[POEM] Percy Shelley to Teresa Viviani by Andre Demers

A sequence of twenty-two sonnets in the voice of the poet to the imprisoned Italian noblewoman who inspired his last great work.

I.

I hope, Emilia, that you will forgive
That I have used your story for my verses.
Prithee absolve me; I, whom love coerces,
Have never known another way to live
Than for the siblings of my heart. The lines
Are all for you, though soon for all the world,
So when you see the letter that is curled
Twice at the end, know ’tis yourself who signs,
For you have authorised all I have written
Even as the Sun has bade spring’s flowers open.
Now something in me is fixed that had been broken;
Thanks for your help. I am no longer smitten,
And I look on my song to you with eyes
Sadder than I can say, since our friendship dies.

II.

It dies because we let it, because we die
Ourselves as fast as seasons, and renew
Our changing circle with replacements, who
Show the whole range of noble spirits. I
Have been enriched to know you. Now I cry,
Because I have not sway enough to save you
From the fate that you must love, though it enslave you,
Because my poem is powerless to decry
The prevailing order of custom, law, and state;
And though I like the way they pain me now,
The relish of the words will soon abate,
And I will wonder how I could avow
Kinship so easily, awake till late,
Thinking that soon we could together sail
Into the East and write our future’s tale.

III.

O lady mine, please know I would have done it,
Modelled the vessel that brings liberty,
Ordered it built, with all the fittings on it,
And readied it in the night for you to flee
Your captors. Yes, to call them so is fit,
Just as I called you a creature that must be
Claiming some glorious perch or in the sky
At leisure to be accompanied by what birds
Remember your sweet voice, how they chanced by
You in this life. So many were the words
That Dante wrote without the chance to spy
Into his Bice’s soul, and knew not why
He should at once love all of her, as I
Knew from the first that you came from on high.

IV.

But family prohibits that our sails
Should be set for our deepest heart’s desire,
Though it might be that we should never tire
Of being friends, and sharing all our ills,
And all that from imagination spills.
O, that it could be so! The world entire
Must be unkind to friendship. None inquire
Of the pure quality that ever fills
The conversation of all kindred minds,
But station and sex and age divide, intrude,
And society’s opinion cruelly binds
Our tongues, that have not shared true solitude,
Though letters, poems, and whispers were a kind
Of solitude that Claire or Mary might include.

V.

How have we overlooked how long it takes
To know another well, before we spoke
With the same openness as placid lakes,
And their delight of a refreshing soak.
How our first meetings could in me provoke
The kind of intuition that awakes
The soul to care for everybody’s sakes,
Chiefly your own. The thought of you would stoke
The fire of my hate of all injustice.
How has it made me pine for wealth and power,
That I might buy you lodging faraway,
Since with your life’s direction you would trust us.
May you be followed by some truer vower,
Whose deeds are nobler than all I can write or say.

VI.

The Epipsychidion can never be
Matched in the deed, as it dreams of feats divine,
Like loving universally yet equally,
Whether it make calumnious sorrow mine
Or give my closest ones a hate for me.
Those words are strong but lies, O every line,
But their past truth, that lived so rapidly
The fortnight of their gestation, had the Nine
Most specially convoked to see their birth,
In a river I was no fool to try to stop,
But grateful for the alchemy and mirth,
Though it did not make my fever for you drop.
Yet slow time can, long walking of the earth,
Or a new love, that is an old love’s only swap.

VII.

I will not sign it with my poet’s name,
Or I will sign it his who never was, but died
Out in the sea, and was washed in by the tide,
With none to kiss him ere decay would claim
The beauty of his face. ’Tis not for shame
That I must be anonymous, but pride,
For I have done what none can ever chide,
None but yourself. Lady, am I to blame?
Was it too bold, and did it rankle in you
As the obsequies of the arrogant and vile,
As the untaught song of a boy younger than you?
Was it overly dolce et nuovo in its style,
That none would read but think I sought to win you?
Was I not well-intentioned, ever void of guile?

VIII.

