Even to a point within our day and night;7 And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
48 Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre
425 O, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought That ages, empires, and religions there Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; For such as he can lend,?they8 borrow not Glory from those who made the world their prey;
430 And he is gathered to the kings of thought Who waged contention with their time's decay, And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
49
Go thou to Rome,?at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
435 And where its wrecks0 like shattered mountains rise, ruins And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses9 dress The bones of Desolation's nakedness Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access1
440 Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead, A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.
50 And grey walls moulder round,2 on which dull Time Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;3 And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,4
445 Pavilioning the dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory, doth stand Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath, A field is spread, on which a newer band Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death5
450 Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
51
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned Its charge to each; and if the seal is set, Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,6
455 Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
7. The poet bids the mourner to stretch his imag-The next line is a glancing allusion to Shelley's ination so as to reach the poet's own cosmic view-three-year-old son, William, also buried there. point and then allow it to contract ('shrink') back 2. The wall of ancient Rome formed one boundary to its ordinary vantage point on Earth?where, of the cemetery. unlike Adonais in his heavenly place, we have an 3. A burning log, white with ash. alternation of day and night. 4. The tomb of Caius Cestius, a Roman tribune, 8. Poets such as Keats. just outside the cemetery. 9. Undergrowth. In Shelley's time the ruins of 5. A common name for a cemetery in Italy is cam- ancient Rome were overgrown with weeds and posatito, 'holy camp or ground.' Shelley is punning shrubs, almost as if the ground were returning to seriously on the Italian word. its natural state. 6. Shelley's mourning for his son. 1. The Protestant Cemetery, Keats's burial place.
.
ADONAIS / 835
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
52
460 The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.7?Die,
465 If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled!?Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
53
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
470 Thy hopes are gone before; from all things here They have departed; thou shouldst now depart! A light is past0 from the revolving year, passed And man, and woman; and what still is dear Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
475 The soft sky smiles,?the low wind whispers near: 'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither, No more let Life divide what Death can join together.
54
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Reauty in which all things work and move,
480 That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of'
485 The fire for which all thirst;9 now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
55
The breath whose might I have invoked in song1 Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
490 Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!2 I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star,
495 Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
1821 1821
