Explore "Ode to Liberty" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A glorious people vibrated again / The lightning of the nations: Liberty / From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er Spain, / Scattering contagious fire into the sky, / Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay, / And in the rapid plumes of song / Clothed itself, sublime and strong; / As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among, / Hovering inverse o'er its accustomed prey; / Till from its station in the Heaven of fame / The Spirit's whirlwind rapped it, and the ray / Of the remotest sphere of living flame / Which paves the void was from behind it flung, / As foam from a ship's swiftness, when there came / A voice out of the deep: I will record the same.
The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth: / The burning stars of the abyss were hurled / Into the depths of Heaven. The daedal earth, / That island in the ocean of the world, / Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air: / But this divinest universe / Was yet a chaos and a curse, / For thou wert not: but, power from worst producing worse, / The spirit of the beasts was kindled there, / And of the birds, and of the watery forms, / And there was war among them, and despair / Within them, raging without truce or terms: / The bosom of their violated nurse / Groaned, for beasts warred on beasts, and worms on worms, / And men on men; each heart was as a hell of storms.