December 14, 1815
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude Nondwn amabam, et amare amabam, qaeurebam quid amarem, amans amare.?Confess. St. August.3 Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood! 510If our great Mother4 has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety' to feel Your love, and recompense the boon' with mine;6 If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,? With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,7 And solemn midnight's tingling silentness; If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; giftevening If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; isIf no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred; then forgive This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw No portion of your wonted0 favour now! customary Mother of this unfathomable world! 20Favour my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death 25 Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings8
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
2. Wordsworth's The Excursion 1.519?21; the 4. Nature, invoked as the common mother of both passage occurs also in The Ruined Cottage 96?98, the elements and the poet. which Wordsworth reworked into the first book of 5. Wordsworth, 'My heart leaps up,' lines 8-9: The Excursion (1814). 'And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to
3. St. Augustine's Confessions 3.1: 'Not yet did each by natural piety.' Wordsworth also used these 1 love, though 1 loved to love, seeking what 1 might lines as the epigraph to his 'Ode: Intimations of love, loving to love.' Augustine thus describes Immortality.'
his state of mind when he was addicted to illicit 6. I.e., with my love.
sexual love; the true object of his desire, which 7. The sunset colors.
compels the tortuous spiritual journey of his life, 8. Wordsworth, 'Ode: Intimations of Immortal- he later discovered to be the infinite and transcen-ity,' lines 141?42: 'those obstinate questionings/
dent God. Of sense and outward things.'
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74 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
30 When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears
35 Uniting with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge: . . . and, though ne'er yet
Thou hast unveil'd thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
40 And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless,0 as a long-forgotten lyre motionless
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane,9
45 I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.1
50 There was a Poet whose untimely tomb
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:?
55 A lovely youth,?no mourning maiden decked
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,2
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:?
