13. Melancholic strain. Shelley was profoundly melancholy. His poems are permeated by “the still sad music of humanity.” This melancholic strain is present everywhere in Shelley’s poetry. He says in To a Skylark.
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought
Again he says:
Most wretched souls—
Are cradled into poetry by wrong
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Shelley says in the Ode to the West Wind:
I fall upon the thorns of life ! I bleed.
“Though Shelley is profoundly melancholy,” says Bradle, even his saddest poems, even the Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples and the lament, swifter far than summer’s flight, do not make me sad, and hardly make me pity him. In this sorrow, however forlorn and deep, there is not bitterness; and in the soul that feels it, and can so utter it that sorrow becomes more beautiful than beauty’s self, there is something above sorrow and beyond its reach.”
