Collected English Verse — Percy Bysshe Shelley. b. 1792, d. 1822 (Part 6 of 7)

   When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
   The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possest.
   O Love, who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
   Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

   Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high:
   Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
   From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
   Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

622   To—

ONE word is too often profaned
   For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdain’d
   For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
   For prudence to smother;
And pity from thee more dear
   Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love:
   But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
   And the heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
   Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
   From the sphere of our sorrow?

623   The Question

I DREAM’D that, as I wander’d by the way,
   Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring;
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
   Mix’d with a sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay
   Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kiss’d it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets;
   Daisies, those pearl’d Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flower that never sets;
   Faint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets—
   Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth—
Its mother’s face with heaven-collected tears
When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
   Green cowbind and the moonlight-colour’d May,
And cherry-blossoms, and white cups whose wine
   Was the bright dew yet drain’d not by the day;
And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,
   With its dark buds and leaves wandering astray;
And flowers, azure, black, and streak’d with gold,
Fairer than any waken’d eyes behold.

And nearer to the river’s trembling edge
   There grew broad flag-flowers, purple prank’d with white,
And starry river-buds among the sedge,
   And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,
Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge
   With moonlight beams of their own watery light;
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green
As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.

Methought that of these visionary flowers
   I made a nosegay, bound in such a way
That the same hues which in their natural bowers
   Were mingled or opposed, the like array
Kept these imprison’d children of the Hours
   Within my hand;—and then, elate and gay,
I hasten’d to the spot whence I had come,
That I might there present it—O! to whom?

624   Remorse

AWAY! the moor is dark beneath the moon,
   Rapid clouds have drunk the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
   And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of
      heaven.
Pause not! the time is past! Every voice cries ‘Away!’
   Tempt not with one last tear thy friend’s ungentle mood:
Thy lover’s eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy
      stay:
   Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.

Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
   Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
   And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.
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