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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=478170" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Fragments Of An Unfinished Drama</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Scene.--Before the Cavern of the Indian Enchantress.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The Enchantress comes forth.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Enchantress.<br>He came like a dream in the dawn of life,<br>He fled like a shadow before its noon;<br>He is gone, and my peace is turned to strife,<br>And I wander and wane like the weary moon.<br>O, sweet Echo, wake,<br>And for my sake<br>Make answer the while my heart shall break!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But my heart has a music which Echo's lips,<br>Though tender and true, yet can answer not,<br>And the shadow that moves in the soul's eclipse<br>Can return not the kiss by his now forgot;<br>Sweet lips! he who hath<br>On my desolate path<br>Cast the darkness of absence, worse than death!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The Enchantress makes her spell: she is answered by a Spirit.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Spirit.<br>Within the silent centre of the earth<br>My mansion is; where I have lived insphered<br>From the beginning, and around my sleep<br>Have woven all the wondrous imagery<br>Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world;<br>Infinite depths of unknown elements<br>Massed into one impenetrable mask;<br>Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins<br>Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron.<br>And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven<br>I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and clouds,<br>And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns<br>In the dark space of interstellar air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>ANOTHER SCENE<br>Indian Youth and Lady.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>And, if my grief should still be dearer to me<br>Than all the pleasures in the world beside,<br>Why would you lighten it?-</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>I offer only<br>That which I seek, some human sympathy<br>In this mysterious island.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>Oh! my friend,<br>My sister, my beloved!-What do I say?<br>My brain is dizzy, and I scarce know whether<br>I speak to thee or her.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>Peace, perturbed heart!<br>I am to thee only as thou to mine,<br>The passing wind which heals the brow at noon,<br>And may strike cold into the breast at night,<br>Yet cannot linger where it soothes the most,<br>Or long soothe could it linger.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>But you said<br>You also loved?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>Loved! Oh, I love. Methinks<br>This word of love is fit for all the world,<br>And that for gentle hearts another name<br>Would speak of gentler thoughts than the world owns.<br>I have loved.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>And thou lovest not? if so,<br>Young as thou art thou canst afford to weep.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>Oh! would that I could claim exemption<br>From all the bitterness of that sweet name.<br>I loved, I love, and when I love no more<br>Let joys and grief perish, and leave despair<br>To ring the knell of youth. He stood beside me,<br>The embodied vision of the brightest dream,<br>Which like a dawn heralds the day of life;<br>The shadow of his presence made my world<br>A Paradise. All familiar things he touched,<br>All common words he spoke, became to me<br>Like forms and sounds of a diviner world.<br>He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,<br>As terrible and lovely as a tempest;<br>He came, and went, and left me what I am.<br>Alas! Why must I think how oft we two<br>Have sate together near the river springs,<br>Under the green pavilion which the willow<br>Spreads on the floor of the unbroken fountain,<br>Strewn, by the nurslings that linger there,<br>Over that islet paved with flowers and moss,<br>While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,<br>Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine,<br>Sad prophetess of sorrows not her own?<br>The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt,<br>And the false cuckoo bade the spray good morn;<br>And on a wintry bough the widowed bird,<br>Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves,<br>Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow.<br>I, left like her, and leaving one like her,<br>Alike abandoned and abandoning<br>(Oh! unlike her in this!) the gentlest youth,<br>Whose love had made my sorrows dear to him,<br>Even as my sorrow made his love to me!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>One curse of Nature stamps in the same mould<br>The features of the wretched; and they are<br>As like as violet to violet,<br>When memory, the ghost, their odours keeps<br>Mid the cold relics of abandoned joy.-<br>Proceed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>He was a simple innocent boy.<br>I loved him well, but not as he desired;<br>Yet even thus he was content to be:-<br>A short content, for I was-</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian<br>[aside].<br>God of Heaven!<br>From such an islet, such a river-spring-!<br>I dare not ask her if there stood upon it<br>A pleasure-dome surmounted by a crescent,<br>With steps to the blue water. [Aloud.]<br>It may be<br>That Nature masks in life several copies<br>Of the same lot, so that the sufferers<br>May feel another's sorrow as their own,<br>And find in friendship what they lost in love.<br>That cannot be: yet it is strange that we,<br>From the same scene, by the same path to this<br>Realm of abandonment -- But speak! your breath-<br>Your breath is like soft music, your words are<br>The echoes of a voice which on my heart<br>Sleeps like a melody of early days.<br>But as you said-- </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>He was so awful, yet<br>So beautiful in mystery and terror,<br>Calming me as the loveliness of heaven<br>Soothes the unquiet sea:-and yet not so,<br>For he seemed stormy, and would often seem<br>A quenchless sun masked in portentous clouds;<br>For such his thoughts, and even his actions were;<br>But he was not of them, nor they of him,<br>But as they hid his splendour from the earth.<br>Some said he was a man of blood and peril,<br>And steeped in bitter infamy to the lips.