Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/645

And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying. 5
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year, 10
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

II.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone 15
To his dwelling.
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black and gray;
Let your light sisters play—
Ye, follow the bier 20
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.

 

THE WANING MOON

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.]

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East, 5
A white and shapeless mass—

 

TO THE MOON

[Published (I) by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824, (II) by W. M. Rossetti, Complete P. W., 1870.]

I.
 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 5
That finds no object worth its constancy?

II.
 Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,
That gazes on thee till in thee it pities . . . .