+Stanza 20,+ 11. 1, 2. _The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender, Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath._ 'This spirit tender' is the 'quickening life' of the renascent year; or briefly the Spring. By 'the leprous corpse' Shelley may mean, not the corpse of an actual leper, but any corpse in a loathsome state of decay. Even so abhorrent an object avails to fertilize the soil, and thus promotes the growth of odorous flowers. 1. 3. _Like incarnations of the stars_, &c. These flowers--star-like blossoms--illumine death and the grave: the light which would belong to them as stars is converted into the fragrance proper to them as flowers. This image is rather confused, and I think rather stilted: moreover, 'incarnation' (or embodiment in _flesh_) is hardly the right word for the vegetative nature of flowers. As forms of life, the flowers mock or deride the grave-worm which battens or makes merry on corruption. The appropriateness of the term 'merry worm' seems very disputable. 1. 6. _Nought we know dies._ This affirmation springs directly out of the consideration just presented to us--that even the leprous corpse does not, through various stages of decay, pass into absolute nothingness: on the contrary, its constituents take new forms, and subserve a re-growth of life, as in the flowers which bedeck the grave. From this single and impressive instance the poet passes to the general and unfailing law--No material object of which we have cognizance really dies: all such objects are in a perpetual cycle of change. This conception has been finely developed in a brace of early poems of Lord Tennyson, _All Things will Die_, and _Nothing will Die_:-- 'The stream will cease to flow, The wind will cease to blow, The clouds will cease to fleet, The heart will cease to beat-- For all things must die. * * * * * 'The stream flows, The wind blows, The cloud fleets, The heart beats, Nothing will die. Nothing will die; All things will change Through eternity.'