Love’s Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley (read by Tom O’Bedlam)

Most girls would reply, “Nice try. Make me a better offer“. Sometimes this poem is used in connection with marriage but it’s actually about Free Love. Free Love is to Marriage what Anarchy is to Government. Shelley was a great believer and practitioner of Free Love: his wife Mary, it seems, believed in theory but never practised it herself. Mary was a feminist like her mother Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote a treatise called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -