Selected Poems (104 page)

Read Selected Poems Online

Authors: Byron

Tags: #Literary Criticism, #Poetry, #General

BOOK: Selected Poems
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1345

Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire
While in those warm and lovely veins the fire
Of health and holy feeling can provide
Great Nature’s Nile, whose deep stream rises higher
Than Egypt’s river: – from that gentle side

1350

Drink, drink and live, old man! Heaven’s realm holds no such tide.
CLI
The starry fable of the milky way
Has not thy story’s purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this

1355

Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds: – Oh, holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss
To thy sire’s heart, replenishing its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.
CLII

1360

Turn to the Mole which Hadrian rear’d on high,
Imperial mimic of old Egypt’s piles,
Colossal copyist of deformity,
Whose travell’d phantasy from the far Nile’s
Enormous model, doom’d the artist’s toils

1365

To build for giants, and for his vain earth,
His shrunken ashes, raise this dome: How smiles
The gazer’s eye with philosophic mirth,
To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!
CLIII
But lo! the dome – the vast and wondrous dome,

1370

To which Diana’s marvel was a cell –
Christ’s mighty shrine above his martyr’s tomb!
I have beheld the Ephesian’s miracle –
Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell
The hyæna and the jackall in their shade;

1375

I have beheld Sophia’s bright roofs swell
Their glittering mass i’ the sun, and have survey’d
Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem pray’d;
CLIV
But thou, of temples old, or altars new,
Standest alone – with nothing like to thee –

1380

Worthiest of God, the holy and the true.
Since Zion’s desolation, when that He
Forsook his former city, what could be,
Of earthly structures, in his honour piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,

1385

Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.
CLV
Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not;
And why? it is not lessen’d; but thy mind,
Expanded by the genius of the spot,

1390

Has grown colossal, and can only find
A fit abode wherein appear enshrined
Thy hopes of immortality; and thou
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined,
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now

1395

His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.
CLVI
Thou movest – but increasing with the advance,
Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,
Deceived by its gigantic elegance;
Vastness which grows — but grows to harmonise —

1400

All musical in its immensities;
Rich marbles – richer painting – shrines where flame
The lamps of gold – and haughty dome which vies
In air with Earth’s chief structures, though their frame
Sits on the firm-set ground – and this the clouds must claim.
CLVII

1405

Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break,
To separate contemplation, the great whole;
And as the ocean many bays will make,
That ask the eve — so here condense thy soul
To more immediate objects, and control

1410

Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll
In mighty graduations, part by part,
The glory which at once upon thee did not dart,
CLVIII
Not by its fault – but thine: Our outward sense

1415

Is but of gradual grasp – and as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense
Outstrips our faint expression; even so this
Outshining and o’erwhelming edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great

1420

Defies at first our Nature’s littleness,
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.
CLIX
Then pause, and be enlighten’d; there is more
In such a survey than the sating gaze

1425

Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore
The worship of the place, or the mere praise
Of art and its great masters, who could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan;
The fountain of sublimity displays

1430

Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man
Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can.
CLX
Or, turning to the Vatican, go see
Laocoon’s torture dignifying pain –
A father’s love and mortal’s agony

1435

With an immortal’s patience blending: — Vain
The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon’s grasp,
The old man’s clench; the long envenom’d chain
Rivets the living links, – the enormous asp

1440

Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.
CLXI
Or view the Lord of the unerring bow,
The God of life, and poesy, and light –
The Sun in human limbs array’d, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;

1445

The shaft hath just been shot – the arrow bright
With an immortal’s vengeance; in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might
And majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.
CLXII

1450

But in his delicate form – a dream of Love,
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast
Long’d for a deathless lover from above,
And madden’d in that vision – are exprest
All that ideal beauty ever bless’d

1455

The mind with in its most unearthly mood,
When each conception was a heavenly guest –
A ray of immortality — and stood,
Starlike, around, until they gather’d to a god!
CLXIII
And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven

1460

The fire which we endure, it was repaid
By him to whom the energy was given
Which this poetic marble hath array’d
With an eternal glory – which, if made
By human hands, is not of human thought;

1465

And Time himself hath hallow’d it, nor laid
One ringlet in the dust – nor hath it caught
A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which ’twas wrought.
CLXIV
But where is he, the Pilgrim of my song,
The being who upheld it through the past?

1470

Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.
He is no more — these breathings are his last;
His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing: – if he was
Aught but a phantasy, and could be class’d

1475

With forms which live and suffer – let that pass –
His shadow fades away into Destruction’s mass,
CLXV
Which gathers shadow, substance, life, and all
That we inherit in its mortal shroud,
And spreads the dim and universal pall

1480

Through which all things grow phantoms; and the cloud
Between us sinks and all which ever glow’d,
Till Glory’s self is twilight, and displays
A melancholy halo scarce allow’d
To hover on the verge of darkness; rays

1485

Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze,
CLXVI
And send us prying into the abyss,
To gather what we shall be when the frame
Shall be resolved to something less than this
Its wretched essence; and to dream of fame,

1490

And wipe the dust from off the idle name
We never more shall hear, – but never more,
Oh, happier thought! can we be made the same:
It is enough in sooth that
once
we bore

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