Percy Shelley; The Revolt of Islam.

Hello all just a quick one today! After recently purchasing the Penguin anthology of Shelley poems there are two lines from The Revolt of Islam, which in light of current events seemed to be particularly poignant.

"The calm: for sudden, the firm earth was shaken,
As if by the last wreck its frame were overtaken."

Undoubtedly these are two beautiful lines of poetry but are so obviously significant on more than a superficial level. Transposed to today the "for sudden, the firm earth was shaken," can be viewed as a reflection on how our world is constantly changing beyond our control in unexpected ways. The use of "shaken," coupled with the purveyance of the feeling of the unexpected makes it almost too crude a comparison with the recent earthquake in Japan.

Perhaps even more interestingly the line "as if by the last wreck its frame were overtaken," in a modern context could be seen as a scathing remark on how the impact of humans is lurching the Earth from one destructive wreck to another. The use of "frame," is very much implicit that we are confined to live within our means and that the exploitation of natural resources could have disastrous consequences.

Shelley was by no means a prophet and his poem is in fact about his disillusionment with the ideas of rebellion following the dissolution of the French Revolution. In any case it is interesting that although his poem was written two hundred years ago we can still find parallels in our world today.