Poemattic: Poetry and Art for the Soul

What is your Love Philosophy? I will share my poem later this month.

Love’s Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the Ocean,

The winds of Heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle,

Why not I with thine?-

 

See the mountains kiss high Heaven

and the waves clasp one another;

No sister-flower would be forgiven

If it disdained its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth

and the moonbeams kiss the sea:

What is all this sweet work worth

if thou kiss not me?

 

– Persey Bysshe Shelley, Romantic Poet

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born 4 August 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England. The eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, he stood in line to inherit his grandfather’s considerable estate and a seat in Parilament. He attended Eton College, where he began writing poetry, and went on to Oxford University. His first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he voiced his own heretical and atheistic opinions through the villain Zastrozzi. After less than a year at Oxford, he was expelled for writing and circulating a pamphlet promoting atheism.

“In the slightly more than four years before his death in a boat accident, Shelley published seven further volumes of poetry: Rosalind and Helen (which included “Julian and Maddalo” and “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills“) (1819); The Cenci; Prometheus Unbound; with Other Poems (which included “The Cloud” and his “Ode to the West Wind”); and Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, a satirical drama on the trial for adultery of Queen Caroline which was quickly suppressed (1820); Epipsychidion and Adonais: subtitled “An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (1821); and Hellas (1822). Many other poems were left in notebooks, some (like the “Letter to Maria Gisborne” and “The Witch of Atlas,” both dating from 1820, and “The Triumph of Life,” left unfinished in 1822, were published among the Posthumous Poems put together by Mary in 1824. Still others (like the satire on Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third) were held back, only to appear in her full-scale edition of her husband’s poetry published in 1839. His numerous prose works, such as the “Defence of Poetry” and his translation of Plato’s Symposium were brought out a year later, in 1840.

Shelley drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on 8 July 1822. After his body washed ashore near Viareggio, it was cremated according to the dictates of Italian law. His ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery (actually, Cimitero Acattolico or non-Catholic Cemetery) in Rome. In 1854, three years after Mary’s death a monument was erected in memory of both the Shelleys.”

*http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/bio.html