The power of seasons changing in the following poem by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley nicely evokes the overall power yet grace the natural world consists of. Here, the elements themselves seem to be moaning about the injustice that is corrupting the society. Autumn is a fitting background for Shelley's own vision of political and social revolution because it can have such a drastic change on the Earth's physical appearance. Shelley often suggested that the natural world held a sublime power over his imagination. Nature also had a creative power over him because he was very inspired by the natural world and what nature is capable of.
Autumn ; A Dirge ' was published by Percy Shelley's widow Mary in 1824, two years after Percy's death in Italy at the age of just twenty nine. Unlike his contemporary John Keats, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2010/04/john-keats-doomed-romantic.html Shelley makes no attempt to evoke Autumn's golden harvests, but calls on all but the most carefree summer months to keep vigil by the dying year.
( from Posthumous Poems : 1824 )
The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling.
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black and gray;
Let your light sisters play--
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.
Below are links to two earlier posts about Shelley:
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/percy-bysshe-shelley-august-4-1792-july.html
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