Shelley on the Devotion of the Moth for the Star

Percy Bysshe Shelley · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages carrying one short poem complete — "One word is too often profaned," composed by Shelley in 1822 and published in the Posthumous Poems of 1824.

The first stanza refuses a set of words rather than a set of feelings. One word is too often profaned for the poet to profane it; one feeling too falsely disdained for the person addressed to disdain it; one hope too like despair for prudence to smother — and pity from her is called dearer than pity from anyone else. The word being avoided is never named, which is the whole device of the poem. The second stanza then offers what can be given in its place. He cannot give what men call love, but asks whether she will accept the worship the heart lifts above and the heavens do not reject: named in the closing four lines as the desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow, and the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. What makes the lines fit this series is that the object of the devotion is defined only by its distance and by its being out of reach, and the value of the feeling is made to rest on that rather than on any prospect of attainment.

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