---

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Hellas: A Lyrical Drama
Work rating: Low

1 2 


Enter second Messenger.


Second Messenger.
Nauplia, Tripolizza, Mothon, Athens,
Navarin, Artas, Monembasia,
Corinth, and Thebes are carried by assault,
And every Islamite who made his dogs
Fat with the flesh of Galilean slaves
Passed at the edge of the sword: the lust of blood,
Which made our warriors drunk, is quenched in death;
But like a fiery plague breaks out anew
In deeds which make the Christian cause look pale
In its own light. The garrison of Patras
Has store but for ten days, nor is there hope
But from the Briton: at once slave and tyrant,
His wishes still are weaker than his fears,
Or he would sell what faith may yet remain
From the oaths broke in Genoa and in Norway;
And if you buy him not, your treasury
Is empty even of promises—his own coin.
The freedman of a western poet-chief[4]
Holds Attica with seven thousand rebels,
And has beat back the Pacha of Negropont:
The agèd Ali sits in Yanina
A crownless metaphor of empire:
His name, that shadow of his withered might,
Holds our besieging army like a spell
In prey to famine, pest, and mutiny;
He, bastioned in his citadel, looks forth
Joyless upon the sapphire lake that mirrors
The ruins of the city where he reigned
Childless and sceptreless. The Greek has reaped
The costly harvest his own blood matured,
Not the sower, Ali—who has bought a truce
From Ypsilanti with ten camel-loads
Of Indian gold.


Enter a third Messenger.


Mahmud.
                 What more?


Third Messenger.
                            The Christian tribes
Of Lebanon and the Syrian wilderness
Are in revolt;—Damascus, Hems, Aleppo
Tremble;—the Arab menaces Medina,
The Aethiop has intrenched himself in Sennaar,
And keeps the Egyptian rebel well employed,
Who denies homage, claims investiture
As price of tardy aid. Persia demands
The cities on the Tigris, and the Georgians
Refuse their living tribute. Crete and Cyprus,
Like mountain-twins that from each other`s veins
Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake-spasm,
Shake in the general fever. Through the city,
Like birds before a storm, the Santons shriek,
And prophesyings horrible and new
Are heard among the crowd: that sea of men
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Dervise, learnèd in the Koran, preaches
That it is written how the sins of Islam
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West[5],
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that Spirit
In which all live and are. Ominous signs
Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky:
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;
It has rained blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord.
The army encamped upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time
Cast on the mirror of the night. While yet
The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm
Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the Spirit of the Plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents;
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead.
The last news from the camp is, that a thousand
Have sickened, and—


Enter a fourth Messenger.


Mahmud.
                      And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumour, speak!


Fourth Messenger.
                                  One comes
Fainting with toil, covered with foam and blood:
He stood, he says, on Chelonites`
Promontory, which o`erlooks the isles that groan
Under the Briton`s frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon,
When as the wandering clouds unveiled or hid
Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets
Stalk through the night in the horizon`s glimmer,
Mingling fierce thunders and sulphureous gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco
Awoke, and drove his flock of thunder-clouds
Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objects—save that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dreamed he saw, the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war,
With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorrèd cross—


Enter an Attendant.


Attendant.
                          Your Sublime Highness,
The Jew, who—


Mahmud.
               Could not come more seasonably:
Bid him attend. I`ll hear no more! too long
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge
Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not in whose hand we are.


[Exeunt.


Semichorus I.
  Would I were the wingèd cloud
  Of a tempest swift and loud!
    I would scorn
    The smile of morn
  And the wave where the moonrise is born!
    I would leave
    The spirits of eve
  A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave
From other threads than mine!
Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
       Who would? Not I.


Semichorus II.
Whither to fly?


Semichorus I.
Where the rocks that gird th`Aegean
Echo to the battle paean
    Of the free—
    I would flee
  A tempestuous herald of victory!
    My golden rain
    For the Grecian slain
Should mingle in tears with the bloody main,
  And my solemn thunder-knell
  Should ring to the world the passing-bell
    Of Tyranny!


Semichorus II.
  Ah king! wilt thou chain
  The rack and the rain?
Wilt thou fetter the lightning and hurricane?
  The storms are free,
    But we—


Chorus.
O Slavery! thou frost of the world`s prime,
  Killing its flowers and leaving its thorns bare!
Thy touch has stamped these limbs with crime,
  These brows thy branding garland bear,
    But the free heart, the impassive soul
       Scorn thy control!


