Delphi Poetry Anthology: The World's Greatest Poems (Delphi Poets Series Book 50) (214 page)

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

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
  
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Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winge´d 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
  
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(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!

 
Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,
  
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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
  
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Of some fierce Maenad, ev’n 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 of a vast sepulchre,
  
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Vaulted with all thy congregated might,
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!

 
Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay
  
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Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
  
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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
  
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Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

 
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
  
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The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than Thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed
  
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Scarce seem’d a vision, I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d
  
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One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

 
Make me thy lyre, ev’n 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,
  
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Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
  
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Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
  
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List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

List of Poets in Alphabetical Order

Written Among the Euganean Hills, North Italy

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

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,
  
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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,
  
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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 deep;
  
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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 shore
  
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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 wave,
  
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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 whereso’er he may,
  
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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:
  
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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 nerve
  
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That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortured lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December’s bough.

On the beach of a northern sea
  
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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,
  
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Where a few gray 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;
  
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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 around
  
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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.
  
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Ay, 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 Euganean
  
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I stood listening to the paean
With which the legion’d rooks did hail
The Sun’s uprise majestical:
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar
  
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Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, — as clouds of even
Fleck’d with fire and azure, lie
In the unfathomable sky, —
So their plumes of purple grain
  
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Starr’d with drops of golden rain
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning’s fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail;
  
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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 sea
  
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The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath day’s azure eyes,
Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies, —
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A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphrite’s destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
  
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Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,
  
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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;
  
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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 City! thou hast been
  
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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.
  
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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
  
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Flies, as once before it flew,
O’er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace-gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
  
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Like a rock of ocean’s own,
Topples o’er the abandon’d sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way
Wandering at the close of day,
  
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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
  
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O’er the waters of his path.

Noon descends around me now:
’Tis the noon of autumn’s glow,
When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
  
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Or an air-dissolve´d star
Mingling light and fragrance, far
From the curved horizon’s bound
To the point of heaven’s profound,
Fills the overflowing sky;
  
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And the plains that silent lie
Underneath; the leaves unsodden
Where the infant frost has trodden
With his morning-winge´d feet
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
  
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And the red and golden vines
Piercing with their trellised lines
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
The dun and bladed grass no less,
Pointing from this hoary tower
  
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In the windless air; the flower
Glimmering at my feet; the line
Of the olive-sandall’d Apennine
In the south dimly islanded;
And the Alps, whose snows are spread
  
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High between the clouds and sun;
And of living things each one;
And my spirit, which so long
Darken’d this swift stream of song, —
Interpenetrated lie
  
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By the glory of the sky;
Be it love, light, harmony,
Odour, or the soul of all
Which from heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feels this verse,
  
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Peopling the lone universe.

 
Noon descends, and after noon
Autumn’s evening meets me soon,
Leading the infantine moon
And that one star, which to her
  
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Almost seems to minister
Half the crimson light she brings
From the sunset’s radiant springs:
And the soft dreams of the morn
(Which like winge´d winds had borne
  
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To that silent isle, which lies
‘Mid remember’d agonies,
The frail bark of this lone being),
Pass, to other sufferers fleeing,
And its ancient pilot, Pain,
  
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Sits beside the helm again.

 
Other flowering isles must be
In the sea of life and agony:
Other spirits float and flee
O’er that gulf: ev’n now, perhaps,
  
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On some rock the wild wave wraps,
With folding wings they waiting sit
For my bark, to pilot it
To some calm and blooming cove,
Where for me, and those I love,
  
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May a windless bower be built,
Far from passion, pain, and guilt,
In a dell ‘mid lawny hills
Which the wild sea-murmur fills,
And soft sunshine, and the sound
  
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Of old forests echoing round,
And the light and smell divine
Of all flowers that breathe and shine.
 
— We may live so happy there,
That the spirits of the air
  
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Envying us, may even entice
To our healing paradise
The polluting multitude;
But their rage would be subdued
By that clime divine and calm,
  
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And the winds whose wings rain balm
On the uplifted soul, and leaves
Under which the bright sea heaves;
While each breathless interval
In their whisperings musical
  
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The inspired soul supplies
With its own deep melodies;
And the Love which heals all strife
Circling, like the breath of life,
All things in that sweet abode
  
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With its own mild brotherhood.
They, not it, would change; and soon
Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the Earth grow young again!
  
230

List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

List of Poets in Alphabetical Order