V.
As I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan; 40
They might lament—for I am one
Whom men love not.—and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet. 45
THE WOODMAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE
[Published in part (1-67) by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824; the remainder (68-70) by Dr. Garnett, Relics of Shelley, 1862.]
A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune
(I think such hearts yet never came to good)
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,
One nightingale in an interfluous wood
Satiate the hungry dark with melody;—5
And as a vale is watered by a flood,
Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness-as a tuberose[1]
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie
Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,10
The singing of that happy nightingale
In this sweet forest, from the golden close
Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,
Was interfused upon the silentness;
The folded roses and the violets pale15
Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss
Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear
Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness
Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere
And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,20
And every wind of the mute atmosphere,
And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,
And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,
And every silver moth fresh from the grave
Which is its cradle—ever from below 25
Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,
To be consumed within the purest glow
Of one serene and unapproached star,
As if it were a lamp of earthly light,
Unconscious, as some human lovers are,30
- ↑ —or as a tuberose cj. A. C. Bradley.
