Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MARENGHI, by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MARENGHI, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Let those who pine in pride or in revenge
Last Line: The thought of his own country ...
Subject(s): Italy; Italians


I

LET those who pine in pride or in revenge,
Or think that ill for ill should be repaid,
Or barter wrong for wrong, until the exchange
Ruins the merchants of such thriftless trade,
Visit the tower of Vado, and unlearn
Such bitter faith beside Marenghi's urn.

II

A massy tower yet overhangs the town,
A scattered group of ruined dwellings now.

III

Another scene ere wise Etruria knew
Its second ruin through internal strife,
And tyrants through the breach of discord threw
The chain which binds and kills. As death to life,
As winter to fair flowers (though some be poison)
So Monarchy succeeds to Freedom's foison.

IV

In Pisa's church a cup of sculptured gold
Was brimming with the blood of feuds forsworn
At sacrament; more holy ne'er of old
Etrurians mingled with the shades forlorn
Of moon-illumined forests.

V

And reconciling factions wet their lips
With that dread wine, and swear to keep each spirit
Undarkened by their country's last eclipse.
VI

Was Florence the liberticide? that band
Of free and glorious brothers who had planted,
Like a green isle 'mid AEthiopian sand,
A nation amid slaveries, disenchanted
Of many impious faiths -- wise, just -- do they,
Does Florence, gorge the sated tyrants' prey?

VII

O foster-nurse of man's abandoned glory,
Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendor;
Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story,
As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender.
The light-invested angel Poesy
Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee.

VIII

And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught
By loftiest meditations; marble knew
The sculptor's fearless soul, and as he wrought,
The grace of his own power and freedom grew.
And more than all, heroic, just, sublime,
Thou wert among the false -- was this thy crime?

IX

Yes; and on Pisa's marble walls the twine
Of direst weeds hangs garlanded; the snake
Inhabits its wrecked palaces; -- in thine
A beast of subtler venom now doth make
Its lair, and sits amid their glories overthrown,
And thus thy victim's fate is as thine own.

X

The sweetest flowers are ever frail and rare,
And love and freedom blossom but to wither;
And good and ill like vines entangled are,
So that their grapes may oft be plucked together.
Divide the vintage ere thou drink, then make
Thy heart rejoice for dead Marenghi's sake.

XI

No record of his crime remains in story,
But if the morning bright as evening shone,
It was some high and holy deed, by glory
Pursued into forgetfulness, which won
From the blind crowd he made secure and free
The patriot's meed, toil, death, and infamy.

XII

For when by sound of trumpet was declared
A price upon his life, and there was set
A penalty of blood on all who shared
So much of water with him as might wet
His lips, which speech divided not, he went
Alone, as you may guess, to banishment.

XIII

Amid the mountains, like a hunted beast,
He hid himself, and hunger, toil, and cold,
Month after month endured; it was a feast
Whene'er he found those globes of deepred gold
Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,
Suspended in their emerald atmosphere

XIV

And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,
Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,
All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,
And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,
And where the huge and speckled aloe made,
Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,

XV

He housed himself. There is a point of strand
Near Vado's tower and town; and on one side
The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,
Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide,
And on the other creeps eternally,
Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea.

XVI

Here the earth's breath is pestilence, and few
But things whose nature is at war with life --
Snakes and ill worms -- endure its mortal dew.
The trophies of the clime's victorious strife --
White bones, and locks of dun and yellow hair,
And ringed horns which buffaloes did wear --

XVII

And at the utmost point stood there
The relics of a weed-inwoven cot,
Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer
Had lived seven days there; the pursuit was hot
When he was cold. The birds that were his grave
Fell dead upon their feast in Vado's wave.

XVIII

There must have lived within Marenghi's heart
That fire, more warm and bright than life or hope,
(Which to the martyr makes his dungeon...
More joyous than the heaven's majestic cope
To his oppressor), warring with decay, --
Or he could ne'er have lived years, day by day.

XIX

Nor was his state so lone as you might think.
He had tamed every newt and snake and toad,
And every seagull which sailed down to drink
Those ere the death-mist went abroad.
And each one, with peculiar talk and play,
Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.

XX

And the marsh-meteors, like tame beasts, at night
Came licking with blue tongues his veined feet;
And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright,
In many entangled figures quaint and sweet
To some enchanted music they would dance --
Until they vanished at the first moonglance.

XXI

He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed
The summer dewdrops in the golden dawn;
And, ere the hoarfrost vanished, he could read
Its pictured footprints, as on spots of lawn
Its delicate brief touch in silence weaves
The likeness of the wood's remembered leaves.

XXII

And many a fresh Spring morn would he a waken,
While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron
Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken
Of mountains and blue isles which did environ
With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea, --
And feel liberty.

XXIII

And in the moonless nights, when the dim ocean
Heaved underneath the heaven, ...
Starting from dreams ...
Communed with the immeasurable world;
And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated,
Till his mind grew like that it contemplated.

XXIV

His food was the wild fig and strawberry;
The milky pine-nuts which the autumnal blast
Shakes into the tall grass; and such small fry
As from the sea by winter-storms are cast;
And the coarse bulbs of iris flowers he found
Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.

XXV

And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made
His solitude less dark. When memory came
(For years gone by leave each a deepening shade),
His spirit basked in its internal flame, --
As, when the black storm hurries round at night
The fisher basks beside his red firelight.

XXVI

Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and errors,
Like billows unawakened by the wind,
Slept in Marenghi still; but that all terrors,
Weakness, and doubt, had withered in his mind.
His couch

XXVII

And, when he saw beneath the sunset's planet
A black ship walk over the crimson ocean, --
Its pennons streaming on the blasts that fan it,
Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,
Like the dark ghost of the unburied even
Striding across the orange-colored heaven, --

XXVIII

The thought of his own kind who made the soul
Which sped that winged shape through night and day, --
The thought of his own country ...





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