Percy Bysshe Shelley

• The world's great age begins anew,
      The golden years return,
  The earth doth like a snake renew
      Her winter weeds outworn;
  Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
  Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
  • Hellas (1822) Chorus

The Cloud (1820)

• I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
  From the seas and the streams;
  I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
  In their noonday dreams.
  From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
  The sweet buds every one,
  When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
  As she dances about the sun.
  I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
  And whiten the green plains under,
  And then again I dissolve it in rain,
  And laugh as I pass in thunder.

• I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
  And the nursling of the Sky;
  I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
  I change, but I cannot die.

• For after the rain when with never a stain
  The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
  And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
  Build up the blue dome of air,
  I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
  And out of the caverns of rain,
  Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
  I arise and unbuild it again.
  • (A cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere)

Epipsychidion (1820)

• My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
  Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning,
  Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
  Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
  Thee to base company (as chance may do),
  Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
  I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
  My last delight! tell them that they are dull,
  And bid them own that thou art beautiful.

• Poor captive bird! Who, from thy narrow cage,
  Pourest such music, that it might assuage
  The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
  Were they not deaf to all sweet melody;

• I never thought before my death to see
  Youth's vision thus made perfect.

• Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
  Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt.
  I never was attached to that great sect,
  Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
  Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
  And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
  To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
  Of modern morals, and the beaten road
  Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
  Who travel to their home among the dead
  By the broad highway of the world, and so
  With one chained friend, —perhaps a jealous foe,
  The dreariest and the longest journey go.

• True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
  That to divide is not to take away.
  Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
  Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
  Imagination! which from earth and sky,
  And from the depths of human phantasy,
  As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
  The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
  Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
  Of its reverberated lightning.

• Mind from its object differs most in this:
  Evil from good; misery from happiness;
  The baser from the nobler; the impure
  And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
  If you divide suffering and dross, you may
  Diminish till it is consumed away;
  If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
  Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
  How much, while any yet remains unshared,
  Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
  This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
  The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
  By which those live, to whom this world of life
  Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
  Tills for the promise of a later birth
  The wilderness of this Elysian earth."

• Love's very pain is sweet,
  But its reward is in the world divine
  Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.

• And bid them love each other and be blest:
  And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
  And come and be my guest, —for I am Love's.

Ode to the West Wind (1820)

• Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
  The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
  Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
  Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
  And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
  Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
  All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
  So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.