"No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure."
- Prometheus Unbound
I wonder whether it will be relevant to bear in mind Mary Shelley's subtitle to Frankenstein: "The Modern Prometheus", while reading PBS's verse drama?
Painting: Gustave Moreau
"No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure."
- Prometheus Unbound
I wonder whether it will be relevant to bear in mind Mary Shelley's subtitle to Frankenstein: "The Modern Prometheus", while reading PBS's verse drama?
Painting: Gustave Moreau
"Grief returns with the revolving year."
- Adonais
I'm finding Shelley's elegy for Keats, "Adonais", slow going only because it is so wonderful and I keep having to re-read passages to let his words and meaning sink in.
My work with bereaved people has had added poignancy the past few years as I'm of an age when I'm losing my own loved ones, and I need to process my grief so that I can support theirs. Poetry helps, and this line feels very real.
"An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, -
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, - mud from a muddy spring, -
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field, -
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who would wield, -
??
“Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity."
- Epipsychidion
“True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human fantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning."
- Epipsychidion
"I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good."
- "Song"