SpokenVerse | Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley (read by Tom O'Bedlam) @SpokenVerse | Uploaded April 2014 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
Most girls would reply, "Nice try. Make me a better offer".
Sometimes this poem is used in connection with marriage but it's actually about Free Love. Free Love is to Marriage what Anarchy is to Government. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_love
Shelley was a great believer and practitioner of Free Love: his wife Mary, it seems, believed in theory but never practised it herself. Mary was a feminist like her mother Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote a treatise called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - in it she said "I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves."
Percy and Mary together wrote a play called Proserpine, which was about the abduction and rape by Pluto, God of the underworld, of the daughter of Ceres, Goddess of the Earth. In the end they struck a deal where she spent half the year above ground with her mother and the other half underground with Pluto - and that's why we have summer and winter.
tinyurl.com/n8qxxva
Mary Shelley is better known for her novel Frankenstein which is about plastic surgery, electric shock treatment and resucitation, making the point that when taken to extremes these procedures can make people look pretty scary.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
Portraits of Mary Shelley.
The final picture is the Rape of Persephone by Simone Pignoni (c. 1650)
THE fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle—
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd 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?
Most girls would reply, "Nice try. Make me a better offer".
Sometimes this poem is used in connection with marriage but it's actually about Free Love. Free Love is to Marriage what Anarchy is to Government. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_love
Shelley was a great believer and practitioner of Free Love: his wife Mary, it seems, believed in theory but never practised it herself. Mary was a feminist like her mother Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote a treatise called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - in it she said "I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves."
Percy and Mary together wrote a play called Proserpine, which was about the abduction and rape by Pluto, God of the underworld, of the daughter of Ceres, Goddess of the Earth. In the end they struck a deal where she spent half the year above ground with her mother and the other half underground with Pluto - and that's why we have summer and winter.
tinyurl.com/n8qxxva
Mary Shelley is better known for her novel Frankenstein which is about plastic surgery, electric shock treatment and resucitation, making the point that when taken to extremes these procedures can make people look pretty scary.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
Portraits of Mary Shelley.
The final picture is the Rape of Persephone by Simone Pignoni (c. 1650)
THE fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle—
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd 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?
