“She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.”
St. X
Adonais (1821)
Context: Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.
“With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.”
Canto V, st. 23
The Revolt of Islam (1817)
St. 8
Song: Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley/17889 (1821)
St. LII
Adonais (1821)
Context: The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
St. 7 (a cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere)
The Cloud (1820)
Context: For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
St. 7
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: 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,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
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, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
St. I
Ode to the West Wind (1819)
Context: 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: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.
“I met Murder on the way —
He had a mask like Castlereagh”
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him.
St. 2
The Masque of Anarchy (1819)
“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!”
St. V
Ode to the West Wind (1819)
Context: Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
St. 91
(1819)
Source: The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester
Epipsychidion (1821)
“On a poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept.”
Fourth Spirit, Act I, l. 737
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)
Demogorgon, Act IV, closing lines
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)
The Necessity of Atheism (1811)
"Verses On A Cat" (1800), St. 2, as published in Life of Shelley (1858) by Thomas Jefferson Hogg, p. 21