Percy Bysshe Shelley

We must prove design before we can infer a designer.

There is no God! This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

You lie—under a mistake, For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man's face. I now Say what I think.

Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.

What! alive, and so bold, O earth?

That orbed maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon.

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.

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?

Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life.

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead — When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed. When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not;

There is no sport in hate where all the rage Is on one side.

Death will come when thou art dead, Soon, too soon — Sleep will come when thou art fled; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, beloved Night — Swift be thine approaching flight,

Swiftly walk over the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, —

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it; One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.

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;

Rough wind, the moanest loud Grief too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Knells all the night long; Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain,

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light. And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.

Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine, Yet let's be merry: we'll have tea and toast; Custards for supper, and an endless host Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, And other such ladylike luxuries.

His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.

Have you not heard When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him?

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets, Daisies, those pearl'd Arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets; Faint oxlips; tender bluebells at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets Its …

First our pleasures die — and then Our hopes, and then our fears — and when These are dead, the debt is due, Dust claims dust — and we die too.

A lovely lady, garmented in light From her own beauty.