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.

ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI,

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

• • It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
  • Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
  • Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
  • Its horror and its beauty are divine.
  • Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie
  • Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,
  • Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
  • The agonies of anguish and of death.
• • 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 hue 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 shew
  • 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
  • Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
  • Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
  • Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
  • Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
  • And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
  • After a taper; and the midnight sky
  • 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 evershifting 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.