Explore Poetry: 'The Sensitive Plant'

This activity is an introduction to some of the techniques used in poetry.

Read the following extract from a much longer poem called 'The Sensitive Plant' by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and then answer the questions that follow.

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The Sensitive Plant

For Winter came: the wind was his whip:

One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills

And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;

His breath was a chain which without a sound

The earth, and the air, and the water bound;

He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne

By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living death

Fled from the frost to the earth beneath. 

Their decay and sudden flight from frost

Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

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