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‘The flower that smiles today’.

The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies;

All that we wish to stay Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight? Lightning that mocks the night, Brief even as bright …

So begins this poem, sometimes titled ‘Mutability’ (though Shelley, confusingly, wrote another poem called ‘Mutability’), which is one of Shelley’s most widely anthologised poems and a classic example of the carpe diem or ‘seize the day’ poem.

7. ‘Ode to the West Wind’.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes …

Written in 1819 during a turbulent time in English history – the Peterloo Massacre, which Shelley also wrote about in his poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, deeply affected the poet – this classic ode is one of Shelley’s best-known poems. The west wind is the wind that would carry Shelley back from Florence (where he was living at the time) to England, where he wanted to help fight for reform and revolution. The west wind thus becomes, before Harold Macmillan, a ‘wind of change’.

8. ‘The Mask of Anarchy’.

As I lay asleep in Italy

There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh— Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew …

Sometimes called ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, this political poem was written in response to the above-mentioned Peterloo Massacre, when cavalry charged a group of some 60,000 protesters (some accounts put the figure as high as 80,000) in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester. The crowd were protesting over famine and poor economic conditions in the north of England in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. 15 people were killed, and hundreds injured. The nonviolent resistance to violent attempts at suppression, which underpins Shelley’s poem, would later influence Mahatma Gandhi’s own philosophy of nonviolent protest.

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