World Poetry Month: Day Seventeen
Today’s poetry is ‘Love’s Philosophy’ a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the visionary poets who helped define Romanticism, but he was a rather obscure poet who wasn’t widely read or celebrated while he was alive.
Only after his untimely death did his poetry begin to receive recognition and be truly appreciated.
This is not to say, however, he didn’t have a huge influence on the literary community of his day.
He was friends with Lord Byron and John Keats, both of whom inspired and in turn were inspired by Shelley.
Like his peers, he was a free spirit and a free-thinker, a humanist, atheist, feminist, socialist, philosopher, and to top it off a wooer of women.
“Love’s Philosophy” combines his rhetorical skills and philosophical musings in an attempt to persuade the listener to kiss the poet using arguments that nothing in the world is single.
‘Love’s Philosophy’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley ▶️
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?—See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
