Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art1 moving every where;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!

II.

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs, of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome 2 of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!

III.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline1 streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!

IV.

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O, uncontroulable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

1 There is no accent on the second syllable in Shelley's edition.

2 So in Shelley's edition, and Mrs. Shelley's first edition of 1839: it was in her second that the notorious corruption of the later copies, the for

thy, first made its appearance. No doubt it was a mere misprint. There is MS. authority for thy if such were needed: see Mr. Garnett's Relics of Shelley, p. 93.

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

AN ODE,

[WRITTEN, OCTOBER, 1819, BEFORE THE SPANIARDS HAD RECOVERED THEIR LIBERTY.]1

ARISE, arise, arise!

There is blood on the earth that denies ye bread;

Be your wounds like eyes

To weep for the dead, the dead, the dead. What other grief were it just to pay?

5

Your sons, your wives, your brethren, were they;
Who said they were slain on the battle day?

Awaken, awaken, awaken

The slave and the tyrant are twin-born foes;

Be the cold chains shaken

10

To the dust where your kindred repose, repose:

Their bones in the grave will start and move,
When they hear the voices of those they love,
Most loud in the holy combat above.

Wave, wave high the banner!

When Freedom2 is riding to conquest by:

Though the slaves that fan her

Be Famine and Toil, giving sigh for sigh.

And ye who attend her imperial car,
Lift not your hands in the banded war,
But in her defence whose children ye are.

1 In the original edition this poem is headed as above: in Mrs. Shelley's editions it is called "An Ode to the Assertors of Liberty," which title Mr. Rossetti adopts. For a cancelled

stanza, see Addenda to Vol. IV, p. 571.

2 In Shelley's edition freedom here, and famine and toil in line 18, are not given with capitals, though clearly used personally.

Glory, glory, glory,

To those who have greatly suffered and done!

Never name in story

Was greater than that which ye shall have won. Conquerors have conquered their foes alone,

Whose revenge, pride, and power they have overthrown: Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.

Bind, bind every brow

With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine:

Hide the blood-stains now

With hues which sweet nature has made divine:

Green strength, azure hope, and eternity:

But let not the pansy among them be;

Ye were injured, and that means memory.

25

THE CLOUD.1

I BRING fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;

1 Mrs. Shelley, in grouping the poems for her collected editions, assigns The Cloud to 1820; but Mr. Rossetti, taking literally a passage in Mrs. Shelley's Preface, inclines to group the poem with those of 1818 at latest, though he leaves it standing among those of 1820. The passage in Mrs. Shelley's Preface is this: "There are others, such as the 'Ode to the Sky Lark,' and 'The Cloud,' which in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on

the Thames." Mr. Rossetti says, "I rather suspect this latter is the surer guide as to the date, and the style of the poem would suggest a like induction. However, it is possible that Shelley completed the lyric in 1820." Now it seems to me that Mrs. Shelley merely means to refer to a class of poems and a class of influences, and selects those two as types without considering their bearing on chronology; and she certainly does not say that the particular poem called The Cloud was written during the time of residence near the Thames. The internal evidence also commends the poem to me as belonging to Italy: it is more like Arethusa, both in metre and in style, than anything else of