With thy clear keen joyance
              Languor cannot be:
           Shadow of annoyance
              Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.

           Waking or asleep,
              Thou of death must deem
           Things more true and deep
              Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

           We look before and after,
              And pine for what is not:
           Our sincerest laughter
              With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

           Yet, if we could scorn
              Hate and pride and fear,
           If we were things born
              Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

           Better than all measures
              Of delightful sound,
           Better than all treasures
              That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

           Teach me half the gladness
              That thy brain must know;
           Such harmonious madness
              From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

616   The Moon

I

AND, like a dying lady lean and pale,
      Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east
A white and shapeless mass.

II

      Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
      Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

617   Ode to the West Wind

I

O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being
   Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

   Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
   Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingàd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
   Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

   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 art moving everywhere;
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