(no subject)

The first Shelley poem I read must have been Ozymandias, in the first or second year of high school. My attitude toward poetry then was complete hostility: the best way to say something was directly, obviously. Rhyme, meter, allusion, symbolism were all useless curlicues or teases, narcotizing, the typical features of a culture of lies. I recall respecting Ozymandias as being less offensive than several others we went over, e.g. Donne's poem on death, because I could at least agree with its sentiment. But everything worth saying you could, should say straight (and pretty quick, napkinquick--I'm still not fully over this one, re. nonfiction: who has three hundred pages of expertise on anything?). Ode to the West Wind may have been assigned, but I didn't read it.

The next must have been Mutability, the opening poem in the Norton (6th ed v. 2):

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! - yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. - A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. - One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! - For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

This I found congenial (to understate, symbolize, allude) at once, and every Shelley poem that followed it. This would have been the weakest in that selection, in fact--especially that opening stanza. By 1996 I'd fallen in love with rhyme, so the conventionally acceptable near-rhymes would have induced winces. I do remember the shock of response' being pronounced RES-pns, and the abiding shock of "The path of its departure still is free," and the antecedence of "its" by the earlier it of "It is the same"--any it, all of it, the it to be beyond all its that have been, the it itself unanteceded because things had already changed enough to orphan it. I fumble; better the way he found, the straightest way of saying something escaping the crookedness of normal speech. Of saying something about why nothing stays straight.

How Shelley that third stanza is. How did he do what he did? Why can no one else do it? Why are his words the only words for whatever his words are the words for?