and stabbed in th' unfilled field;2 An army, whom liberticide3 and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
10 Golden and sanguine laws4 which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless?a book sealed; A senate, Time's worst statute, unrepealed? Are graves from which a glorious Phantom5 may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
1819 1839
To Sidmouth and Castlereagh1
As from their ancestral oak
Two empty ravens wind their clarion, Yell by yell, and croak by croak, When they scent the noonday smoke
5 Of fresh human carrion:?
As two gibbering night-birds flit
From their bowers of deadly yew Through the night to frighten it? When the moon is in a fit,
io And the stars are none, or few:?
As a shark and dogfish wait Under an Atlantic isle
1. George 111, who had been declared insane in I. Shelley's powerful satire is directed against Vis1811. He died in 1820. count Castlereagh, foreign secretary during 1812? 2. Alluding to the Peterloo Massacre on August 22, who took a leading part in the European 16, 1819. In St. Peter's field, near Manchester, a settlement after the Battle of Waterloo, and Vis- troop of cavalry had charged into a crowd attending count Sidmouth (1757?1844), the home secrea peaceful rally in support of parliamentary reform. tary, whose cruelly coercive measures (supported 'Peterloo' is an ironic combination of 'St. Peter's' by Castlereagh) against unrest in the laboringclasand 'Waterloo.' ses were in large part responsible for the Peterloo 3. The killing of liberty. Massacre. 4. Laws bought with gold and leading to blood-When this poem was reprinted by Mary Shelley shed. in 1839, it was given the title 'Similes for Two 5. I.e., a revolution. Political Characters of 1819.'
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77 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
15For the Negro-ship, whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red gills the while? 20Are ye?two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained2 cattle, Two vipers tangled into one. 1819 1832
To William Shelley1
i My lost William, thou in whom Some bright spirit lived, and did That decaying robe consume Which its lustre faintly hid,? 5 Here its ashes find a tomb, But beneath this pyramid2 Thou art not?if a thing divine Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine Is thy mother's grief and mine.
2
io Where art thou, my gentle child? Let me think thy spirit feeds, With its life intense and mild, The love of living leaves and weeds Among these tombs and ruins wild;?
15 Let me think that through low seeds Of sweet flowers and sunny grass Into their hues and scents may pass A portion
1819 1824
Ode to the West Wind1
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
2. A murrain is a malignant disease of domestic 2. The Shelleys, who left Rome shortly after Wilanimals. liam's death, ordered the construction of a small 1. The Shelleys' son William, who died of malaria stone pyramid to mark his grave. This is not, except in June 1819, age three and a half years, was bur-perhaps obliquely, a reference to the famous tomb, ied in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. These a 150-foot pyramid, of the Ist-century B.C.E . unfinished lines were discovered among the poet's Roman magistrate Caius Cestius just outside the papers by his widow, Mary Shelley (the grieving cemetery. mother of line 9), who published them in her hus-1. This poem was conceived and chiefly written in band's Posthumous Poems (1824). a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on
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ODE TO THE WEST WIND / 773
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic2 red, 5
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring3 shall blow
10 Her clarion4 o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and Preserver;5 hear, O hear!
2
15 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,
Angels6 of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aery surge, 20 Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad,7 even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height, The locks of the
