Explore "Queen Mab" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How wonderful is Death, / Death and his brother Sleep! / One, pale as yonder waning moon / With lips of lurid blue; / The other, rosy as the morn / When throned on ocean's wave / It blushes o'er the world: / Yet both so passing wonderful!
Hath then the gloomy Power / Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres / Seized on her sinless soul? / Must then that peerless form / Which love and admiration cannot view / Without a beating heart, those azure veins / Which steal like streams along a field of snow, / That lovely outline, which is fair / As breathing marble, perish? / Must putrefaction's breath / Leave nothing of this heavenly sight / But loathsomeness and ruin? / Spare nothing but a gloomy theme, / On which the lightest heart might moralize? / Or is it only a sweet slumber / Stealing o'er sensation, / Which the breath of roseate morning / Chaseth into darkness? / Will Ianthe wake again, / And give that faithful bosom joy / Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch / Light, life and rapture from her smile?