Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Teacher card
- Published
- 1820, in The Complete Poetical Works
- Length
- 45 lines, 311 words, 1 word in 26 is long
- Year band
- Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
- Themes
- sun
- Time
- 5–10 min, depending on the activity
The text
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,The waves are dancing fast and bright,Blue isles and snowy mountains wearThe purple noon’s transparent might,The breath of the moist earth is light,Around its unexpanded buds;Like many a voice of one delight,The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,The City’s voice itself, is soft like Solitude’s.
I see the Deep’s untrampled floorWith green and purple seaweeds strown;I see the waves upon the shore,Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:I sit upon the sands alone,—The lightning of the noontide oceanIs flashing round me, and a toneArises from its measured motion,How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,Nor peace within nor calm around,Nor that content surpassing wealthThe sage in meditation found,And walked with inward glory crowned—Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.Others I see whom these surround—Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;—To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Yet now despair itself is mild,Even as the winds and waters are;I could lie down like a tired child,And weep away the life of careWhich I have borne and yet must bear,Till death like sleep might steal on me,And I might feel in the warm airMy cheek grow cold, and hear the seaBreathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
Some might lament that I were cold,As I, when this sweet day is gone,Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,Insults with this untimely moan;They might lament—for I am oneWhom men love not,—and yet regret,Unlike this day, which, when the sunShall on its stainless glory set,Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (died 1822), The Complete Poetical Works (1820), lines 34664–34716 of Project Gutenberg ebook #4800. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.
What to do with it
- Its lines are dealt for the sky in the weather poemsin weatherline · 45 lines · about 5–10 min
See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
weatherline.popplepoetry.com/sources#sh-naples
Send the whole hand-out
https://popplepoetry.com/find/shelley-stanzas-written-in-dejection-near-naples · popplepoetry.com