Selected Poems and Prose

  197 Avon: The river from which the birthplace of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, takes its name.

  200–203 The Italian Renaissance poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) lived the final years of his life in the town of Arquà in the Euganean Hills and is buried there. For Petrarch as love poet, see A Defence of Poetry.

  218–19 The Italian farmer labours for the benefit of the Austrian occupier. See Letters II, p. 43.

  228 foizon: (Usually spelled ‘foison’) abundant harvest.

  238–48 PBS borrows from both Paradise Lost II.648–870, where Satan and Sin are figured as father and mother; and from Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), ll. 191–4 in the 1805 version, where ‘Death’ and ‘Life-in-Death’ throw dice for the soul of the mariner. Ezzelin is Ezzelino da Romano (1194–1259), a brutal tyrant who ruled Padua and much of its environs, until he was deposed in a bloody revolt. The river Po flows across northern Italy from the Alps and into the Adriatic, near Venice.

  256–7 The University of Padua, founded in 1222, is one of the oldest in Europe.

  258 meteor: In PBS’s day, the term was applied to a variety of luminous atmospheric phenomena, from will-o’-the-wisps to ‘falling stars’.

  269–79 Poems II compares Mary Wollstonecraft’s account of a forest fire near Oslo in her Letters Written … in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Letter 15: ‘Fires of this kind are occasioned by the wind suddenly rising when the farmers are burning roots of trees, stalks of beans, &c. with which they manure the ground. The devastation must, indeed, be terrible, when this, literally speaking, wild fire, runs along the forest, flying from top to top, and crackling amongst the branches.’

  271 brakes: Thickets, undergrowth.

  289 an air-dissolved star: Whose light is dispersed in the atmosphere like ‘fragrance’ (l. 290).

  306 olive-sandalled Apennine: The Apennine Mountains run down the centre of the Italian peninsula with olive groves at their feet.

  323 that one star: The planet Venus appearing as evening star (Hesperus).

  335–73 PBS imagines a similar island paradise in Epipsychidion, ll. 407–590.

  362–9 The meaning of these lines has been much discussed and the punctuation variously altered: see Locock I, p. 592; Poems II, p. 442; Major Works, p. 738. 1819’s punctuation, retained here, requires the verb ‘supplies’ (l. 364) to be understood as repeated before ‘All things’ (l. 368).

  JULIAN AND MADDALO

  PBS drew many of the details for this poem (hereafter JM) from his visit to Byron in Venice on 23–4 August 1818; composition began in September–October and continued the following year. Our text of the poem is taken from the fair copy which PBS sent to Leigh Hunt on 15 August 1819, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library (MS MA 974: see MYR (Shelley) VIII). PBS notes that this ‘was composed at Este last year’ and asks Hunt to have it published anonymously (Letters II, p. 108). But Hunt did not do so and it remained unpublished until 1824, which is the sole authority for the preface and epigraph. MWS dates this text ‘Rome, May 1819’ and says that it had ‘received the author’s ultimate corrections’ (1824, p. vii) but she was uncertain about the composition date, amending it to 1820 in 1839 before deciding on 1818 in 1840.

  Using the Socratic device of dialogue, JM reflects on a number of philosophical, political and personal issues through ‘a conversation’ between the two interlocutors named in the title. When PBS sent the poem to Hunt in August 1819, he assured him that ‘two of the characters you will recognise’ (Letters II, p. 108) and most commentators accept that Julian and Maddalo are fictional versions of PBS and Byron; indeed, PBS’s cousin Thomas Medwin records Byron saying of Maddalo that PBS ‘does not make me cut a good figure’ (Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jnr (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 119).

  Two issues loomed large in PBS’s relationship with Byron in August 1818. The first, and the main reason for PBS’s visit to Byron in Venice, was the ongoing discussion about the custody of Allegra, Byron’s illegitimate daughter with Claire Clairmont, and (presumably) the original of Maddalo’s ‘child’, introduced in ll. 143–50. Second was PBS’s disappointment with Byron’s much-anticipated Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Fourth (1818): the poem is pessimistic about the possibilities of human improvement and PBS felt that this would damage support for political reform. In a letter to T. L. Peacock of 17 or 18 December 1818, PBS says of Childe Harold, IV Canto, that the ‘spirit in which it is written is, if insane, the most wicked & mischievous insanity that ever was given forth. It is a kind of obstinate & self-willed folly in which he [i.e. Byron] hardens himself. I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises’ (Letters II, p. 58). To a certain extent, JM reprises this ‘remonstrance’, with the idealistic Julian attempting to convince the fatalistic Maddalo that human nature and society can be perfected. But the poem narrates – as its subtitle suggests – a conversation rather than an argument won, and PBS is careful to maintain critical distance from both Julian’s and Maddalo’s positions, each exposing the strengths and limitations of the other’s arguments.

