The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface.
• Julian and Maddalo; a Conversation.
• The Witch of Atlas.
• Letter to —
• The Triumph of Life.
• Fragments From an Unfinished Drama.
• Prince Athanase: a Fragment.
• Ode to Naples. *
• Marianne’s Dream.
• Mont Blanc. Lines Written In the Vale of Chamouni.
• Miscellaneous Poems.
• On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery.
• Song.
• To Constantia, Singing.
• The Fugitives.
• A Lament.
• The Pine Forest of the Cascine, Near Pisa.
• To Night.
• Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa.
• Arethusa.
• The Question.
• Lines to an Indian Air.
• Stanzas Written In Dejection, Near Naples.
• Autumn: a Dirge.
• Hymn of Apollo.
• Hymn of Pan.
• The Boat On the Serchio.
• The Zucca. *
• The Two Spirits. an Allegory.
• A Fragment.
• A Bridal Song.
• The Sunset.
• Song, On a Faded Violet.
• Lines to a Critic.
• Good Night.
• To-morrow.
• Death.
• A Lament.
• Love’s Philosophy.
• To E*** V***
• To —
• Lines.
• To William Shelley.
• An Allegory.
• Mutability.
• From the Arabic. an Imitation.
• To —
• Music.
• Lines.
• Death.
• To —
• Passage of the Apennines.
• To Mary —
• The Past.
• Song of a Spirit.
• Liberty.
• To —
• The Isle.
• To —
• Time.
• Lines.
• A Song.
• The World’s Wanderers.
• A Dirge.
• Lines.
• Dirge For the Year.
• Sonnet I.
• Sonnet II. Political Greatness.
• Sonnet III.
• Sonnet IV.
• Fragments.
• Ginevra. *
• Charles the First. Fragments.
• Prince Athanase. Part II.
• Mazenghi. *
• The Woodman and the Nightingale.
• To the Moon.
• Song For Tasso.
• The Waning Moon.
• Epitaph.
• Alastor; Or the Spirit of Solitude.
• Translations.
• Hymn to Mercury. Translated From the Greek of Homer
• The Cyclops; a Satyric Drama.
• Translation From Moschus.
• Scenes From the “magico Prodigioso” of Calderon.
• Scenes From the Faust of GoËthe.

ODE TO NAPLES.*

• EPODE I. α.
• I stood within the city disinterred;†
• And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls
• Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
• The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals
• Thrill through those roofless halls;
• The oracular thunder penetrating shook
• The listening soul in my suspended blood;
• I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke—
• I felt, but heard not:—through white columns glowed
• The isle-sustaining Ocean-flood,
• A plane of light between two Heavens of azure:
• Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre
• Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure
• Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;
• But every living lineament was clear
• As in the sculptor’s thought; and there
• The wreathes of stony myrtle, ivy and pine,
• Like winter leaves o’ergrown by moulded snow,
• Seemed only not to move and grow
• Because the crystal silence of the air
• Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine
• Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.

• EPODE II. α.
• Then gentle winds arose
• With many a mingled close
• Of wild Æolian sound and mountain odour keen;
• And where the Baian ocean
• Welters with airlike motion,
• Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
• Moving the sea flowers in those purple caves
• Even as the ever stormless atmosphere
• Floats o’er the Elysian realm,
• It bore me like an Angel, o’er the waves
• Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air
• No storm can overwhelm;
• I sailed, where ever flows
• Under the calm Serene
• A spirit of deep emotion
• From the unknown graves
• Of the dead kings of Melody.*
• Shadowy Aornos darkened o’er the helm
• The horizontal æther; heaven stript bare
• Its depths over Elysium, where the prow
• Made the invisible water white as snow;
• From that Typhæan mount, Inarime
• There streamed a sunlike vapour, like the standard
• Of some ethereal host;
• Whilst from all the coast,
• Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
• Over the oracular woods and divine sea
• Prophesyings which grew articulate—
• They seize me—I must speak them—be they fate!

