I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
(Shelley: Ozymandias of Egypt. 1817.)
Shelley wrote but few sonnets, and all but one (To the Nile) are irregular in structure. The rime-scheme of the present specimen is, of course, wholly eccentric.
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead:
That is the Grasshopper's; he takes the lead
In summer luxury; he has never done
With his delights, for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
(Keats: The Grasshopper and Cricket. 1817.)
Keats's sonnets are for the most part regular in both rime-scheme and bipartite structure; but a number of the posthumous sonnets are in the English form. The present specimen (which competes with the more familiar sonnet on Chapman's Homer for the chief place among those of Keats) is a particularly good example of the bipartite structure and its organic relation to the thought of the sonnet.
Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
Forever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!
O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth! What particle canst thou share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by, linked fin by fin! most odiously.
(Leigh Hunt: The Fish to the Man. 1836.)
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing, and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors,—another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Fill'd by dead eyes, too tender to know change?
That's hardest! If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief tries more, as all things prove:
For grief indeed is love, and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love—
Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,
And fold within the wet wings of thy dove.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese, xxxv. 1850.)