Selected Poems and Prose
38 forbidden mines of lore: The radical and progressive authors who challenged received religious and political ideas and who had formed the outlook of the young PBS – among them the Roman poet Lucretius, the French revolutionary theorist Volney, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. See headnote to Queen Mab.
41 armour for my soul: Adapting the injunction to the Christian in Ephesians 6:11–17 to ‘put on the whole armour of God’, as had Spenser in the ‘Letter of the Authors’ (to Sir Walter Raleigh) explaining the allegory of the Faerie Queene (Longman edition, p. 738).
46–54 Looking back from his union with MWS, which he regards as fulfilling his destiny in love, PBS finds only despair and betrayal in his earlier attachments to women. The lines appear to encode his relations with his cousin Harriet Grove (see ‘How eloquent are eyes!’) and his deceased wife, Harriet Westbrook (see PBS’s dedicatory poem before Queen Mab, ‘To Harriet *****’).
54 clog: A weight that hinders or obstructs.
58–9 mortal chain / Of Custom: The sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin declared her love for PBS, a married man, in June 1814 and, against her father’s wishes, eloped with him the following month – in defiance of conventional social morality.
60–62 The meaning is clarified when ‘breathed’ is understood as ‘breathed forth’. Those slaves imprisoned in their dungeons by Custom exhale dark clouds of disapproval which MWS’s action penetrates like light.
86 Anarch Custom’s reign: The Greek word anarchos signifies ‘without a leader’. The sense here is that Custom is not a true ruler but rather a tyrant whose sway is misrule.
88 Amphion: In Greek mythology, Amphion, son of Zeus and Antiope, was both poet and the father of music, having been given the lyre by Hermes. He helped build Thebes, legend relating that the stones of the wall around the city moved into place by themselves, in response to the sweet melodies he played.
89–90 While composing 1817 (L&C) PBS suffered from ill-health, which made him fear for his life and determined him to ‘leave some record of myself’ in a major poem (Letters I, p. 577).
91–2 PBS is hinting at some future literary fame for MWS, who was responsible for the bulk of 1817 and had written Frankenstein, which would be published early the following year. Both works were issued anonymously.
99 vestal fire: Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth in whose temple a perpetual fire, held to guarantee the well-being of the state, was tended by an order of women, the Vestal Virgins, dedicated from youth to the task.
102 One: MWS’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died on 10 September 1797, eleven days after giving birth to her.
108–9 thy Sire … One voice: Referring to MWS’s father, William Godwin, whom PBS identifies in both the draft and fair-copy MSS as the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which proposed a theory of rational anarchism based on the principle of human perfectibility.
109–10 Defining Godwin’s ‘voice’ as inspired by the best thinkers and writers of ancient and modern Europe.
115 low-thoughted: Petty, mean-spirited.
118–21 PBS is affirming his intention to speak to the present post-revolutionary period when Truth’s voice has been temporarily silenced.
121–6 The images in these lines are adapted from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) II.1–5, which praise the retired sage who observes with philosophic calm the vain struggles of the unenlightened as if watching a man weltering on the raging sea (see Queen Mab, editorial note to PBS’s note [6]), and III.1–2 and V.11–12, which liken true wisdom to a light illuminating the darkness of error.
