Love’s Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Wake Wake Pleasure Fair
Wake wake pleasure fair
Love’s soft music echoes clear
Hearts romancing dance
Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792 -1822), English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language.
American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as;
“a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem.”
A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets including Browning, Swinburne, Hardy and Yeats.
Shelley’s critical reputation fluctuated in the twentieth century, but in recent years he has achieved increasing critical acclaim for the sweeping momentum of his poetic imagery, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the complex interplay of sceptical, idealist, and materialist ideas in his work.
Among his best-known works are “Ozymandias” (1818), “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), “To a Skylark” (1820), and the political ballad “The Mask of Anarchy” (1819).
His other major works include the verse drama The Cenci (1819) and long poems such as Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815), Julian and Maddalo (1819), Adonais (1821), Prometheus Unbound (1820)—widely considered his masterpiece—, Hellas (1822), and his final, unfinished work, The Triumph of Life (1822).
Shelley also wrote prose fiction and a quantity of essays on political, social, and philosophical issues.
Much of this poetry and prose was not published in his lifetime, or only published in expurgated form, due to the risk of prosecution for political and religious libel.
From the 1820s, his poems and political and ethical writings became popular in Owenist, Chartist, and radical political circles] and later drew admirers as diverse as Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw.
Shelley’s life was marked by family crises, ill health, and a backlash against his atheism, political views and defiance of social conventions.
He went into permanent self-exile in Italy in 1818, and over the next four years produced what Leader and O’Neill call;
“some of the finest poetry of the Romantic period”.
Poem Attribution © Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love’s Philosophy, 1819
Source Attribution https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50262/loves-philosophy
Bio Reference Attribution https://www.britannica.com/biography/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
Senryū Attribution, Goff James, Wake Wake Pleasure Fair
Copyright (c) 2021 Goff James – All Rights Reserved
More senryū poems by Goff James
Painting 1 Attribution Irma Hameri, By the Fountain, (Canvas 2012)
Source attribution https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-By-the-Fountain/1135149/4514155/view
Painting 2 Attribution © Alfred Clint, Percy Bysshe Shelley, c. 1829
Source Attribution https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw05764/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley
Love’s Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In another’s being 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?
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