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744 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
greatly admired by Robert Browning, Swinburne, and other Victorians; but in the
mid-twentieth century he was repeatedly charged with intellectual and emotional
immaturity, shoddy workmanship, and incoherent imagery by influential writers such
as F. R. Leavis and his followers in Britain and the New Critics in America. More
recently, however, many sympathetic studies have revealed the coherent intellectual
understructure of his poems and have confirmed Wordsworth's early recognition that
"Shelley is one of the best artists of Us all: I mean in workmanship of style." Shelley,
it has become clear, greatly expanded the metrical and stanzaic resources of English
versification. His poems exhibit a broad range of voices, from the high but ordered
passion of "Ode to the West Wind," through the heroic dignity of the utterances of
Prometheus, to the approximation of what is inexpressible in the description of Asia's
transfiguration and in the visionary conclusion of Adonais. Most surprising, for a poet
who almost entirely lacked an audience, is the urbanity, the assured command of the
tone and language of a cultivated man of the world, exemplified in passages that
Shelley wrote all through his mature career and especially in the lyrics and verse
letters that he composed during the last year of his life.
The texts printed here are those prepared by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat
for Shelley's Poetry and Prose, a Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. (2001); Reiman has
also edited for this anthology a few poems not included in that edition.
Mutability
We are as 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 for ever:
5 Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
0 wind harps
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;
io We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast Our cares away:
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
15 Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
ca. 1814-15 1816
To Wordsworth1
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
1. Shelley's grieved comment on the poet of nature and of social radicalism after his views had become
conservative.
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768 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night 7 —
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
70 This world from its dark slavery,
That thou—O awful L O V E L I N E S S ,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.
7
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past—there is a harmony
75 In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
so Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm—to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, S P I R I T fair, thy spells did bind
To fear 8 himself, and love all human kind.
1816 1817
Ozymandias1
I met a traveller from an antique land,
W h o said—"Two vast and trunkless 0 legs of stone without a torso
Stand in the desart. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
5 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, 0 stamped on these lifeless things, outlive
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 2
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
10 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."
1817 1818
7. I.e., stayed up until the night, envious of their where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my
delight, had reluctantly departed. exploits." Ozymandias was the Greek name for
8. Probably in the old sense: "to stand in awe of." Ramses II of Egypt, 13th century B . C . E .
1. According to Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian 2. "The hand" is the sculptor's, who had "mocked"
of the 1st century B.C.E., the largest statue in Egypt (both imitated and satirized) the sculptured pas-
had the inscription "I am Ozymandias, king of sions; "the heart" is the king's, which has "fed" his
kings; if anyone wishes to know what I am and passions.
