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    The Witch of Atlas
    The Witch of Atlas
    The Witch of Atlas
    Ebook46 pages30 minutes

    The Witch of Atlas

    By Percy Bysshe Shelley

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJun 1, 2004
    The Witch of Atlas
    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.

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      Book preview

      The Witch of Atlas - Percy Bysshe Shelley

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Witch of Atlas, 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.net

      Title: The Witch of Atlas

      Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

      Posting Date: August 24, 2009 [EBook #4696] Release Date: November, 2003 First Posted: March 3, 2002

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WITCH OF ATLAS ***

      Produced by Sue Asscher

      The Witch of Atlas

      by

      Percy Bysshe Shelley

      TO MARY (ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM, UPON THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST).

       1.

       How, my dear Mary,—are you critic-bitten

       (For vipers kill, though dead) by some review,

       That you condemn these verses I have written,

       Because they tell no story, false or true?

       What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, _5

       May it not leap and play as grown cats do,

       Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time,

       Content thee with a visionary rhyme.

       2.

       What hand would crush the silken-winged fly,

       The youngest of inconstant April's minions, _10

       Because it cannot climb the purest sky,

       Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions?

       Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die,

       When Day shall hide within her twilight pinions

       The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile, _15

       Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

       3.

       To thy fair feet a winged Vision came,

       Whose date should have been longer than a day,

       And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame,

       And in thy sight its fading plumes display; _20

       The watery bow burned in the evening flame.

       But the shower fell, the swift Sun went his way—

       And that is dead.—O, let me not believe

       That anything of mine is fit to live!

       4.

       Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years _25

       Considering and retouching Peter Bell;

       Watering his laurels with the killing tears

       Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to Hell

       Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres

       Of Heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well _30

       May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil

       The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.

       5.

       My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature

       As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise

       Clothes for our grandsons—but she matches Peter, _35

       Though he took

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