Percy Bysshe Shelley: Passage of the Apennines

Updated May 6, 2020 | Infoplease Staff
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
To the Nile
The Past

Passage of the Apennines

Composed May 4, 1818. Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous Poems", 1824. There is a copy amongst the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, which supplies the last word of the fragment.

Listen, listen, Mary mine,
To the whisper of the Apennine,
It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,
Or like the sea on a northern shore,
Heard in its raging ebb and flow
By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
On the dim starlight then is spread,
And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,
Shrouding...
.com/t/lit/shelley/2/4/2.html
Sources +