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Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822

Shelley was an intense young man at Oxford when he wrote and published, in 1811, a pamphlet, "On the Necessity of Atheism"; he was expelled on account of it. Shelley was very much alive to the social and political questions of the time. He eventually settled in Italy, where his mature works were written, among them "Prometheus Unbound" (1820). In 1821, Shelley wrote A Defence of Poetry, his most important prose work. He was drowned while sailing in 1822. Shelley's poetry reveals his belief in reason and the perfectibility of man. (He was unlike Keats.) In Shelley's preface to "Revolt of Islam" one will find some of his political views; it is an "excellent exposition of Godwin's ideas."

A widow bird sate mourning for her Love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare,
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel's sound.

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river,

And the rivers with the ocean;

The winds of heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

All things, by a law divine,

In one another's being mingle--

Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

England in 1819

An old, mad blind, despised, and dying king, -
Princess, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, - mud from a muddy spring -
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field, -
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield, -
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless - a book sealed;
A Senate, - Time’s worst statue unrepeald, -
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which still survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing else remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ode to the West Wind

     I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

 

The wingйd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odors plain and hill:

 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

Persy Bysshe Shelly

© 2000 Elena and Yacov Feldman