Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  IV

  In the resonant concluding paragraph of A Defence of Poetry (here), Shelley memorably articulates the relation between contemporary writers and what he calls ‘the spirit of the age’ which animates them. An epoch of great intellectual and artistic achievement is one in which revolutionary events, ideas and imagination energize each other. Such was the case in the England of the Renaissance, and so it is at the present moment:

  we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty … At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.

  Within this atmosphere of creative interchange, the art of great poets such as Dante exhibits a vital relation to contemporary ‘knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political condition’, so shaping an indispensable representation of the epoch to itself and transmitting it to succeeding ages (here). This high and serious office Shelley began to define in the Preface to Laon and Cythna and pursued in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, where artists are said to be ‘in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age’ (here). His exploration of this central idea of his poetics in A Defence of Poetry concludes that the artist must engage critically with contemporary realities if art is to remain relevant: his task is ‘to create afresh the associations’ that words and images and ideas have acquired over time if they are not to become ‘dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse’ (here). On this view, all imaginative creation, and poetry pre-eminently, is at once determined by and able to determine how we apprehend the world in which we live; it

  purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by re-iteration. (here)

  The primary task of poetry is to absorb and transform its sources in nature, art and thought, past and present, into instruments for knowing the world as it has become; in effect bringing a new reality into being. The corollary of these visionary, creative and ethical functions is Shelley’s celebrated declaration that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’ (here).

  Fundamental to this creative enterprise as he conceived it was an original engagement with poetic form. In this Shelley followed the example of the writers he regarded as having defined the age as one of exceptional imaginative power, for a distinguishing hallmark of the Romantic period was the extent of its experimentation with genre, style and versification. To deploy these effectively requires an alert awareness of decorum – that is, of the language, narrative structures, characters, prosody (and so on) which tradition had established as proper to a given literary kind. Not that these conventions simply dictate the attributes of a given Shelley poem: many of his most memorable effects involve the revision, even subversion, of received styles and stories, of genre itself. His awareness of traditional prescriptions always remains acute, however, and his characteristic impulse is to test the limits of the convention within which he works. Harold Bloom’s contention that our reading of Shelley’s verse ought above all to remain conscious of its relation to the history of poetry is pertinent here.37 Shelley’s handling of a traditional form both bears the impress of the age and functions as a searching means of exploring it.

  His variations on the ballad form offer a signal example. Historically, a leading theme of the popular ballad was mockery of the great as a means of social protest, Shelley’s object in ‘The Monarch’s funeral: An Anticipation’ (1810), in which a contrast between the pomp and luxury of royalty and the obscure grave of the true patriot is developed. The Mask of Anarchy, written in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819, elicits a more variously nuanced response. It combines the simplicity of language and relaxed versification of the ballad style with elements of biblical dream vision, courtly masque and public pageant to form a generic hybrid in which those heterogeneous elements interact to mimic the discontinuities and dissonances of the socially fractured encounter they commemorate. Traditionally the ballad also served as vehicle for the narration of local events of an apparently supernatural character. Such was Wordsworth’s tale, in a five-line expansion of the ballad stanza, of the conversion to an upright life of an itinerant seller of earthenware pots in Peter Bell (1819), whose imminent publication prompted Shelley to recast the tale in Peter Bell the Third, with a stricter rhyme scheme and a farcical caricature of Wordsworth himself as chief personage. In Shelley’s reworking, the pedlar’s conversion has been replaced with Wordsworth’s passage from reformist to conservative politics, the consequent dullness of his poetry being his fitting recompense. Within a narrower compass, Shelley was a determined experimenter in the sonnet form. None of the nine sonnets included in the present selection follows the same rhyme scheme, and only the translation ‘From the Italian of Dante’ conforms to a major traditional pattern of rhyme – the Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg) – though not to its division into three quatrains and a concluding couplet. Nor do any of the sonnets respect the Petrarchan model’s division into octave and sestet, rhyming abba abba cdecde. The distinctive effects that Shelley achieves through innovative rhyming and unexpected divisions of sense in his sonnets reward close attention.

  So does his management of other, even more intricate forms. The poems that Shelley composed between 1809 and 1812, which include the first thirteen titles in this volume, display a remarkable spectrum of metres, stanzas and rhyme schemes, a prelude to the continued development in technical ingenuity and control throughout his career. The skill with which he negotiates the prosodic variations over forty lines on only three rhymes in ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’ represents a quite astonishing example, as if the masterly display of the poet’s art carried through in the poem’s five stanzas rendered homage to the prodigious existence of the subject that is recalled. As remarkable, in their different ways, are his sustained handling of the solemn fifteen-line stanzas of ‘Ode to Liberty’, and the rapid verbal music and lightness of rhythm he creates in ‘The Cloud’. The interplay of the iambic pentameter couplets of Julian and Maddalo with what Shelley described as the poem’s ‘familiar style of language’ is as exhilarating as the animated conversation of the two principals as they ride along the shore of the Venetian Lido through wind-blown sunny spray.38 Exhilarating too, though in quite another mode, is the fanciful journey of the lady witch in The Witch of Atlas, in which the delighted play and gleeful mischief generated by the confrontation between the things of this world and the creative imagination are brilliantly adapted to the Italian comic measure of ottava rima.