  Of the Maniac whom Julian and Maddalo visit in the latter part of the poem PBS wrote to Hunt that he is ‘also in some degree a painting from nature, but, with respect to time and place, ideal [i.e. imaginary]’ (Letters II, p. 108). Commentators have variously interpreted the Maniac as a reflection of PBS’s guilt over the collapse of his marriage to Harriet Westbrook, or of Byron’s guilt over the failure of his marriage to Annabella Milbanke and his complex relationship with his half-sister Augusta. Comparisons have also been drawn with the fate of the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, who was imprisoned and driven insane after attempting to pursue a relationship with Leonora d’Este, the daughter of his patron. Byron had written a ‘Lament of Tasso’ in 1817 and, in a letter of 20 April 1818, PBS told Peacock that he meant to devote ‘this summer & indeed the next year’ to ‘the composition of a tragedy on the subject of Tasso’s madness, which I find upon inspection is, if properly treated, admirably dramatic & poetical’ (Letters II, p. 8; only one draft, ‘Scene’ and a ‘Song’, survive of this project). JM may be compared with PBS’s other, broadly contemporary engagement with Venice and Byron in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’ (p. 153).

  JM is in iambic pentameter couplets, and PBS observed to Hunt that he had employed ‘a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms’ (Letters II, p. 108). Commentators have noted stylistic similarities with Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816) and John Keats’s Endymion (1818), both of which also employ iambic pentameter couplets as part of an urbane and cultured style.

  Influential biographical readings of the poem include William Brewer, The Shelley-Byron Conversation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 39–56, and Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 73–106. For critical readings, see: Kelvin Everest, ‘Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 63–88; Nick Johnston, ‘Shelley, Julian and the Narratives of Julian and Maddalo’, KSR 14 (2000), pp. 34–41; Geoffrey Matthews, ‘Julian and Maddalo: The Draft and the Meaning’, Studia Neophilologica 35 (1963), pp. 57–84; and Vincent Newey, ‘The Shelleyan Psycho-Drama: Julian and Maddalo’, in Miriam Allott (ed.), Essays on Shelley (Totawa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982), pp. 71–104.

  Epigraph Excerpted from PBS’s own (partial) translation of Virgil, Eclogues X.29–30, made in June 1818. The words are spoken by Pan in an attempt to correct the excessive grief of Gallus, Virgil’s friend and patron, at the loss of his would-be lover, Lycoris.

  Preface Count Maddalo: The two seventeenth-century Italian bio
graphies of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) which PBS read in spring 1818 in preparation for his drama on the life of the poet identify a Count Maddalo Fucci as responsible for betraying the secret of Tasso’s love for Leonora d’Este, and a ‘Count Maddalo’ features in PBS’s draft scene for the play (see Poems II, pp. 365–7).

  p. 163 capable, if he would direct: In 1816, PBS had written to Byron to urge him to make his work ‘a fountain from which the thoughts of other men shall draw strength and beauty’ (Letters I, p. 507).

  his degraded country: The reference is both to Italy, ‘degraded’ by Austrian occupation (see note to ll. 121–8 of ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’), and, implicitly, to contemporary England.

  But it is … human life: Cp. PBS’s description of Byron in his letter to Peacock of 17 or 18 December 1818, as ‘heartily & deeply discontented with himself, & contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts, the nature & the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt & despair?’ (Letters II, p. 58).

  concentred: Self-focused.

  1–3 I rode … Venice: Cp. PBS’s letter to MWS of 23 August 1818 in which he describes the day’s events: ‘[Byron] took me in his gondola … across the laguna to a long sandy island which defends Venise [sic] from the Adriatic. When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, & we rode along the sands of the sea talking’ (Letters II, p. 36).

