The Sunset by Percy Bysshe Shelley — Read

There late was One within whose subtle being, / As light and wind within some delicate cloud / That fades amid the blue noon's burning sky, / Genius and death contended. None may know / The sweetness of the joy which made his breath / Fail, like the trances of the summer air, / When, with the Lady of his love, who then / First knew the unreserve of mingled being, / He walked along the pathway of a field / Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er, / But to the west was open to the sky. / There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold / Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points / Of the far level grass and nodding flowers / And the old dandelion's hoary beard, / And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay / On the brown massy woods-and in the east / The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose / Between the black trunks of the crowded trees, / While the faint stars were gathering overhead. - / ‘Is it not strange, Isabel,' said the youth, / ‘I never saw the sun? We will walk here / To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.'

That night the youth and lady mingled lay / In love and sleep-but when the morning came / The lady found her lover dead and cold. / Let none believe that God in mercy gave / That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild, / But year by year lived on-in truth I think / Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles, / And that she did not die, but lived to tend / Her aged father, were a kind of madness, / If madness 'tis to be unlike the world. / For but to see her were to read the tale / Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts / Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief; - / Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan: / Her eyelashes were worn away with tears, / Her lips and cheeks were like things dead-so pale; / Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins / And weak articulations might be seen / Day's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self / Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day, / Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!