Lyric Poem · Nature
Passage of the Apennines
1Listen, listen, Mary mine,
2To the whisper of the Apennine,
3It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,
4Or like the sea on a northern shore,
5Heard in its raging ebb and flow
6By the captives pent in the cave below.
7The Apennine in the light of day
8Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
9Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
10But when night comes, a chaos dread
11On the dim starlight then is spread,
12And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,
13Shrouding...
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“Passage of the Apennines” by Percy Bysshe Shelley — quilloak.com/poems/passage-of-the-apennines
Quick facts
- Poem
- Passage of the Apennines
- Poet
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Length
- 13 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- Nature
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
- 13 lines · one 13-line stanza
- Line length
- Lines run 7-10 syllables (median 9). No single length dominates, which is normal once elision and contraction are in play.
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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
- PoetryDBPassage of the Apennines 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 8462791999a9e251…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.