Selected Poems and Prose
721–2 Various accounts of the torture of the Aztec emperor Guatimozin by the Spanish under Hernán Cortés have been recorded, including that he was made to lie on a hot gridiron to force him to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasure.
725 famed seven: The Seven Sleepers, Christian youths of Ephesus who under the persecution of the Roman emperor Decius in the third century were sealed up in a cavern where, according to legend, they slept for nearly two centuries only to awake without having aged. See Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), chapter 33.
734 pest: Plague.
763 bailiff: The landowner’s agent who collected rent.
Ode to the West Wind
PBS began and probably completed a draft of this, one of his best-known poems, in Florence in late October 1819. It was published in 1820, from which we take our text. Punctuation and capitalization have been modified after consulting PBS’s MSS (see BSM V and XVIII) and 1839.
The ‘Ode’ addresses the West Wind as both the natural energy that drives the abrupt passage of autumn to winter in the Mediterranean region and as prophetic symbol in relation to what PBS perceived as converging public and personal crises in October 1819. In the political sphere he feared that social injustices in England would precipitate a ‘bloody struggle’ (Letters II, p. 149), in contrast to the non-violent revolutions he had imagined in Laon and Cythna (1817) and The Mask of Anarchy, written the previous month. In mid October Laon and Cythna, which he had hoped would promote ‘a happier condition of moral and political society’ (Poems II, p. 32), was comprehensively denigrated and himself branded as cowardly and vicious in the Quarterly Review dated April 1819. His family life was also deeply troubled. All three children born to him and MWS in the past five years had died, the loss four months earlier of their three-year-old son, William, leaving them particularly disconsolate. That MWS was pregnant with their fourth child (who would be born on 12 November) is likely to have influenced l. 64 (see also note).
These circumstances inform the ‘Ode’, which, like ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, shares many features with prayer. The West Wind is invoked as a powerful deity and petitioned to aid the poet in a radical transformation that will confer on him the power of prophecy as well as a form of posthumous existence. Prosodically intricate and demanding, the poem’s five divisions each consist of four groups of lines in terza rima (rare in English poetry of the period) – the Italian verse form of three-line stanzas rhyming aba bcb cdc, and so on – and a concluding couplet, which together compose a sonnet. Both Dante’s Divina Commedia and Petrarch’s Trionfi employ terza rima; the latter supplies the model for The Triumph of Life.
Critical commentary includes: Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 158–78; James Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 525–54; Chernaik, pp. 90–97; Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 23–42; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 156–72; Edward Duffy, ‘Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote For’, SiR 23 (1984), pp. 351–77 (360–71); and Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 203–17.
Footnote temperature: Attributes in combination.
Cisalpine: South of the Alps.
1 Wind: The wind is associated with creation and inspiration in Genesis 1:2 and Acts 2:2.
2 leaves dead: The comparison of the human dead to dead leaves is traditional in epic poetry: e.g. Homer, Iliad VI.146–9; Virgil, Aeneid VI.309–10; Dante, Inferno III.112–17; cp. also Milton, Paradise Lost III.300–303 and The Triumph of Life, ll. 49–51 and 528–9.
4 hectic: Flushed, as if with a wasting fever.
9 azure sister: The gentle west wind of spring, called Zephyrus or Favonius in Classical literature, was traditionally represented as a young man rather than a woman.
14 Destroyer and Preserver: Attributes, respectively, of the Hindu deities Shiva and Vishnu.
hear, O hear: Cp. Psalm 61:1: ‘Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.’
17 tangled boughs: The ocean provides moisture for the formation of clouds, which returns to the sea as rain.
18 Angels: Harbingers, forerunners: from the Greek aggelos = ‘messenger’.
21 Maenad: A female follower of Dionysus, Greek god of wine and ecstasy, typically represented as dancing ecstatically. PBS saw a relief sculpture of Maenads at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence on 11 October 1819; in ‘Notes on Sculptures’ he describes their ‘hair loose and floating [which] seems caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous motion’ (Ingpen and Peck VI, p. 323). See also note to Prometheus Unbound II.iii.9–10.
32–6 pumice isle … picturing them: Pumice is porous rock formed from cooling lava. In December 1818, PBS made an excursion that included Baiae on the Bay of Naples (described in Letters II, p. 61), where from a boat he was able to see the sunken ruins of its ancient buildings.
54 Recalling Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), ll. 88–9: ‘The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree / I planted, – they have torn me, – and I bleed.’
57 lyre: See A Defence of Poetry: ‘Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre’ (here). (See also Alastor, ll. 41–9 and note to l. 42.)
63 dead thoughts: PBS’s poems and prose writings, which had failed to find the readers he wished to influence.
64 new birth: PBS expanded on the idea in A Philosophical View of Reform, begun in late 1819, in a passage that he later adapted in A Defence of Poetry: ‘The literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever followed or preceded a great and free developement of the national will, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth’ (here).
To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]
Composed in autumn 1819, published under the title ‘Similes’ by Thomas Medwin in The Athenaeum for 25 August 1832 and by MWS in 1839. In 1840 the title was expanded to ‘Similes, For Two Political Characters of 1819’. Our text is from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12, pp. 60–61 (see BSM XVIII).
