The lone and level sands stretch far away.
 

                Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): Shelley was born in England, the son of a wealthy landowner. He became friends with Thomas Jefferson Hogg while at Oxford, and both became interested in radical philosophy. The two were expelled for circulating a pamphlet they had written, 'The Necessity of Atheism'. He married and had two children with Harriet Westbrook, but in 1814 he left her for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (who later wrote 'Frankenstein'). They married after his wife's death, and died in Italy in 1822.
 


 

"Art thou pale for weariness"

    Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
    Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
 

"Music When Soft Voices Die"

    Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory--
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

    Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
 

"To Night"

Swiftly walk o'er the western wave,
    Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,--
    Swift be thy flight!

Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
    Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day;
Kiss her until she be wearied out,
Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand--
    Come, long-sought!

When I arose and saw the dawn,
    I sighed for thee;
When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest.
    I sighed for thee.

Thy brother Death came, and cried,
    Wouldst thou me?
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noontide bee,
Shall I nestle near thy side?
Wouldst thou me?--And I replied,
    No, not thee!

Death will come when thou art dead,
    Soon, too soon--
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, belovèd Night--
Swift be thine approaching flight,
    Come soon, soon!
 

"Love's Philosophy"

The fountains mingle with the river,
     And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
          With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
     All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
          Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
     And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
          If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
     And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
          If thou kiss not me?
 

"A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire"

     The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere
          Each vapour that obscured the sunset's ray,
     And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:
     Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,
     Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

     They breathe their spells towards the departing day,
          Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
     Light, sound, and motion, own the potent sway,
Responding to the charm with its own mystery.
     The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
     Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.

     Thou too, aerial pile, whose pinnacles
          Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
     Obey'st I in silence their sweet solemn spells,
Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
     Around whose lessening and invisible height
     Gather among the stars the clouds of night.

     The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:
          And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,
     Half sense half thought, among the darkness stirs,
Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,
     And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,
     Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

     Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild
          And terrorless as this serenest night.
     Here could I hope, like some enquiring child
Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
     Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
     That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.
 
 

"On a Poet's Lips I Slept"
        from `Prometheus Unbound'

On a poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!
One of these awakened me,
And I sped to succour thee.
 
 
 

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Q