Percy Bysshe Shelley: Quotes about death

Percy Bysshe Shelley was English Romantic poet. Explore interesting quotes on death.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: 492   quotes 46   likes

“He lives, he wakes — 'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XLI
Adonais (1821)

Death , Dead

“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

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.

Life , Death

“Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Earth, Act III, sc. iii, l. 113
Variant: Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life.
Source: Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Life , Death , Sleep

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

Preface
Source: Adonais (1821)

Love , Death , Thinking , Winter

“The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and fade with those of the body, and even accommodate themselves to the most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspends many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principle; drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently derange them. Madness or idiotcy may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind gradually withers; and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so does it together with the body sink into decrepitude. Assuredly these are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and perception, and apprehension are at an end.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death , Men , Age , Disease

“Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mont Blanc http://www.readprint.com/work-1366/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1816), st. 3

Death , World , Soul , Business

“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change nor falter nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act IV, closing lines
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love , Life , Death , Beauty

“It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death,—that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual and unchanged.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death , Age , Idea , Nature

“To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. VI
Adonais (1821)

Death , Beauty

“Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 8
(1819)

Death , Horse

“I never thought before my death to see
Youth's vision thus made perfect.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 41

Death , Youth , Perfection

“What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death — bed,
In mockery of monumental stone,
The heavy heart heaving without a moan?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XXXV
Adonais (1821)

Death , Heart , Dead

“Some philosophers—and those to whom we are indebted for the most stupendous discoveries in physical science, suppose… that intelligence is the mere result of certain combinations among the particles of its objects; and those among them who believe that we live after death, recur to the interposition of a supernatural power, which shall overcome the tendency inherent in all material combinations, to dissipate and be absorbed into other forms.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death , Intelligence , Science

“The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward everlasting fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro [because they lack a sacred bard]. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

This passage has sometimes been paraphrased as "History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man".
A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

Life , Death , Men , Peace

“Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its component parts, which may enable us to assert with certainty that we do or do not live after death.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death , Question , Nature , Light

“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,
Come soon, soon!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley To Night

To Night (1821), st. 5

Death , Art , Sleep , Night

“Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Spirit of the Hour, Act III, sc. iv, l. 200
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Death , Star , Chance