Poem of the Week – The Moon by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Alongside John Keats and Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley is regarded as one of the primary pioneers of later Romantic poetry. His literary generation wrote in the wake of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s exquisite artistic exertions. Expelled from Oxford for his radical atheist tendencies, Shelley led the expected life of a wayward romantic poet, incessantly travelling whilst composing profound lyrics that expounded an exemplary aesthetic vision.

Perhaps the most political of all the Romantics, Shelley remains an icon among cultural progressives. Married to the famous author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, he was therefore the son-in-law of William Godwin, the father of Anarchism, as well as to Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Feminism. Due to his inherent talent and intimate attachments, this handsome, clever and daring young writer became involved in some of the most exalted intellectual circles of his century. Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, whom Shelley deeply impressed and befriended, attended his funeral on a beach near Viareggio in Tuscany in 1822 after the poet drowned during mysterious circumstances aboard an unseaworthy vessel.

In this week’s poem, Shelley explores his romantic proclivities, writing a poem to the moon whom he compares to a woman. Wittily he notes the lunar cycles, applying remarkable metaphors to the Queen of the Skies’s changing moods and appearances. We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did. 

The Moon

And, like a dying lady lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

The moon arose up in the murky east

A white and shapeless mass.

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?