I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean and sing A fairy's song.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighed deep; And there I shut her wild sad eyesSo kissed to sleep.
And there we slumbered on the moss, And there I dreamed, ah! woe betide, The latest dream I ever dreamed,
On the cold hill-side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors-death-pale were they all; Who cried, "La Belle Dame Sans Mercy Hath thee in thrall!"
I saw their starved lips in the gloom,
With horrid warning gapèd wide;
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill-side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering:
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Na drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree !
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity;
The north cannot undo them
With a sleepy whistle through them,
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook!
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But, with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme.
Ir any apology be thought necessary for the appearance of the unfinished poem of "Hyperion," the publishers beg to state that they alone are responsible, as it was printed at their particular request, and contrary to the wish of the author. The poem was intended to have been of equal length with "Endymion," but the reception given to that work discouraged the author from proceeding.
Fleet Street, June 26, 1820,
EEP in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery-noon, and eve's one star,
Sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.
Along the margin-sand large footmarks went, No further than to where his feet had strayed, And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed; While his bowed head seemed list'ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.
It seemed no force could wake him from his place;
But there came one, who with a kindred hand
Touched his wide shoulders, after bending low
With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was the Goddess of the infant world;
By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pigmy's height: she would have ta'en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
Or with a finger stayed Ixion's wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,
Pedestalled haply in a palace court,
When sages looked to Egypt for their lore.
But oh! how unlike marble was that face!
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self!
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
One hand she pressed upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Through an immortal, she felt cruel pain:
The other upon Saturn's bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenour and deep organ tone:
Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents-O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods!
"Saturn, look up!-though wherefore, poor old
King?
I have no comfort for thee, no, not one:
I cannot say, 'O wherefore sleepest thou?'
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
And ocean, too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy sceptre passed; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of thy new command,
Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years !
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
And press it so upon our weary griefs
That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
Saturn, sleep on :-O thoughtless, why did I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?
Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep!
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