Of many questions never
answered I return
to give the questions up and
she may take them
if she will or laugh
that I am bothered
by them. Love if anything
is practical.
Her wildest ecstasy is
common sense.
Theodore Enslin
Of many questions never
answered I return
to give the questions up and
she may take them
if she will or laugh
that I am bothered
by them. Love if anything
is practical.
Her wildest ecstasy is
common sense.
harboring tons with little to say stretched
on wooden models and tapiocas of time
till soon I shut my door and start to grind
No cry is exultant enough
for my thanks, for my heart that flings open its hinges
and slants my ribs with light
But for him love was a revolution-weapon: the active principle, as strong as electro-magnetism and, he surmised, the same force, by which the universe worked and by which men would be perfected. The germ of that force - like the tiny, compacted light of the sun and the stars - lay deep in the heart of man.
When men and women faced their oppressors armed with light and love, rather than revenge, they would be unconquerable. And, however crushed by outward chains, they would be free.
Shelley's importance for us, now, is not merely that he is a political poet. It is that he is a transcendent spiritual poet. If our age does not want such a voice, if it prefers to bring him down to a more secular, acceptable and ordinary level, that is a reflection on us, not him. Despite all the advances of his own industrial age, as he wrote in 1821, "we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life."