Poetic Ponderings for January - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetic Ponderings at the Caledon Library
Wednesday, January 26
4pm SLT
Caledon Library Meeting Rooms, Caledon Victoria City
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Victoria%20City/155/118/23

The 19th century was a time of poetic inspiration and innovation.  In both style and subject, poets experimented with characterizing their emotions and perceptions within the frame of verse. At the beginning of the century the Romantic school, in reaction against Enlightenment ideals, sought inspiration in the workings of intuition and in pastoral settings.  In mid-century, Emily Dickinson wrote of death and immortality, drawing on her own rarefied sensibility and using the unconventional device of slant rhyme. At the end of the century William Butler Yeats made the Celtic twilight come alive for his readers.  Our series will read and consider these poets and more, focusing on the force and individuality of the poetic voice. Join us for a new poem each month.

Here are our poems for this month:

Percy Bysshe Shelley  1792-1822

Mutability

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! -yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. -A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. -One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! -For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutablilty.




Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".