'A widow bird sate mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.
'There was no leaf upon the forest bare,
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel's sound.'
[Composed at Lerici on the Gulf of Spezzia in the spring and early summer of 1822-the poem on which Shelley was engaged at the time of his death. Published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems of 1824, pp. 73-95. Several emendations, the result of Dr. Garnett's examination of the Boscombe MS., were given to the world by Miss Mathilde Blind, Westminster Review, July, 1870. The poem was, of course, included in the Poetical Works, 1839, both edd. See Editor's Notes.]
SWIFT as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth-
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth
Of light, the Ocean's orison arose,
To which the birds tempered their matin lay.
All flowers in field or forest which unclose
Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
Swinging their censers in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray
Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;
And, in succession due, did continent,
Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear
The form and character of mortal mould,
Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear
Their portion of the toil, which he of old
Took as his own, and then imposed on them:
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold
Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem
10-17 A widow . . . sound 1870; omitted here 1824; printed as 'A Song,' 1824, p. 217.
Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep
Of a green Apennine: before me fled
The night; behind me rose the day; the deep
Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,-
When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread
Was so transparent, that the scene came through
As clear as when a veil of light is drawn
O'er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew
That I had felt the freshness of that dawn
Bathe in the same cold dew my brow and hair,
And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn
Under the self-same bough, and heard as there
The birds, the fountains and the ocean hold
Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air,
And then a vision on my brain was rolled.
As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay,
This was the tenour of my waking dream:-
Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro,
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, and so
Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer's bier;
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,
Some flying from the thing they feared, and some
Seeking the object of another's fear;
And others, as with steps towards the tomb,
Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death;
And some fled from it as it were a ghost,
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath:
But more, with motions which each other crossed,
Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw,
Or birds within the noonday aether lost,
34, 35 dawn Bathe Mrs. Shelley (later edd.); dawn, Bathed 1824, 1839. 63 shunned Boscombe MS.; spurned 1824, 1839.
Upon that path where flowers never grew,-
And, weary with vain toil and faint for thirst,
Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew
Out of their mossy cells forever burst;
Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told
Of grassy paths and wood-lawns interspersed
With overarching elms and caverns cold,
And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they
Pursued their serious folly as of old.
And as I gazed, methought that in the way
The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June
When the south wind shakes the extinguished day,
And a cold glare, intenser than the noon,
But icy cold, obscured with blinding light
The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon-
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might-
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark aether from her infant's chair,--
So came a chariot on the silent-storm
Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape
So sate within, as one whom years deform,
Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb;
And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape
Was bent, a dun and faint aethereal gloom
Tempering the light. Upon the chariot-beam
A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume
The guidance of that wonder-winged team;
The shapes which drew it in thick lightenings
Were lost:--I heard alone on the air's soft stream
The music of their ever-moving wings.
All the four faces of that Charioteer
Had their eyes banded; little profit brings
Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,
Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun,
Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere
70 Of... interspersed Boscombe MS.; Of grassy paths and wood, lawninterspersed 1824; wood-lawn-interspersed 1839.
93 light... beam] light upon the chariot beam; 1824.
Of all that is, has been or will be done;
So ill was the car guided-but it passed
With solemn speed majestically on.
The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,
Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw, like clouds upon the thunder-blast,
The million with fierce song and maniac dance
Raging around-such seemed the jubilee
As when to greet some conqueror's advance
Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senate-house, and forum, and theatre,
When
Had bound a yoke, which soon they stooped to bear.
Nor wanted here the just similitude
Of a triumphal pageant, for where'er
The chariot rolled, a captive multitude
Was driven; all those who had grown old in power
Or misery, all who had their age subdued
By action or by suffering, and whose hour
Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,
So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower;
All those whose fame or infamy must grow
Till the great winter lay the form and name
Of this green earth with them for ever low;—
All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the conquerors-but as soon
As they had touched the world with living flame,
Fled back like eagles to their native noon,
Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems. . .
Were there, of Athens or Jerusalem,
Were neither mid the mighty captives seen,
Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them,
Nor those who went before fierce and obscene.
The wild dance maddens in the van, and those
Who lead it--fleet as shadows on the green,
Outspeed the chariot, and without repose
Mix with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music, wilder as it grows,
They, tortured by their agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
Of that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure
109 thunder Boscombe MS.; thunders 1824; thunder's 1839. Boscombe MS.; meet 1824, 1839. 131-4 See Editor's Note.
Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,
Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair;
And in their dance round her who dims the sun,
Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air
As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now
Bending within each other's atmosphere,
Kindle invisibly-and as they glow,
Like moths by light attracted and repelled,
Oft to their bright destruction come and go,
Till like two clouds into one vale impelled,
That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle
And die in rain-the fiery band which held
Their natures, snaps-while the shock still may tingle,
One falls and then another in the path
Senseless-nor is the desolation single,
Yet ere I can say where-the chariot hath
Passed over them-nor other trace I find
But as of foam after the ocean's wrath
Is spent upon the desert shore;-behind,
Old men and women foully disarrayed,
Shake their gray hairs in the insulting wind,
And follow in the dance, with limbs decayed,
Seeking to reach the light which leaves them still
Farther behind and deeper in the shade.
But not the less with impotence of will
They wheel, though ghastly shadows interpose
Round them and round each other, and fulfil
Their work, and in the dust from whence they rose
Sink, and corruption veils them as they lie,
And past in these performs what in those.
Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry,
Half to myself I said-'And what is this?
Whose shape is that within the car? And why-'
I would have added-'is all here amiss ?—'
But a voice answered-' Life!'-I turned, and knew
(O Heaven, have mercy on such wretchedness!)
That what I thought was an old root which grew
To strange distortion out of the hill side,
Was indeed one of those deluded crew,
And that the grass, which methought hung so wide
And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,
And that the holes he vainly sought to hide,
158 while Boscombe MS.; omitted 1824, 1839. 167 And... dance 1839; To seek, to [], to strain 1824. 168 Seeking1839; Limping 1824.
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