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Home  »  The World’s Best Poetry  »  To Ianthe, Sleeping

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

Descriptive Poems: II. Nature and Art

To Ianthe, Sleeping

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

From “Queen Mab,” I.

HOW wonderful is Death!

Death and his brother Sleep!

One, pale as yonder waning moon,

With lips of lurid blue;

The other, rosy as the morn

When, throned on ocean’s wave,

It blushes o’er the world:

Yet both so passing wonderful!

Hath then the gloomy Power,

Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,

Seized on her sinless soul?

Must then that peerless form

Which love and admiration cannot view

Without a beating heart, those azure veins

Which steal like streams along a field of snow,

That lovely outline, which is fair

As breathing marble, perish?

Must putrefaction’s breath

Leave nothing of this heavenly sight

But loathsomeness and ruin?

Spare nothing but a gloomy theme,

On which the lightest heart might moralize?

Or is it only a sweet slumber

Stealing o’er sensation,

Which the breath of roseate morning

Chaseth into darkness?

Will Ianthe wake again,

And give that faithful bosom joy,

Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch

Light, life, and rapture from her smile?

Yes! she will wake again,

Although her glowing limbs are motionless,

And silent those sweet lips,

Once breathing eloquence

That might have soothed a tiger’s rage,

Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror.

Her dewy eyes are closed,

And on their lids, whose texture fine

Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,

The baby Sleep is pillowed:

Her golden tresses shade

The bosom’s stainless pride,

Curling like tendrils of the parasite

Around a marble column.

*****

A gentle start convulsed Ianthe’s frame:

Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;

Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained.

She looked around in wonder, and beheld

Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,

Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,

And the bright-beaming stars

That through the casement shone.