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