Percy Bysshe Shelley

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own?

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

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 …

Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might.

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts, and this must be Our chastisement or recompense.

Me — who am as a nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth, And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth, When all beside was cold: — that thou on me Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony!

It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise, we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind? and if we were not weak,

I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies

Fear not the future, weep not for the past.

With hue like that when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

Can man be free if woman be a slave?

A wild dissolving bliss Over my frame he breathed, approaching near, And bent his eyes of kindling tenderness Near mine, and on my lips impressed a lingering kiss.

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, fair, thy spells did bind

The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen

Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven, Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Spirit of , that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower