And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose, And from this undefiled Paradise, When Heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them, For each one was interpenetrated With the light and the odor its neighbor shed,Like young lovers, whom youth and love make dear, Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere. But the sensitive plant which could give small fruit Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root, Received more than all, it loved more than ever, Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver, For the sensitive plant has no bright flower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, The light winds which from unsustaining wings The plumèd insects, swift and free, The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie The quivering vapors of dim noontide, Each and all, like ministering angels, were And when evening descended from Heaven above, There was a power in this sweet place, A lady, the wonder of her kind, Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind, Tended the garden from morn to even; She had no companion of mortal race, But her tremulous breath, and her flushing face As if some bright spirit, for her sweet sake, Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her. Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest; And wherever her airy footstep trod, Her trailing hair from the grassy sod Erased its light vestige with shadowy sweep, I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet She sprinkled bright water from the stream She lifted their heads with her tender hands, And sustained them with rods and osier bands; If the flowers had been her own infants she Could never have nursed them more tenderly. And all killing insects and gnawing worms, In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full, And many an antenatal tomb, Where butterflies dream of the life to come, This fairest creature from earliest spring All the sweet season of summer-tide, And, ere the first leaf looked brown, she died. PART III. Three days the flowers of the garden fair Or the waves of Baiæ, ere luminous She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius. And on the fourth the sensitive plant And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow, The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass, The garden, once fair, became cold and foul, Swift summer into the autumn flowed, Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks Between the time of the wind and the snow, All loathliest weeds began to grow, Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck, Like the water-snake's belly, and the toad's back; And plants at whose names the verse feels loath, Livid and starred with a lurid dew. The sensitive plant, like one forbid, Wept, and the tears within each lid Of its folded leaves, which together grew, For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon For Winter came; the wind was his whip; He had torn the cataracts from the hills, His breath was a chain which, without a sound, Then the weeds, which were forms of living death, And under the roots of the sensitive plant And were caught in the branches naked and bare. When winter had gone, and spring came back, The sensitive plant was a leafless wreck; But the mandrakes and toad-stools and docks and darnels In Pisa Shelley's best poems were written, The Cenci, Hellas, The Witch of Atlas, Adonais, The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and nearly all the shorter poems of which I have spoken. The last thing he ever wrote was The Triumph of Time, which was left unfinished, and was published by his wife in as perfect a shape as she could bring it from his scattered papers. In the spring of 1822 Shelley left Pisa and took a house on the west coast of Italy, near the village of Lerici. He was very fond of the sea, and had ordered a yacht built, in which he and a warm friend, Captain Williams, were going to spend many a day on the blue Italian waters close at hand. On the sixteenth of May the yacht arrived. Shelley was as pleased with it as a boy with a long-wished-for toy. They made several excursions in the boat, which was named "Don Juan," from Byron's poem, and finally came down to Leghorn in her. After a few days' stay here, Shelley and Williams started back in the boat for the town of Spezzia, on the Gulf of Spezzia, not far from their home. |