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ADONAIS / 833
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;1
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.
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The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil.2 When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what0 whatever Shall be its earthly doom,0 the dead live there3 destiny
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
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The inheritors of unfulfilled renown4
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:0 justified
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.
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And many more, whose names on Earth are dark
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
'Thou art become as one of us,' they cry,
'It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an Heaven of song.
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!'5
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Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth
Fond? wretch! and know thyself and him aright. foolish
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous6 Earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might0 power
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
1. I.e., to the degree that a particular substance of despair over his poverty and lack of recognition, will permit. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) died in battle at 2. The radiance of stars (i.e., of poets) persists, thirty-two, and the Roman poet Lucan (39?65 even when they are temporarily 'eclipsed' by c.E.) killed himself at twenty-six to escape a senanother heavenly body, or obscured by the veil of tence of death for having plotted against the tyrant the earth's atmosphere. Nero. 3. I.e., in the thought of the 'young heart.' 5. Adonais assumes his place in the sphere of Ves4. Poets who (like Keats) died young, before per, the evening star, hitherto unoccupied ('kingachieving their full measure of fame: the less'), hence also 'silent' amid the music of the seventeen-year-old Thomas Chatterton (1752? other spheres. 1770) was believed to have committed suicide out 6. Suspended, floating in space.
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83 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
