By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the greatest second-generation Romantic poets, along with John Keats and Lord Byron. Shelley’s poem ‘To the Moon’ is a short lyric in which the poet, addressing the moon in the night sky, poses several questions to it. ‘To the Moon’ is worth analysing because it displays many hallmarks of Romantic poetry, not least the observation of and identification with the world around us (or, in the case of the moon, the world beyond our world), and pathetic fallacy, or the attributing of human emotions to non-human objects. Here is ‘To the Moon’.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?