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Home  »  Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century  »  Emily Pfeiffer (1841–1890)


Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Sonnets. IX.–X. Shelley

Emily Pfeiffer (1841–1890)

  • It will be remembered that Pisa, associated as it is with Shelley, was the scene of the life and labours of Galileo.


    • I.
    THERE lies betwixt dead Pisa and the sea

    A haunted forest, with a heart so deep,

    That none could sit beneath its pines to weep,

    But it would throb for them mysteriously.

    Here, in this place I dreamed there met with me

    The spirit who his part in it doth keep,

    Albeit his starry orbit now hath sweep

    As vast as Galileo’s, if more free.

    He drew me on to where the hollow beat

    Of waves upon a shore seemed to my mind

    The moan of a remorseful soul, to meet

    The homicidal Sea, whose passion blind

    Had slain him; as it writhed about my feet

    Methought his spirit past me on the wind.

    II.
    Wild sea, that drank his life to quench the thirst

    Thou had’st of him; and all devouring Fire,

    Who made his body thine with love as dire;

    Air pregnate with his breath, and thou accurst,

    Mother of Sorrows, Earth, whose claim is first

    Upon thy children dead, who from the pyre

    Received his dust,—what did his soul require—

    Wring from ye—ere your Protean bonds he burst?

    Perchance ye failed to reach him, and he hath

    O’er-leapt the rounds of change the earthlier dead

    May weary through, nor needing Lethean bath

    To speed anew his soul’s etherial tread,

    Hath left the elements, spurned from his path,

    To challenge grosser spirits in his stead.


    Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD