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AN ALLEGORY. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, Posthumous Poems [1824]

Edition used:

Posthumous Poems (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824).

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AN ALLEGORY.

    • A portal as of shadowy adamant
    • Stands yawning on the highway of the life
    • Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;
    • Around it rages an unceasing strife
    • Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt
    • The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
    • Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.
    • And many passed it by with careless tread,
    • Not knowing that a shadowy []
    • Tracks every traveller even to where the dead
    • Wait peacefully for their companion new;
    • But others, by more curious humour led,
    • Pause to examine,—these are very few,
    • And they learn little there, except to know
    • That shadows follow them where’er they go.