To Constantia
Written between mid 1817 and January 1818 while the Shelley household was living at Marlow; published in the Oxford University and City Herald (OH) on 31 January 1818, which supplies our text, over the signature ‘Pleyel’. The name recalls the novel Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), by the American Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), in which the character Henry Pleyel is the lover of Clara Wieland. But it may also have been suggested by the composer Ignaz Pleyel (1757–1831), the founder in 1807 of a piano-manufacturing company. It is generally agreed that ‘To Constantia’ was inspired by the singing of MWS’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, an accomplished musician, who at Marlow accompanied herself on the piano that PBS and Leigh Hunt acquired at the end of April 1817. The ‘Constantia’ of the title was PBS’s familiar name for Claire (given name ‘Clara’) as well as alluding to Constantia Dudley, the owner of an exquisite singing voice in another of Brown’s novels, Ormond (1799); Peacock records PBS’s high admiration for her character (Peacock Works VIII, p. 77). Brown’s fiction was a favourite with the Shelleys, and the exchange of playful nicknames was common in their circle at Marlow, as well as later. On 19 January 1818, Claire transcribed a copy of the poem, very likely the one to be sent to OH (Clairmont Journal, p. 79), which she and PBS kept secret from MWS. Judith Chernaik recovered the OH text and printed it in 1969. See MYR (Shelley) V and Chernaik, pp. 52–8, 195–7.
‘To Constantia’ explores the transformative effects on the listener of a woman singing, a theme that PBS also developed in Asia’s lyric in Prometheus Unbound II.v.72–110 and in ‘To Jane’ (‘The keen stars were twinkling’). The highly unusual stanza form of eleven lines of eight, ten or twelve syllables rhyming (ababcdcedee) lends a traditional motif of the personal lyric something of the formal breadth and intricacy of a Pindaric ode (see ‘Ode to Liberty’) as well as its rhythmic variety and verbal music.
Neville Rogers, ‘Music at Marlow’, KSMB 5 (1953), pp. 20–25, gives the history of the piano in question. Jean de Palacio’s ‘Music and Musical Themes in Shelley’s Poetry’, MLR 59 (1964), pp. 345–59, includes a consideration of ‘To Constantia’. Chernaik, pp. 52–8, offers an acute exegesis, while Paul A. Vatalaro, Shelley’s Music: Fantasy, Authority and the Object Voice (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), examines PBS’s poems on music from a psychoanalytic standpoint.
31–2 If ‘moons’ is understood as satellites of other planets than the earth and ‘sphere’ as ‘domain’, then the sense would be ‘beyond the furthest limit of the universe where heavenly bodies wane’. Cp. 1817 (L&C), ll. 1344–5: ‘Beyond the sun, beyond the stars that wane / On the verge of formless space’.
44 PBS’s draft reads: ‘Alas that the torn heart can bleed but not forget’ (BSM III).
Ozymandias
Probably written in late December 1817, perhaps as PBS’s contribution to a friendly sonnet-writing competition with the stockbroker and man of letters Horace Smith, who visited the Shelleys in Marlow on the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of the month (MWS Journal I, p. 188). Leigh Hunt published PBS’s sonnet in The Examiner for 11 January 1818 over the signature ‘Glirastes’, which has been plausibly interpreted as a compound of the Latin word for ‘dormouse’ and the Greek for ‘lover’; one of PBS’s pet-names for MWS was ‘the dormouse’. Horace Smith’s poem, which appeared in The Examiner for 1 February 1818, reads as follows:
OZYMANDIAS
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.”—The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
‘Ozymandias’ is the Greek name for the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II (reigned 1279–1213 BC). Whether directly or indirectly, both PBS and Smith will have been acquainted with a descrip
tion of the huge statue of Ozymandias in the temple he erected at Thebes, first given in the Library of History of Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian-Greek historian of the first century BC. They might also have known that negotiations were in progress to bring to the British Museum the massive bust of Ramses II, part of a larger seated colossus, which had been removed from the temple. The bust, which did not arrive until spring 1818, was put on display in 1820 and is still exhibited in the British Museum. In his long reign Ramses II undertook a grandiose programme of monumental building, of which the temple at Thebes was a spectacular example. It is this vainglorious ostentation as symptom and emblem of monarchical power that provokes the irony of both PBS and Horace Smith.
Widely cited and anthologized, the sonnet is one of the best-known short poems in the English language. The sculpted figure of Ozymandias as PBS imagines it has been regularly invoked in political discourse – appearing, for example, on the front page of The Times (London) on 10 April 2003 beneath a photo of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad – while the name ‘Ozymandias’ has been appropriated in fantasy and science fiction, graphic novels, the lyrics of popular songs and television series.
