‘Oh, save me! Oh, guide me! And bid the deep hide me. For he grasps me now by the hair!’ The loud Ocean heard, To its blue depth stirred, And divided at her prayer; And under the water The Earth’s white daughter Fled like a sunny beam; Behind her descended, Her billows, unblended With the brackish Dorian stream. Like a gloomy stain On the emerald main Alpheus rushed behind,— As an eagle pursuing A dove to its ruin Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
Under the bowers Where the Ocean Powers Sit on their pearlèd thrones; Through the coral woods Of the weltering floods; Over heaps of unvalued stones; Through the dim beams Which amid the streams Weave a network of coloured light; And under the caves, Where the shadowy waves Are as green as the forest’s night: Outspeeding the shark, And the swordfish dark,— Under the ocean foam, And up through the rifts Of the mountain clifts,— They passed to their Dorian home.
And now from their fountains In Enna’s mountains, Down one vale where the morning basks, Like friends once parted Grown single-hearted, They ply their watery tasks. At sunrise they leap From their cradles steep In the cave of the shelving hill; At noontide they flow Through the woods below And the meadows of asphodel; And at night they sleep In the rocking deep Beneath the Ortygian shore,— Like spirits that lie In the azure sky When they love but live no more.
P. B. Shelley.
[ THE DAY IS DONE]
The day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of Night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village Gleam through the rain and the mist, And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me, That my soul cannot resist;
A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day.