Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue (1876)/Lines written on the Euganean Hills
LINES
WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS,
October, 1818.
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on
Day and night, and night and day,5
Drifting on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel's track;
Whilst above the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily,10
And behind the tempest fleet
Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o'er-brimming deep15
And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore20
Still recedes, as ever still
Longing with divided will,
But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever drifted on
O'er the unreposing wave25
To the haven of the grave.
What, if there no friends will greet;
What, if there no heart will meet
His with love's impatient beat;
Wander wheresoever he may,30
Can he dream before that day
To find refuge from distress
In friendship's smile, in love's caress?
Then 'twill wreak him little woe
Whether such there be or no:35
Senseless is the breast, and cold,
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve40
That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortured lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now[1]
Frozen upon December's bough.
On the beach of a northern sea45
Which tempests shake eternally,
As once the wretch there lay to sleep,
Lies a solitary heap,
One white skull and seven dry bones,
On the margin of the stones,50
Where a few grey rushes stand,
Boundaries of the sea and land:
Nor is heard one voice of wail
But the sea-mews, as they sail
O'er the billows of the gale;55
Or the whirlwind up and down
Howling, like a slaughtered town,
When a king in glory rides
Through the pomp of fratricides:
Those unburied bones around60
There is many a mournful sound;
There is no lament for him,
Like a sunless vapour, dim,
Who once clothed with life and thought
What now moves nor murmurs not.65
Aye, many flowering islands lie
In the waters of wide Agony:
To such a one this morn was led,
My bark by soft winds piloted:
'Mid the mountains Euganean70
I stood listening to the paean,
With which the legioned rooks did hail
The sun's uprise majestical;
Gathering round with wings all hoar,.
Thro' the dewy mist they soar75
Like grey shades, till the[2] eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,
Flecked with fire and azure, lie
In the unfathomable sky,
So their plumes of purple grain,80
Starred with drops of golden rain.
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning's fitful gale
Thro' the broken mist they sail,85
And the vapours cloven and gleaming
Follow down the dark steep streaming,
Till all is bright, and clear, and still,
Round the solitary hill.
Beneath is spread like a green sea90
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath day's azure eyes
Ocean's nursling, Venice lies,95
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite's destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,100
Broad, red, radiant, half reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline[3];
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,105
Column, tower, and dome, and spire?
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;110
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.
Sun-girt[4] City, thou hast been115
Ocean's child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.120
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew 125
Flies, as once before it flew,
O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its antient state,
Save where many a palace gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown 130
Like a rock of ocean's own,
Topples o'er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day, 135
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death 140
O'er the waters of his path.
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aerial gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were145
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake150
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch's hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously,155
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they,160
Clouds which stain truth's rising day
By her sun consumed away,
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring165
With more kindly blossoming.
Perish—let there only be[5]
Floating o'er thy hearthless sea,
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally, 170
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tattered pall of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;—
That a tempest-cleaving swan
Of the songs[6] of Albion,175
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung 180
From his lips like music flung
O'er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror:—what though yet
Poesy's unfailing river,
Which thro' Albion winds for ever, 185
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred poet's grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled?
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay190
Aught thine own? oh, rather say,
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's wasting springs;195
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power, which he
Imaged 'mid mortality;
As the love from Petrarch's urn,200
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp, by which the heart
Sees things unearthly;—so thou art,
Mighty spirit—so shall be
The city that did refuge thee.205
Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-wingèd Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread,210
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that grey cloud
Many-domèd Padua proud215
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest-shining plain,[7]
Where the peasant heaps his grain
In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow220
With the purple vintage strain,
Heaped upon the creaking wain,
That the brutal Celt may swill
Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword225
Lies unchanged, though many a lord,
Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region's foison,[8]
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction's harvest home:230
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot's rage, the slave's revenge.235
Padua, thou within whose walls
Those mute guests at festivals,
Son and Mother, Death and Sin,
Played at dice for Ezzelin,
Till Death cried, "I win, I win!"240
And Sin cursed to lose the Wager,
But Death promised, to assuage her,
That he would petition for
Her to be made Vice-Emperor,
When the destined years were o'er,245
Over all between the Po
And the eastern Alpine snow,
Under the mighty Austrian.
Sin smiled so as Sin only can,
And since that time, aye, long before,250
Both have ruled from shore to shore,
That incestuous pair, who follow
Tyrants as the sun the swallow,
As Repentance follows Crime,
And as changes follow Time.255
In thine halls the lamp of learning,
Padua, now no more is burning;
Like a meteor, whose wild way
Is lost over the grave of day,
It gleams betrayed and to betray:260
Once remotest nations came
To adore that sacred flame,
When it lit not many a hearth
On this cold and gloomy earth:
Now new fires from antique light265
Spring beneath the wide world's might;
But their spark lies dead in thee,
Trampled out by tyranny.
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depth of piny dells,270
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn
By the fire thus lowly born:
The spark beneath his feet is dead,275
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darkened sky
With a myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear: so thou,
O Tyranny,[9] beholdest now280
Light around thee, and thou nearest
The loud flames ascend, and fearest:
Grovel on the earth: aye, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!
