This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw Mother of this unfathomable world! Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, 20 25 When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, 30 Like an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears 35 Such magic as compels the charmed night To render up thy charge:... and, though ne'er yet And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, 40 And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain 1 Unveil'd in Shelley's edition; but as he does not use the contraction 45 throughout the volume it was probably unintentional here. And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns There was a Poet whose untimely tomb 50 55 6) 65 By solemn vision, and bright silver dream, His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, So in Shelley's edition and in the Posthumous Poems; but sang in the editions of 1839. In the Posthumous Poems Mrs. Shelley substituted sighed for pined; but she restored pined in 1839. Shelley 70 would have been unlikely to make a change involving a repetition: line 59 ends with sigh. 3 Mrs. Shelley changed the sense by putting the comma after too in her second edition of 1839. And knew. When early youth had past, he left To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice To avarice or pride, their starry domes Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines 1 In the Posthumous Poems, the words as he are substituted for he has; but Mrs. Shelley restored the right reading in 1839. His wandering step Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old: Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx, Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Of more than man, where marble dæmons watch The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men 110 115 Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, 120 He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world's youth, through the long burning day And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food, Her daily portion, from her father's tent, - To speak her love :-and watched his nightly sleep, Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn 125 130 135 The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, In joy and exultation held his way; Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine 140 145 His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet 159 Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul 155 Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, 160 Herself1 a poet. Soon the solemn mood Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame A permeating fire: wild numbers then She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs 1 So in Shelley's edition, but himself in Mrs. Shelley's second edition of 1839 and later collections. Mr. Rossetti prints himself, and says it is "not quite clear" that herself “is a misprint," though he strongly inclines to suppose it is. I feel convinced that the misprint is in Mrs. Shelley's later editions: it would be altogether unlike Shelley to remind us at this stage that his hero was a poet; but the idea involved in his telling us that 105 the veiled maid was a poet is both beautiful and characteristic. Shelley's ideal of female perfection,-the ideal of the poet-hero of Alastor,-should naturally be, inter alia, a poet; and she whose speech of knowledge and truth and virtue, and lofty hopes of divine liberty, kindled through all her frame a permeating fire, until she raised wild numbers, fulfilled the precise conditions of the poetic state. |