I spoke the language of your soul before
Italiano coursed melodiously
Over my tongue, which I freed by the sea
Of people, listening like a child for
Each word, that would be beautiful evermore,
Because all things are fair that they convey,
And sweet a voice’s sound with naught to say.
I scorned the study of grammar. What would pour
From your lips and eyes was more than any book
Could teach, without a tutor wise and kind
Like you, my Diotima by a brook
Whose quiet warble stimulates the mind,
Without distracting it, as would a look
At your angelic eyes that do not mean to blind.

IX.

I could have done nine hundred lines, but I
Found in six hundred the sum of what I sought
From writing, help in thinking my heart’s thought,
At least these three that thou mayst ne’er belie:
I love thee, and I thank thee, and I am sorry,
No, not for all those words, but how I failed
To have been born someone who could have sailed
Away with you, less far in my life’s story,
Younger and closer to you with no bars
To easy flight; someone who fought for change
In youth, without being aged, to make it strange
That parents should be cruel. My memoirs
Will tell of you one day, when we are old,
And the song has mellowed in memory to gold.

X.

Madonna, the verses will be rendered all
In the tongue of Dante, and my master Love.
Why? Italiano surely will improve,
As with true genius, the original,
And terza rima happily will sprawl
My stanzas’ petals, that the pistils of new rhyme
May have their pollen and bear fruit in their time.
Know that I have even yet begun to scrawl
The Italianising, that you may read it first.
It is so clear and full of grace, and yet
Unfitting to be called better or worse;
But still your partial judgement has not met
It, that I might be swayed by fellow-feeling,
That ever tells me what my ear is not revealing.

XI.

Our honoured Milton put those words of yours
That I may choose for a dear epigraph
Into the mouth of Satan. ’Tis a laugh
That makes the mind its Heaven, and then spurs
The Hell within to exit through the doors
That goodwill opes, that evil may say goodnight,
For it can only live in our own sight.
May you know peace always despite the wars
That rage around you; may your inner might
Keep every care from tainting your delight;
If you must be anxious, let it be in hope;
If you must dwell on the past, dwell yearningly,
Until the present is your only scope,
And patience, love, and courage have taught you to be free.

XII.

How did we know each other in the vale
Where souls are made? We merely had to look
At our eyes’ mirror, opening the veil
That the prophetic breaths of our mouth shook,
To know that we were twins. There was no nook
That could hide us from each other. Were you male,
We would not be more akin by seeming so,
But ’tis our difference that joins us to
Each other, that completes and makes us new.
Now I must lose myself since you must go,
To your new life and to that someone, who
Can only be less than you deserve. Say no,
And may your family’s mercy fall on you,
Plucking you not in your bloom that you may longer grow.

XIII.

Though you are your own highest authority,
The world still holds that all must have a master;
So for new bonds you trade captivity,
Though a wrong spouse is the greatest disaster.
But if it were your choice, would you choose faster
Than they who choose for you expediently?
Or would you never choose, there being no man
Whose soul can match your own in strength and beauty?
I thought, “We will find him for her if we can,
Someone with virtue for his highest duty,
And brains enough to match her intellect.”
There are none such, and we have carefully checked.
No one can string the bow, and thus you may
Be single as a bride of God until your dying day.

XIV.

When you were born, I would have been the age
That Dante was when first he saw his Lady.
I was so innocent in life’s early stage;
Am I not so, now I have known what shady
Woods and enchantresses the world can hold?
You were so ready to think me more than human,
And so I thought you of an angel’s mould,
One trapped below that my lamp could illumine,
And light your own. The way I think of you
Is like the endless circling of the moth;
Soon may the flame be dead, the anguish through,
And our sight be clear to see the living truth,
That I am not the hero you have dreamed,
Nor you the faultless damozel you have seemed.

XV.

