Weep, for he is dead!
I didn't get around to posting yesterday, but I was thinking all day that it was Percy Bysshe Shelley's death day, and had this bit of "To a Skylark" running through my head:
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
I saw a few bits of his ashes at the British Library...they were encased in glass and mounted on a sort of velvet-covered bit of board. A morbid thrill, that.
They say his heart wouldn't burn. I find that terribly romantic, but at the same time I can't help but wonder if the bystanders might not have doused the flames a bit and helped the fates along. And I think of Byron out there treading water, looking at the pyre on the beach and feeling rather lonesome since Keats and Shelley had both managed such poetic exits, and wondering how he might properly accomplish his own end. Poor bloke, dying in his bed of something as unpoetic as dysentery, without even making it to the battlefield. I do pity him a bit. But I digress. It is Shelley we mourn today.
I do so love dead people.
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
I saw a few bits of his ashes at the British Library...they were encased in glass and mounted on a sort of velvet-covered bit of board. A morbid thrill, that.
They say his heart wouldn't burn. I find that terribly romantic, but at the same time I can't help but wonder if the bystanders might not have doused the flames a bit and helped the fates along. And I think of Byron out there treading water, looking at the pyre on the beach and feeling rather lonesome since Keats and Shelley had both managed such poetic exits, and wondering how he might properly accomplish his own end. Poor bloke, dying in his bed of something as unpoetic as dysentery, without even making it to the battlefield. I do pity him a bit. But I digress. It is Shelley we mourn today.
I do so love dead people.