YESTERDAY’S poet, the Chinese Guo Moruo, was influenced by Western writers, including that leading English Romantic, Shelley. So here today is one of the latter’s best known, though shortest pieces. Was the anonymous dedicatee duly pleased and flattered, one wonders.

TO –

Music when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory –

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.