II.Of hatred I am proud,--with scorn content;Indifference, that once hurt me, now is grownItself indifferent;But, not to speak of love, pity aloneCan break a spirit already more than bent.The miserable oneTurns the mind’s poison into food,--Its medicine is tears,--its evil good.
III.Therefore, if now I see you seldomer,Dear friends, dear FRIEND! know that I only flyYour looks, because they stirGriefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:The very comfort that they ministerI scarce can bear, yet I,So deeply is the arrow gone,Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
IV.When I return to my cold home, you ask Why I am not as I have ever been.YOU spoil me for the taskOf acting a forced part in life's dull scene,--Of wearing on my brow the idle maskOf author, great or mean,In the world's carnival. I soughtPeace thus, and but in you I found it not.
V.Full half an hour, to-day, I tried my lotWith various flowers, and every one still said,'She loves me--loves me not.'And if this meant a vision long since fled--If it meant fortune, fame, or peace of thought--If it meant,--but I dreadTo speak what you may know too well:Still there was truth in the sad oracle.
VI.The crane o'er seas and forests seeks her home;No bird so wild but has its quiet nest,When it no more would roam;The sleepless billows on the ocean’s breastBreak like a bursting heart, and die in foam, And thus at length find rest:Doubtless there is a place of peaceWhere MY weak heart and all its throbs will cease.
VII.I asked her, yesterday, if she believedThat I had resolution. One who HAD Would ne’er have thus relievedHis heart with words,—but what his judgement badeWould do, and leave the scorner unrelieved.These verses are too sadTo send to you, but that I know, Happy yourself, you feel another’s woe.
About the author
About the poet
Shelley, born the heir to rich estates and the son of an Member of Parliament, went to University College, Oxford in 1810, but in March of the following year he and a friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were both expelled for the suspected authorship of a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.
In 1811 he met and eloped to Edinburgh with Harriet Westbrook and, one year later, went with her and her older sister first to Dublin, then to Devon and North Wales, where they stayed for six months into 1813. However, by 1814, and with the birth of two children, their marriage had collapsed and Shelley eloped once again, this time with Mary Godwin.
Along with Mary's step-sister, the couple travelled to France, Switzerland and Germany before returning to London where he took a house with Mary on the edge of Great Windsor Park and wrote Alastor (1816), the poem that first brought him fame.
In 1816 Shelley spent the summer on Lake Geneva with Byron and Mary who had begun work on her Frankenstein. In the autumn of that year Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park and Shelley then married Mary and settled with her, in 1817, at Great Marlow, on the Thames. They later travelled to Italy, where Shelley wrote the sonnet Ozymandias (written 1818) and translated Plato's Symposium from the Greek. Shelley himself drowned in a sailing accident in 1822.