Percy Bysshe Shelley Poems

"An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, "

"Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day, "

"Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?-"

"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,"

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,"

"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."

"Who scheme, regardless of the poor man’s pang,
Who coolly sharpen misery’s sharpest fang,
Yourselves secure. Your’s is the power to breathe
O’er all the world the infectious blast of death,"

"The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies. "

"And the spring arose on the garden fair.
Like the spirit of love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on earth’s dark breast.
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest."

"Each day a shadow onward cast
Which made us wish it yet might last—
That Time long past."

"Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest, "

"And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,
That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ..,: