Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted

I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me- who knows how?To thy chamber-window, Sweet!

Ozymandias"I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich 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 decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.

And on the pedestal these words appear:_'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:__ook on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'__othing beside remains. Round the decay__f that colossal wreck, boundless and bare__he lone and level sands stretch far away.

Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.

Sorrow (A Song)To me this world's a dreary blank,All hopes in life are gone and fled,My high strung energies are sank,And all my blissful hopes lie dead.--The world once smiling to my view, Showed scenes of endless bliss and joy;The world I then but little knew,Ah! little knew how pleasures cloy;All then was jocund, all was gay,No thought beyond the present hour,I danced in pleasure__ fading ray,Fading alas! as drooping flower.Nor do the heedless in the throng,One thought beyond the morrow give,They court the feast, the dance, the song, Nor think how short their time to live.The heart that bears deep sorrow__ trace,What earthly comfort can console,It drags a dull and lengthened pace,'Till friendly death its woes enroll.--The sunken cheek, the humid eyes,E__n better than the tongue can tell;In whose sad breast deep sorrow lies,Where memory's rankling traces dwell.--The rising tear, the stifled sigh, A mind but ill at ease display,Like blackening clouds in stormy sky,Where fiercely vivid lightnings play.Thus when souls' energy is dead,When sorrow dims each earthly view, When every fairy hope is fled,We bid ungrateful world adieu.

O weep for Adonis - He is dead." "Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep - he hath wakened from the dream of life

The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.

Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.

No more let life divide what death can join together.

What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much.

See the mountains kiss high HeavenAnd the waves clasp one another;No sister-flower would be forgivenIf it disdained 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?

I have drunken deep of joy,And I will taste no other wine tonight.

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

I can give not what men call love;But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd the heavens reject not:The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow?