Explore "Letter to Maria Gisborne" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
LEGHORN, July 1, 1820.
The spider spreads her webs, whether she be / In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree; / The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves / His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves; / So I, a thing whom moralists call worm, / Sit spinning still round this decaying form, / From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought- / No net of words in garish colours wrought / To catch the idle buzzers of the day- / But a soft cell, where when that fades away, / Memory may clothe in wings my living name / And feed it with the asphodels of fame, / Which in those hearts which must remember me / Grow, making love an immortality.