Classic Love Poems
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English poet and one of the major poets of the Romantic Movement in England. He is most famous for his classic anthology verse works—Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, The Masque of Anarchy, and others—which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. After his death, he was idolized by the next four generation of poets, including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau, William Butler Yeats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“Young Woman in Boat”
by James Tissot, 1870
The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
featuring “Queen Mab,” Shelley’s first major poem. He was never completely satisfied with it. Even after it was printed, he continued to refashion some of its passages with handwritten revisions and additions to the first edition.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley,
wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and
author of the novel, Frankenstein
(Portrait by Richard Rothwell, 1840)
Love’s Philosophy
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by law divine
In one another’s being 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 sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?
The Indian Serenade
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep or night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me-who knows how?
To thy chamber-window, sweet!
The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream,
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
O, beloved as thou art!
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:
Oh! press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last!
To —
I
When passion’s trance is overpast,
If tenderness and truth could last,
Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep,
I should not weep, I should not weep!
II
It were enough to feel, to see,
Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly.
And dream the rest and burn and be
The secret food of fires unseen,
Couldst thou but be as thou hast been.
III
After the slumber of the year
The woodland violets reappear;
All things revive in field or grove,
And sky and sea, but two, which move
And form all others, life and love.
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