An Exhortation

Percy Bysshe Shelley - 1792-1822

Chameleons feed on light and air:
   Poets' food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
   Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
   Would they ever change their hue
   As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
      Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,
   As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
   In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
   Where love is not, poets do:
   Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
      That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
   A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
   Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
   As their brother lizards are.
   Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
      Oh, refuse the boon!

This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on August 4, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.

Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth,-- And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?

49 Go thou to Rome,—at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation's nakedness Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread; 50 And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand; And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, Pavilioning the dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory, doth stand Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath, A field is spread, on which a newer band Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death, Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath. 51 Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned Its charge to each; and if the seal is set, Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. What Adonais is, why fear we to become? 52 The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled!—Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death. Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone; Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, As [ ] grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions shew Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there— A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

Poems

An Exhortation

More by Percy Bysshe Shelley

To the Moon [fragment]

Adonais, 49-52, [Go thou to Rome]

On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery

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Poems

An Exhortation

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