This is how I always feel about Percy Shelley. Always.

 

Current Motto.

"Creatives need "imaginative space" to produce art. We have to balance the amount of information we crave with the needs we require to let our imaginations thrive. So we must choose carefully to protect that imaginative space. Too much information destroys our capacity to create." — Jane  Harrington

(This post was inspired by an earlier post/quote by Percy Shelley on creativity.)

“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; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.” 

                       — Percy Shelley

Trelawny was such a Romantic.

“The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce Shelley to grey ashes. The only portions not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained.”

                           Edward Trelawny, August 16, 1822

The Bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Death: An Online Global Event

Percy Shelley dies on this day, in 1822.

To thirst and find no fill, -- to wail and wander

With short unsteady steps, -- to pause and ponder, --

To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle

Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle, --

To nurse the image of unfelt caresses

Till dim imagination just possesses

The half-created shadow, then all the night

Sick . . .

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

(This is how I feel on this day about Shelley)

Shelley moved into Casa Magni today in 1822.

Casa Magni

Shelley's House. From a drawing. Lerici, Gulf of Spezia, Italy

April 30, 1822, Percy Shelley and family and friends took possession of house.

Today I am celebrating the birth of Percy B Shelley, English poet and visionary.

It's Percy B. Shelley's Birthday today, a day I ALWAYS celebrate. I've been lying in bed this morning, composing in my head a post and tribute to this polymathic genius that I adore and who is my number #1 influence since I was a sixteen year old girl. Of course, I lay there long enough to where the post turned into a small paper, some of it filled with pithy comments on those in his circle. No film has ever captured him correctly. His critics are often foolish and biased, especially those who see him as cruel, sexist, and misogynistic. How absurd. He was a young man, brilliant, and way ahead of his time. A man of our current time. No other Romantic poet is so fitting for the 21st century. It literally breaks my heart that he died before he was 30 years old. I am not one to believe in so called "destiny" but the moment Percy B set foot in Milan in 1816, a series of events were set in motion that would lead to his drowning in 1822. Lilliputian ties and I can trace them in my mind as I did this morning, lying there in bed. I suppose out of all his circle, I adore Claire Clairmont and Thomas Peacock the most, the rest all deserve my contempt (I even give that grudgingly) and this morning I recounted their sins in my head for hours and that includes Mary Shelley, who out of guilt and desperation, slaved over compiling an edition of his poems until she had a nervous breakdown, one of the many she already had experienced. I pity her. I do. But she was Godwin's true daughter and if you don't know what that means, go read about Godwin. Shelley, himself, made two serious mistakes, and they both concerned his so-called marriages, something he never believed in or held to and it cost him. And he paid the ultimate price. Of the two, Harriet Westbrook is the one that haunted him emotionally. It is easy to see how all that happened, when ones considers Shelley's nasty upbringing with a neglectful mother and sadistic father, where the poet's only emotional respite was the adoration and love of his sisters. This pattern never left his emotional make-up. It ruled him. He was flawed, of course, but he was genuine and warm and generous and good. I feel so blessed to know his work, to understand his life, and to feel his visions. To share those visions. I was one of those women who was a prisoner, too, until his work freed me to see the world very differently, to embrace independent thought and skepticism and live in doubt and uncertainty with the grace that he possessed. What an incredible human being. I am not into mythmaking and I make none of him. I am team Human. He was human. That's enough.

Reading Shelley makes me feel like this.

To thirst and find no fill, -- to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps, -- to pause and ponder, --
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle, --
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half-created shadow, then all the night
Sick . . .

                — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fragment: "Igniculus Desiderii"

To thirst and find no fill, -- to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps, -- to pause and ponder, --
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle, --
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half-created shadow, then all the night
Sick . . .

                                 —Percy Bysshe Shelley

                              

Caricatures for Albe by Claire Clairmont

Caricatures for Albe

The last his Death. He dead, extended on his bed, covered all but his breast, which many wigged doctors are cutting open to find out (as one may be saying) what was the extraordinary disease of which this great man died—His heart laid bare, they find an immense capital I grown on its surface—and which had begun to pierce the breast—They are all astonishment.

One says, "A new disease." Another, "I never had a case of this before." A third, "What medicine would have been proper?" The fourth, holding up a finger, "A Desert island."


                                                —Claire Clairmont
                                                 on Lord Byron

Shelley on what we Modern Americans Need to Do

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like
dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many-they are few.” 
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

Gardening and philosophy of life

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addressed,

Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,

Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air

The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,

As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup,

Till the fiery star, which is its eye,

Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,

The sweetest flower for scent that blows;

And all rare blossoms from every clime

Grew in that garden in perfect prime. 

from The Sensitive Plant by Percy B Shelley

Some of the most important things I have learned about life have been discovered in my garden. The first lesson you learn is how nature is full of contradictions, both literally

and metaphorically. At first you are surrounded by all this beauty and mystery, and then those senses are followed by the hard work and dangers, the losses you experience, some so quick you are shocked senseless. You begin to understand that while the world is very big, it is also very small, that one moment it is beautiful and the next moment it's the ugly monster. You try to comprehend that while you are a part of nature, it is totally apart from you. No one has written about this so well as Percy Shelley in his poem, The Sensitive Plant. The poem spells out all the beauty and love of a garden, then all the horrors of what a garden is, and then our feeble hopes as human beings in that garden. It is a poem about contradictions. I've come to understand one thing only, that sometimes I have no answers, no solutions, no theory.