Selected Poetry and Prose - Percy Bysshe Shelley

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The secret Strength of things

      Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

      Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

      And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

      If to the human mind’s imaginings

      Silence and solitude were vacancy?

      MUTABILITY

      We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

      How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,

      Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon

      Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

      Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings

      Give various response to each varying blast,

      To whose frail frame no second motion brings

      One mood or modulation like the last.

      We rest—a dream has power to poison sleep;

      We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;

      We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,

      Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:—

      It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,

      The path of its departure still is free;

      Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;

      Nought may endure but Mutability.

      ODE TO HEAVEN

      CHORUS OF SPIRITS

      First Spirit

      Palace-roof of cloudless nights?

      Paradise of golden lights!

      Deep, immeasurable, vast,

      Which art now, and which wert then!

      Of the Present and the Past,

      Of the eternal Where and When,

      Presence-chamber, temple, home,

      Ever-canopying dome,

      Of acts and ages yet to come!

      Glorious shapes have life in thee—

      Earth, and all earth’s company;

      Living globes which ever throng

      Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;

      And green worlds that glide along;

      And swift stars with flashing tresses;

      And icy moons most cold and bright,

      And mighty suns beyond the night,

      Atoms of intensest light.

      Even thy name is as a god,

      Heaven! for thou art the abode

      Of that Power which is the glass

      Wherein man his nature sees;—

      Generations as they pass

      Worship thee with bended knees—

      Their unremaining gods and they

      Like a river roll away:

      Thou remainest such—alway!—

      Second Spirit

      Thou art but the mind’s first chamber,

      Round which its young fancies clamber,

      Like weak insects in a cave,

      Lighted up by stalactites;

      But the portal of the grave,

      Where a world of new delights

      Will make thy best glories seem

      But a dim and noonday gleam

      From the shadow of a dream!

      Third Spirit

      Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn

      At your presumption, atom-born!

      What is Heaven? and what are ye

      Who its brief expanse inherit?

      What are suns and spheres which flee

      With the instinct of that Spirit

      Of which ye are but a part?

      Drops which Nature’s mighty heart

      Drives through thinnest veins! Depart!

      What is Heaven? a globe of dew,

      Filling in the morning new

      Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken

      On an unimagined world:

      Constellated suns unshaken,

      Orbits measureless, are furled

      In that frail and fading sphere,

      With ten millions gathered there,

      To tremble, gleam, and disappear!—

      ODE TO LIBERTY

      Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,

      Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind.

      BYRON.

      I.

      A glorious people vibrated again

      The lightning of the nations: Liberty

      From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o’er Spain,

      Scattering contagious fire into the sky,

      Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay,

      And in the rapid plumes of song

      Clothed itself, sublime and strong;

      As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,

      Hovering inverse o’er its accustomed prey;

      Till from its station in the Heaven of fame

      The Spirit’s whirlwind rapped it, and the ray

      Of the remotest sphere of living flame

      Which paves the void was from behind it flung,

      As foam from a ship’s swiftness, when there came

      A voice out of the deep: I will record the same.

      II.

      The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth:

      The burning stars of the abyss were hurled

      Into the depths of Heaven. The daedal earth,

      That island in the ocean of the world,

      Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air:

      But this divinest universe

      Was yet a chaos and a curse,

      For thou wert not: but, power from worst producing worse,

      The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,

      And of the birds, and of the watery forms,

      And there was war among them, and despair

      Within them, raging without truce or terms:

      The bosom of their violated nurse

      Groaned, for beasts

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