Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/406

Or a swift eagle in the morning glare 405
Breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight,
The pinnace, oared by those enchanted wings,
Clove the fierce streams towards their upper springs.

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The water flashed, like sunlight by the prow

Of a noon-wandering meteor flung to Heaven; 410
The still air seemed as if its waves did flow
In tempest down the mountains; loosely driven
The lady's radiant hair streamed to and fro:
Beneath, the billows having vainly striven
Indignant and impetuous, roared to feel 415
The swift and steady motion of the keel.

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Or when the weary moon was in the wane,

Or in the noon of interlunar night,
The lady-witch in visions could not chain
Her spirit; but sailed forth under the light 420
Of shooting stars, and bade extend amain
Its^[1] storm-outspeeding wings, the Hermaphrodite;
She to the Austral waters took her way,
Beyond the fabulous Thamondocana^[2],—
 

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Where, like a meadow which no scythe has shaven, 425

Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake,
With the Antarctic constellations paven,
Canopus and his crew, lay the Austral lake—
There she would build herself a windless haven
Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make 430
The bastions of the storm, when through the sky
The spirits of the tempest thundered by:
 

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A haven beneath whose translucent floor

The tremulous stars sparkled unfathomably,
And around which the solid vapours hoar, 435
Based on the level waters, to the sky
Lifted their dreadful crags, and like a shore
Of wintry mountains, inaccessibly
Hemmed in with rifts and precipices gray,
And hanging crags, many a cove and bay. 440

l

And whilst the outer lake beneath the lash

Of the wind's^[3] scourge, foamed like a wounded thing,
And the incessant hail with stony clash
Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing

1. Its transcript; His ed. 1824, B.
2. Thamondocana transcript, B.; Thamondocona ed. 1824.
3. wind's transcript, B.; winds' ed. 1834.