  2–3 the bank of land …Venice: The Lido di Venezia, which shields Venice from the Adriatic Sea.

  36–9 Our talk … extinguish: Our conversation became more serious, as conversation often does when we try and fail to dismiss sobering thoughts with witty, self-ironic chatter.

  40 so poets tell: As Milton did in Paradise Lost II.555–61; the phrase introduces ll. 41–5 here.

  46 descanted: Discussed at length.

  51 struck … blind: Cp. PBS’s account of Coleridge in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 202–8, and Byron’s ‘Lament of Tasso’ (1817), ll.1–2.

  67 hoar: Grey or white with age; here implying snow-capped.

  74 rent: Torn gap.

  77–9 PBS develops the island-mountain simile in more detail in his ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’ (p. 153).

  88 that funereal bark: Cp. PBS’s description of gondolas in his letter to Peacock of 8 October 1818: ‘the gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic & picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis. They are hung with black, & painted black, & carpeted with grey’ (Letters II, p. 42).

  111 vespers: Evening prayers.

  115–18 You were ever … Providence: Maddalo’s quip might recall an incident in July 1816, when PBS and Byron ran into difficulties during a sailing trip on Lake Geneva and their boat appeared near sinking. PBS could not swim; Byron was an excellent swimmer (see Letters I, p. 483). The phrase ‘A wolf for the meek lambs’ alludes to John 10:11–12, in which Christ contrasts the good shepherd who gives his life for his sheep and the hireling who abandons them to the wolf.

  143–55 Biographical readings usually associate Maddalo’s child with Allegra, Byron’s illegitimate daughter with Claire Clairmont. Claire had sent the fifteen-month-old Allegra to Byron in Venice in April 1818, believing that he could better provide for her. Hence PBS had not seen Allegra for four months when he arrived in Venice in August 1818. PBS describes Allegra’s ‘deep blue eyes’, her ‘seriousness’ and ‘vivacity’ in a letter of 15 August 1821 (Letters II, p. 334).

  144 toy: Plaything, companion in play.

  162 old saws: Proverbial sayings.

  163 never own: Never acknowledge.

  164 teachless: Incapable of being taught; here meaning ‘free’.

  170–76 it is our will … desire: Cp. ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 241–5: ‘He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever / Can be between the cradle and the grave / Crowned him the King of Life. O vain endeavour! / If on his own high will a willing slave, / He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor’; and MWS’s ‘Note on Prometheus Unbound’: ‘Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none’ (1839 II, p. 133).

  175–6 and … desire: Cp. Macbeth I.vii.39–41: ‘Art thou afeared / To be the same in thine own act and valour / As thou art in desire?’

  188–9 PBS refers to the pre-Christian thought of Classical Greece and Rome.

  190–91 And those … religion: Those whose religion leads them to sympathy with others, or those for whom such sympathy has the force of religion.

  204 “soul of goodness”: Cp. Shakespeare, Henry V IV.i.3–4: ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out.’

  218 This line is not in 1824.

  238 peculiar: Specific, particular.

  244 humourist: Two senses are possible: someone subject to the humours (i.e. of unstable feelings), or someone with a sense of humour.

  252–8 Poems II compares a similar act of kindness by Glenarvon, Caroline Lamb’s portrait of Byron in her eponymous novel of 1816.

  301 jade: A worn-out horse.

  302–3 PBS describes convicts chained in St Peter’s Square in a letter of 6 April 1819 to Peacock from Rome (Letters II, p. 93).

  320 What … torture us: Cp. Prometheus Unbound II.iv.100–101, in which Asia asks Demogorgon ‘who rains down / Evil, the immedicable plague’.

  354–7 Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, in Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 137, suggest that PBS ‘refers here to the homeopathic principle [which seeks the cure for an illness or injury in its cause], but warns against a single-minded application of it’.

  380–82 as when … nature: PBS recalls such a youthful crisis in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ll. 49–62, and in the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, ll. 19–36.

  383 pent: Imprisoned.

  384–5 In PBS’s draft of these lines, the Maniac refers to a ‘Laura’ at this point, Petrarch (buried in the nearby Euganean Hills) and his unrequited love for Laura of Avignon. Poems II observes that John Black’s Life of Tasso, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1810), II, p. 242, records that the imprisoned and ailing poet confused ‘illusions’ of the mind with ‘external impressions’ and frequently conversed with an imagined ‘familiar spirit’.

