Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night?
Swift be thine approaching flight,
35 Come soon, soon! 1820 1824
To [Music, when soft voices die]1
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory.?
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.0? enliven
5 Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed2?
And so thy thoughts,3 when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on. 1821 1824
O World, O Life, O Time1
O World, O Life, O Time,
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before,
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more, O never more!
1. Here the 'Day' is the male sun, not the female notebook of Percy Shelley's now housed in the 'day' with whom the Spirit of Night dallies in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. preceding stanza. 2. The bed of the dead rose. 1. This poem was first published under the title 3. I.e., my thoughts of thee. 'Memory' in Mary Shelley's edition of her hus-1. For the author's revisions while composing this band's Posthumous Poems in 1824, with the two poem, see 'Poems in Process,' in the appendices stanzas in the reverse order from what we give to this volume. here. Our text is based on a version found in a
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CHORU S FRO M HELLAS / 82 1 10Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight? Fresh spring and summer [ ] and winter hoar Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more, O never more! 1824 Chorus from Hellas1 5io1520The world's great age2 The world's great age begins anew, The golden years3 return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds4 outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far, A new Peneus5 rolls his fountains Against the morning-star, Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads6 on a sunnier deep. A loftier Argo7 cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus8 sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies; A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso9 for his native shore. O, write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death's scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian1 rage the joy
1. Hellas, a closet drama written in the autumn of return of the golden age, when 'all the earth will 1821, was inspired by the Greek war for indepen-produce all things.' dence against the Turks. ('Hellas' is another name 3. In Greek myth the first period of history, when for Greece.) In his preface Shelley declared that Saturn reigned. he viewed this revolution as foretelling the final 4. Clothes (especially mourning garments) as well overthrow of all tyramy. The choruses throughout as dead vegetation. are sung by enslaved Greek women. We give the 5. The river in northeast Greece that flows chorus that concludes the drama. through the beautiful vale of Tempe (line 11). 2. Prophecies of wars, and rumours of wars, etc., 6. The Cyclades, islands in the Aegean Sea. may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, 7. On which Jason sailed in his quest for the but to anticipate however darkly a period of regen-Golden Fleece. eration and happiness is a more hazardous exercise 8. The legendary player on the lyre who was torn of the faculty which bards possess or fain. It will to pieces by the frenzied Thracian women while he remind the reader .. . of Isaiah and Virgil, whose was mourning the death of his wife, Eurydice. ardent spirits . . . saw the possible and perhaps 9. The nymph deserted by Ulysses on his voyage approaching state of society in which the 'lion back from the Trojan War to his native Ithaca. shall lie down with the lamb,' and 'otnnis feret 1. King Laius of Thebes was killed in a quarrel by omnia tellus.' Let these great names be my author-his son Oedipus, who did not recognize his father. ity and excuse [Shelley's note]. The quotations are Shortly thereafter Oedipus delivered Thebes from from Isaiah's millennial prophecy (e.g., chaps. 25, the ravages of the Sphinx by answering its riddle 45), and Virgil's prediction, in Eclogue 4, of a (lines 23-24).
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82 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Which dawns upon the free; Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
25 Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime, And leave, if nought so bright may live, 30 All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdued;2 35 Not gold, not blood their altar dowers0 gifts But votive tears and symbol flowers.
O cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
40 Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, O might it die or rest at last!
1821 1822
Adonais John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. Shelley had met Keats, had invited him to be his guest at Pisa, and had gradually come to realize that he was 'among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age' (Preface to Adonais). The name 'Adonais' is
