“when your husband’s on the pier with some young lady / when the spirit of conjugal love is fading”

For Poetry Monday, another posthumously published short from a 2nd Gen Romantic:

“Music, when soft voices die,” Percy Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.


Written in 1821 but not published until the 1824 Posthumous Poems edited by Mary Shelley and Leigh Hunt, under the title “To ——”. To be fair to the editors, Shelley used that title for a couple other enigmatic love lyrics also not written to Mary.

---L.

Subject quote from Zeur niet!, Annie M. G. Schmidt, tr. de_eekhoorn.