RECOLLECTED PLEASURES

From “Letter to Maria Gisborne”, Leghorn, July I, 1820

THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet’s tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralist call worm,
Sit spinning still round his decaying from,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought-
No net of words in garish colors wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day-
But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,
Which in those hearts which most remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.

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You are not here! the quaint witch Memory sees
In vacant chairs, your absent images,
And points where once you sat, and now should be
But are not.-I demand if ever we
Shall meet as then we met;- and she replies;
Veiling in awe her second-sighted eyes;
“I know the past alone –but summon home
My sister Hope,-she speaks of all to come.”
But I, an old diviner, who knew well
Every false verse of that sweet oracle,
Turned to the sad enchantress once again,
And sought a respite from my gentle pain,
Of our communion-how on the sea-shore
We watcht the ocean and the sky together,
Under the roof of blue Italian weather;-

…………………………………………………


Or how
You listened to some interrupted flow
Of visionary rhyme,-in joy and pain
Strtuck from the inmost fountains of my brain,
With little skill perhaps;- or how we sought
Those deepest wells of passion or of thought
Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years,
Staining their sacred waters with our tears;
Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed!

………………………………………………..

Thou wert then to me
As in a nurse –when inarticulately
A child would talk as its grown parents do.
If living winds the rapid clouds pursue,
If hawks chase doves through the ethereal way,
Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey,
Why should not we rouse with the spirit’s blast
Out of the forest of the pathless past
These recollected pleasures?

Percy Busshe Shelley.