"One Word Is Too Often Profaned" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

One Word Is Too Often Profaned

One word is too often profaned

For me to profane it;

One feeling too falsely disdained

For thee to disdain it;

One hope is too like despair

For prudence to smother;

And pity from thee more dear

Than that from another.

 

I can give not what men call love;

But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the heavens reject not,

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow?

Enjoy the poem with beautiful music.

poem video👇 

https://youtu.be/Bey6XYm1gBI

Who wrote the poem "One Word Is Too Often Profaned"?

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. His literary reputation steadily grew after his death, and he greatly influenced subsequent poets such as Browing, Hardy, and Yeats. He had suffered from family crises, ill health, and a backlash against his atheism and radical political views. His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of "Frankenstein." He died at the age of 29 in a boating accident.

"One Word Is Too Often Profaned" explanation

 In the poem, the speaker describes his relationship with his beloved that is more than love, which is too often misused and vulgarized. He expresses his pure devotion of her, and even pity from her is better than love from another woman. This poem was written for Jane Williams. The poet and his wife Mary met Jane Williams and her lover Edward Ellerker Williams in Pisa in 1821. The two couples befriended each other, and the poet in particular developed a special “platonic” relationship with Jane Williams and wrote many poems for her. Shelley and Edward Williams drowned together in a sailing accident in 1822.