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On the castle of chillon

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart—
The heart which love of Thee alone can bind.
And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd,
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon! thy prison is a holy place
And thy sad floor an altar, for 'twas trod,
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.

• This poem is another sonnet, 14 lines of iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of ABBA,ACCA,DEDEDE.
• where one lives
• placed in chains, imprisoned
• Note the strong use of alliteration in this line.
• a castle in Geneva where a sixteenth-century Swiss patriot was imprisoned for resisting the French
• François Bonivard (c.1493 – 1570), the Swiss patriot imprisoned in Chillon

1. Notes
2. Reading Pointers for Sharper Insights
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
   1. Inroduction
   2. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Seven Parts
   3. Kubla Khan
4. William Blake
   1. Introduction
   2. The Lamb
   3. The Tyger
   4. The Chimney Sweeper
   5. The Chimney Sweeper
   6. A Poison Tree
5. William Wordsworth
   1. Inroduction
   2. Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798
   3. My Heart Leaps Up
   4. Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
   5. The Lucy Poems
      1. Strange fits of Passion have I Known
      2. She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
      3. I travelled among unknown men
      4. Three years she grew in sun and shower
      5. A slumber did my spirit seal
6. George Gordon, Lord Byron
   1. Introduction
   2. On the castle of chillon
   3. She walk in beauty
   4. Prometheus
7. Percy Bysshe Shelley
   1. Introduction
   2. Ozymandias
   3. Ode to the West Wind
   4. Adonais
8. John Keats
   1. Introduction
   2. To Hope
   3. Ode on Melancholy
   4. Ode to a Nightingale
9. Copyright