Explore "The Cyclops" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
SILENUS. / ULYSSES. / CHORUS OF SATYRS. / THE CYCLOPS.
SILENUS: / O Bacchus, what a world of toil, both now / And ere these limbs were overworn with age, / Have I endured for thee! First, when thou fled'st / The mountain-nymphs who nursed thee, driven afar / By the strange madness Juno sent upon thee; / Then in the battle of the Sons of Earth, / When I stood foot by foot close to thy side, / No unpropitious fellow-combatant, / And, driving through his shield my winged spear, / Slew vast Enceladus. Consider now, / Is it a dream of which I speak to thee? / By Jove it is not, for you have the trophies! / And now I suffer more than all before. / For when I heard that Juno had devised / A tedious voyage for you, I put to sea / With all my children quaint in search of you, / And I myself stood on the beaked prow / And fixed the naked mast; and all my boys / Leaning upon their oars, with splash and strain / Made white with foam the green and purple sea,- / And so we sought you, king. We were sailing / Near Malea, when an eastern wind arose, / And drove us to this waste Aetnean rock; / The one-eyed children of the Ocean God, / The man-destroying Cyclopses, inhabit, / On this wild shore, their solitary caves, / And one of these, named Polypheme, has caught us / To be his slaves; and so, for all delight / Of Bacchic sports, sweet dance and melody, / We keep this lawless giant's wandering flocks. / My sons indeed on far declivities, / Young things themselves, tend on the youngling sheep, / But I remain to fill the water-casks, / Or sweeping the hard floor, or ministering / Some impious and abominable meal / To the fell Cyclops. I am wearied of it! / And now I must scrape up the littered floor / With this great iron rake, so to receive / My absent master and his evening sheep / In a cave neat and clean. Even now I see / My children tending the flocks hitherward. / Ha! what is this? are your Sicinnian measures / Even now the same, as when with dance and song / You brought young Bacchus to Althaea's halls?