A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

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by Percy Bysshe Shelley (#8 in our series by Percy Bysshe Shelley)
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Title: A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Release Date: April, 2004 [EBook #5428] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on July 18, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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A DEFENCE OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

ON LOVE ON LIFE IN A FUTURE STATE ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICS SPECULATIONS ON MORALS ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS ON THE SYMPOSIUM, OR PREFACE TO THE BANQUET OF PLATO A DEFENCE OF POETRY

ON LOVE
What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? ask him who adores, what is God?
I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine, whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have everywhere sought sympathy and have found only repulse and disappointment.
Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything which exists. We are born into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother; this propensity develops itself with the development of our nature. We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed;[Footnote: These words are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so--No help!] a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret; with a frame whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful