Romance in Percy Bysshe Shelleys Plays :: Percy Bysshe Shelley Romantic Romance Essays

To think of something romantically is to think of it naively, in a positive light, away from the view of the majority. Percy Bysshe Shelley has many romantic themes in his plays. Educated at Eton College, he went on to the University of Oxford only to be expelled after one year after publishing an inappropriate collection of poems. He then worked on writing full-time, and moved to Italy shortly before his death in a boating accident off the shore of Leghorn. He wrote many pieces, and his writing contains numerous themes. Shelley experienced first-hand the French Revolution. This allowed him to ponder many different situations, and determine deep philosophical views - views that were so radically different they were considered naive at best, downright wrong at worst. He contemplated socialism, having for a father-in-law William Godwin, who was the prominent socialist in the United Kingdom in Shelley''''s time. Shelley liked Napolean, and was suspicious of both the Bourbon monarchy and the Directory. Most of all, Shelley felt that all people had the right to work for themselves; he did not support the notion that once one had been born into a class, one must stay in that class for the rest of one''''s life. Shelley felt that all bodies of the universe were governed by the same principle, completely contradicting the given theories, those of Aristotle. Thus, Shelley gained a romantic and rather naive view of the universe. In fact, Carlos Baker describes his poems as "The Fabric of a Vision". (Baker 1) In Percy Bysshe Shelley''''s poems, the author uses those naive, romantic opinions on the themes of romance, politics, and science. Romance is well defined as a theme choice for Shelley. Shelley uses this theme rather romantically; one could say that Shelley''''s theme in his amorous poetry is unrestricted passion; love, Shelley feels, can overcome all obstacles, distance, fear, even death. One example of this is in Shelley''''s poem which is titled by the first line: "I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden": "I fear thy kisses gentle maiden;/Thou needst not fear mine;/My spirit is too deeply laiden/Ever to burden thine/I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion;/Thou needst not fear mine;/Innocent is the heart''''s devotion/With which I worship thine" In this poem Shelley is observing that he feels inferior to his maiden; he "fears" her kisses because he is intimidated by her perfection to the point where he feels as though he is stifling her, that she is compromising her own value by falling in love with him; this is why the maiden should not fear Shelley. He emphasizes his own faults in line 3,