Representative Poetry Online
  Poet Index Poem Index Random Search
  Introduction Timeline Calendar Glossary Criticism Bibliography
  RPO Canadian Poetry UTEL
by Name
by Date
by Title
by First Line
by Last Line
Poet
Poem
Short poem
Keyword
Concordance

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Time


              1  Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
              2    Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
              3Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
              4    Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
              5Claspest the limits of mortality!

              6  And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
              7Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
              8    Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
              9      Who shall put forth on thee,
            10        Unfathomable Sea?

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Posthumous Poems, ed. Mary Shelley (1824). Cf. Posthumous Poems of Shelley. Mary Shelley's Fair Copy Book, Bodleian MS. Shelley Adds. d. 9, Collated with the Holographs and the Printed Texts, ed. Irving Massey (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1969). PR 5403 M27 ROBA.
First publication date: 1824
RPO poem editor: M. T. Wilson
RP edition: 3RP 2.276.
Recent editing: 4:2002/5/20

Composition date: 1821
Rhyme: ababc ccdcc

Other poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Your comments and questions are welcomed.
All contents copyright © Ian Lancashire (Department of English) and the University of Toronto
RPO is hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries.