170 Which from their unworn obelisks9 look forth In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs Of those who were their conquerors, mouldering round. Those imaged to the pride of Kings and Priests A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide
175 As is the world it wasted, and are now But an astonishment; even so the tools And emblems of its last captivity Amid the dwellings of the peopled Earth, Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.
180 And those foul shapes, abhorred by God and man? Which under many a name and many a form Strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable Were Jupiter,1 the tyrant of the world; And which the nations panic-stricken served
185 With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless And slain amid men's unreclaiming tears, Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate? Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines.
190 The painted veil, by those who were, called life,2 Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside? The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed?but man:
195 Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree,?the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise?but man: Passionless? no?yet free from guilt or pain Which were, for his will made, or suffered them,
200 Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance and death and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.3
7. A drug (probably opium) that brings forgetful-gods who, whatever their names, were all really ness of pain and sorrow. manifestations of Jupiter. 8. Annotated, explained. 2. I.e., which was thought to be life by humans as 9. The Egyptian obelisks (tapering shafts of they were before their regeneration. stone), brought to Rome by its conquering armies, 3. I.e., a dim point in the extreme of empty space. included hieroglyphs that?because they were still The sense of lines 198?204 is if regenerate man undeciphered in Shelley's time?seemed 'mon-were to be released from all earthly and biological strous and barbaric shapes' (line 168). impediments ('clogs'), he would become what I. The 'foul shapes' (line 180) were statues of the even the stars are not?a pure ideal.
.
81 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
From Act 44 SCENE?A Part of the Forest near the Cave of PROMETHEUS.
DEMOGORGON
This is the Day which down the void Abysm 555 At the Earth-born's spell5 yawns for Heaven's Despotism,
And Conquest is dragged Captive through the Deep;6 Love from its awful0 throne of patient power axvesome In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, 560 And narrow verge of crag-like Agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance,? These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength; 565 And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length7? These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o'er the disentangled Doom.8
570 To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
575 Neither to change nor falter nor repent: This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
1818-19 1820
4. The original drama, completed in the spring of an infant whose hour has come round at last. Shel1819, consisted of three acts. Later that year Shel-ley based this description in part on Ezekiel 1, the ley added a jubilant fourth act. In Revelation 21 vision of the chariot of divine glory, which had trathe apocalyptic replacement of the old world by 'a ditionally been interpreted as a portent of apocanew heaven and new earth' had been symbolized lypse. The third episode (lines 319?502) is the by the marriage of the Lamb with the New Jeru-bacchanalian dance of the love-intoxicated Moon salem. Shelley's fourth act, somewhat like the con-around her brother and paramour, the rejuvenesclusion of Blake's Jerusalem, expands this figure cent Earth. into a cosmic epithalamion, representing a union 5. Prometheus's spell?the magically effective of divided elements that enacts everywhere the words of pity, rather than vengefulness, that he reunion of Prometheus and Asia taking place off-spoke in act 1. stage. 6. Ephesians 4.8: 'When [Christ} ascended up on Shelley's model is the Renaissance masque, high, he led captivity captive.' which combines song and dance with spectacular 7. A final reminder that the serpent incessantly displays. Panthea and lone serve as commentators struggles to break loose and start the cycle of on the action, which is divided into three episodes. humanity's fall all over again. In the first episode the purified 'Spirits of the 8. Shelley's four cardinal virtues (line 562), which human mind' unite in a ritual dance with the seal the serpent in the pit, also constitute the Hours of the glad new day. In the second episode magic formulas ('spells') by which to remaster (lines 194?318), there appear emblematic repre-him, should he again break loose. sentations of the moon and the earth, each bearing
.
THE CLOUD / 815
The Cloud I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noon-day dreams. 5 From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's0 breast, earth's As she dances about the Sun. I wield the flail1 of the lashing hail, 10 And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; 15 And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, 20 It struggles and howls at fits;0 fitfully Over Earth and Ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea;2 25 Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or
