Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Daemon of the World
    The Daemon of the World
    The Daemon of the World
    Ebook51 pages25 minutes

    The Daemon of the World

    By Percy Bysshe Shelley

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJun 1, 2004
    The Daemon of the World
    Author

    Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet. Born into a prominent political family, Shelley enjoyed a quiet and happy childhood in West Sussex, developing a passion for nature and literature at a young age. He struggled in school, however, and was known by his colleagues at Eton College and University College, Oxford as an outsider and eccentric who spent more time acquainting himself with radical politics and the occult than with the requirements of academia. During his time at Oxford, he began his literary career in earnest, publishing Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810) and St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811) In 1811, he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he lived an itinerant lifestyle while pursuing affairs with other women. Through the poet Robert Southey, he fell under the influence of political philosopher William Godwin, whose daughter Mary soon fell in love with the precocious young poet. In the summer of 1814, Shelley eloped to France with Mary and her stepsister Claire Claremont, travelling to Holland, Germany, and Switzerland before returning to England in the fall. Desperately broke, Shelley struggled to provide for Mary through several pregnancies while balancing his financial obligations to Godwin, Harriet, and his own father. In 1816, Percy and Mary accepted an invitation to join Claremont and Lord Byron in Europe, spending a summer in Switzerland at a house on Lake Geneva. In 1818, following several years of unhappy life in England, the Shelleys—now married—moved to Italy, where Percy worked on The Masque of Anarchy (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Adonais (1821), now considered some of his most important works. In July of 1822, Shelley set sail on the Don Juan and was lost in a storm only hours later. His death at the age of 29 was met with despair and contempt throughout England and Europe, and he is now considered a leading poet and radical thinker of the Romantic era.

    Read more from Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Related to The Daemon of the World

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      RHYME & REASON

      May 17, 2021

      RHYME & REASON
      1 min read

    • Article

      Something About John Coltrane

      Sep 1, 2021

      Something about a tree in shallow sleepListening for what it wants to remember: The note of a seed, its neck sliding throughDirt and its confusion—nothing cleansed Of struggle. The weight lost after death,A confrontation of death. John Coltrane Even

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Epic Of Gilgamesh

      Jan 1, 2020

      My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Call Of The Wild

      Nov 30, 2020

      The Call Of The Wild
      2 min read

    • Article

      Embracing Nature

      Jun 29, 2021

      Embracing Nature
      5 min read

    • Article

      One Night

      Sep 15, 2022

      The night looks wrapped in milky cotton. The full moon shines through from time to time when the fogbanks turn wispy under the stratus. The entire sea glows with greenish, phosphorescent sheets. It is hardly rumbling, because the fog muffles all soun

      5 min read

    • Article

      Bard In The Woods

      Nov 30, 2020

      Bard In The Woods
      4 min read

    • Article

      Worship On High

      Oct 18, 2021

      Worship On High
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Remains Of The Day

      Jan 11, 2023

      The Remains Of The Day
      5 min read

    • Article

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend

      Jun 17, 2020

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend
      4 min read

    • Article

      Earthlings

      Apr 9, 2021

      Earthlings
      5 min read

    • Article

      Competition

      Sep 20, 2023

      IN COMPETITION No 297 you were invited to write a poem called Bells. Gail White concluded with a firm couplet: ‘We keep that memory with us like a shield / Against despair: the bells of Finchingfield.’ Other Essex bells inspired Christine Ratcliff. B

      2 min read

    • Article

      Seek And Ye Shall Find

      Oct 19, 2022

      Seek And Ye Shall Find
      2 min read

    • Article

      Tessa Castro

      Mar 9, 2022

      IN COMPETITION No 277 you were invited to write a poem called Morning Sounds. The entries were vivid: half domestic, half outdoor. Tim Lloyd observed that ‘A bin lorry approaching in reverse/Sounds like an asthmatic seal.’ Liz Piper remembered, durin

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Paul Valéry

      Apr 14, 2020

      Two Poems by Paul Valéry
      1 min read

    • Article

      from “NIGHT SKY”

      Sep 15, 2018

      And what did you see, sequoia-quiet, looking out at blacknight. No islands, no kings or corridors of fury.But the districts where we were born, a few icy stars,the moon’s beaming chalk thirst. Above the painted desert,the air rustles at your wrists,

