The smiles that win, the tints that glow, A heart whose love is innocent! 15 ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTYSIXTH YEAR MISSOLONGHI, JANUARY 22, 1824 'Tis time this heart should be unmoved, But 't is not thus and 't is not here Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now, Where glory decks the hero's bier, Or binds his brow 10 15 20 The sword, the banner, and the field, Awake! (not Greece she is awake!) Awake, my spirit! Think through whom Thy lifeblood tracks its parent lake, And then strike home! Tread those reviving passions down, 25 30 If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live? Is here: up to the field, and give 35 Away thy breath! Seek out less often sought than found Then look around, and choose thy ground, And take thy rest. 40 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1792-1822 His SHELLEY was born in Sussex, in the south of England. father, Sir Timothy Shelley, was a well-to-do country gentleman, who sent his son to Eton and then to Oxford. The lad was high-spirited and rather ungovernable, and chafed at all restraint. He was expelled from Oxford when he was nineteen. Shortly afterwards Shelley married Harriet Westbrooke, a schoolgirl of sixteen. This childish pair lived an unsettled life for a few years and then parted. After the suicide of his wife, Shelley married Mary Godwin, with whom he lived happily until his death. Deprived by the Lord Chancellor of the guardianship of his children by his first wife, and stung by the harsh criticisms which were heard on every hand, he forsook England and spent the remainder of his life in Italy. It was during his residence here that his chief literary work was done. At the age of twentynine he was drowned in a squall off the coast of Italy. His remains were laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. Shelley's chief poems are Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais, a noble elegy on Keats, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, and many short lyrics. Much of Shelley's poetry expresses the political, social, and religious unrest of his times; and, as Matthew Arnold points out, he failed to get any "wide and luminous view of life." But Shelley died at thirty, and it is not given to many mortals to obtain a "wide and luminous view of life at that age. Let us be glad, therefore, that he has left us a body of poetry that will always charm us by its brilliant imaginative qualities, its refinement and delicacy, its gifts of language and of melody, and its fine lyric note. ODE TO THE WEST WIND I O, WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, II 5 IO Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, 15 Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 20 Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Vaulted with all thy congregated might 125 Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; 30 35 40 A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 45 The impulse of thy strength, only less free The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, 50 Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! |