men of Letters), by J. A. Symonds; Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy_; Rossetti's _Memoir of Sh.e.l.ley_; Dowden's _Life of P. B. Sh.e.l.ley_; Moore's _Life of Lord Byron_; Middleton's _Sh.e.l.ley and his Writings_; Medwin's _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_; Trelawney's _Recollections of the Last Days of Sh.e.l.ley and Byron_; Todhunter's _Sh.e.l.ley: A Study_.

John Keats.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.

I

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards{1} had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness,-- That thou, light-winged Dryad{2} of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

II.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Provencal song,{3} and sun-burnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,{4} With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

III.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where Beauty cannot keep her l.u.s.trous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

IV.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,{5} But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and r.e.t.a.r.ds: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cl.u.s.tered around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

V.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The gra.s.s, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;{6} Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eyes.

VI.

Darkling{7} I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-- To thy high requiem{8} become a sod.

VII.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this pa.s.sing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn{9}; The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic cas.e.m.e.nts, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

VIII.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream?