The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (ed. Hutchinson, 1914)/The Sunset
For works with similar titles, see Sunset.
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1816
THE SUNSET
[Written at Bishopsgate, 1816 (spring). Published in full in the Posthumous Poems, 1824. Lines 9-20, and 28-42, appeared in Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book, 1823, under the titles, respectively, of Sunset, From an Unpublished Poem, and Grief. A Fragment.]
There late was One within whose subtle being,As light and wind within some delicate cloudThat fades amid the blue noon's burning sky,Genius and death[1] contended. None may knowThe sweetness of the joy which made his breath5Fail, like the trances of the summer air,When, with the Lady of his love, who thenFirst knew the unreserve of mingled being,He walked along the pathway of a fieldWhich to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er,10But to the west was open to the sky.There now the sun had sunk, but lines of goldHung on the ashen clouds, and on the pointsOf the far level grass and nodding flowersAnd the old dandelion's hoary beard,15And, mingled with the shades of twilight, layOn the brown massy woods—and in the eastThe broad and burning moon lingeringly roseBetween the black trunks of the crowded trees,While the faint stars were gathering overhead.—20'Is it not strange, Isabel,' said the youth,'I never saw the sun? We will walk[2] hereTo-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.'
That night the youth and lady mingled layIn love and sleep—but when the morning came25The lady found her lover dead and cold.Let none believe that God in mercy gaveThat stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,But year by year lived on—in truth I thinkHer gentleness and patience and sad smiles,30And that she did not die, but lived to tendHer agèd father, were a kind of madness,If madness 'tis to be unlike the world.For but to see her were to read the taleWoven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts35Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;—Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan[3]:Her eyelashes were worn[4] away with tears,Her lips and cheeks were like things dead—so pale; Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins40And weak articulations might be seenDay's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead selfWhich one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!
'Inheritor of more than earth can give,45Passionless calm and silence unreproved,Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,And are the uncomplaining things they seem,Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were—Peace!'50This was the only moan she ever made.