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Queen Mab

Queen Mab
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes, published in 1813 in nine cantos with seventeen notes, is the first large poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley , the English Romantic poet.After substantial reworking, a revised edition of a portion of the text was published in 1816 under the title The Daemon of the World.

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Notes
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Notes
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto I
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Heaven's ebon vault,
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto IV
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“And man … no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto VIII
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto IV
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Gold is a living god and rules in scorn,
All earthly things but virtue.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Notes
Queen Mab (1813)
Variant: It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen; for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever play
A losing game into each other's hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto III
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!
Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all
The wanton horrors of her bloody play;
Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,
Shunning the light, and owning not its name,
Compelled by its deformity to screen
With flimsy veil of justice and of right
Its unattractive lineaments that scare
All save the brood of ignorance; at once
The cause and the effect of tyranny;
Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness;
With heart impassive by more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;
Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Notes
Queen Mab (1813)

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