Upon its snow;
As a strain of sweetest sound
Wraps itself the wind around 10
Until the voiceless wind be music too;
As aught dark, vain, and dull,
Basking in what is beautiful,
Is full of light and love—
CANCELLED STANZA OF THE MASK OF ANARCHY
[Published by H. Buxton Forman, The Mask of Anarchy (Facsimile of Shelley's MS.), 1887.]
(For which stanzas LXVIII, LXIX have been substituted.)
Like the dead from putrid graves,
Troops of starvelings gliding come,
Living Tenants of a tomb.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY
Shelley loved the People; and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and therefore more deserving of sympathy, than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people's side. He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their circumstances and wrongs. He wrote a few; but, in those days of prosecution for libel, they could not be printed. They are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they show his earnestness, and with what heartfelt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury—that oppression is detestable as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph: such is the scope of the Ode to the Assertors of Liberty. He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty.
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1820
THE SENSITIVE PLANT
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.
- ↑ 6 Like the Spirit of Love felt 1820; And the Spirit of Love felt 1839, 1st ed; And the Spirit of Love fell 1839, 2nd ed.