  416–19 As the slow … immortality: Cp. Prometheus Unbound I.13–14: ‘And moments aye divided by keen pangs / Till they seemed years’.

  433 cearedst: 1824 reads ‘seard’st’. OED cites ‘cear’ as an obsolete form of ‘sear’ = ‘to dry or burn’. Poems II, p. 686, emends to ‘ceredst’, suggesting that PBS’s spelling is an alternative for both ‘seared’ (burned, dried) and ‘sered’ (embalmed). Cp. l. 614 and note.

  438 imprecate for, on me: Wish upon me as a curse.

  450 Echoing Ecclesiastes 4:1: ‘So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun.’

  504 words like embers, every spark: Cp. ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ll. 66–7, and The Triumph of Life, ll. 206–7, 386–8.

  536 nice: Refined.

  541–2 That is, language that would have been called poetry if it had been metrical. In his letter to Hunt of 15 August 1819, PBS says of the ‘style of language’ used in JM that ‘passion exceeding a certain limit touches the boundaries of that which is ideal [i.e. imaginary]. Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor borrowed from objects alike remote or near, and casts over all the shadow of its own greatness’ (Letters II, p. 108).

  561 make me know myself: Echoing the famous advice, ‘Know Thyself’, of the oracle at Delphi. Cp. Adonais, ll. 415–16: ‘come forth / Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright’; and The Triumph of Life, ll. 211–12: ‘their lore / Taught them not this—to know themselves’.

  586–7 Byron studied the Armenian language at a monastery in Venice.

  588 His dog was dead: Byron kept a sequence of Newfoundland dogs as favoured pets, and elegized the first – Boatswain –
in a poem of November 1808.

  588–9 His child … woman: Byron and Claire’s daughter Allegra was to die, from malaria or pneumonia, on 20 April 1822, aged five.

  595 lorn: Forlorn, i.e. ‘miserable’ or ‘abandoned’.

  597 The fair copy that PBS sent to Hunt begins direct speech at this point, but this seems incompatible with the reference to ‘my departure’ in l. 598. Editors have differed as to where direct speech should begin.

  608–15 Child … lie: The distribution of the dialogue in these lines is uncertain. In PBS’s fair copy the lines are compressed into the edge of the page, leaving it impossible to discern any intended punctuation. Editors tend to assign the question in l. 608 to Julian and ll. 609–15 to Maddalo’s daughter. However, the division between the speakers given here is also possible: that Julian asks an extended question in ll. 608–10, to which Maddalo’s daughter replies in ll. 611–15. In PBS’s fair copy, ‘Yet’ in l. 611 replaces a cancelled ‘But’, which, as Poems II observes, ‘might enforce a pause and help suggest a change of speaker’.

  614 ceared: See note to l. 433 above.

  Stanzas Written in Dejection—December 1818, near Naples

  Composed, as the title indicates, in December 1818, and first published in 1824. PBS’s draft is in the Bodleian Library (BSM XV), and there are two autograph fair copies, one in the Pierpont Morgan Library (MYR (Shelley) V) and the other in the Bodleian (MS Shelley e. 5: see BSM XXI). Our text follows the Bodleian fair copy, evidently the later of the two. The poem was one of a number which PBS gathered together in November 1820 as his ‘saddest verses’ and planned to publish with Julian and Maddalo (Letters II, p. 246). The ‘dejection’ of the title resulted from several converging causes: PBS’s poor health, a malicious reference to his personal life (though not by name) in the Quarterly Review for May 1818, the death of his daughter Clara that September and the depression of spirits it occasioned in MWS, and the complications surrounding Elena Adelaide, PBS’s ‘Neapolitan charge’ (Letters II, p. 211): a child registered as his and MWS’s in February 1819 and as having been born the previous December, but whose relationship to them remains unclear (MWS Journal I, pp. 249–50; Bieri II, pp. 103 ff.). The ‘Stanzas’ take the form of modified Spenserian stanzas, and commentators have noted the influence of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807) and Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802). Chernaik, pp. 74–80, offers a close and informative reading.