No More Learning

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition. ]

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed--a lovely one--
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode; _5
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.

***


TO MARY SHELLEY.

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition. ]

The world is dreary,
And I am weary
Of wandering on without thee, Mary;
A joy was erewhile
In thy voice and thy smile, _5
And 'tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.

***


ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous Poems", 1824. ]

1.
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie _5
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.

2.
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone, _10
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain. _15

3.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As . . . grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock, _20
And with unending involutions show
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

4.
And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft _25
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies _30
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

5.
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error, _35
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a . . . and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there--
A woman's countenance, with serpent-locks,
Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks. _40

NOTES:
_5 seems 1839; seem 1824.
_6 shine]shrine 1824, 1839.
_26 those 1824; these 1839.