Ode on the Departing Year - Coleridge (1796)/Ode on the Departing Year

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For other versions of this poem, see Ode to the Departing Year.

ODE

 

ON THE

 

DEPARTING YEAR.

 

STROPHE I.

SPIRIT who sweepest the wild Harp of Time,
It is most hard, with an untroubled Ear
Thy dark inwoven Harmonies to hear!
Yet, mine eye fixt on Heaven's unchanging clime,
Long had I listened, free from mortal fear,
With inward stillness, and submitted mind:
When lo! its folds far waving on the wind
I saw the train of the Departing Year!
Starting from my silent sadness
Then with no unholy madness,
Ere yet the entered cloud forbade my sight,
I rais'd th' impetuous song, and solemnized his flight.

STROPHE II.

Hither from the recent Tomb;
From the Prison's direr gloom;
From Poverty's heart-wasting languish;
From Distemper's midnight anguish:
Or where his two bright torches blending
Love illumines Manhood's maze;
Or where o'er cradled Infants bending
Hope has fix'd her wishful gaze:
Hither, in perplexed dance,
Ye Woes, and young-eyed Joys, advance!
By Time's wild harp, and by the Hand
Whose indefatigable Sweep
Forbids its fateful strings to sleep,
I bid you haste, a mixt tumultuous band!
From every private bower,
And each domestic hearth,
Haste for one solemn hour;
And with a loud and yet a louder voice
O'er the sore travail of the common earth
Weep and rejoice!
Seiz'd in sore travail and portentous birth

(Her eye-balls flashing a pernicious glare)
Sick Nature struggles! Hark—her pangs increase!
Her groans are horrible! But ô! most fair
The promis'd Twins, she bears—Equality and Peace!

EPODE.

I mark'd Ambition in his war-array:

I heard the mailed Monarch's troublous cry—
"Ah! whither does the Northern Conqueress^[1] stay?

"Groans not her Chariot o'er its onward way?
Fly, mailed Monarch, fly!
Stunn'd by Death's "twice mortal" mace
No more on Murder's lurid face
Th' insatiate Hag shall glote with drunken eye!
Manes of th' unnumbered Slain!
Ye that gasp'd on Warsaw's plain!
Ye that erst at Ismail's tower,
When human Ruin chok'd the streams,
Fell in Conquest's glutted hour
Mid Women's shrieks and Infant's screams;
Whose shrieks, whose screams were vain to stir
Loud-laughing, red-eyed Massacre!
Spirits of th' uncoffin'd Slain,
Sudden blasts of Triumph swelling
Oft at night, in misty train
Rush around her narrow Dwelling!
Th' exterminating Fiend is fled—
(Foul her Life and dark her Doom!)
Mighty Army of the Dead,
Dance, like Death-fires, round her Tomb!
Then with prophetic song relate
Each some scepter'd Murderer's fate!

When shall scepter'd Slaughter cease?
Awhile He crouch'd, O Victor France!
Beneath the light'ning of thy Lance,
With treacherous dalliance wooing Peace.^[2]
But soon up-springing from his dastard trance

The boastful, bloody Son of Pride betray'd
His Hatred of the blest and blessing Maid.
One cloud, O Freedom! cross'd thy orb of Light
And sure, be deem'd, that Orb was quench'd in night:
For still does Madness roam on Guilt's bleak dizzy height!

 

ANTISTROPHE I.

Departing Year! 'twas on no earthly shore

My Soul beheld thy Vision.^[3] Where, alone,
Voiceless and stern, before the Cloudy Throne
Aye Memory sits; there, garmented with gore,
With many an unimaginable groan
Thou storiedst thy sad Hours! Silence ensued:
Deep Silence o'er th' etherial Multitude,
Whose purple Locks with snow-white Glories shone.
Then, his eye wild ardors glancing,
From the choired Gods advancing,
The Spirit of the Earth made reverence meet
And stood up beautiful before the Cloudy Seat!

ANTISTROPHE II.

On every Harp, on every Tongue

While the mute Enchantment hung;
Like Midnight from a thundercloud,
Spake the sudden Spirit loud—
"Thou in stormy Blackness throning
"Love and uncreated Light,
"By the Earth's unsolac'd groaning
"Seize thy terrors. Arm of Might!
"By Belgium's corse-impeded flood!^[4]
"By Vendee steaming Brother's, blood!
"By Peace with proffer'd insult scar'd,
"Masked hate, and envying scorn!
"By Years of Havoc yet unborn;
"And Hunger's bosom to the frost-winds bar'd!
"But chief by Afric's wrongs
"Strange, horrible, and foul!
"By what deep Guilt belongs
"To the deaf Synod, "full of gifts and lies!"
"By Wealth's insensate Laugh! By Torture's Howl!
"Avenger, rise!

"For ever shall the bloody Island scowl?^[5]
"For aye unbroken, shall her cruel Bow
"Shoot Famine's arrows o'er thy ravag'd World?
"Hark! how wide Nature joins her groans below—
"Rise, God of Nature, rise! Why sleep thy Bolts unhurl'd?

EPODE II.

The Voice had ceas'd, the Phantoms fled,

Yet still I gasp'd and reel'd with dread.
And ever when the dream of night
Renews the vision to my sight,
Cold sweat-damps gather on my limbs,
My Ears throb hot, my eye-balls start,
My Brain with horrid tumult swims,
Wild is the Tempest of my Heart;
And my thick and struggling breath
Imitates the toil of Death!
No uglier agony confounds
The Soldier on the war-field spread,
When all foredone with toil and wounds
Death-like he dozes among heaps of Dead!
(The strife is o'er, the day-light fled,
And the Night-wind clamours hoarse;
See! the startful Wretch's head
Lies pillow'd on a Brother's Corse!)
O doom'd to fall, enslav'd and vile,
O Albion! O ray mother Isle!
Thy valleys, fair as Eden's bowers,

Glitter green with sunny showers;
Thy grassy Upland's gentle Swells
Echo to the Bleat of Flocks;
(Those grassy Hills, those glitt'ring Dells
Proudly ramparted with rocks)
And Ocean 'mid his uproar wild
Speaks safety to his Island-child.
Hence for many a fearless age
Has social Quiet lov'd thy shore;
Nor ever sworded Foeman's rage
Or sack'd thy towers, or stain'd thy fields with gore.
Disclaim'd of Heaven! mad Av'rice at thy side,
At coward distance, yet with kindling pride—
Safe 'mid thy herds and corn-fields thou hast stood,
And join'd the yell of Famine and of Blood.
All nations curse thee: and with eager wond'ring
Shall hear Destruction, like a vulture, scream!
Strange-eyed Destruction, who with many a dream
Of central flames thro' nether seas upthund'ring
Soothes her fierce solitude, yet (as she lies
Stretch'd on the marge of some fire-flashing fount
In the black chamber of a sulphur'd mount,)

If ever to her lidless dragon eyes,
O Albion! thy predestin'd ruins rise,
The Fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap,
Mutt'ring distemper'd triumph in her charmed sleep.

 

Away, my soul, away!
In vain, in vain, the birds of warning sing—
And hark! I hear the famin'd brood of prey
Flap their lank pennons on the groaning wind!
Away, my Soul, away!
I unpartaking of the evil thing,
With daily prayer, and daily toil
Soliciting my scant and blameless soil,
Have wail'd my country with a loud lament.
Now I recenter my immortal mind
In the long sabbath of high self-content;
Cleans'd from the fleshly Passions that bedim
God's Image, Sister of the Seraphim.

1. Northern Conqueress.——A Subsidiary Treaty had been just concluded; and Russia was to have furnished more effectual aid, than that of pious manifestoes, to the powers combined against France. I rejoice—not over the deceased Woman—(I never dared figure the Russian Sovereign to my imagination under the dear and venerable character of Woman——Woman, that complex term for Mother, Sister, Wife!) I rejoice, as at the disenshrining of a Dæmon! I rejoice, as at the extinction of the evil Principle impersonated! This very day, six years ago, the massacre of Ismail was perpetrated. Thirty thousand human beings. Men, Women & Children, murdered in cold blood, for no other crime, than that their Garrison had defended the place with perseverance and bravery! Why should I recall the poisoning of her husband, her iniquities in Poland, or her late unmotived attack on Persia; the desolating ambition of her public Life, or the libidinous excesses of her private Hours! I have no wish to qualify myself for the office of Historiographer to the King of Hell————! December 23, 1796.
2. With treacherous dalliance wooing Peace.—To juggle this easily-juggled people into better humour with the supplies (and themselves, perhaps, affrighted by the successes of the French,) our Ministry sent an ambassador to Paris to sue for Peace. The Supplies are granted: and in the mean time the Arch-duke Charles turns the scale of Victory on the Rhine, and Buonaparte is checked before Mantua. Straightways, our courtly Messenger is commanded to uncurl his lips, and propose to the lofty Republic to restore all its conquests, and to suffer England to retain all hers, (at least all her important ones) as the only terms of Peace, and the ultimatum of the negociation!
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   ταλαινα ΠΑΡΑΚΟΠΑ πρωτοπημων
   Æschyl. Ag. 230.
   The friends of Freedom in this country are idle. Some are timid; some are selfish; and many the torpedo touch of hopelessness has numbed into inactivity. We would fain hope, that (if the above account be accurate—it is only the French account) this dreadful instance of infatuation in our ministry will rouse them to one effort more; and that at one and the same time in our different great towns the people will be called on to think solemnly, and declare their thoughts fearlessly, by every method, which the remnant of the constitution allows.
3. My Soul beheld thy Vision.—i.e. Thy Image in a Vision.
4. Belgium's corse-impeded flood.—The Rhine.
5. —bloody island scowl?
   "In Europe the smoking villages of Flanders and the putrified fields of La Véndee—from Africa the unnumbered victims of a detestable Slave-trade—in Asia the desolated plains of Indostan and the million whom a rice-contracting Governor destroyed by famine—in America the recent enormities of our scalp-merchants—the four quarters of the globe groan beneath the intolerable iniquity of this nation!" Addresses to the People, p. 46.