Page:Prometheus Unbound - Shelley.djvu/175

 For Winter came: the wind was his whip: One choppy finger was on his lip: He had torn the cataracts from the hills And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;

His breath was a chain which without a sound The earth, and the air, and the water bound; He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living death Fled from the frost to the earth beneath. Their decay and sudden flight from frost Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant The moles and the dormice died for want: The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

First there came down a thawing rain And its dull drops froze on the boughs again, Then there steamed up a freezing dew Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;