‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
These are the most famous lines from ‘Ozymandias’, and among the most famous quotations in all of Shelley’s work. The words form the inscription found on the remains of the statue of the long-dead emperor: all that survives of his once-great civilisation.
The inscription turns out, then, in hindsight, to be ironic: Ozymandias was the Greek name for Rameses II, the Egyptian ruler, whose empire crumbled to dust long ago. We should ‘despair’ when looking on his ‘works’ because they have not lasted: nothing does.
BLOG ON Shelley--
Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley's --- A Defense of Poetry
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1) According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity.
Shelley divides the mental faculty into two parts: reason and imagination. Reason implies a kind of logical process that enables one to connect ideas together and/or determine their relationships to one another. It is a passive thing. Imagination, meanwhile, acts upon those thoughts. It enables creation; it is the source of our artistic desires.
2) Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; Imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and Imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
The distinction between reason and imagination is akin to the distinction between quality and quantity. We acknowledge the significance of each, all the while holding one in higher regard compared to the other. Reason is a lesser faculty, but it is necessary and instrumental to imagination. Reason implies a mechanical knowledge of things. However, until the imagination allows us to recognize the importance of such facts, they hold no value. It is the soul to the mere vessel of the body. One is inextricably linked with the other.
3) Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the Imagination:" and Poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody.
Poetry is man's real and outward expression of his imagination, and Poetry is an innate characteristic of man. A human being is that body with the imaginative soul. Like Nature creating music on Coleridge's Eolian harp, our interactions with the world are themselves forms of poetry. We are constantly processing things, evaluating, and revising who we are.
4) For language is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression... We have thus circumscribed the meaning of the word Poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself.
Poetic language expresses the Imagination best because speech is directly related to our thoughts. It is the problem of mediation; words are our best mode of conveying our thoughts. The Imagination creates thoughts, and language is "a more direct representation of our the actions and passions of our internal being." Shelley holds poetry as the highest form of art, superior to music, painting, and sculpture.
5) A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food.
This is the social aspect of Shelley's poetry. Poetry is not just to induce delight and pleasure, which granted, it does well. It can and must inspire goodness in man, but at the same time, it must not be didactic. It should allow for a wealth of interpretation.
6) We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.
Shelley also says, "a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." This divine attribute of poetry is not unlike Coleridge's conception of the primary Imagination. He cautions us, however, that although we want always to be able to imagine and to create, there is also a danger in allowing our innovations to enslave us. He ascribes a dualistic nature of the divine to poetry; it is both as "God and the Mammon of the world."
7) A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline.
The composition of poetry is uncontrollable. Because Poetry is innately human, there is no translation from observation that occurs. The source of creation is internal, and we have no control over when or how inspiration strikes. Furthermore, the composition cannot hold up against what was imagined; it will always be inferior because there is no adequate way of capturing that always-elusive Truth. Though Poetry expresses an eternal truth of life, it is truth captured in imperfection.
8) Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interluminations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide-- abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
As an "expression of the Imagination," Poetry does capture these things. The "vanishing apparitions" are the thoughts residing in the Imagination, and Poetry allows us to express them with language. However imperfect they are, Poetry ensures that they are never wholly lost.*********
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I have started with Shelley because I read about a dozen of his poems today. Plan on doing at least 3 blogs on Shelly., Keats and Byron. May add a few poems of Shelly's as I present this blog. Shelley that died far , far , far too young. A poetic genius.
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by Percy Bysshe Shelley
ART thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth ¡ª
And ever-changing like a joyless eye 5
That finds no object worth its constancy?
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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 5
Of shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The blue bees in the ivy-bloom
Nor heed nor see what things they be¡ª 10
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man
Nurslings of Immortality!
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.
How can I call the lone night good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood --
Then it will be -- good night.
To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
5
No flower upon the ground
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel's sound.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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 5
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed:
And so thy thoughts when thou art gone
Love itself shall slumber on.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
O WORLD! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more¡ªoh never more! 5
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief but with delight
No more¡ªoh never more! 10
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I FEAR thy kisses gentle maiden;
Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burthen thine.
I fear thy mien thy tones thy motion; 5
Thou needest not fear mine;
Innocent is the heart's devotion
With which I worship thine.
by Dorothy Parker
The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
AND, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The mood arose up in the murky east, 5
A white and shapeless mass.
II
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, 10
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Extract from Poetical Essay by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Millions to fight compell'd, to fight or die
In mangled heaps on War's red altar lie .
.
.
When the legal murders swell the lists of pride;
When glory's views the titled idiot guide
Lost Shelley poem found after 200 years
http://www.
timesonline.
co.
uk/article/0,,2-2267433,00.
html
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The odor from the flower is gone
Which like thy kisses breathed on me;
The color from the flower is flown
Which glowed of thee and only thee!
A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,
It lies on my abandoned breast;
And mocks the heart, which yet is warm,
With cold and silent rest.
I weep--my tears revive it not;
I sigh--it breathes no more on me:
Its mute and uncomplaining lot
Is such as mine should be.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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?
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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?
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality,
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea?
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Heigho! the lark and the owl!
One flies the morning, and one lulls the night:
Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,
Sings like the fool through darkness and light.
"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.
"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
One sung of thee who left the tale untold,
Like the false dawns which perish in the bursting;
Like empty cups of wrought and daedal gold,
Which mock the lips with air, when they are thirsting.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,
Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods and men and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
If with mists of evening dew
Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow in scent and hue
Fairest children of the Hours,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere
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Shelley Quote _____
Poetry is man's real and outward expression of his imagination, and Poetry is an innate characteristic of man. A human being is that body with the imaginative soul. Like Nature creating music on Coleridge's Eolian harp, our interactions with the world are themselves forms of poetry.
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Before beginning ‘Love’s Philosophy’ is important to discuss the title. The term “philosophy” carries with it some heavy implications. The title implies that the speaker understands a set of logical laws by which love itself must abide. This suggests that love works in a certain and specific way, though it might be, at times, difficult to understand. Though there may be different views about love, this author suggests that love can be understood through logic, just as life can be understood through logic and the use of philosophy.
Love’s Philosophy
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The fountains mingle with the riverAnd the rivers with the ocean,The winds of heaven mix for everWith a sweet emotion;Nothing in the world is single,All things by a law divineIn 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 forgivenIf it disdain'd its brother;And the sunlight clasps the earth,And the moonbeams kiss the sea—What is all this sweet work worthIf thou kiss not me?