The poem is addressed to two government ministers, Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth (1757–1844), and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), pillars of the Tory administration of Lord Liverpool from 1812 to 1822. Steadfastly hostile to electoral reform, Sidmouth and Castlereagh were regarded as reactionary and repressive by liberal opinion. As home secretary, Sidmouth often dealt harshly with popular discontent following the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), overseeing a network of government spies and informers. See headnote to The Mask of Anarchy. Castlereagh, foreign secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, was accused of excessive severity in suppressing – in 1798 when chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – a rising of United Irishmen, and was unresponsive to popular demands for relief and reform following the Napoleonic Wars.
2 empty: Hungry.
wind: Blow.
4 smoke: Vapour from rotting corpses.
9 in a fit: Hidden for a time.
11–13 shark and dogfish … Negro ship: The predators wait for a vessel transporting African slaves to the West Indies, anticipating that those among them who are dead or sick will be thrown overboard.
18 bloodless: Heartless, unfeeling.
19 murrained: Diseased.
Love’s Philosophy
On 16 November 1819, PBS sent a copy of this playfully erotic lyric, probably just composed, from Florence to London, where Leigh Hunt published it in his literary weekly The Indicator on 22 December under the present title, which may be either his or PBS’s. At the end of December, PBS presented a copy of the poem to Sophia Stacey, inscribed in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819, also edited by Leigh Hunt – a combined calendar, memorandum book, compendium of misc
ellaneous information and anthology of contemporary writing – on her departure from Florence, where she had been lodging in the same house as the Shelleys. Miss Stacey, a year older than PBS and distantly related to him through a family marriage, was travelling in Italy with an older female companion. She and PBS spent much time together during her stay in Florence from 9 November to 29 December. The version of the poem presented to her, now in the library of Eton College, supplies our text. It is untitled and shows minor variations from the Indicator version. Another transcription, in a notebook (now Harvard MS Eng. 258.2: see MYR (Shelley) V), is entitled ‘An Anacreontic’ after the Greek poet (Anacreon) of the sixth century BC whose lyrics typically celebrate the pleasures of the senses.
7 The line is more explicitly erotic in both the Harvard and Indicator versions: ‘In one another’s being mingle.’
Goodnight
Probably composed in autumn 1819, ‘Goodnight’ was presented to Sophia Stacey in late December on her departure from Florence, inscribed in a copy of the The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819 (see previous headnote), which is now in the library of Eton College and which supplies our text. Another transcription of the poem, in a notebook (now Harvard MS Eng. 258.2: see MYR (Shelley) V), is entitled ‘Song’. ‘Goodnight’ was first published in late 1821 in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1822. PBS made a free imitation of the poem in Italian in 1821, ‘Buona Notte’, for which see Poems IV, pp. 93–6.
Time Long Past
PBS inscribed this poem, together with ‘Love’s Philosophy’ and ‘Goodnight’, into a copy of The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819, which he gave to Sophia Stacey on her departure from Florence for Rome at the end of December 1819. It is now in the library of Eton College and supplies our text. (For Sophia Stacey and The Literary Pocket-Book, see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’.) The poem could have been written towards the end of the period from early November to late December 1819, when Sophia was in Florence. If written earlier, it might have been inspired by the strained relations between PBS and MWS following the death in Rome in June 1819 of the Shelleys’ three-year-old son, William, which is alluded to in ll. 15–18. It was first published in Rossetti 1870.
15 corse: Corpse.
On a Dead Violet: To —–
In March 1820, PBS appended this lament for faded love to a letter sent from Pisa by MWS to Sophia Stacey (for whom see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’) in Rome, enjoining her to keep its origin secret. In his accompanying note he refers to the poem as ‘old stanzas’, and they appear to have been drafted some months earlier, perhaps addressed to MWS. His relations with her had been severely strained since the death in Rome in June 1819 of their three-year-old son, William. PBS later sent a copy of the poem to Leigh Hunt in London, who published it in The Literary Pocket-Book (see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’) for 1821 under the title ‘Song. On a faded Violet’. Our text is from PBS’s holograph on MWS’s letter to Sophia Stacey of 7 March 1820, now in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cologny-Genève, Switzerland (see MYR (Shelley) VIII).
On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery
PBS probably composed this poem on a painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in November–December 1819. No holograph MS is known to exist. It was published by MWS in 1824 (from which our text is taken) in its present form, with ll. 18 and 37 incomplete. The painting, in oil on a wooden panel measuring 74 × 49cm, is now considered the work of an unidentified Flemish artist of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, though when PBS was in Florence it was attributed to Leonardo. The picture draws on two mythical traditions concerning the Medusa. According to one, she was a monster (a Gorgon – see l. 26) so hideous that to gaze on her (or to be gazed upon by her) was to be turned to stone. In his struggle with the Medusa, the hero Perseus avoided looking directly on her face, instead viewing her reflection in a polished shield, and was thus able to cut off her head. The other tradition represents the Medusa as a remarkable beauty whom Minerva punished by changing her hair into a knot of serpents. This combination of beauty and horror in art fascinated PBS, who wrote (disapprovingly) of Michelangelo in a letter of early 1819: ‘What is terror without a contrast with & a connection with loveliness?’ (Letters II, p. 80).
