THIRD SPIRIT. Peace the abyss is wreathed with scorn What is heaven? and what are ye What are suns and spheres which flee Of which ye are but a part? Drops which Nature's mighty heart What is heaven? a globe of dew, Filling in the morning new Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken Constellated suns unshaken, Orbits measureless, are furled In that frail and fading sphere, O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill * This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and ligntning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathises with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it. Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere, II. Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge, Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: Oh hear ! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, IV. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; The impulse of thy strength, only less free The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed ! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud V. Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, AN EXHORTATION. CAMELEONS feed on light and air: Poets' food is love and fame: If in this wide world of care Poets could but find the same With as little toil as they, Would they ever change their hue Poets are on this cold earth, In a cave beneath the sea; Where light is, cameleons change! Yet dare not stain with wealth or power ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY. Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine, Yet it is less the horror than the grace And from its head as from one body grow, And with unending involutions show Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror thereA woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks FLORENCE, 1819. TO WILLIAM SHELLEY. (With what truth I may say- My lost William, thou in whom Here its ashes find a tomb, Where art thou, my gentle child? The love of living leaves and weeds, Let me think that through low seeds June, 1819. |