Sensitive Plant, The

London: Robt. Rivière & Son, 1910. Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Sensitive Plant
Handsomely Bound by Rivière & Son

[RIVIÈRE & SON, binders]. SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. The Sensitive Plant... London: Robt. Rivière & Son, 1910.

Square sixteenmo (5 1/16 x 3 15/16 inches; 129 x 100 mm.). 46, [2, blank] pp. Title-page and initial letters printed in red and black.

Handsomely bound ca. 1910 by Rivière & Son, stamp-signed in gilt on lower turn-in. Full dark blue crushed levant morocco, covers bordered in gilt surrounding an ornate floral design stamped in gilt, each with twelve inlaid red morocco flowers, spine with five raised bands decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, gilt board edges and turn-ins, cream paper liners and end-leaves, top edge gilt. Neat ink inscription on front free end-paper and a small gold bookplate. A fine example.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792-1822). In The Sensitive Plant, Shelley has separated his poem into three separate parts and a conclusion. In the first part of the poem, Shelley portrays a wondrous, beautiful garden, full of life and luminosity. Shelley uses several realistic depictions of flowers and plants to provide the reader with a detailed insight into the garden. These stanzas are full of details which helps one picture the garden that Shelley so beautifully illustrates through his words. As part one continues, Shelley introduces a contradiction into the garden, The Sensitive Plant. Unlike the other flowers, this floweret is not vivid in color or shape, and lacks the beautiful odor flowers are characterized for. Percy Shelley goes on to say in The Sensitive Plant...

"For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!