Semichorus I.
Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose!—Around her born,
Shone like mountains in the morn
Glorious states;—and are they now
Ashes, wrecks, oblivion?


Semichorus II.
                          Go,
Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed
  Persia, as the sand does foam;
Deluge upon deluge followed,
  Discord, Macedon, and Rome:
And lastly thou!


Semichorus I.
                  Temples and towers,
  Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
  And may be thine, and must decay;
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystàlline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits,
  Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
  Their seal is set.


Semichorus II.
                      Hear ye the blast,
  Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls
  From ruin her Titanian walls?
Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones
  Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete
Hear, and from their mountain thrones
  The daemons and the nymphs repeat
The harmony.


Semichorus I.
             I hear! I hear!


Semichorus II.
The world`s eyeless charioteer,
    Destiny, is hurrying by!
What faith is crushed, what empire bleeds
Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?
What eagle-wingèd victory sits
At her right hand? what shadow flits
  Before? what splendour rolls behind?
    Ruin and renovation cry
`Who but We?`


Semichorus I.
              I hear! I hear!
  The hiss as of a rushing wind,
The roar as of an ocean foaming,
The thunder as of earthquake coming.
    I hear! I hear!
The crash as of an empire falling,
The shrieks as of a people calling
`Mercy! mercy!`—How they thrill!
Then a shout of `kill! kill! kill!`
And then a small still voice, thus—


Semichorus II.
                                        For
Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,
  The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in the guilty mind,
  And Conscience feeds them with despair.


Semichorus I.
In sacred Athens, near the fane
  Of Wisdom, Pity`s altar stood:
Serve not the unknown God in vain,
But pay that broken shrine again,
  Love for hate and tears for blood.


Enter Mahmud and Ahasuerus.


Mahmud.
Thou art a man, thou sayest, even as we.


Ahasuerus.
No more!


Mahmud.
         But raised above thy fellow-men
By thought, as I by power.


Ahasuerus.
                             Thou sayest so.


Mahmud.
Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the Past, and sees
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness,
And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circles—it is much—
I honour thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehended not
What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the Future present—let it come!
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours;
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.


Ahasuerus.
Disdain thee?—not the worm beneath thy feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem
That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;
But look on that which cannot change—the One,
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds—this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision;—all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The Future and the Past are idle shadows
Of thought`s eternal flight—they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be.


Mahmud.
What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest
Of dazzling mist within my brain—they shake
The earth on which I stand, and hang like night
On Heaven above me. What can they avail?
They cast on all things surest, brightest, best,
Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.


Ahasuerus.
Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dodona`s forest to an acorn`s cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is—the absent to the present. Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o`er, worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the Future?—ask and have!
Knock and it shall be opened—look, and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the Past
As on a glass.


Mahmud.
               Wild, wilder thoughts convulse
My spirit—Did not Mahomet the Second
Win Stamboul?


Ahasuerus.
              Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit
The written fortunes of thy house and faith.
Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell
How what was born in blood must die.


Mahmud.
                                        Thy words
Have power on me! I see—


Ahasuerus.
                            What hearest thou?


Mahmud.
A far whisper—
Terrible silence.


Ahasuerus.
                   What succeeds?


Mahmud.
                                  The sound
As of the assault of an imperial city[6],
The hiss of inextinguishable fire,
The roar of giant cannon; the earthquaking
Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,
The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,
The clash of wheels, and clang of armèd hoofs,
And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck
Of adamantine mountains—the mad blast
Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,
The shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,
And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear,
As of a joyous infant waked and playing
With its dead mother`s breast, and now more loud
The mingled battle-cry,—ha! hear I not
`En toutwi nikh!` `Allah-illa-Allah!`?


Ahasuerus.
The sulphurous mist is raised—thou seest—


Mahmud.
                                               A chasm,
As of two mountains, in the wall of Stamboul;
And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,
Like giants on the ruins of a world,
Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust
Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one
Of regal port has cast himself beneath
The stream of war. Another proudly clad
In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb
Into the gap, and with his iron mace
Directs the torrent of that tide of men,
And seems—he is—Mahomet!


Ahasuerus.
                             What thou seest
Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.
A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that
Thou call`st reality. Thou mayst behold
How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned,
Bow their towered crests to mutability.
Poised by the flood, e`en on the height thou holdest,
Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths.—Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,
Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which called it from the uncreated deep,
Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will
The imperial shade hither.


