Into The Past - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) - Queen Mab VII

Into The Past

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography

Queen Mab

VII - VIII

VII

SPIRIT

'I was an infant when my mother went

To see an atheist burned. She took me there.

The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;

The multitude was gazing silently;

And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,

Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,

Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;

The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;

His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;

His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob

Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.

"Weep not, child!" cried my mother, "for that man

Has said, There is no God."'

FAIRY

'There is no God!

Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed.

Let heaven and earth, let man's revolving race,

His ceaseless generations, tell their tale;

Let every part depending on the chain

That links it to the whole, point to the hand

That grasps its term! Let every seed that falls

In silent eloquence unfold its store

Of argument; infinity within,

Infinity without, belie creation;

The exterminable spirit it contains

Is Nature's only God; but human pride

Is skilful to invent most serious names

To hide its ignorance.

'The name of God

Has fenced about all crime with holiness,

Himself the creature of his worshippers,

Whose names and attributes and passions change,

Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord,

Even with the human dupes who build his shrines,

Still serving o'er the war-polluted world

For desolation's watchword; whether hosts

Stain his death-blushing chariot-wheels, as on

Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise

A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans;

Or countless partners of his power divide

His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke

Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness,

Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy,

Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven

In honor of his name; or, last and worst,

Earth groans beneath religion's iron age,

And priests dare babble of a God of peace,

Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,

Murdering the while, uprooting every germ

Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,

Making the earth a slaughter-house!

'O Spirit! through the sense

By which thy inner nature was apprised

Of outward shows, vague dreams have rolled,

And varied reminiscences have waked

Tablets that never fade;

All things have been imprinted there,

The stars, the sea, the earth, the sky,

Even the unshapeliest lineaments

Of wild and fleeting visions

Have left a record there

To testify of earth.

'These are my empire, for to me is given

The wonders of the human world to keep,

And fancy's thin creations to endow

With manner, being and reality;

Therefore a wondrous phantom from the dreams

Of human error's dense and purblind faith

I will evoke, to meet thy questioning.

Ahasuerus, rise!'

A strange and woe-worn wight

Arose beside the battlement,

And stood unmoving there.

His inessential figure cast no shade

Upon the golden floor;

His port and mien bore mark of many years,

And chronicles of untold ancientness

Were legible within his beamless eye;

Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth;

Freshness and vigor knit his manly frame;

The wisdom of old age was mingled there

With youth's primeval dauntlessness;

And inexpressible woe,

Chastened by fearless resignation, gave

An awful grace to his all-speaking brow.

SPIRIT

'Is there a God?'

AHASUERUS

'Is there a God!--ay, an almighty God,

And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice

Was heard on earth; earth shuddered at the sound;

The fiery-visaged firmament expressed

Abhorrence, and the grave of Nature yawned

To swallow all the dauntless and the good

That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,

Girt as it was with power. None but slaves

Survived,--cold-blooded slaves, who did the work

Of tyrannous omnipotence; whose souls

No honest indignation ever urged

To elevated daring, to one deed

Which gross and sensual self did not pollute.

These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend,

Gorgeous and vast; the costly altars smoked

With human blood, and hideous pćans rung

Through all the long-drawn aisles. A murderer heard

His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and arts

Had raised him to his eminence in power,

Accomplice of omnipotence in crime

And confidant of the all-knowing one.

These were Jehovah's words.

'"From an eternity of idleness

I, God, awoke; in seven days' toil made earth

From nothing; rested, and created man;

I placed him in a paradise, and there

Planted the tree of evil, so that he

Might eat and perish, and my soul procure

Wherewith to sate its malice and to turn,

Even like a heartless conqueror of the earth,

All misery to my fame. The race of men,

Chosen to my honor, with impunity

May sate the lusts I planted in their heart.

Here I command thee hence to lead them on,

Until with hardened feet their conquering troops

Wade on the promised soil through woman's blood,

And make my name be dreaded through the land.

Yet ever-burning flame and ceaseless woe

Shall be the doom of their eternal souls,

With every soul on this ungrateful earth,

Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong,--even all

Shall perish, to fulfil the blind revenge

(Which you, to men, call justice) of their God."

'The murderer's brow

Quivered with horror.

'"God omnipotent,

Is there no mercy? must our punishment

Be endless? will long ages roll away,

And see no term? Oh! wherefore hast thou made

In mockery and wrath this evil earth?

Mercy becomes the powerful--be but just!

O God! repent and save!"

'"One way remains:

I will beget a son and he shall bear

The sins of all the world; he shall arise

In an unnoticed corner of the earth,

And there shall die upon a cross, and purge

The universal crime; so that the few

On whom my grace descends, those who are marked

As vessels to the honor of their God,

May credit this strange sacrifice and save

Their souls alive. Millions shall live and die,

Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name,

But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave,

Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale,

Such as the nurses frighten babes withal;

These in a gulf of anguish and of flame

Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,

Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow,

Even on their beds of torment where they howl,

My honor and the justice of their doom.

What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts

Of purity, with radiant genius bright

Or lit with human reason's earthly ray?