<br>More need was there I should be innocent,<br>More need that I should be most true and kind,<br>And much more need that there should be found one<br>To share remorse and scorn and solitude,<br>And all the ills that wait on those who do<br>The tasks of ruin in the world of life.<br>He fled, and I have followed him.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>Such a one<br>Is he who was the winter of my peace.<br>But, fairest stranger, when didst thou depart<br>From the far hills where rise the springs of India?<br>How didst thou pass the intervening sea?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>If I be sure I am not dreaming now,<br>I should not doubt to say it was a dream.<br>Methought a star came down from heaven,<br>And rested mid the plants of India,<br>Which I had given a shelter from the frost<br>Within my chamber. There the meteor lay,<br>Panting forth light among the leaves and flowers,<br>As if it lived, and was outworn with speed;<br>Or that it loved, and passion made the pulse<br>Of its bright life throb like an anxious heart,<br>Till it diffused itself, and all the chamber<br>And walls seemed melted into emerald fire<br>That burned not; in the midst of which appeared<br>A spirit like a child, and laughed aloud<br>A thrilling peal of such sweet merriment<br>As made the blood tingle in my warm feet:<br>Then bent over a vase, and murmuring<br>Low, unintelligible melodies,<br>Placed something in the mould like melon-seeds,<br>And slowly faded, and in place of it<br>A soft hand issued from the veil of fire,<br>Holding a cup like a magnolia flower,<br>And poured upon the earth within the vase<br>The element with which it overflowed,<br>Brighter than morning light, and purer than<br>The water of the springs of Himalah.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>You waked not?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>Not until my dream became<br>Like a child's legend on the tideless sand,<br>Which the first foam erases half, and half<br>Leaves legible. At length I rose, and went,<br>Visiting my flowers from pot to pot, and thought<br>To set new cuttings in the empty urns,<br>And when I came to that beside the lattice,<br>I saw two little dark-green leaves<br>Lifting the light mould at their birth, and then<br>I half-remembered my forgotten dream.<br>And day by day, green as a gourd in June,<br>The plant grew fresh and thick, yet no one knew<br>What plant it was; its stem and tendrils seemed<br>Like emerald snakes, mottled and diamonded<br>With azure mail and streaks of woven silver;<br>And all the sheaths that folded the dark buds<br>Rose like the crest of cobra-di-capel,<br>Until the golden eye of the bright flower,<br>Through the dark lashes of those veinèd lids,<br>....disencumbered of their silent sleep,<br>Gazed like a star into the morning light.<br>Its leaves were delicate, you almost saw<br>The pulses<br>With which the purple velvet flower was fed<br>To overflow, and like a poet's heart<br>Changing bright fancy to sweet sentiment,<br>Changed half the light to fragrance. It soon fell,<br>And to a green and dewy embryo-fruit<br>Left all its treasured beauty. Day by day<br>I nursed the plant, and on the double flute<br>Played to it on the sunny winter days<br>Soft melodies, as sweet as April rain<br>On silent leaves, and sang those words in which<br>Passion makes Echo taunt the sleeping strings;<br>And I would send tales of forgotten love<br>Late into the lone night, and sing wild songs<br>Of maids deserted in the olden time,<br>And weep like a soft cloud in April's bosom<br>Upon the sleeping eyelids of the plant,<br>So that perhaps it dreamed that Spring was come,<br>And crept abroad into the moonlight air,<br>And loosened all its limbs, as, noon by noon,<br>The sun averted less his oblique beam.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>And the plant died not in the frost?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lady.<br>It grew;<br>And went out of the lattice which I left<br>Half open for it, trailing its quaint spires<br>Along the garden and across the lawn,<br>And down the slope of moss and through the tufts<br>Of wild-flower roots, and stumps of trees o'ergrown<br>With simple lichens, and old hoary stones,<br>On to the margin of the glassy pool,<br>Even to a nook of unblown violets<br>And lilies-of-the-valley yet unborn,<br>Under a pine with ivy overgrown.<br>And there its fruit lay like a sleeping lizard<br>Under the shadows; but when Spring indeed<br>Came to unswathe her infants, and the lilies<br>Peeped from their bright green masks to wonder at<br>This shape of autumn couched in their recess,<br>Then it dilated, and it grew until<br>One half lay floating on the fountain wave,<br>Whose pulse, elapsed in unlike sympathies,<br>Kept time<br>Among the snowy water-lily buds.<br>Its shape was such as summer melody<br>Of the south wind in spicy vales might give<br>To some light cloud bound from the golden dawn<br>To fairy isles of evening, and it seemed<br>In hue and form that it had been a mirror<br>Of all the hues and forms around it and<br>Upon it pictured by the sunny beams<br>Which, from the bright vibrations of the pool,<br>Were thrown upon the rafters and the roof<br>Of boughs and leaves, and on the pillared stems<br>Of the dark sylvan temple, and reflections<br>Of every infant flower and star of moss<br>And veined leaf in the azure odorous air.<br>And thus it lay in the Elysian calm<br>Of its own beauty, floating on the line<br>Which, like a film in purest space, divided<br>The heaven beneath the water from the heaven<br>Above the clouds; and every day I went<br>Watching its growth and wondering;<br>And as the day grew hot, methought I saw<br>A glassy vapour dancing on the pool,<br>And on it little quaint and filmy shapes,<br>With dizzy motion, wheel and rise and fall,<br>Like clouds of gnats with perfect lineaments...<br>O friend, sleep was a veil uplift from Heaven--<br>As if Heaven dawned upon the world of dream--<br>When darkness rose on the extinguished day<br>Out of the eastern wilderness.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Indian.<br>I too<br>Have found a moment's paradise in sleep<br>Half compensate a hell of waking sorrow.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Percy+Bysshe+Shelley">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=478170" data-title="Fragments Of An Unfinished Drama de Percy Bysshe Shelley" data-description="Scene.--Before the Cavern of the Indian Enchantress.

The Enchantress comes forth.


Enchantress.
He came like a dream in the dawn of life,
He fled like a shadow before its noon;
He is gone, and my peace is turned to strife,
And I wander and wane ..."></div>
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