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    O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems
    O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems
    O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems
    Ebook41 pages20 minutes

    O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems

    By Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Robert Browning

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems
    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

      O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems - Percy Bysshe Shelley

      O May I Join the Choir Invisible!, by George Eliot

      The Project Gutenberg eBook, O May I Join the Choir Invisible!, by George

      Eliot

      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: O May I Join the Choir Invisible!

      and Other Favorite Poems

      Author: George Eliot

      Release Date: March 4, 2007 [eBook #20742]

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

      ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK O MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE!***

      Transcribed from the 1884 D. Lothrop and Company edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

      O MAY I JOIN

      THE CHOIR INVISIBLE!

      by

      GEORGE ELIOT

      and other favorite poems

      ILLUSTRATED

      BOSTON

      D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY

      franklin and hawley streets

      Copyright by

      D. Lothrop and Company

      1884

      O MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE!

      O may I join the choir invisible

      Of those immortal dead who live again

      In minds made better by their presence; live

      In pulses stirred to generosity,

      In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

      Of miserable aims that end with self,

      In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,

      And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds

      To vaster issues.

         So to live is heaven:

      To make undying music in the world,

      Breathing a beauteous order that controls

      With growing sway the growing life of man.

      So we inherit that sweet purity

      For which we

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