greykit.poetry — Percy Bysshe Shelley
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1832
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
The Masque of Anarchy
Written in response to the Peterloo Massacre (1819), in which cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 reformers in Manchester — Shelley's furious call for non-violent resistance, cataloguing the allegorical figures of Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy and ending with the clarion "Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.
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1821
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Adonais
Shelley's pastoral elegy for John Keats in 55 Spenserian stanzas — mourning the death of genius at the hands of hostile critics, tracing the mourning of Urania and Keats's fellow-poets, and arriving at the vision of Adonais absorbed into the eternal One, a star beaconing from the abode where the Eternal are.
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1820
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ode to the West Wind
In five linked terza rima sonnets, Shelley invokes the autumn West Wind — destroyer and preserver — begging it to scatter his words over the earth as seeds of prophecy.
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1820
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
To a Skylark
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit — a bird that is heard and never seen, chased through simile after simile (poet, high-born maiden, glow-worm, rose) because no human joy is unmixed enough to explain it.
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1819
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, princes who are the dregs of their dull race, a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field — a catalogue of graves from which a glorious Phantom may burst.
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1818
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ozymandias
A traveller's report of a ruined desert statue whose pedestal proclaims the vast ambitions of a king whose works have wholly vanished.