Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/397

vi

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow

Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate
Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:
A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;
In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.45
If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate
Can shrive you of that sin.—if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.

THE WITCH OF ATLAS
i

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth

Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,50
Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learned rhyme,
A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain55
Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

ii

Her mother was one of the Atlantides:

The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden
In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden60
In the warm shadow of her loveliness;—
He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden
The chamber of gray rock in which she lay—
She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

iii

'Tis said, she first was^[1] changed into a vapour,65

And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,
Like splendour-winged moths about a taper,
Round the red west when the sun dies in it:
And then into a meteor, such as caper
On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit:70
Then, into one of those mysterious stars
Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars.

iv

Ten times the Mother of the Months had bent

Her bow beside the folding-star, and bidden
With that bright sign the billows to indent75
The sea-deserted sand—like children chidden,
At her command they ever came and went—
Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden
Took shape and motion: with the living form
Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm.80

1. first was transcript, B., was first ed. 1824.