Mario Praz takes the poem as typical of a characteristically Romantic idea of beauty in the first chapter of The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). See also: Jerome McGann, ‘The Beauty of the Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology’, SiR 11 (1972), pp. 3–25; and W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 171–6.
3 tremblingly: As if blurred, perhaps by mist.
9–13 It is rather the grace than the terror of the Medusa’s countenance that turns the spirit of ‘the gazer’ to stone on which her features are engraved and so assimilated.
16 strain: i.e. of music.
18 watery: Damp, moist; or perhaps located in water, such as a stream.
22 mailed: Covered with scales.
mock: Defy or mimic.
25 eft: A small lizard.
35 inextricable error: Convoluted winding that cannot be disentangled.
36 thrilling: Quivering.
To Night
PBS probably composed this lyric on a traditional theme (cp. ‘Epithalamium’ and Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet III.ii.1–31) in late 1819. MWS published it in 1824. In Greek myth, both Night (Nyx) and Day (Hemera) were goddesses. PBS alternates the gender of Day and Night in stanzas 2–4. Kurt Schlueter traces the poem’s debt to the Classical hymn to a deity as well as to other Classical models in SiR 36/2 (1997), pp. 239–60; Chernaik, pp. 144–6, examines its character as a lyric of desire. The urgency of the address to Night is embodied in an intricate stanza of seven lines of eight, seven, four or three syllables rhyming ababccb.
Our text is from PBS’s holograph fair copy in Harvard MS Eng. 258.2 (see MYR (Shelley) V). Some punctuation has been modified.
England in 1819
Not published until 1839, though written in late 1819 and sent on 23 December in a letter to Leigh Hunt that includes PBS’s lament ‘What a state England is in!’ and his instruction ‘I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please’ (Letters II, pp. 166–7). Webb 1995 compares the liberal reformer Sir Francis Burdett’s election address of 6 October 1812, published in The Examiner for 11 October 1812, pp. 654–6, on the condition of the nation: ‘an army of spies and informers … a phantom for a King; a degraded Aristocracy; an oppressed People … irresponsible ministers; a corrupt and intimidated Press; pensioned Justices; packed Juries; vague and sanguinary Laws’ (here). The eighty-one-year-old King George III, who had reigned since 1760, had been diagnosed as incurably insane in 1810 and by late 1819 was blind, deaf and senile; he would die on 29 January 1820. His son, the unpopular Prince of Wales and future George IV, had exercised the office of regent from early 1811. The six other sons of George III, royal dukes supported from the public purse, were resented for their profligacy and extravagance. The first line invites comparison with Shakespeare, King Lear III.ii.20, in which the old former ruler of a kingdom in turmoil describes himself as ‘A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’. The play was not allowed to be performed during the Regency (Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 204–5).
Our text is from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12 (see BSM XVIII), which is untitled. MWS supplied the present title in 1839.
7 An allusion to the killing and wounding of demonstrators for reform, many of them agricultural and industrial labourers who had suffered great hardship, by armed militia on 16 August 1819 at St Peter’s Field, Manchester; see headnote to The Mask of Anarchy.
8–9 An army maintained to oppress the people and extinguish liberty (the sense of ‘liberticide’) can turn against those who employ it.
10 Gold and blood (here ‘sanguine’ = ‘sanguin
ary’, ‘bloody’) are in PBS’s poetry regularly presented as the foundations and instruments of tyranny. They ‘tempt and slay’ by bribery and corruption, and judicial murder.
11 a book sealed: Cp. Isaiah 29:11 – ‘And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed’ – directed at those who refuse God’s warnings.
12 senate … unrepealed: Parliament, for too long unrepresentative and in need of reform.
13–14 The lines borrow a symbolic figure from the conclusion to PBS’s An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, written two years earlier: ‘Let us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverentially to its tomb: and if some glorious Phantom should appear, and make its throne of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust, let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and left all that was gross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it as our Queen’ (here). Cp. the similar apparition in The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 102–25.
Song: To the Men of England
The text given here is from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, ff. 75v–76r (see MYR (Shelley) V). The ‘Song’ was probably written some time in early 1820; MWS published it in 1839. On 1 May 1820, PBS wrote to Leigh Hunt: ‘I wish to ask you if you know of any bookseller who would like to publish a little volume of popular songs wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers. I see you smile but answer my question’ (Letters II, p. 191). PBS never carried out his plan for such a collection; had he done so, this poem as well as a number of others that he wrote in late 1819 and early 1820 are likely to have figured in it, among those in the present selection: The Mask of Anarchy, ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’, ‘To —–’ (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’) and ‘God save the Queen!’. MWS noted in 1839 (III, p. 307) that the reason none of them could appear in print until years later was that ‘in those days of prosecution for libel’ no bookseller would dare publish them. All of these poems emerge from the mixed outrage and apprehension that PBS felt following ‘Peterloo’, the killing of civilians by mounted militia at Manchester on 16 August 1819. See headnote to The Mask of Anarchy.