An Exhortation

Percy Bysshe Shelley * Track #75 On The Complete Poetical Works Of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume 2

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Album The Complete Poetical Works Of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume 2

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

An Exhortation by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of the ‘Big Six’ Romantic poets, the others being Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Romantic Poetry
A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. This was a subject of particu...

An Exhortation Annotated

[Published with "Prometheus Unbound", 1820. Dated 'Pisa, April, 1820' in Harvard manuscript (Woodberry), but assigned by Mrs. Shelley to 1819.]

Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets' food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
in a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh, refuse the boon!

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