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Subject Area: Literature

LIBERTY. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, Posthumous Poems [1824]

Edition used:

Posthumous Poems (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


LIBERTY.

    • The fiery mountains answer each other;
    • Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone;
    • The empestuous oceans awake one another,
    • And the ice-rocks are shaken round winter’s zone
    • When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.
    • From a single cloud the lightning flashes,
    • Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,
    • Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
    • An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound
    • Is bellowing underground.
    • But keener thy gaze than the lightning’s glare,
    • And swifter thy step than the earthquake’s tramp;
    • Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare
    • Makes blind the volcanos; the sun’s bright lamp
    • To thine is a fen-fire damp.
    • From billow and mountain and exhalation
    • The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;
    • From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,
    • From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,—
    • And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night
    • In the van of the morning light.