• STROPHE α. I.
• Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
• Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven!
• Elysian City which to calm enchantest
• The mutinous air and sea: they round thee, even
• As sleep round Love, are driven!
• Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
• Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!
• Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,
• Which armed Victory offers up unstained
• To Love, the flower-enchained!
• Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
• Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
• If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,
• Hail, hail, all hail!

• STROPHE β. 2.
• Thou youngest giant birth
• Which from the groaning earth
• Leap’st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!
• Last, of the Intercessors!
• Who ’gainst the Crowned Transgressors
• Pleadest before God’s love! Arrayed in Wisdom’s mail,
• Wave thy lightning lance in mirth
• Nor let thy high heart fail,
• Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors,
• With hurried legions move!
• Hail, hail, all hail!

• ANTISTROPHE α.
• What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
• Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror
• To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam
• To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer,
• A new Acteon’s error
• Shall their’s have been—devoured by their own hounds!
• Be thou like the imperial Basilisk
• Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
• Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk
• Aghast she pass from the Earth’s disk,
• Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier grow,
• And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe;
• If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail,
• Thou shalt be great—All hail!

• ANTISTROPHE β. 2.
• From Freedom’s form divine,
• From Nature’s inmost shrine,
• Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil:
• O’er Ruin desolate,
• O’er Falsehood’s fallen state
• Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!
• And equal laws be thine,
• And winged words let sail,
• Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:
• That wealth, surviving fate,
• Be thine.—All hail!

• ANTISTROPHE α. γ.
• Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling pæan
• From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
• Till silence became music? From the Æean*
• To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
• Starts to hear thine! The Sea
• Which paves the desart streets of Venice laughs
• In light and music; widowed Genoa wan
• By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
• Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,
• Within whose veins long ran
• The vipers† palsying venom, lifts her heel
• To bruise his head. The signal and the seal
• (If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
• Art Thou of all these hopes.—O hail!

• ANTISTROPHE β. γ.
• Florence! beneath the sun,
• Of cities fairest one,
• Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation:
• From eyes of quenchless hope
• Rome tears the priestly cope,
• As fuling once by power, so now by admiration,
• An athlete stript to run
• From a remoter station
• For the high prize lost on Philippi’s shore:—
• As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,
• So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

• EPODE I. β.
• Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
• Arrayed against the everliving Gods?
• The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
• Bursting their inaccessible abodes
• Of crags and thunder-clouds?
• See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
• Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?
• Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,
• The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide
• With iron light is dyed,
• The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions
• Like Chaos o’er creation, uncreating;
• An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions
• And lawless slaveries,—down the aerial regions
• Of the white Alps, desolating,
• Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
• Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
• Trampling our columned cities into dust,
• Their dull and savage lust
• On Beauty’s corse to sickness satiating—
• They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary
• With fire—from their red feet the streams run gory!

• EPODE II. β.
• Great Spirit, deepest Love!
• Which rulest and dost move
• All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;
• Who spreadest heaven around it,
• Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;
• Who sittest in thy star, o’er Ocean’s western floor,
• Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command
• The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison
• From the Earth’s bosom chill;
• O bid those beams be each a blinding brand
• Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!
• Bid the Earth’s plenty kill!
• Bid thy bright Heaven above,
• Whilst light and darkness bound it,
• Be their tomb who planned
• To make it ours and thine!
• Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill
• And raise thy sons, as o’er the prone horizon
• Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire—
• Be man’s high hope and unextinct desire,
• The instrument to work thy will divine!
• Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,
• And frowns and fears from Thee,
• Would not more swiftly flee
• Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.—
• Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
• Thou yieldest or withholdest, Oh let be
• This city of thy worship ever free!

September, 1820.

[* ]The Author has connected many recollections of his visit to Pompeii and Baiæ with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples. This has given a tinge of picturesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory Epodes which depicture these scenes, and some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene of this animating event.—Author’s Note.

[† ]Pompeii.

[* ]Homer and Virgil.

[* ]Ææa, the island of Circe.

[† ]The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.