On Death

Percy Bysshe Shelley * Track #7 On The Complete Poetical Works Of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume 2

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

On Death 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...

On Death Annotated

[For the date of composition see Editor's Note.
Published with "Alastor", 1816.]

THERE IS NO WORK, NOR DEVICE, NOR KNOWLEDGE, NOR WISDOM,
IN THE GRAVE, WHITHER THOU GOEST.—Ecclesiastes.

The pale, the cold, and the moony smile
Which the meteor beam of a starless night
Sheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,
Ere the dawning of morn's undoubted light,
Is the flame of life so fickle and wan
That flits round our steps till their strength is gone.

O man! hold thee on in courage of soul
Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way,
And the billows of cloud that around thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
Where Hell and Heaven shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.

This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel,
And the coming of death is a fearful blow
To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;
When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.

The secret things of the grave are there,
Where all but this frame must surely be,
Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear
No longer will live to hear or to see
All that is great and all that is strange
In the boundless realm of unending change.

Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?
Who painteth the shadows that are beneath
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?
Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be
With the fears and the love for that which we see?

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