Golden Lightning of the Sunken Sun

This morning the light was pretty, and humid. I correct myself that it's not the light that is humid, but the air. Hence why my windows are full of condensation. The air on either side of the glass are vastly different, and colliding. But it is now evening and I have a few minutes before someone is coming over for tea.

I pick up a small, old book of poetry on my console table, and flip it open randomly to a page, where by eyes falls directly on these lines by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I gently pace back and forth on my creaking wood floors as I read:

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race
is just begun.

I take a deep breathe and relish in such beautiful words. They capture me and I note how appropriate these lines are as I admire the setting sun's light that is currently coming into my home, casting that lovely muted glow into certain nooks. I love when lines of poetry so succinctly capture a feeling or a scene of that present moment.

Shelley (1792 -1822) is writing with a loving, melancholy tone, to a skylark, and I enjoy his detailed, beautiful lines that I can read God's creativity in. I get a sense of his writing to the skylark as a way of sharing something of himself; the inability to express something that the world will listen to. He is listening to the loveliness of the skylark and wishes the world would also listen. He longs for what is not, and recognizes that "our sweetest songs are those that tell of sadness thought".

While Shelley was an atheist, I find myself enjoying his melancholy, flowing, poetical lines more and more. He was a student at Oxford University (at University College) and was good friends with John Keats and Lord Byron. In his poems, where he may lean toward despair and see no light, I spy the presence of God in many of his lines (almost hidden), and seek to find such light he may portray unbeknownst to him.