Six lines, three natural forces and one country: Shelley's fragment wastes no time. Before we learn who is being spoken to, we get a sunrise, a north wind and an earthquake. Only in the fifth line does the poem name its addressee, "Everlasting Italy", and the last line delivers the wish itself: "Be those hopes and fears on thee." The central idea is that a people's or a place's hopes and fears are not quiet, private feelings. They arrive like weather, or like geology, too large to be argued with.
The grammar builds that effect. The whole poem is one sentence, and it holds back its main clause. Three "As" phrases pile up comparisons, and we wait to find out what is being compared. A paraphrase would run: may those hopes and fears fall on you as the sunrise falls on the night, as the north wind falls on the clouds, as the earthquake falls on the mountains. The word "those" matters here. It points to hopes and fears we have never been told about, so we feel we have walked into the middle of a thought. That is what "Fragment" means in the title, and it works in the poem's favour. We never learn what the hopes and fears are, so attention stays on their size and force.
The images move upward in violence. Sunrise is gradual and gentle, and it simply ends the dark. The north wind is quicker and sweeps the sky clear. The earthquake is catastrophic, "Ruining mountain solitudes". In each pair a powerful force meets something that cannot resist it, and the settled state gives way. It is tempting, though only an inference, to hear hopes in the light and the wind and fears in the earthquake, since the poem puts both feelings in the same breath. The phrase "fiery flight" is the most startling choice. Earthquakes do not fly, but the word turns the quake into something hurled and fast-moving, a bolt rather than a tremor. "Solitudes" is also telling. The plural makes the mountains' loneliness something broad and old, and the long word rolls out at the end of the line before the quake is allowed to break it.
The sound pattern is tight. The rhyme runs ABABCC: "night" and "flight" are a full rhyme, and "clouds" and "solitudes" are held together only by their closing consonants. You could hear that imperfect match as a slight roughness in the middle of the poem, though that is a matter of taste. The lines are short, roughly seven syllables each, and the stresses land heavily at the ends, so the images close with a thud: night, clouds, flight, solitudes. After the four-line build, the couplet changes pace. "Italy" and "thee" rhyme on a softer vowel, and the rhyme joins the country and the "you" it is addressed as. The direct address, the old-fashioned "thee" and the subjunctive "Be" give the ending the tone of a blessing or an invocation.
"Everlasting" is the most important word in the poem. Sunrise, wind and earthquake are all events: they come, they act, they pass. Italy is the one thing here that does not pass. The poem can imagine something as violent as an earthquake falling on Italy partly because Italy is imagined as outlasting it. The adjective turns what could have been a threat into a kind of confidence.
Shelley was an English Romantic poet who spent his last years in Italy and died there in 1822, so the warmth of "thee" is easy to hear as personal. The poem itself gives us only its title and its words, though, and those are enough. What makes it worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It shows a Romantic habit of describing feeling, and even the fate of a nation, in the language of elemental nature. Wind as an agent of change also appears in Shelley's famous "Ode to the West Wind". And because it stops where it does, it leaves a question for the reader: what would you say the hopes and fears were, and which of the three images would they match?