As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea.
Where light is, chameleons change!
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.
For this, too, had been a song of metamorphosis.
This love of metamorphosis may, from one point of view, be thought to have limited Shelley’s genius, but it limited only to intensify. It was this that enabled him to pass from wonderful image to wonderful image without a pause in that immortal procession of similes in “The Skylark.” Every poet has this gift to some extent—the gift by which the metamorphosis of the thing into the image takes place—but Shelley had it in disproportionate abundance because the world of images meant so much more to him than did the world of experience. Not that he was blind to the real world, as we see from his observation of rooks in the morning sun in “The Euganean Hills”: