"On The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci"

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

This on-line version of "On The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci" by Percy Bysshe Shelley is edited by Melissa J. Sites and Neil Fraistat. The text is taken from Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mary W. Shelley (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824), pages 139-40. Mary Shelley's transcription of the poem can be found in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. d.7, pp. 97-8, 100, reproduced in the Garland Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, volume 2. An evolving bibliography of critical works focused on this poem is now a part of the hypertext.

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ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI,

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

IT lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,

Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;

Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie

Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,

Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

The agonies of anguish and of death.

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;

Whereon the lineaments of that dead face

Are graven, till the characters be grown

Into itself, and thought no more can trace;

'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown

Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,

Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

And from its head as from one body grow,

As [    ] grass out of a watery rock,

Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow

And their long tangles in each other lock,

And with unending involutions shew

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock

The torture and the death within, and saw

The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft

Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;

Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise

Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,

And he comes hastening like a moth that hies

After a taper; and the midnight sky

Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;

For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare

Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air

Become a [      ] and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there-

A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,

Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

Florence, 1819.

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shrine is corrected to shine in 1847. back

Mary Shelley gives these instead of those in her editions of 1839.back

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