Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere III. Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear! IV. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; The impulse of thy strength, only less free The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. I fall upon the thorns of life; I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee; tameless, and swift, and proud. V. Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth; And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, AN EXHORTATION. CHAMELEONS feed on light and air: Poets could but find the same Would they ever change their hue Twenty times a day? Poets are on this cold earth, Find either, never think it strange That poets range. Yet dare not stain with wealth or power A poet's free and heavenly mind: If bright chameleons should devour Any food but beams and wind, ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY. Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'Tis the melodious hues of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, As [ grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow, And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions show Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there,— A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks. FLORENCE, 1819. |