Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/31



How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! One pale as yonder wan and hornèd moon, With lips of lurid blue, The other glowing like the vital morn, When throned on ocean's wave It breathes over the world: Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!

Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton, Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres, To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form, Which love and admiration cannot view Without a beating heart, whose azure veins Steal like dark streams along a field of snow, Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed In light of some sublimest mind, decay? Nor putrefaction's breath Leave aught of this pure spectacle But loathsomeness and ruin?— Spare aught but a dark theme, On which the lightest heart might moralize? Or is it but that downy-wingèd slumbers Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids To watch their own repose? Will they, when morning's beam Flows through those wells of light, Seek far from noise and day some western cave, Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds A lulling murmur weave?— Ianthe doth not sleep The dreamless sleep of death: Nor in her moonlight chamber silently SHELLEY