Fiery Martyrdom

There was a Being whom my spirit oft

Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,

In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn,

Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,

Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves

Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves

Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor

Paved her light steps;—on an imagined shore,

Under the gray beak of some promontory

She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,

That I beheld her not. In solitudes

Her voice came to me through the whispering woods,

And from the fountains, and the odours deep

Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep

Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there,

Breathed but of her to the enamoured air;

And from the breezes whether low or loud,

And from the rain of every passing cloud,

And from the singing of the summer birds,

And from all sounds, all silence. In the words

Of antique verse and high romance,—in form,

Sound, colour—in whatever checks that Storm

Which with the shattered present chokes the past;

And in that best philosophy, whose taste

Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom

As glorious as a fiery martyrdom;

Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.—

Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth

I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,

And towards the loadstar of my one desire,

I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight

Is as a dead leaf’s in the owlet light,

When it would seek in Hesper’s setting sphere

A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,

As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.—

But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame,

Passed, like a God throned on a wingèd planet,

Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it,

Into the dreary cone of our life’s shade;

And as a man with mighty loss dismayed,

I would have followed, though the grave between

Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen:

When a voice said:—‘O Thou of hearts the weakest,

The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.’

— Percy Bysshe Shelley taken from Epipsychidion

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