"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."
— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Edward Moxon
Date
w. 1821, 1840
Metaphor
"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."
Metaphor in Context
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide - abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1840). <Link to Google Books
Text from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, based on the Harvard Classics series, 1909. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/shelley-poetry.html>
Text from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, based on the Harvard Classics series, 1909. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/shelley-poetry.html>
Date of Entry
10/03/2006
Date of Review
02/02/2008
