With a Copy of Shelley

Harriet Monroe

Behold, I send thee to the heights of song,
My brother! Let thine eyes awake as clear
As morning dew, within whose glowing sphere
Is mirrored half a world; and listen long,
Till in thine ears, famished to keenness, throng
The bugles of the soul, till far and near
Silence grows populous, and wind and mere
Are phantom-choked with voices. Then be strong—
Then halt not till thou seest the beacons flare
Souls mad for truth have lit from peak to peak.
Haste on to breathe the intoxicating air—
Wine to the brave and poison to the weak—
Far in the blue where angels’ feet have trod,
Where earth is one with heaven and man with God.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 12, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“With a Copy of Shelley” by Harriet Monroe appears in the anthology American Sonnets (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890), edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and E. H. Bigelow. In her essay, “The Poet and the Composer” in Poets and Their Art (The Macmillan Company, 1926), Monroe wrote, “There is, among American artists—poets, musicians, and all the others—a curious professional aloofness which fights against co-operation [sic]. The architect makes his design, the sculptor models his isolated figure, the painter paints his easel picture, all separate and alone; they do not get together, as in the Phidian or the Gothic again, or the Renaissance, to pool their energies and make a grand, complete and monumental building. In the same infertile way the poet writes his poem apart in his traditional garret; and the musician, seeking a song poem, or a ballet motive, or an opera libretto, reads in his library uncharted seas of poetry, history and romance instead of going where modern poetry is created and swinging into its current so that the two arts may move along together and mutually inspire each other.”

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