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235 'Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart Dare? the unpastured dragon in his den?4 challenge Defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then
240 Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?5 Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,6
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.
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'The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
245 The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead; The vultures to the conqueror's banner true Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion;?how they fled, When like Apollo, from his golden bow,
250 The Pythian of the age7 one arrow sped And smiled!?The spoilers tempt no second blow, They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.
'The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn; He sets, and each ephemeral insect8 then
255 Is gathered into death without a dawn, And the immortal stars awake again; So is it in the world of living men: A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight Making earth bare and veiling heaven,9 and when
260 It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light Leave to its kindred lamps' the spirit's awful night.'
3? Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came, Their garlands sere, their magic mantles0 rent; cloaks The Pilgrim of Eternity,2 whose fame 265 Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument,
4. I.e., the hostile reviewers. 'the Pythian' because he had slain the dragon 5. The allusion is to Perseus, who had cut off Python. Medusa's head while avoiding the direct sight of 8. Insect that lives and dies in a single day. her (which would have turned him to stone) by 9. As the sun reveals the earth but veils the other looking only at her reflection in his shield. stars. 6. I.e., when thy spirit, like the full moon, should 1. The other stars (i.e., creative minds), of lesser have reached its maturity. brilliance than the sun. 7. Byron, who had directed against critics of the 2. Byron, who had referred to his Childe Harold age his satiric poem English Bards and Scotch as one of the 'wanderers o'er Eternity' (3.669). Reviewers (1809). The allusion is to Apollo, called
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83 0 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent The sweetest lyrist' of her saddest wrong, 270 And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue. 3 1 Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,4 A phantom among men; companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Whose thunder is its knell;? he, as I guess, funeral bell 275 Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.5 3 2 280 A pardlike0 Spirit beautiful and swift? leopardlike A Love in desolation masked;?a Power Girt round with weakness;?it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour;6 It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, 285 A breaking billow;?even whilst we speak Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
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His head was bound with pansies overblown,
290 And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew7 Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew, Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
295 Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew He came the last, neglected and apart; A herd- abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.
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All stood aloof, and at his partial moan
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
300 Who in another's fate now wept his own; As in the accents of an unknown land, He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned The Stranger's mien, and murmured: 'who art thou?' He answered not, but with a sudden hand
3. Thomas Moore (1779-1852), from Ireland into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. ('lerne'), who had written poems about the 6. The heavy, overhanging hour of Keats's death. oppression of his native land. 7. Like the thyrsus, the leaf-entwined and cone4. Shelley, represented in one of his aspects? topped staff carried by Dionysus, to whom leopards such as the Poet in Alastor, rather than the author (see line 280) are sacred. The pansies, which are of Prometheus Unbound. 'overblown,' i.e., past their bloom, are emblems of 5. Actaeon, while hunting, came upon the naked sorrowful thought. The cypress is an emblem of Diana bathing and, as a punishment, was turned mourning.
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ADONAIS / 831
305 Made bare his branded and ensanguined0 brow, bloodied Which was like Cain's or Christ's8?Oh! that it should be so!
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What softer voice is hushed over the dead? Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown? What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,
