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O lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fail! Let thy love in kisses rain On my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast: O press it to thine own again, Where it will break at last!
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, The cross leads generations on.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
What! alive, and so bold, O earth?
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light. And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
The seed ye sow another reaps; The wealth ye find another keeps; The robes ye weave another wears; The arms ye forge another bears.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes; And yet I pity those they torture not.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
From the haunts of daily life Where is waged the daily strife With common wants and common cares Which sows the human heart with tares.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Best and brightest, come away!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Swiftly walk over the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, - Swift be thy flight!
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength; And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length; These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o’er the disentangled doom.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it; One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
What softer voice is hushed over the dead? Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown? What form leans sadly o'er the white death - bed, In mockery of monumental stone, The heavy heart heaving without a moan?
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
What if English toil and blood Was poured forth, even as a flood? It availed, Oh, Liberty, To dim, but not extinguish thee.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
And like a prophetess of May Strewed flowers upon the barren way, Making the wintry world appear Like one on whom thou smilest, dear.
Percy Bysshe Shelley