Our text is from the Examiner printing, though some punctuation and capitalization have been adopted from PBS’s fair-copy MS (BSM III).
4–8 The displeasure and scorn on the sculpted face have outlived both the discerning sculptor who duplicated (and thereby derided) them, and the Pharaoh’s heart that nourished them.
Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818
Composed October 1818, with at least one later addition (see note to ll. 165–6); published in 1819, from which the text is taken, apart from ll. 56–112 – which follow a fragment of MWS’s transcription for the press (now in the Huntington Library: HM331: see MYR (Shelley) III) – and ll. 165–205, which follow a fragment of PBS’s MS now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (Tinker Collection 1897; see MYR (Shelley) VIII). In early October 1818, PBS was living at I Cappuccini, a villa at Este about twenty miles south-west of Padua which Byron had rented for the summer but had chosen not to occupy – preferring to remain in Venice, some thirty-five miles to the north-east. PBS’s letter to T. L. Peacock of 8 October 1818 (Letters II, pp. 41–4) sketches a visual and moral portrait of Venice as well as describing the view from the villa at Este and the nearby Euganean Hills (pronounced with an accent on the third syllable: Euganèan), a view also described by MWS in her note on Julian and Maddalo in 1839 (OSA, pp. 203–4).
PBS’s ‘Advertisement’ to 1819 (dated 20 December 1818) reveals that the poem
was written after a day’s excursion among those lovely mountains which surround what was once the retreat, and where is now the sepulchre, of Petrarch. If anyone is inclined to condemn the insertion of the introductory lines, which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst of an Italian sunrise in autumn on the highest peak of those delightful mountains, I can only offer as my excuse, that they were not erased at the request of a dear friend [MWS], with whom added years of intercourse only add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have had more right than any one to complain, that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness.
PBS’s ‘Lines’ continue a tradition of English verse in which the poet’s wide survey of his natural surroundings from a lofty vantage point prompts reflections on history, politics and poetry itself, as well as recommending the ideal of a tranquil and retired life. Sir John Denham’s ‘Cooper’s Hill’ (1642) and John Dyer’s ‘Grongar Hill’ (1726) are among the better-known examples. This mode PBS combines with that of the extended lyric of personal crisis as practised by both Coleridge and Wordsworth; his title imitates the specificity of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798’. Byron’s blending of loco-descriptive and confessional poetry in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (especially Canto IV, 1818) is also a major influence. The image in the ‘introductory lines’ (1–65) of human existence as a dark and relentless voyage to death cheered only by the occurrence of fertile islands PBS developed from his own dejection, brought on by personal affliction – in particular the death of the one-year-old Clara Shelley on 24 September and the painful events of his life in the England he had left behind the previous March. These and other sources are identified by Donald H. Reiman in PMLA 77 (1962), pp. 404–13, in Poems II, pp. 428–9, and in Chernaik, pp. 80–81. The passage does not invite precise interpretation as autobiography, however; its symbolic idiom is designed both to conceal specific details and to open up a broader range of meaning.
1–2 In Julian and Maddalo, ll. 77–9, PBS evokes the view from Venice of ‘Those famous Euganean hills, which bear / As seen from Lido through the harbour piles / The likeness of a clump of peaked isles’.
10 Big with: Heavily pregnant with.
13 Riving: Ripping apart.
18 Weltering: Tumbling, as if tossed by waves.
27–8 Poems II compares the series of rhetorical questions in Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (1717), ll. 55–62. See also note to l. 36 below.
34 wreak: Cause (harm or injury).
36 Senseless: Unable to perceive or feel. Poems II compares Pope, ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’, l. 33: ‘Cold is that breast which warm’d the world before.’
