Images of Warmth and Happiness

Bay of Naples 1830  Rober Walter Weir

from Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples 

by Percy Bysshe Shelley 

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might:
The breath of the moist earth is light
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight—
The winds', the birds', the ocean-floods'—
The city's voice itself is soft like solitude's.

I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore
Like light dissolved in star-showers thrown.
I sit upon the sands alone;
The lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion—
How sweet, did any heart now share in my emotion! 

Since the title of this poem does not match the verses I chose to share, I would add that the verses following this excerpt show Shelley's dejection, end with him imagining his cold dead body on the lovely ocean shore described above. 

I thought the cold days we've been having around much of the country warranted the image of sunshine in the verses I included.

Earthsleep

Winter Magpie  Claude Monet

from Lines: The Cold Earth Slept Below

By Percy Byssche Shelley

The cold earth slept below;

Above the cold sky shone;

And all around,

With a chilling sound,

From caves of ice and fields of snow

The breath of night like death did flow

Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black;

The green grass was not seen;

The birds did rest

On the bare thorn’s breast,

Whose roots, beside the pathway track,

Had bound their folds o’er many a crack

Which the frost had made between.

Antiquity's Disquietude

Approach of the Simoon, Desert of Gizeh  David Roberts

Ozymandias
                by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".