The Witch of Atlas

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The Witch of Atlas" is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley published in the Posthumous Poems collection in 1824. This book contains 78 ottava rima stanzas with a theme for a perfect union. A romantic poem for both young and old to keep the romance burning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Jun 2, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547041948

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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Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Witch of Atlas

EAN 8596547041948

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

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

Table of Contents

 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