Percy Bysshe Shelley

In his short life, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) married twice, fathered five children, and wrote far too much. One’s appreciation for his poetry depends, I suppose, on one’s tolerance for romanticism in general, for exclamation points and protracted odes and effusive diction. Matthew Arnold proclaimed that Shelley had “neither intellectual force enough nor sanity enough” to master poetry, believing that musicality was more his forte, not sense, not words. Modernists such as Eliot and Lawrence dismissed him but nowadays Harold Bloom considers him canonical.

Among Shelley’s tics were groan-worthy personifications. “The Waning Moon” compares earth’s satellite to a sick old woman. The poem reads like one of many Shelleyan fragments but is not listed as such in the Collected Poems. Perhaps the opening image struck even Shelley as unpromising and he abandoned it. Since Shelley drowned in a sailing accident, I couldn’t resist including a second poem built on an extended metaphor comparing time to the sea. If he’d only survived the storm, perhaps he might have understood that images such as the sea “vomiting” shipwrecks only embroider a harsh reality; then he might have turned to a more faithful rendering of things; then he might have gotten real.


The Waning Moon

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass—


Time

Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
   Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
   Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality,
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
   Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
      Who shall put forth on thee,
      Unfathomable Sea?

 
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