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The Moon


By Percy Bysshe Shelley



  And, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east
A white and shapeless mass.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
 

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was born near Horsham in Sussex, England, the son of a member of parliament. He was educated at Eton and later Oxford University, where he began to form his own political and religious ideas, writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism that attacked the the idea of compulsory Christianity. When the University discovered what he had written, he was expelled. His reaction was to elope to Ireland with the 16 year old daughter of a nearby coffee-house owner, and make revolutionary speeches on religion and politics along a similar unconventional vein. He later had poetry published on the subjects of republicanism, atheism, vegetarianism and free love. In 1814, he fell in love with and married the 16 year old daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Women, and for the next few years travelled around Europe with her. Mary Shelley would herself go on to write Frankenstein. In 1822, Shelley moved to Italy where he was free to begin publishing a Journal called The Liberal; but unfortunately was lost at sea the same year. When his body floated to shore a volume of Keats' poetry was found open in Shelley's coat pocket. The remains were reduced to ashes and deposited in the Protestant burial ground at Rome, near those of a child he had lost in that city. Mary Shelley never remarried.


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