Green Isles
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
Especially in memory, life seems to have green isles, times that we savour; times when anxieties lift and we can feel a little of what is present, here, now. Disconcertingly, at any given moment, if we can see it, life is usually perfectly acceptable. What is bad is our apprehension, our hopelessness, the reverberations of the loss of what is no longer here. Often our memories and fantasies quite obliterate what is right in front of us: a breeze, a voice, the play of light; such delights are frequently available if we can set aside what is not here.
The picture of the Islands of Fleet was taken from the Barholm Road west of Gatehouse of Fleet, Galloway, Scotland. Shelley composed these ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’ when he was 26, two years before his death.
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