Wollstonecraftwerk



Love's Philosophy

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?


I seem to remember either Steve Bell or Martin Rowson having done an "after Fournier" version of the picture up there but I can't find it. If it does indeed exist then it is somewhere on those lists. Good Luck. Is this Bathos or Facetiousness? I cannot tell. Anyway, all this Percy Bysshe is of course to do with Lewis last night. It used to take lot to get me to watch 2 hour detective shows, especially on ITV now that the adverts are frequent and irregular - often interrupting the crucial final quarter that used to be commercial free in the old days of The Professionals. However, now having a PVR with rinky-dinky binary skip we can almost totally ignore such interruptions - we only usually get to see the sponsors logos (today I have an irrational urge to buy everything that Sainsbury's have) - and concentrate on the 90 minutes of actual programme. Have I told you that I feel like a thief? There was a lot of Shelley in it - both Percy Bysshe and Mary and though I've never really bothered with Shelley and "the rest of the boys in the band" the poem above does seem both simple in execution and true in emotion - I was going to say "intent" but if you watched the programme you will know why that is just not allowed - Shelley, Keats, Byron etc , did not have "intentions" in their poetry - they just liked writing it and that is the way poetry should be. Having said that I suppose that Blake and, to a lesser extent, Wordsworth were actually trying to change the world a little bit but I am not nearly enough of a scholar to be able to comment further than the fact that "The Band" were too pisshhed and sshhtoned to be able to actually mean anything beyond the moment. But of course Everything I Know I Learned from TV. Maybe I do want to change the world through poetry but I have seen enough delusion amongst internet poets to know that I cannot. Actually I am not sure I needed to see any delusion to be aware of that.

So now of course a small appreciation of the literary junkies is on the cards though I suspect I really should try and avoid any large intake. What with Marvell last week and Shelley this week - they are really spoiling us.