Lyric Poem · Love
Lines to a Critic
1Honey from silkworms who can gather,
2Or silk from the yellow bee?
3The grass may grow in winter weather
4As soon as hate in me.
5Hate men who cant, and men who pray,
6And men who rail like thee;
7An equal passion to repay
8They are not coy like me.
Full-text availability follows the United States display decision recorded below; status can differ elsewhere.
“Lines to a Critic” by Percy Bysshe Shelley — quilloak.com/poems/lines-to-a-critic
Quick facts
- Poem
- Lines to a Critic
- Poet
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Length
- 16 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- Love, Nature, Winter
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 16 lines · 4 quatrains
- Line length
- Consistent with common metre. Alternating eight- and six-syllable lines — the hymn stanza (8.6.8.6), the most-used quatrain in English verse.
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.
- Author record
- Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822
- Source record
- PoetryDBLines to a Critic by percy-bysshe-shelley, PoetryDB transcription
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 005ffa19497b38d9…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.