Many are called, but few will I elect.

Do thou my bidding, Moses!"

'Even the murderer's cheek

Was blanched with horror, and his quivering lips

Scarce faintly uttered--"O almighty one,

I tremble and obey!"

'O Spirit! centuries have set their seal

On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain,

Since the Incarnate came; humbly he came,

Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape

Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard

Save by the rabble of his native town,

Even as a parish demagogue. He led

The crowd; he taught them justice, truth and peace,

In semblance; but he lit within their souls

The quenchless flames of zeal, and blessed the sword

He brought on earth to satiate with the blood

Of truth and freedom his malignant soul

At length his mortal frame was led to death.

I stood beside him; on the torturing cross

No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense;

And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed

The massacres and miseries which his name

Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried,

"Go! go!" in mockery.

A smile of godlike malice reillumined

His fading lineaments. "I go," he cried,

"But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth

Eternally." The dampness of the grave

Bathed my imperishable front. I fell,

And long lay tranced upon the charmčd soil.

When I awoke hell burned within my brain

Which staggered on its seat; for all around

The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,

Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them,

And in their various attitudes of death

My murdered children's mute and eyeless skulls

Glared ghastily upon me.

But my soul,

From sight and sense of the polluting woe

Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer

Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven.

Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began

My lonely and unending pilgrimage,

Resolved to wage unweariable war

With my almighty tyrant and to hurl

Defiance at his impotence to harm

Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand,

That barred my passage to the peaceful grave,

Has crushed the earth to misery, and given

Its empire to the chosen of his slaves.

These I have seen, even from the earliest dawn

Of weak, unstable and precarious power,

Then preaching peace, as now they practise war;

So, when they turned but from the massacre

Of unoffending infidels to quench

Their thirst for ruin in the very blood

That flowed in their own veins, and pitiless zeal

Froze every human feeling as the wife

Sheathed in her husband's heart the sacred steel,

Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love;

And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood

Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war,

Scarce satiable by fate's last death-draught, waged,

Drunk from the wine-press of the Almighty's wrath;

Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace,

Pointed to victory! When the fray was done,

No remnant of the exterminated faith

Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh,

With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere,

That rotted on the half-extinguished pile.

'Yes! I have seen God's worshippers unsheathe

The sword of his revenge, when grace descended,

Confirming all unnatural impulses,

To sanctify their desolating deeds;

And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross

O'er the unhappy earth; then shone the sun

On showers of gore from the upflashing steel

Of safe assassination, and all crime

Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord,

And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.

'Spirit! no year of my eventful being

Has passed unstained by crime and misery,

Which flows from God's own faith. I 've marked his slaves

With tongues, whose lies are venomous, beguile

The insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was red

With murder, feign to stretch the other out

For brotherhood and peace; and that they now

Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds

Are marked with all the narrowness and crime

That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise,

Reason may claim our gratitude, who now,

Establishing the imperishable throne

Of truth and stubborn virtue, maketh vain

The unprevailing malice of my foe,

Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave,

Adds impotent eternities to pain,

Whilst keenest disappointment racks his breast

To see the smiles of peace around them play,

To frustrate or to sanctify their doom.

'Thus have I stood,--through a wild waste of years

Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,

Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,

Mocking my powerless tyrant's horrible curse

With stubborn and unalterable will,

Even as a giant oak, which heaven's fierce flame

Had scathčd in the wilderness, to stand

A monument of fadeless ruin there;

Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves

The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,

As in the sunlight's calm it spreads

Its worn and withered arms on high

To meet the quiet of a summer's noon.'

The Fairy waved her wand;

Ahasuerus fled

Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,

That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,

Flee from the morning beam;--

The matter of which dreams are made

Not more endowed with actual life

Than this phantasmal portraiture

Of wandering human thought.

VIII

THE FAIRY

'The present and the past thou hast beheld.

It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn,

The secrets of the future.--Time!

Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,

Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,

And from the cradles of eternity,

Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep

By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,

Tear thou that gloomy shroud.--Spirit, behold

Thy glorious destiny!'

Joy to the Spirit came.

Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil,

Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear;

Earth was no longer hell;

Love, freedom, health had given

Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,

And all its pulses beat

Symphonious to the planetary spheres;

Then dulcet music swelled

Concordant with the life-strings of the soul;

It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,

Catching new life from transitory death;

Like the vague sighings of a wind at even

That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea

And dies on the creation of its breath,

And sinks and rises, falls and swells by fits,

Was the pure stream of feeling

That sprung from these sweet notes,

And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies

With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.

Joy to the Spirit came,--

Such joy as when a lover sees

The chosen of his soul in happiness

And witnesses her peace

Whose woe to him were bitterer than death;

Sees her unfaded cheek

Glow mantling in first luxury of health,

Thrills with her lovely eyes,

Which like two stars amid the heaving main

Sparkle through liquid bliss.

Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen:

'I will not call the ghost of ages gone

To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore;

The present now is past,

And those events that desolate the earth

Have faded from the memory of Time,

Who dares not give reality to that

Whose being I annul. To me is given

The wonders of the human world to keep,

Space, matter, time and mind. Futurity

Exposes now its treasure; let the sight

Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.

O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal

Where virtue fixes universal peace,

And, 'midst the ebb and flow of human things,

Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,

A light-house o'er the wild of dreary waves.

'The habitable earth is full of bliss;

Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled

By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,

Where matter dared not vegetate or live,

But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude

Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;

And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles

Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls

Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,

Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet

To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves

And melodize with man's blest nature there.

'Those deserts of immeasurable sand,

Whose age-collected fervors scarce allowed

A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,

Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's love

Broke on the sultry silentness alone,

Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,

Cornfields and pastures and white cottages;

And where the startled wilderness beheld

A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,

A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs

The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs,

Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang,--

Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,

Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles

To see a babe before his mother's door,

Sharing his morning's meal

With the green and golden basilisk

That comes to lick his feet.

'Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail

Has seen above the illimitable plain

Morning on night and night on morning rise,

Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread

Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,

Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves

So long have mingled with the gusty wind

In melancholy loneliness, and swept

The desert of those ocean solitudes

But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,

The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm;

Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds

Of kindliest human impulses respond.

Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,

With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,

And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss,

Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,

Which like a toil-worn laborer leaps to shore

To meet the kisses of the flowrets there.

'All things are recreated, and the flame

Of consentaneous love inspires all life.

The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck

To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,

Rewarding her with their pure perfectness;

The balmy breathings of the wind inhale

Her virtues and diffuse them all abroad;

Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,

Glows in the fruits and mantles on the stream;

No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven,

Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride

The foliage of the ever-verdant trees;

But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,

And autumn proudly bears her matron grace,

Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of spring,

Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit

Reflects its tint and blushes into love.

'The lion now forgets to thirst for blood;

There might you see him sporting in the sun

Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,

His teeth are harmless, custom's force has made

His nature as the nature of a lamb.

Like passion's fruit, the nightshade's tempting bane

Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows;

All bitterness is past; the cup of joy

Unmingled mantles to the goblet's brim

And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.

But chief, ambiguous man, he that can know

More misery, and dream more joy than all;

Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast

To mingle with a loftier instinct there,

Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,

Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;

Who stands amid the ever-varying world,

The burden or the glory of the earth;

He chief perceives the change; his being notes

The gradual renovation and defines

Each movement of its progress on his mind.

'Man, where the gloom of the long polar night

Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,

Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost

Basks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,

Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;

His chilled and narrow energies, his heart

Insensible to courage, truth or love,

His stunted stature and imbecile frame,

Marked him for some abortion of the earth,

Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,

Whose habits and enjoyments were his own;

His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,

Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,

Apprised him ever of the joyless length

Which his short being's wretchedness had reached;

His death a pang which famine, cold and toil

Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark

Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought:

All was inflicted here that earth's revenge

Could wreak on the infringers of her law;

One curse alone was spared--the name of God.

'Nor, where the tropics bound the realms of day

With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,

Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere

Scattered the seeds of pestilence and fed

Unnatural vegetation, where the land

Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,

Was man a nobler being; slavery

Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust;

Or he was bartered for the fame of power,

Which, all internal impulses destroying,

Makes human will an article of trade;

Or he was changed with Christians for their gold

And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound

Of the flesh-mangling scourge he does the work

Of all-polluting luxury and wealth,

Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads

The long-protracted fulness of their woe;

Or he was led to legal butchery,

To turn to worms beneath that burning sun

Where kings first leagued against the rights of men

And priests first traded with the name of God.

'Even where the milder zone afforded man

A seeming shelter, yet contagion there,

Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,

Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late

Availed to arrest its progress or create

That peace which first in bloodless victory waved

Her snowy standard o'er this favored clime;

There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,

The mimic of surrounding misery,

The jackal of ambition's lion-rage,

The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.

'Here now the human being stands adorning

This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;

Blest from his birth with all bland impulses,

Which gently in his noble bosom wake

All kindly passions and all pure desires.

Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing

Which from the exhaustless store of human weal

Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise

In time-destroying infiniteness gift

With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks

The unprevailing hoariness of age;

And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene

Swift as an unremembered vision, stands

Immortal upon earth; no longer now

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,

And horribly devours his mangled flesh,

Which, still avenging Nature's broken law,

Kindled all putrid humors in his frame,

All evil passions and all vain belief,

Hatred, despair and loathing in his mind,

The germs of misery, death, disease and crime.

No longer now the wingčd habitants,

That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,

Flee from the form of man; but gather round,

And prune their sunny feathers on the hands

Which little children stretch in friendly sport

Towards these dreadless partners of their play.

All things are void of terror; man has lost

His terrible prerogative, and stands

An equal amidst equals; happiness

And science dawn, though late, upon the earth;

Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;

Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,

Reason and passion cease to combat there;

Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extend

Their all-subduing energies, and wield

The sceptre of a vast dominion there;

Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends

Its force to the omnipotence of mind,

Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth

To decorate its paradise of peace.'

Introduction to Queen Mab

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