Fun With Shelley.

To ----

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,--
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?


Obvs, the fine Master Bysshe, taking back and marking time with a favourite poem of mine from my teenage years.

(this entry is inspired by the fact that i've been fiddling the last two lines of this in my head for a bit. the devotion, the far, the sorrow, it's flickering a little, in an angst-ridden way. and then i looked up the poem and re-read it. i liked it, deeply in the past, but now, older, and far more cynical, it seems less romantic, and more of a cop out. this rant is not about you, anyone, it's about my own irritation... as with last entry. general disillusionment, a little less magic realism now covers the world... snow melting, and the grass is dead under it.)


i can't remember, exactly, which of Shelley's passing fancies inspired this. he was a wanderer, and constantly strayed around mary, as though she was a flagpole, one hand upon her, swinging in circles, circles, her the stable, but in love with the romance of time, those fleeting moments, oh, i cannot have you and i shall weep, weep, weep, at the melancholy of it all. i shall let my soul be wrecked in torment, poetic mistress, as i cavort, and you, my love, shall watch patient at this.

of course, as a teenager, it merely was a good poem to cement adolescent angst over my teenage crush on brent. (now married to a lovely good christian girl, excellent), then niftily i could transfer the feelings to these words to hannah, my divine, large handed actress. then finally, the buck was passed to max, my shelleyan love, born on the same day, unable to swim, and adoring of parallels between his life and that of bysshe, (only without the 'free love' polyamoury).

i hated being a distant goddess - this is the situation my first relationship put me in. this poem leaves a bitter taste now. i can recall it from memory, shelley is the only poet with which i can do this. i enjoy his rhythm. i want to argue shelley verses keats verses byron. i never want a lover who hasn't read at least one of the three.

the idea that shelley is unable to love this woman, that she is impossible, that his desire for her is pointless and endless and spirals up like moths fluttering at little flickers in the sky, that the night that never reaches the sun, that the rays can never be it, and that they are in fact, in their nature, impossible; it's a cop-out, fucker.

'the passion' is my favourite re-write of the romantics - fiction, but retold from the perspective of the women, embroiled with their selfish, and emotionally ignorant lovers. did shelley ask the woman in the poem (i think this is the one entrenches in the top of a cloister somewhere, she's sixteen or something, i dunno, memory is not serving me well right now) whether she yearned to be loved like a few scales falling of a moth's wing? what is it that 'men call love' shelley, and what makes you above this, this time: your flighty ambitions? your invisible dreams? your romance romance let me have these words and suck them dry from the orange, the citrus staining the corners of my mouth and stinging any small cracks in the lips? what's the use of poetry when ahhh, you are just an impossible flight to the stars, and the moth? does it know what a star is? does it care? it's misguided. it doesn't see a star. it sees something, and it is misguided, and it's directionless, and it too will die fast, flattened against the earth, under the tread of someone's shoe, or pinned to a board. little moth, your devotion is nothing. it's misplaced biology.