The Witch of Atlas - Percy Bysshe Shelley - E-Book

The Witch of Atlas E-Book

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Beschreibung

The Witch of Atlas is a major poetic work of the English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley written in 1820 and published posthumously in 1824.  The plot of The Witch of Atlas revolves around the travels and adventures of a mysterious and mythical Witch who lives in a cave on Atlas' mountain by a secret fountain and who creates a hermaphrodite "by strange art" kneading together fire and snow, a creature, Hermaphroditus, "a sexless thing", with both male and female characteristics, with pinions, or wings. 

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

THE WITCH OF ATLAS

The Witch of Atlas is a major poetic work of the English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley written in 1820 and published posthumously in 1824.

The plot of The Witch of Atlas revolves around the travels and adventures of a mysterious and mythical Witch who lives in a cave on Atlas' mountain by a secret fountain and who creates a hermaphrodite "by strange art" kneading together fire and snow, a creature, Hermaphroditus, "a sexless thing", with both male and female characteristics, with pinions, or wings.

Table of Contents
Percy Bysshe Shelley
THE WITCH OF ATLAS
THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

TO MARY

(ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM, UPON THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST).

1.

How, my dear Mary, – are you critic-bitten

(For vipers kill, though dead) by some review,

That you condemn these verses I have written,

Because they tell no story, false or true?

What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,

May it not leap and play as grown cats do,

Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time,

Content thee with a visionary rhyme.

2.

What hand would crush the silken-winged fly,

The youngest of inconstant April’s minions,

Because it cannot climb the purest sky,

Where the swan sings, amid the sun’s dominions?

Not thine. Thou knowest ‘tis its doom to die,

When Day shall hide within her twilight pinions

The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile,

Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

3.

To thy fair feet a winged Vision came,

Whose date should have been longer than a day,

And o’er thy head did beat its wings for fame,

And in thy sight its fading plumes display;

The watery bow burned in the evening flame.

But the shower fell, the swift Sun went his way –

And that is dead. – O, let me not believe

That anything of mine is fit to live!

4.

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years

Considering and retouching Peter Bell;

Watering his laurels with the killing tears

Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to Hell

Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres

Of Heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil

The over-busy gardener’s blundering toil.

5.

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature

As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise

Clothes for our grandsons – but she matches Peter,

Though he took nineteen years, and she three days

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre

She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays,

Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress

Like King Lear’s ‘looped and windowed raggedness.’

6.

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow

Scorched by Hell’s hyperequatorial climate

Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;

In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate

Can shrive you of that sin, – if sin there be

In love, when it becomes idolatry.

THE WITCH OF ATLAS.