“I met a traveller from an antique land,” starts the narrator. What is being offered to the reader in the course of this short (just fourteen lines) story? Person, setting, incident, mood; a precise choice of whittled-down language and detail; a particular way of considering, isolating, describing something, so that a moment in text resonates out through time and space and over “the lone and level sands.” These seem to me to be pertinent aspects of a short story; that’s what Shelley’s doing, entirely successfully, here. I think this one through in my mind when I wake up in the night, and it calms my heartbeat, sends me off to sleep.
First published in The Examiner, January 1818. Collected in Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; With Other Poems, C. and J. Ollier, 1819, and Selected Poems and Prose, Penguin Classics, 2017. Available online here
A Personal Anthology 