Explore "A Dialogue" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
DEATH: / For my dagger is bathed in the blood of the brave, / I come, care-worn tenant of life, from the grave, / Where Innocence sleeps ‘neath the peace-giving sod, / And the good cease to tremble at Tyranny's nod; / I offer a calm habitation to thee,- / Say, victim of grief, wilt thou slumber with me? / My mansion is damp, cold silence is there, / But it lulls in oblivion the fiends of despair; / Not a groan of regret, not a sigh, not a breath, / Dares dispute with grim Silence the empire of Death. / I offer a calm habitation to thee,- / Say, victim of grief, wilt thou slumber with me?
MORTAL: / Mine eyelids are heavy; my soul seeks repose, / It longs in thy cells to embosom its woes, / It longs in thy cells to deposit its load, / Where no longer the scorpions of Perfidy goad,- / Where the phantoms of Prejudice vanish away, / And Bigotry's bloodhounds lose scent of their prey. / Yet tell me, dark Death, when thine empire is o'er, / What awaits on Futurity's mist-covered shore?