Noon descends around me now:285
'Tis the noon of autumn's glow,
When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolved star
Mingling light and fragrance, far290
From the curved horizon's bound
To the point of heaven's profound,
Fills the overflowing sky;
And the plains that silent lie
Underneath, the leaves unsodden295
Where the infant frost has trodden
With his morning-winged feet,
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
And the red and golden vines,
Piercing with their trellised lines300
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
The dun and bladed grass no less,
Pointing from this hoary tower
In the windless air; the flower
Glimmering at my feet; the line305
Of the olive-sandalled Apennine
In the south dimly islanded;
And the Alps, whose snows are spread
High between the clouds and sun;
And of living things each one;310
And my spirit which so long
Darkened this swift stream of song,
Interpenetrated lie
By the glory of the sky:
Be it love, light, harmony,315
Odour, or the soul of all
Which from heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feeds this verse
Peopling the lone universe.
Noon descends, and after noon320
Autumn's evening meets me soon,
Leading the infantine moon,
And that one star, which to her
Almost seems to minister
Half the crimson light she brings325
From the sunset's radiant springs:
And the soft dreams of the morn,
(Which like winged winds had borne
To that silent isle, which lies
'Mid remembered agonies,330
The frail bark of this lone being,)
Pass, to other sufferers fleeing,
And its antient pilot, Pain,
Sits beside the helm again.
Other flowering isles must be335
In the sea of life and agony:
Other spirits float and flee
O'er that gulph; even now, perhaps,
On some rock the wild wave wraps,
With folded wings they waiting sit340
For my bark, to pilot it
To some calm and blooming cove,
Where for me, and those I love,
May a windless bower be built,
Far from passion, pain, and guilt,345
In a dell 'mid lawny hills,
Which the wild sea-murmur fills,
And soft sunshine, and the sound
Of old forests echoing round,
And the light and smell divine350
Of all flowers that breathe and shine:
We may live so happy there,
That the spirits of the air,
Envying us, may even entice
To our healing paradise355
The polluting multitude;
But their rage would be subdued
By that clime divine and calm,
And the winds whose wings rain balm
On the uplifted soul, and leaves360
Under which the bright sea heaves;
While each breathless interval
In their whisperings musical
The inspired soul supplies
With its own deep melodies,365
And the love which heals all strife
Circling, like the breath of life,
All things in that sweet abode
With its own mild brotherhood:
They, not it would change; and soon370
Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again.
- ↑ Mr. Rossetti substitutes for this line
Is like a sapless leaflet now;
and says in a note that he has "rescued these lines (with some consciousness of audacity) from the annoying grammatical solecism of the original—
'Every little living nerve
Are like sapless leaflets now.'"Mr. Swinburne says (Essays and Studies, pp. 228–9)—"If the editor finds the license of such a phrase ... too 'annoying' to be endured by a scholastic sense of propriety, the annoyance is far keener which will be inflicted on others by his substituted reading ... Shelley has indulged in a loose and obsolete construction which may or may not be defensible; I should not at the present day permit it to myself, or condone it in another; and had the editor been engaged in the revision of a schoolboy's theme, he would certainly have done right to correct such a phrase, and as certainly would not have done wrong to add such further correction as he might deem desirable; but the task here undertaken is not exactly comparable to the revision of a schoolboy's theme."
- ↑ In Shelley's edition, the is contracted into th', to bring the line within someone's idea of regularity; but Mrs. Shelley restores the. I say " restores," because I cannot suppose for a moment that the contraction was Shelley's,—the line being quite in his manner without it. I do not know who saw the volume through the press; but, from the general scarcity of Shelley’s favourite item of punctuation (the pause), I suspect it was Peacock, who, I am told by a friend of his, cut out quantities of Shelley's pauses when revising for press.
- ↑ In Shelley's edition, chrystalline.
- ↑ As to this beautiful epithet sun-girt, I entirely agree with Mr. Swinburne, who says Mr. Palgrave's proposal (Golden Treasury,—Notes), to substitute sea-girt, "may look plausible, but the new epithet is feeble, inadequate, inaccurate. Venice is not a sea-girt city ; it is interlaced and interwoven with sea, but not girdled; pierced through with water, but not ringed about. Seen by noon from the Euganean heights, clothed as with the very and visible glory of Italy, it might seem to Shelley a city girdled with the sunlight, as some Nereid with the arms of the sun-god."—Essays and Studies, p. 199.
- ↑ This passage (lines 167 to 205) seems to have been an after-thought. Mr. Frederick Locker possesses a copy of Rosalind and Helen, &c., containing the MS. interpolation sent after the poem had gone to the publisher; and with his kind permission I have followed that in preference to the printed text. The variations, though numerous, are very slight, being confined to matters of pointing and "capitalling." Shelley heads the passage thus:
"After the lines
From thy dust shall nations spring
With more kindly blossoming."Doubtless he quoted from memory, and had no intention of changing your to thy, and new to shall, in the first line of the couplet.
- ↑ I cannot but think this word should be sons, not songs. It has always, as far as I am aware, been printed songs; and it certainly is songs in Mr. Locker's MS. This, however, is somewhat hastily written; and Shelley might easily have made such a clerical mistake as I suspect; but in the absence of any other MS. the text must of course remain as it is,—the expression a swan of the songs of Albion being conceivable, and indeed being considered, by some critics with whom I have discussed this point, more probable than a swan of the sons of Albion.
- ↑ There is no hyphen to connect harvest and shining in Shelley's edition; and it is possible that he inadvertently omitted it, as he often did; but I have supplied it because, as the line was originally printed, it might mean that Padua stood shining plainly amid the harvest, whereas I take it Shelley meant that she stood amid the plain which was shining with harvest.
- ↑ Printed foizon in Shelley's edition.
- ↑ Tyranny with a small t in Shelley's edition.