The sensitive plant

Of this Special Edition on Japanese Paper only 50 copies have been printed for the Guild of Women-Binders, of which this is No. 38



THE SENSITIVE PLANT BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
ILLUSTRATED BY LAURENCE HOUSMAN
London: Printed for the Guild of Women-Binders. 61 Charing Cross Road. W.C. 1899



When Shelley wrote The Sensitive Plant he was drawing very near the end of his poetry. It was one of the poems belonging to the days at Pisa, whither the Shelleys had gone late in the January of 1820. In the next winter—a winter of many painful associations for him, and many discouragements and reminders of evil fortune—he wrote this mysterious song of beauty and death. The idea of it appears to have come to him from the flowers which Mrs. Shelley had collected round her in her own room at the house they occupied on the south side of the Arno. Their fragrance, as it exhaled on the wintry Italian sunshine, and the sense of their fading loveliness, added to certain graver influences of which we read,—the death of a dearly-loved child, the illness of a dear friend,—contributed, no doubt, to provide that “atmosphere of memorial dejection and very sorrowful delight,” of which an old Italian poet speaks, as being propitious for the working of the imagination. But a miracle is not less miraculous because we know the conditions under which it was worked, and something inexplicable remains about The Sensitive Plant after we have gathered together everything we can of its circumstances and the moods of its poet in the memorable Pisan days when it was written.