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The Spirit he loves remains;

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

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And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile. And the winds and sunbeams with their convex Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,

When the morning star shines dead, As on the jag of a mountain crag,

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings.

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May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,

The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone, And the moon's with a girdle of pearl; 60 The volcanoes are dim, and the stars 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,

gleams

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,1 And out of the caverns of rain,

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Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

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Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere,

Whose intense lamp narrows

In the white dawn clear,

Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud

When the powers of the air are chained to my The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is

chair,

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overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see,

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As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,

1 An empty tomb.

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* "John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth [twenty-sixth] year. the [22d] day of [February], 1821; and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that city, under the pyr amid which is the tomb of Cestius and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space 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."-From Shelley's Preface. "Adonais" is of course a poetical name for Keats. The elegy was the outcome of Shelley's noble indignation over a death which he somewhat mistakenly supposed was immediately due to the savage criticism of Keats's reviewers-"Wretched men," as he characterized them, who "know not what they do." murderers who had "spoken daggers but used none. See Eng. Lit., p. 258. The especially beautiful concluding stanzas, which are given here, are almost purely personal; Shelley is communing with himself, and thinking of his own troubled life.

And where its wrecks like shattered mountains | And man, and woman; and what still is dear

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.

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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.

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That Light whose smile kindles the Universe.
That Beauty in which all things work and move,

And gray walls moulder round, on which dull That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse

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.

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Of birth 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.

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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;

Here pause: these graves are all too young as The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven! 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?

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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.

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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 past from the revolving year,

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2 creeds and monarchies (to which, as such, Shelley was devotedly hostile) Shelley's drama of the modern Greeks' struggle for independence concludes with this Chorus, prophesying the return of that Golden Age when Saturn was fabled to have reigned over a universe of peace and love. Of the fulfillment of this prophecy Shelley had at times an ardent hope, which reaches perhaps its highest expression in this Chorus (with which compare Byron's Isles of Greece), and at other times a profound despair, which can easily be read in some of the lyrics that are given on subsequent pages.

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Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendour of its prime;

And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose

Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell,3 than One who rose,+ Than many unsubdued:5

Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.

Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!

ΤΟ

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

ΤΟ

One word is too often profaned

For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained

3 Pagan gods. 4 Christ.

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36

A LAMENT

O world! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime?

No more-oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar. Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more-oh, never more!

WHEN THE LAMP IS SHATTERED

When the lamp is shattered,

The light in the dust lies dead-
When the cloud is scattered,

42 The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.

5 Objects
of heathen
idolatry.

The more or less historic Trojan War, and the

woes of the Theban house of Laius and his son Edipus, belong of course to a time succeeding the Golden Age of fable.

As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render

No song when the spirit is mute:—
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled

To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest

The frailty of all things here,

Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

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Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

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Therefore, on every morrow,1 are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear

rills

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The very music of the name has gone
Into my being, and each pleasant scene
Is growing fresh before me as the green
Of our own valleys: so I will begin
Now while I cannot hear the city's din;
Now while the early budders are just new,
And run in mazes of the youngest hue
About old forests; while the willow trails
Its delicate amber; and the dairy pails
Bring home increase of milk. And, as the year
Grows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steer
My little boat, for many quiet hours,
With streams that deepen freshly into bowers.
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimmed and white, 50
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finished: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.
And now at once, adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness:
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with green, that I may speed
Easily onward, thoroughs flowers and weed.

THE EVE OF ST. AGNES

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