Poetry Thursday - a snippet of Shelley

John Caple, Midsummer Eve, 2019

One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine
A soul-dissolving odour, to invite
to some more lovely mystery. Through the dell
Silence and twilight here, twin sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades
Like vaporous shapes, half-seen …

From Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, 1815
Percy Bysshe Shelley


Part of doing "Poetry Thursday" every week is waiting for the poem to appear. This one appeared in an online catalogue of paintings by John Caple for his upcoming exhibition "Silence and Twilight", inspired by this poem and by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Alastor has an epigraph, which relates nicely (I think) with Caple's paintings -

The epigraph to the poem is from St. Augustine's Confessions, III, i, written between 397 and 398 AD:

Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.

The English translation of the Latin is: "I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love, I sought what I might love, in love with loving."

John Caple, Where I Have Lost I Softer Tread, 2019