In the golden lightning Like a rose embowered Of the sunken sun, In its own green leaves, O'er which clouds are brightning, By warm winds deflowered, Thou dost float and run; Till the scent it gives Like an unbodied joy whose race is just Makes faint with too much sweet these begun. heavy-winged thieves: The pale purple even Sound of vernal showers Melts around thy flight; On the twinkling grass, Like a star of heaven, Rain-awakened flowers, In the broad daylight All that ever was Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music delight, doth surpass : Keen as are the arrows Teach us, sprite or bird, Of that silver sphere, What sweet thoughts are thine: Whose intense lamp narrows I have never heard In the white dawn clear, Praise of love or wine Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, Chorus Hymeneal, As, when night is bare, Or triumphal chant, From one lonely cloud Matched with thine would be all The moon rains out her beams, and heaven But an empty vaunt, is overflowed. A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? What objects are the fountains From rainbow clouds there flow not Of thy happy strain ? Drops so bright to see, What fields, or waves, or mountains? As from thy presence showers a rain of What shapes of sky or plain? melody. What love of thine own kind? what ig norance of pain? Like a poet hidden With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be: Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Like a high-born maiden Waking or asleep, In a palace-tower, Thou of death must deem Soothing her love-laden Things more true and deep Soul in secret hour Than we mortals dream, With music sweet as love, which over Or how could thy notes flow in such a flows her bower: crystal stream? Like a glow-worm golden We look before and after, In a dell of dew, And pine for what is not : Scattering unbeholden Our sincerest laughter Its aërial hue With some pain is fraught; Among the flowers and grass, which screen Our sweetest songs are those that tell of it from the view : saddest thought. O WORLD! O life! O time! before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more Oh, never more! Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight; Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more Oh, never more! TO NIGHT SWIFTLY walk over the western wave, Spirit of Night! Swift be thy flight! Star-inwrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out, Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land Touching all with thine opiate wand Come, long sought! When I arose and saw the dawn, I sighed for thee; gone, I sighed for thee. Wouldst thou me? No, not thee! ADONAIS for Adonais ! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow! Say: “With me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!" Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies In darkness? where was lorn Urania When Adonais died? With veilèd eyes, 'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath, Rekindled all the fading melodies With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death. A grave Oh weep for Adonais he is dead! Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the weep! last, Yet wherefore? Quench within their The bloom, whose petals nipt before burning bed they blew Thy fiery tears, and let thy lov'd heart Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste; keep, The broken lily lies — the storm is overLike his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep; past. For he is gone, where all things wise and fair Descend; — oh, dream not that the am- To that high Capital, where kingly Death orous Deep Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, Will yet restore him to the vital air; He came; and bought, with price of Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs purest breath, at our despair. among the eternal. Come away! Most musical of mourners, weep again, Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day Lament anew, Urania ! He died, Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while stili Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay; Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's Awake him not ! surely he takes his fill pride, Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill. The priest, the slave, and the liberticide, Trampled and mocked with many a He will awake no more, oh, never more! loathèd rite Within the twilight chamber spreads apace Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified, The shadow of white Death, and at the Into the gulf of death; but his clear door Sprite Invisible Corruption waits to trace Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among His extreme way to her dim dwellingthe sons of light. place; The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to Not all to that bright station dared to deface climb; So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law And happier they their happiness who Of change shall o'er his sleep the mortal knew, curtain draw. Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time Oh weep for Adonais ! — The quick In which suns perished; others more Dreams, sublime, The passion-winged Ministers of thought, Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Who were his flocks, whom near the living Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent streams prime; Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he And some yet live, treading the thorny road, taught Which leads, through toil and hate, to The love which was its music, wander Fame's serene abode. Wander no more, from kindling brain to But now, thy youngest, dea brain, perished, But droop there, whence they sprung; The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew, and mourn their lot Like a pale flower by some sad maiden Round the cold heart, where, after their cherished, sweet pain, And fed with true love tears, instead of They ne'er will gather strength, or find not, one has a home again, dew; And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries; “Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead; See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain." Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise ! She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had out wept its rain. And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, the gleam Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, Came in slow pomp; — the moving pomp might seem Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream. a All he had loved, and moulded into thought, From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound, Lamented Adonais. Morning sought Her eastern watchtower, and her hair unbound, Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, Dimmed the aërial eyes that kindle day; Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay. One from a lucid urn of starry dew Washed his light limbs as if embalming them; Another clipt her profuse locks, and threw The wreath upon him, like an anadem, Which frozen tears instead of pearls be gem; Another in her wilful grief would break Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem A greater loss with one which was more weak; And dull the barbèd fire against his frozen cheek. Another Splendour on his mouth alit, That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit, And pass into the panting heart beneath With lightning and with music: the damp death Quenched its caress upon his icy lips; And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath Of moonlight vapor, which the cold night Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless moun tains, And feeds her grief with his remembered lay, And will no more reply to winds or foun tains, Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day; Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear Than those for whose disdain she pined away Into a shadow of all sounds : a drear Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear. clips, It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse. And others came Desires and Adora tions, Wingèd Persuasions and veiled Destinies, Splendrous and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phan tasies; Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were, Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown For whom should she have waked the sullen year? To Phæbus was not Hyacinth so dear Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both Thou Adonais: wan they stand and sere Amid the faint companions of their youth, With dew all turned to tears; odour, to sighing ruth. Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow. Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst As it has ever done, with change and motion, From the great morning of the world when first God dawned on Chaos; in its stream im mersed The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light; All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst; Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight, The beauty and the joy of their renewed might. He will awake no more, oh, never more! "Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core, A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs." And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes, And all the Echoes whom their sister's song Had held in holy silence, cried: "Arise!” Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung, From her ambrosial rest the fading Splen dour sprung |