Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley
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SEMICHORUS I.
If Liberty
Lent not life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet’s robe to wear,
Love its power to give and bear.
CHORUS.
In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
Like vultures frighted from Imaus,
Before an earthquake’s tread.—
So from Time’s tempestuous dawn
Freedom’s splendour burst and shone:—
Thermopylae and Marathon
Caught like mountains beacon-lighted,
The springing Fire.—The winged glory
On Philippi half-alighted,
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
The quenchless ashes of Milan.
From age to age, from man to man,
It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.
Then night fell; and, as from night,
Reassuming fiery flight,
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of Heaven and doom.
A second sun arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
From far Atlantis its young beams
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine steams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain.
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest’s warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain-cedar’s hair,
And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine:—Freedom, so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
Like Orient mountains lost in day;
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings prey,
And in the naked lightenings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
Let Freedom leave—where’er she flies,
A Desert, or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.
SEMICHORUS I.
With the gifts of gladness
Greece did thy cradle strew;
SEMICHORUS II.
With the tears of sadness
Greece did thy shroud bedew!
SEMICHORUS I.
With an orphan’s affection
She followed thy bier through Time;
SEMICHORUS II.
And at thy resurrection
Reappeareth, like thou, sublime!
SEMICHORUS I.
If Heaven should resume thee,
To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;
SEMICHORUS II.
If Hell should entomb thee,
To Hell shall her high hearts bend.
SEMICHORUS I.
If Annihilation—
SEMICHORUS II.
Dust let her glories be!
And a name and a nation
Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!
INDIAN. His brow grows darker—breathe not—move not!
He starts—he shudders—ye that love not,
With your panting loud and fast,
Have awakened him at last.
MAHMUD. [starting from his sleep.]
Man the Seraglio-guard!—make fast the gate!
What! from a cannonade of three short hours?
’Tis false! that breach towards the Bosphorus
Cannot be practicable yet—who stirs?
Stand to the match; that when the foe prevails
One spark may mix in reconciling ruin
The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower
Into the gap—wrench off the roof!
[Enter HASSAN.] Ha! what!
The truth of day lightens upon my dream
And I am Mahmud still,—
HASSAN. Your Sublime Highness
Is strangely moved.
MAHMUD. The times do cast strange shadows
On those who watch and who must rule their course,
Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,
Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:—and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea,
Leaving no figure upon memory’s glass.
Would that—no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle
Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
I bade thee summon him:—’tis said his tribe
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.
HASSAN. The Jew of whom I spake is old,—so old
He seems to have outlived a world’s decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he;—his hair and beard
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift
To the winter wind:—but from his eye looks forth
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