310 In mockery of monumental stone,9 The heavy heart heaving without a moan? If it be He,1 who, gentlest of the wise, Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one; Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs
315 The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.
36 Our Adonais has drunk poison?oh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life's early cup with such a draught of woe? The nameless worm2 would now itself disown:
320 It felt, yet could escape the magic tone Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong, But what was howling in one breast alone, Silent with expectation of the song,3
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.
37
325 Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me, Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! But be thyself, and know thyself to be! And ever at thy season be thou free
330 To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow: Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee; Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt?as now.
38 Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
335 Far from these carrion kites4 that scream below; He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead; Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.? Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
340 A portion of the Eternal,5 which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same, Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
8. His bloody ('ensanguined') brow bore a mark like that with which God had branded Cain for murdering Abel?or like that left by Christ's crown of thorns. 9. In imitation of a memorial statue. 1. Leigh Hunt, close friend of both Keats and Shelley. 2. Snake?the anonymous reviewer. 3. The promise of later greatness in Keats's early poems 'held . . . silent' the expression of 'all envy, hate, and wrong' except the reviewer's. 4. A species of hawk that feeds on dead flesh. 5. Shelley adopts for this poem the Neoplatonic view that all life and all forms emanate from the Absolute, the eternal One. The Absolute is imaged as both a radiant light source and an overflowing
.
83 2 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
39
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep? He hath awakened from the dream of life?
345 Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings.?We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
350 Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
4?
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;6 Envy and calumny0 and hate and pain, slander And that unrest which men miscall delight,
355 Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
360 With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
41
He lives, he wakes?'tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais.?Thou young Dawn Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
365 Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!7
42
370 He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;8 He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
375 Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
43
He is a portion of the loveliness
380 Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic9 stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,
fountain, which circulates continuously through the dross of matter (stanza 43) and back to its source.
6. He has soared beyond the shadow cast by the earth as it intercepts the sun's light. 7. Shelley's science is, as usual, accurate: it is the envelope of air around the earth that, by diffusing and reflecting sunlight, veils the stars so that they are invisible during the day.
8. The nightingale, in allusion to Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale.' 9. Formative, shaping.
