Fifty Shades of September

By Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickenson and W B Yeats

The ninth month of the Gregorian calendar strides onto stage with the autumn equinox and the first glimpses of a new season. Nature may adorn the coming days with a blaze of Indian summer, or the early showers and storms of autumn may begin their symphony.

Regardless of Nature’s elemental whims the landscape is a riot of colours, hues and swathes, the harvest of crops continues, the orchards heave with bounty.

Across fifty poems our classic poets including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, W B Yeats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti ready their pens with words and verse of sublime beauty detailing the world around them and their lives upon it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Sep 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781835471906

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.

Book preview

Fifty Shades of September

An Introduction

The ninth month of the Gregorian calendar strides onto stage with the autumn equinox and the first glimpses of a new season.  Nature may adorn the coming days with a blaze of Indian summer, or the early showers and storms of autumn may begin their symphony.

Regardless of Nature’s elemental whims the landscape is a riot of colours, hues and swathes, the harvest of crops continues, the orchards heave with bounty.

Across fifty poems our classic poets including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, W B Yeats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti ready their pens with words and verse of sublime beauty detailing the world around them and their lives upon it.

Index of Contents

September by George Arnold

September by Helen Hunt Jackson

September 1st 1802 By William Wordsworth

Lines Written Beneath an Elm in the Churchyard of Harrow-on-the-Hill September 2nd 1807 by Lord Byron

Sonnet XXL, Sacred to the Memory of Edward Spedding Who Died September 3rd 1832 by Henry Alford

An Indian Summer Day on the Prairie by Vachel Lindsay

Lines Written on the 6th September by Thomas Gent

Autumn in Sussex by Radclyffe Hall

Autumn in Cornwall by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Written in London September 1802 by William Wordsworth

Autumn by Kahlil Gibran

September by Carlos Wilcox

A Calendar of Sonnets - September by Helen Hunt Jackson

September by John Payne

The Name of it is Autumn by Emily Dickinson

September 1815 by William Wordsworth

Autumn Song by Dante Gabriel Rosetti

Autumn Dawn by Charles Sorley

An Autumn Sunset by Edith Wharton

A September Night by George Marion McClellan

In Autumn Moonlight by Robert Seymour Bridges

Indian Summer by Henry Van Dyke

September 1819 by William Wordsworth

The Autumn by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Autumn by Thomas Hood

Elegy in April and September by Wilfred Owen

September 1918 by Amy Lowell

21st September, 1870 by Charles Kingsley

An Autumn Rain Scene by Thomas Hardy

Sonnet. September 1922 by Ivor Gurney

September by Janet Hamilton

In September by Thomas MacDonagh

Autumn Overlooked My Knitting by Emily Dickinson

The Golden Wedding of Sterling and Sarah Lanier September 27th, 1868 by Sidney Lanier

To Autumn by William Blake

Written in September 1804 by Christian Milne

Autumn by Anne Bradstreet

Ode to Autumn by John Keats

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Autumn - A Dirge by Percy Bysshe Shelley

In September by Amy Levy

Postscriptum, September 1913 by Thomas MacDonagh

Hold the Harvest by Fanny Parnell

September Midnights by Sara Teasdale

September 1913 by William Butler Yeats

Late September by Amy Lowell

Love's Harvest by Alfred Austin

Autumn by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Carol of Harvest for 1867 by Walt Whitman

September Dark by James Whitcomb Riley

FIFTY SHADES OF SEPTEMBER

September by George Arnold

Sweet is the voice that calls

From babbling waterfalls

In meadows where the downy seeds are flying;

And soft the breezes blow,

And eddying come and go

In faded gardens where the rose is dying.

Among the stubbled corn

The blithe quail pipes at morn,

The merry partridge drums in hidden places,

And glittering insects gleam

Above the reedy stream,

Where busy spiders spin