Explore "The Daemon of the World" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How wonderful is Death, / Death and his brother Sleep! / One pale as yonder wan and horned moon, / With lips of lurid blue, / The other glowing like the vital morn, / When throned on ocean's wave / It breathes over the world: / Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!
Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton, / Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres, / To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne / Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form, / Which love and admiration cannot view / Without a beating heart, whose azure veins / Steal like dark streams along a field of snow, / Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed / In light of some sublimest mind, decay? / Nor putrefaction's breath / Leave aught of this pure spectacle / But loathsomeness and ruin? - / Spare aught but a dark theme, / On which the lightest heart might moralize? / Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers / Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids / To watch their own repose? / Will they, when morning's beam / Flows through those wells of light, / Seek far from noise and day some western cave, / Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds / A lulling murmur weave? - / Ianthe doth not sleep / The dreamless sleep of death: / Nor in her moonlight chamber silently / Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb, / Or mark her delicate cheek / With interchange of hues mock the broad moon, / Outwatching weary night, / Without assured reward. / Her dewy eyes are closed; / On their translucent lids, whose texture fine / Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below / With unapparent fire, / The baby Sleep is pillowed: / Her golden tresses shade / The bosom's stainless pride, / Twining like tendrils of the parasite / Around a marble column.