On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery
Lines:40Movement:Romanticism
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 lieLoveliness like a shadow, from which shine,Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,The agonies of anguish and of death. Yet it is less the horror than the graceWhich turns the gazer's spirit into stone,Whereon the lineaments of that dead faceAre graven, till the characters be grownInto itself, and thought no more can trace;'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrownAthwart 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 flowAnd their long tangles in each other lock,And with unending involutions showTheir mailed radiance, as it were to mockThe torture and the death within, and sawThe solid air with many a ragged jaw. And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eftPeeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereftOf sense, has flitted with a mad surpriseOut of the cave this hideous light had cleft,And he comes hastening like a moth that hiesAfter a taper; and the midnight skyFlares, a light more dread than obscurity. 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;For from the serpents gleams a brazen glareKindled by that inextricable error,Which makes a thrilling vapour of the airBecome a ... and ever-shifting mirrorOf all the beauty and the terror there--A woman's countenance, with serpent-locks,Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.