      1 min read

    • Article

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • Article

      Paul,

      Jul 1, 2020

      Houston, April 2019 The coarse and leafy stalks, like memory,Began to soften in my hands. The kaleMassaged with olive oil and salt. Silently, You sat on the couch as if in grisaille,Scrolling through the twitter of the state.A fragile, bluesy cover s

      14 min read

    • Article

      Death

      Mar 2, 2023

      Death
      1 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      May 1, 2022

      —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting hi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Perfect Prose II

      May 15, 2020

      Perfect Prose II
      4 min read

    • Article

      Eight Poems

      Sep 1, 2019

      The wind in swells through the wild rye rolls.The bright sky dulls. Over the hills,Their green backs ringed with blue-Bells sunset-rung, flaps a wingy shadow west-Ward. A jay. Poor bird that no netMet nor gin it didn’t love. Good luck,You luckless sc

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      After centuries of deferralto the white sky cloud cover God, who kept me on orange alert,babbling for mercies that were batted away sloppilylike dustballs in the wake of a sock, I turned to the Divine Creatrix,who built the short night, I was convinc

      2 min read

    • Article

      AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2

      Sep 1, 2019

      The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

      7 min read

    • Article

      Tessa Castro

      Jun 1, 2022

      IN COMPETITION No 280 you were invited to write a poem called Cutting. My cue was a 19th-century Norwegian painting I’d seen of a woman cutting bread. You widened it to cutting hair and grass, being cut down to size and cutting people dead in the str

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2023

      Let’s be GodFor a moment, Shall we?That which invites Composition,That which is suspended From a great height,The presence Of approximationHeavy in the meadows, I’m not afraid,And yet My shroud vanishesIn these lines, I am so weptPast weeping, And wh

      1 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

      Jun 15, 2018

      And, after the explosion, made spheres sing,A pure expression of pure poetry,Like rising rain or a nation with noFlag—. Something that whispers as the airDoes just before the lightning comes. A pureExpression of the breaks in the blank lakesOn Neptun

      2 min read

    • Article

      Gjertrud Schnackenberg

      Mar 9, 2021

      Poetry’s “impulse, like electricity, crossing the space, leaves its signature.”—W. S. Graham No wonder that a flash of sparksSpills out from what I touch—the LaserJet, Brimming with static shock,Suspends invisible electron-clouds Across the laser-pap

      3 min read

    Reviews for The Daemon of the World

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Daemon of the World - Percy Bysshe Shelley

      Project Gutenberg's The Daemon of the World, by Percy Bysshe Shelley

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Daemon of the World

      Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

      Release Date: December 9, 2009 [EBook #4654]

      Last Updated: February 6, 2013

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAEMON OF THE WORLD ***

      Produced by Sue Asscher, and David Widger

      THE DAEMON OF THE WORLD.

      A FRAGMENT.

      By Percy Bysshe Shelley

      PART 1.

           Nec tantum prodere vati,

           Quantum scire licet. Venit aetas omnis in unam

           Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus.

           LUCAN, Phars. v. 176.

             How wonderful is Death,

             Death and his brother Sleep!

           One pale as yonder wan and horned moon,

             With lips of lurid blue,

           The other glowing like the vital morn,                        5

             When throned on ocean's wave

             It breathes over the world:

           Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!

           Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton,

           Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,                    10

           To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne

           Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form,

           Which love and admiration cannot view

           Without a beating heart, whose azure veins

           Steal like dark streams along a field of snow,               15

           Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed

           In light of some sublimest mind, decay?

             Nor putrefaction's breath

           Leave aught of this pure spectacle

             But loathsomeness and ruin?—                               20

             Spare aught but a dark theme,

           On which the lightest heart might moralize?

           Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers

           Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids

             To watch their own repose?                                 25

             Will they, when morning's beam

             Flows through those wells of light,

           Seek far from noise and day some western cave,

           Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds

             A lulling murmur weave?—                                   30

             Ianthe doth not sleep

             The dreamless sleep of death:

           Nor in her moonlight chamber silently

           Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb,

             Or mark

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1