By the nearest way, sweet words, you also had
Sought to express what could not be expressed;
Though it must fail, a piece of verse fails best;
So I have tried my utmost and am glad,
And I only hope that you will not be sad
Till the forgetting of your long-lost brother,
Who you have only found to lose another
Time; ’tis the last, and all things that we clad
Ourselves in, whether clothes or words or places,
Will breathe of us still, but soon hold other scents,
And clouds and bedsheets tell of other faces,
When sleep no longer curtains all torments,
And we wonder of the meaning of our dreams,
If in them we both have travelled to each other as moonbeams.

XVI.

The thought of you, so often and so long,
Is like a heartbeat dripping drops of pain
On wounds I cannot find. Though it is wrong,
I cannot help but ache for you in vain.
I have not learned the peace of selfishness;
My poems know more of happiness than I,
And I have striven to be a saviour less
Out of my courage than my agony.
I am so grateful for my suffering
That I will never be assured by my
Right to my death if life must only sting,
For to the sorrowful beauty is ever nigh,
And we can always will to overcome.
What might we make of this in time to come?

XVII.

Though you have been the Sun to me, you are
Receding fast. Soon you must disappear,
Though like truth’s martyr I have held that star
Must be of all the central heavenly sphere,
I now recant that you are such a thing,
Since now your light can no more feed my woods,
And none of its warmth can make my birds to sing,
And the epiphany like lightning floods
My thoughts, that I have looked in the wrong place
To find the perfect being, here on earth,
Who never can be found in a human face
But only in ideality has birth.
The heavens are wide, and we must have our distance,
For even now I feel your gravity’s persistence.

XVIII.

As you send me sweet-basil and mignonette
Telling of love and health, old enemies,
I send you a white rose that must displease.
By thorns and poison ivy ’tis beset,
That you may know that those who for love fret
Will grow so weak as to contract disease;
So in life’s interest my pen must cease,
And this flight of fancy I must now forget.
But I will not burn it, as I must be free
To finish or remember it someday,
And wonder who he was who could agree
To write such things. Would he not also say
Such passionate words in person innocently,
Though it were nothing more than idle play?

XIX.

How have I thought myself excused from all
Reproofs of my wayward passion heaven sent,
Simply because one sweet soul would not call
The violence of it less than innocent,
In this would err, in this would summon sorrow,
Seeing no good or evil anywhere,
But only human beings. On the morrow
I will be new, and find in nature’s air
The joys that I with you so wished to share,
And I will await the graceful swallows’ mirth,
And the light that flashes on the water’s face
As fast as the wind and rain are bade to race,
Thinking it like the stars when all on earth
Is dark, and their profusest gleams have birth.

XX.

Though my quick love is such as cannot die,
A night comes on it, and it now must sleep,
Watched over by the mother of the months
Who has so patient been. She knows that I
Can never feel as when we first would leap
To gulp down life. If such love comes but once,
How can I seek it still in only her?
She saved me once, and being saved, I sought
The general salvation to ensure,
Like a fanatic treasuring one thought,
That all the world may soon accept his creed,
Whose doctrine is that there can be no deed
That is both vile and done in love. But how
Could it be love, that seems like folly now?

XXI.

I wanted to teach you English, that you might
Read o’er that history of my secret heart
That I have bared for all, yet veiled in art.
How much I would have said to bring new light
On every word I chose, to borrow might
From those who used them first and gave a part
Of their bright life to them. ’Twould be but sport
For me to render them first; I would delight
That you may understand them all the faster,
And in their native sounds, so easily
Breathed out, as they were summoned by Desire
That persevering Will has come to master.
But may a swifter genius come on thee,
And I be proved a minor versifier.

XXII.

How much I would have said if there were time,
If we could walk together till the sun
Purpled over the hills, and day was done,
Feeling no longing for its vanished prime.
Freedom is bringing a self-chosen clime
To every corner of the world; not one
Is as mild as you, a breeze that now I shun,
A theme on which I can no longer rhyme.
All mild things pain me now to tell of you;
All food is savourless, all water bland,
Till I have let you go. Forget me too;
My sister, if you dare to understand
That I am with you always, say “good night,”
And I with buona notte will such truth requite.

—S.

Originally submitted as an entry in the Ninth Heaven Witty Poets Competition.