Once low mist smoking beach sands
Harriet and you launched small wooden boats
carrying verse cargoes across the Irish Sea.
Later co-exiled with your new wife
and newer friends you wandered through
a vast and troubled world.
Lighting those years of Poetry
ten thousands candles melted back to wax
while your mind released the fire
to liberate the ancient couple
Prometheus and Asia
already creatures of their own conceit
proud and strong and true...
A darker destiny stalked you
and drowned your small wooden boat.
A pyre blazing on a lonely Italian beach
burned to ash everything but your heart.
Your life with children was cut short:
your hands severed from their growth
your eyes blind to their visions
your mind blocked from their wonder.
Herald of a future you could not grasp
your final triumph sang
of our life stretched beyond judgment
to a finer grace of being:
those newly awakened lives
your hands and eyes and mind had served
with the double light
a comet skimming earth
ignites in its fiery descent into open space.
This is one of the best tributes I have read! You have touched upon the entire orbit of Shelley's life! How he started his life with Harriet, later broke away from her and eloped with Mary Godwin sailing away to other parts of England and unleashed his fiery spirits through poems that were tempestuous like the wild West Wind! I still remember having been inspired by his Song to the Men of England! His Prometheus Unbound has been another jewel! With Marie let me also say that 'ten thousand candles melted back to wax' is a wonderful expression! Finally he got buried in the watery bier at the age of just 28! A life though wasted is never wasted! A sure 10
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
A lovely tribute to Percy Bysshe Shelley detailing his tragic death in the sea. Shelley's poem Ozymandias is my best sonnet of all time. A well articulated piece. Thanks for sharing.