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"Listening To My Sweet Pipings"
by JW Waterhouse, painted 1911
Hymn of Pan
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
From the forests and highlands
We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands
Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings.
The wind in the leaves and the rushes,
The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,
The cicale above the lime,
And the lizard below in the grass,
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,
Listening to my sweet pipings.
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and Sylvans and Fauns,
And the Nymphs of the woods and
the waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend and follow,
Were silent with love, as you now Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven - and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth, -
And then I changed my pipings, -
Singing how, down the vale of Maenalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then
we bleed;
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If age or envy had not frozen
your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
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