Poets Poetry

Blake
Byron
Dickison
Jonson
Ralegh
Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

1792-1822

Shelley was born into a substantial Sussex family and educated at Eton and Oxford, being expelled from the latter because of an atheistic pamphlet.  His life was complex and turbulent, with an early marriage to Harriet Westbrook, whom he subsequently abandoned for Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin and his first wife, Mary Wallstonecraft.  After Harriet's suicide in 1816, Shelley and Mary were married.  Shelley was a distinguished translator as well as a great lyric and dramatic poet.  He drowned when his yacht Ariel foundered in a storm off the Italian coast.  His body, washed ashore after a week, was cremated in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt.

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 beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

This poem found in a notebook, was published after Shelley's death by his widow.  Since the poem is probably unfinished, some of the obscurities may never be understood.  The "beloved" seems to be the dead rose;  "they thoughts" seems to mean "my thoughts of thee."

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,
Princes, 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 statutue unrepealed, -
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

This grammatically remarkable sonnet - twelve lines of subject before a two-line predicate-should be compared with Wordsworth's "London, 1802"
 

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