45–65 The passage has been interpreted both as allegorized autobiography and as generalized image of human woe. Chernaik, pp. 80–81, detects a debt to the celebrated choral ode on the calamities of existence in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (ll. 1239–44), in which man is likened to a shore perpetually beaten by winter tempests from the north. See also references at the end of the headnote above.
54 sea-mews: Seagulls.
59 pomp: Ostentatious victory celebration.
71 paean: Song of praise, originally a hymn to Apollo the sun god, patron of medicine and prophecy.
90–91 On 8 October 1818, PBS wrote to Peacock from Este: ‘We see just before [us] the wide flat plains of Lombardy, in which we see the sun & moon rise and set, & the evening star, & all the golden magnificence of autumnal clouds’ (Letters II, p. 43). Lombardy is the region of northern Italy west of the Veneto.
97 Amphitrite: In Greek myth Amphitrite, queen of the sea, was the daughter of Oceanus (her ‘sire’, l. 98) and wife of Poseidon, god of the sea.
111–14 The spectacle of Venice at sunrise suggests a comparison with ancient sacrificial altars from which flames rose as they did at Delphi (and other shrines) where the prophecies of Apollo were delivered.
115–20 Venice, known as ‘Queen of the Adriatic’, will again be overwhelmed by the sea, the original source of her wealth and power.
121–8 Formerly a republic, Venice had been taken by Napoleon in 1797, ceded to Austria in 1798, retaken by France in 1806, and restored to Austria by the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. PBS maintains that when Venice has been reclaimed by the ocean it will be less devastated than it is at present under Austrian tyranny.
123 the slave of slaves: Both Austria and the powers that granted her dominion over Venice are morally enslaved by the exercise of tyranny.
139 starlight: Contemporary form of ‘starlit’.
140 masque of death: A symbolic drama imagined as enacted by the dead, perhaps one resembling a kind of procession in which the participants dressed as resurrected corpses and paraded through the streets as reminders of mortality.
142–9 On 8 October 1818, PBS wrote to Peacock: ‘I had no conception of the excess to which avarice, cowardice, superstition, ignorance, passionless lust, & all the inexpressible brutalities which degrade human nature could be carried, until I had lived a few days among the Venetians’ (Letters II, p. 43).
152 Celtic Anarch: Austrian tyrant. ‘Celtic’ is here used in the Classical sense
to indicate a barbarian northern people (see also l. 223); while ‘Anarch’, from the Greek ‘without a leader’, designates an oppressor who lacks any genuine title to rule.
165–6 PBS’s MS of ll. 167–205 (see headnote) instructs the publisher to insert these lines after ‘From thy dust shall nations spring / With more kindly blossoming’. The MS version alters the address as printed in 1819 from second-person plural (referring to the ‘hundred cities’ of l. 154, which are addressed as ‘ye’ in l. 163) to the second-person singular, indicating Venice. The plural ‘your’ seems to make better sense in the context, and in the MS PBS may be quoting from memory or from an earlier version of the poem than the one he sent to be printed. But it is also possible, though he does not say so specifically, that he wished to alter ‘your’ to ‘thy’ and ‘new’ to ‘shall’ – as Donald H. Reiman argues in MYR (Shelley) VIII, p. 188. Norton 2002 cites in support of ‘thy’ and ‘shall’ PBS’s corrections in a privately owned copy of 1819.
174–7 Swan … dreams: Byron, then England’s (Albion’s) best-known poet, who had taken up residence in Venice following his departure from England in the wake of scandals surrounding his personal life.
178–83 Ocean … terror: PBS considered that the apostrophe to Ocean at the close of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), stanzas 179–84, proved his greatness as a poet despite the desperate pessimism of the rest of the poem (Letters II, pp. 57–8).
184 Alluding to the ‘rich stream’ of poetry flowing eternally from Mount Helicon in ancient Greece in Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1757), stanza I.i.
194–5 The river Scamander (Karamenderes in modern Turkey) in the Trojan plain is the scene of many battles in Homer’s Iliad.