[Exit Ahasuerus. The Phantom of Mahomet the Second appears.


Mahmud.
                             Approach!


Phantom.


                                       I come
Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living than give up the dead;


Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.
The heavy fragments of the power which fell
When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,
Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return.—


  A later Empire nods in its decay:
The autumn of a greener faith is come,
And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip
The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built
Her aerie, while Dominion whelped below.
The storm is in its branches, and the frost
Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects
Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil,
Ruin on ruin:—Thou art slow, my son;
The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep
A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies
Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou,
Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,
The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now—
Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,
And hopes that sate themselves on dust, and die!—
Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.
Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death:—
And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
Unfold itself even in the shape of that
Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!
To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.


Mahmud.
                     Spirit, woe to all!
Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe
To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed!
Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!
Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor!
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;
Those who are born and those who die! but say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am,
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation!


Phantom.
                   Ask the cold pale Hour,
Rich in reversion of impending death,
When he shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs
Sit Care, and Sorrow, and Infirmity—
The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!
He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and—


Voice without.
                                 Victory! Victory!


[The Phantom vanishes.


Mahmud.
What sound of the importunate earth has broken
My mighty trance?


Voice without.
                   Victory! Victory!


Mahmud.
Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?
It matters not!—for nought we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches: Come what may,
The Future must become the Past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour,
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained.—I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair. Victory! poor slaves!


Exit Mahmud.


Voice without.
Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death,
From Thule to the girdle of the world,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation`s blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!


Semichorus I.
  Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream,
Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day!
  I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant`s dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
In visions of the dawning undelight.
    Who shall impede her flight?
    Who rob her of her prey?


Voice without.
Victory! Victory! Russia`s famished eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent`s light.
Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil!
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!


Semichorus II.
  Thou voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
  Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode
  When desolation flashes o`er a world destroyed:
Oh, bear me to those isles of jaggèd cloud
  Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightning,
  Or to some toppling promontory proud
  Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright`ning
  Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
  Before their waves expire,
When heaven and earth are light, and only light
    In the thunder-night!


Voice without.
Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England,
And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.
Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes,
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners
Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.


Semichorus I.
       Alas! for Liberty!
If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,
  Or fate, can quell the free!
       Alas! for Virtue, when
Torments, or contumely, or the sneers
       Of erring judging men
    Can break the heart where it abides.
Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid,
    Can change with its false times and tides,
       Like hope and terror,—
         Alas for Love!
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror
  Before the dazzled eyes of Error,
  Alas for thee! Image of the Above.


Semichorus II.
    Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn
    Through many an hostile Anarchy!
At length they wept aloud, and cried, `The Sea! the Sea!`
    Through exile, persecution, and despair,
       Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become
       The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb
Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair:
  But Greece was as a hermit-child,
    Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
  To woman`s growth, by dreams so mild,
    She knew not pain or guilt;
And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble
       When ye desert the free—
       If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
       In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.


Semichorus I.
Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made;
  Let the free possess the Paradise they claim;
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed
  With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!


Semichorus II.
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
  Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away—
  Their dishonour a remembrance to abide!


Voice without.
Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The keys of ocean to the Islamite.—
Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled,
And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy
This jubilee of unrevengèd blood!
Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!


Semichorus I.
Darkness has dawned in the East
  On the noon of time:
The death-birds descend to their feast
  From the hungry clime.
Let Freedom and Peace flee far
  To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love`s folding-star
  To the Evening land!


Semichorus II.
         The young moon has fed
           Her exhausted horn
             With the sunset`s fire:
         The weak day is dead,
           But the night is not born;
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire
  While it trembles with fear and delight,
  Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
  Fast-flashing, soft, and bright.
Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
       Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day
         Thou art hidden
    From waves on which weary Noon
    Faints in her summer swoon,
    Between kingless continents sinless as Eden,
    Around mountains and islands inviolably
         Pranked on the sapphire sea.


Semichorus I.
  Through the sunset of hope,
  Like the shapes of a dream,
  What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
    Beneath Heaven`s cope,
  Their shadows more clear float by—
The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe
Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,
    Through the walls of our prison;
  And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!


Chorus[7].


The world`s great age begins anew,
  The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
  Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.


A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
  From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
  Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.


A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
  Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
  And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.


Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
  If earth Death`s scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
  Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.


Another Athens shall arise,
  And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
  The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.


Saturn and Love their long repose
  Shall burst[8], more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
  Than many unsubdued:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.


Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
  Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
  Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
Source
The script ran 0.003 seconds.