Page 11 Loading... Tips: Click on articles from page |
 PASSION Love’s Philosophy
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
(1792—1822) English philosophical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley rejected all conventions that he believed stifled love and human freedom and rebelled against the strictures of English politics and religion. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry was his legacy to all of us on the importance of passionately living our daily lives. No less an authority than the Encyclopedia Britannica said about this English Romantic poet, “His passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language.” Living life passionately has its own tremendous rewards, which are intensified when one is aware that death, in its arbitrary way, can come unexpectedly as it did for Shelley
Just think of this. Here was a man living at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England who risked his life distributing pamphlets advocating political rights and autonomy for Catholics in Ireland. He eloped at age nineteen, betraying both families; he lost his first wife to suicide when he was twenty-four; and two of his children died when he was in his mid-twenties. He then married his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft, fulfilling his desire for a life partner who “can feel poetry and understand philosophy.” Shelley traveled all over Europe supporting himself by writing and publishing his poetry. He met with Lord Byron in various European cities for joint poetic endeavors, and proclaimed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world because they create human values and the forms that shape the social order.
This man was a fervent idealist who wrote of his love for love and his passion for passion. He completed his enormous treasury of poetry and prose by the age of twenty-nine, when he died in a boating accident during a storm. Not only does his poetry speak to all of us of his enormous passion, but so does his life as well. He took up causes, risked his fame and his life, and drank up every moment of his life. The poem quoted here, “Love’s Philosophy,” conveys a glimmer of the passion that Shelley felt in his idealistic heart, and it says to me, as does so much of his romantic poetry: Feel the love for those you adore, and express it with fervor; otherwise live your life in frustration.
Love, the passionate variety is that inner sense of longing that pervades every thought, every waking moment. It is a state of bliss that we usually equate with sexual or romantic feelings when they are ecstatically shared with one’s lover. All of that mingling, mixing, clasping, and kissing between the rivers, winds, mountains, flowers, and moonbeams are Shelley’s metaphors for that shared state of bliss.
Why, he implies, would you choose the frustration of not expressing these feelings? I can recall the aching I have felt at various times in my life for a love that I was unable to share with someone. I think I felt as though I’d died and gone to heaven when that love was made manifest by long embraces and kisses and union . See also
|
