Shelley

[Alexander III]

I just wanted to start a thread about the discussion of some of Shelley's poetry. Or in more specificness, his personal beliefs and how they reflect in his poetry.

Do you agree with Shelley's ideologies ?

What is your favorite poem of Shelley and why ?

How do you believe that Shelley will stand in the future history of literature?( very hypothetical I know)

All opinions on Shelley are welcome in this thread.

[quasimodo1]

MUTABILITY


We are the clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

[conartist]

I love Shelley. I think he'll stand up rather well over time as he was so unsentimental really compared with almost all of his peers and followers. Vegetarianism, atheism, general rebellion, free love etc are movements that for most part aren't going away. The only people to really be against Shelley were the censors; there are very few lovers of poetry that don't find him worthwhile, and that almost inevitably falls into reasons more related to moral sensibilities than to insufficient aesthetic standards.

My favourite Shelley poem is The Triumph of Life, uncompleted due to his death. The power of metaphor and imagery were at their heighest then, as was his lyricism. The evocations of natural landscape, moving people etc are almost unbelievable. My favourite part:

In the April prime
When all the forest tops began to burn
"With kindling green, touched by the azure clime
Of the young year, I found myself asleep
Under a mountain which from unknown time
"Had yawned into a cavern high & deep,
And from it came a gentle rivulet
Whose water like clear air in its calm sweep
"Bent the soft grass & kept for ever wet
The stems of the sweet flowers, and filled the grove
With sound which all who hear must needs forget
"All pleasure & all pain, all hate & love,
Which they had known before that hour of rest:
A sleeping mother then would dream not of
"The only child who died upon her breast
At eventide, a king would mourn no more
The crown of which his brow was dispossest
"When the sun lingered o'er the Ocean floor
To gild his rival's new prosperity.--
Thou wouldst forget thus vainly to deplore
"Ills, which if ills, can find no cure from thee,
The thought of which no other sleep will quell
Nor other music blot from memory--
"So sweet & deep is the oblivious spell.--
Whether my life had been before that sleep
The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell
"Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep,
I know not. I arose & for a space
The scene of woods & waters seemed to keep,
"Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace
Of light diviner than the common Sun
Sheds on the common Earth, but all the place
"Was filled with many sounds woven into one
Oblivious melody, confusing sense
Amid the gliding waves & shadows dun;
"And as I looked the bright omnipresence
Of morning through the orient cavern flowed,
And the Sun's image radiantly intense
"Burned on the waters of the well that glowed
Like gold, and threaded all the forest maze
With winding paths of emerald fire--there stood
"Amid the sun, as he amid the blaze
Of his own glory, on the vibrating
Floor of the fountain, paved with flashing rays,
"A shape all light, which with one hand did fling
Dew on the earth, as if she were the Dawn
Whose invisible rain forever seemed to sing
"A silver music on the mossy lawn,
And still before her on the dusky grass
Iris her many coloured scarf had drawn.

[MANICHAEAN]

Shelley I think, as a leading participant of the Romantic Revival stood for a new sense of human responsibility and that was the Romantic era's greatest permanent contribution. An apt couplet of his states that men:

"Are cradled into poetry by wrong:"
"They learn in suffering what they teach in song"

Shelley, as in Burke, had a real passion for justice and a real hatred of wrong and oppression. Thus as an ultraromantic poet of clouds, sunsets, exotic magic regions and rapturous love he also wrote "The Mask of Anarchy" a direct link to the subject of the Peterloo Massacre.

"I met murder on the way - "
"He had a mask like Castlereagh"

Shelley's ardour for the revolutionary cause of the time is everywhere apparent.The natural goodness of man may be a fact, but his early belief in it was based much more upon feeling and hope and Rousseau than upon experience. And yet in the last, unfinished poem he wrote, "The Triumph of Life" it is quite unlike the sensational despair of much of Shelley's earlier work (he calls himself a "runied soul" in a poem written when he was about twenty years old). The basic feeling and attitude of "The Triumph of Life" spring from a severe self-questioning about human affairs and life and have a background not of cloud-cuckoo land but of recent history, of the French Revolution and Waterloo.
I think that many will still see the essential Shelley in the singer of the west wind and the skylark, of sunsets and clouds, of freedom from chains and of love in beautiful mountain valleys. But it is difficult to conceive of the poet, had he been granted more years, returning to his early self-confident ardours and prophecies.

[MANICHAEAN]

I went back today & revisted one of my favourite Shelley poems "The Daemon of the World"

Custom, and Faith, and Power thou spurnest;
From hate and awe thy heart is free;
Ardent and pure as day thou burnest,
For dark and cold mortality.

[LeavesOfGrass]

I think Shelley has already proven that he will stand the test of time. He's a legend already, I suppose. And the circumstances of his death only creates more interest. People love a mentally tortured poet, don't they? Hyperion is my favorite Shelley poem. Too lengthy to post here. Further, his affiliation with Keats is the nail in the coffin.

[stlukesguild]

Among his shorter works I've always been fond of Ozymandias which presents a powerful image of the fragility (and perhaps the futility) of mankind, art, and vanity:

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 yet 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 beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Probably my favorite poem, however, would be his elegy for John Keats, Adonais.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. -We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. - Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! - Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

As to Shelley's ideologies... I suppose we'd need to identify these and then discuss them on an individual basis. His position in poetry in the English language would seem to be rather secure for the moment. A couple millennia from now? All bets are off. I quite like his work... although my preferences among the Romantics are for Blake and Keats.

[LeavesOfGrass]

I agree with St. Luke. Keats was a poetic monster. He produced such magnificent poetry at a very young age. When I was 23 years old, I could not have penned anything better than a childish sonnet. Of course, when you know death is near and imminent, your love life is essentially over, and are not hindered by a damned television, video game, iphone, easy transportation, it should be easy to focus all of your mind on particular item.

[blazeofglory]

I like Shelly and his poems

[yunxin]

I like his poems "OZYMANDIAS" "Love's Philosophy".

[yunxin]

Love's Philosophy

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 devine
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 disdain'd 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?


-----Imagination is very rich, pure, aesthetic, and subtly sad, extensive love.

[Isitandthink]

Love's philosophy is my favourite as well :)

One aspect of his magnificence is his choice of rhyming diction, perfect and harmonious.

[Perscors]

I think Shelley has already proven that he will stand the test of time. He's a legend already, I suppose. And the circumstances of his death only creates more interest. People love a mentally tortured poet, don't they? Hyperion is my favorite Shelley poem. Too lengthy to post here. Further, his affiliation with Keats is the nail in the coffin.

You mean "Keat's" Hyperion, yes?

I've written in my profile that Shelley is my favorite poet just as David Lindsay's Arcturus is my favorite book. I wouldn't argue that they are the best I have come across but that they resonate with me in a way no other authors have. Byron, my least favorite of the Romantics, arguably wrote the greatest poem of the era--Don Juan. Shelley is a very personal poet to me even though I am unable to follow him in his quests for free-love and vegetarianism (although I'm working on this one.)

Wherever the myth and Romance are present I think Shelley will continue to exert an influence. One example of Shelley's continued influence... perhaps John Crowley's Four Freedoms (novel on a "real" utopia, with a Shelleyan utopian as a side plot).

BTW, Triumph of Life and Adonais are two of my favorite Shelley poems as well. I also, in these troubled times, find myself often quoting the opening lines to The Witch of Atlas:

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learned rhyme,

Will write more soon...

[quasimodo1]

http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/complete-works-of-shelley/15?term=hyperion