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The sensitive plant cover

The sensitive plant

Chapter 77: CONCLUSION
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
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British LiteraturePoetry

About This Book

A lyrical fable set in a cultivated garden focuses on a delicate plant whose fortunes are bound to a devoted female caretaker; her death triggers the plant's decline and the garden's slow surrender. The poem blends vivid botanical description with mythic and elemental figures, moving through seasonal cycles and symbolic episodes. Rather than a conventional plot, the work offers layered meditations on mortality, the fragility of human-made beauty, and nature's persistent, reclaiming force, expressed in rich imagery and musical lines.

CONCLUSION

LXXIII

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.

LXXIV

Whether that lady’s gentle mind
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,

LXXV

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

LXXVI

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

LXXVII

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never past away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.

LXXVIII

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

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