  Such experimentation and formal diversity are the principal medium through which Shelley constructs the substantial autobiographical dimension of his verse. In the course of his correspondence with his future father-in-law, William Godwin, in early 1812, he suggests that an account of the whole of a life from youth to age, recording successive intellectual and sentimental states when and as they are experienced, would possess a scientific value to rival that of systematic studies of mental phenomena:

  If any man would determine sincerely and cautiously at every period of his life to publish books which should contain the real state of his feelings and opinions, I am willing to suppose that this portraiture of his mind would be worth many metaphysical disquisitions.39

  Shelley was acutely conscious of the obstacles in the way of carrying out such a scheme, as well as the related one of reconstituting a life through methodical recollection. In a series of notes on the science of mind, he writes that ‘thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits’.40 And he was especially aware, both in the exercise of self-reflection and more generally, of the imperfections of language itself
as an expressive instrument: ‘These words inefficient & metaphorical—Most words so—No help—’, as he put it in a manuscript footnote to ‘On Love’. Such caveats notwithstanding, self-portraiture forms a major strain in his verse and prose and one to which he returns at critical intervals. The poems that embody this continuing impulse range from the explicitly autobiographical first-person meditations of ‘The Retrospect: Cwm Elan 1812’ and the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, through the formal portraits of himself as Poet speaking to his public in the prefaces to Laon and Cythna and Prometheus Unbound, the imaginative working-through of an interval of personal grief in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’ , or the lament from a moment of deep despondency in ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection—December 1818, near Naples’, to the highly wrought symbolic narratives of Epipsychidion (1821). A pivotal event in the construction of his life story as possessing significant shape and purpose is recounted in both ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1816) and the Dedication before Laon and Cythna. In each poem he recalls in quasi-religious terms, and with important variations, a conversion experience of dramatic suddenness and intensity which condenses the decisive change of direction that he described in his letters to Godwin in early 1812: from the life of privilege into which he had been born, and its accompanying restrictions, to an existence dedicated to free enquiry and general justice.

  But the pre-eminent theme of his autobiographical narratives and lyrics is the quest for love. In exploring the – sometimes highly charged, entangled and painfully fraught – personal experiences that define its course, he represents himself both directly in the first person and in various fictional guises. The latter include the tragic figures of the revolutionary Laon in Laon and Cythna, the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo and the doomed patriot and lover Lionel in Rosalind and Helen (1818). The personal lyrics, many never intended for publication, include those addressed to his first wife, Harriet, in which love is invoked as incitement to virtue; those written to Mary in which love is the condition of mutual creative endeavour; the playful and flirtatious songs composed or recycled for Sophia Stacey (for whom see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’); the passionate exaltation of Epipsychidion; the late lyrics taking Shelley’s troubled attachment to Jane Williams as their subject; and those like ‘On a Dead Violet: To —–’ or ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’, which frankly confront love’s exhaustion and death. A technically accomplished and deeply unsettling example of this engagement with love’s extinction is ‘Time Long Past’, one of three poems that Shelley inscribed in a pocket diary which he presented to Sophia Stacey on her departure from Florence for Rome at the end of December 1819. A mordant recasting of a familiar theme from the lyric repertoire, regret for the passing of a love that was too delightful to endure, these plangent verses (see also here) are a tour de force of lyric craftsmanship.

  Time Long Past

  Like the ghost of a dear friend dead

  Is Time long past.

  A tone which is now forever fled,

  A hope, which is now forever past,

  A love, so sweet it could not last

  Was Time long past.

  There were sweet dreams in the night

  Of Time long past;

  And, was it sadness or delight,

  Each day a shadow onward cast

  Which made us wish it yet might last—

  That Time long past.

  There is regret, almost remorse

  For Time long past.

  ’Tis like a child’s beloved corse

  A father watches, till at last

  Beauty is like remembrance, cast

  From Time long past.

  A close reading of the three stanzas underscores the truth of Wordsworth’s assertion – in a consideration of major contemporary poets, including Thomas Moore, Walter Scott and Byron – that ‘Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style’.41 The eighteen lines count only four rhymes, the title itself occurring six times in the body of the lyric, each occurrence subtly individualized by the addition of a single monosyllabic word. The strict economy of means and the formal patterning rein in the familiar conversational quality of both language and syntax by, as it were, compulsive returns to the three emphatic stresses of the title. Rhetorically, each stanza consists of two statements, both concluding with a variation on the title, the first expressing prosaically, and without strict adherence to any prosodic scheme, a condition for which ‘time long past’ functions simply as a temporal adverb; the second, rhythmically varied in each case, also leads back to the title-phrase, which echoes all previous instances of itself and yet is both grammatically distinct and significantly distinguished in meaning from them. The bitter and shocking image of the dead child and grieving father in the third stanza cruelly realizes the ominous suggestions in the ‘dear friend dead’ and ‘shadow’ of stanzas 1 and 2, jarring with the conventional idiom of erotic complaint that has governed the poem till then by introducing a detail borrowed from Shelley’s personal life, the death of his three-year-old son, William, in June 1819. The sense of ‘remembrance’ in the penultimate line, an act of recollecting the dead, encompasses lost love and lost child as well as the process of memorializing them in the poem itself – an artful instance of carrying the tensions implicit in a traditional lyric topic to their limits and beyond, and of the power of lyric poetry at its best to create much from little. To read Shelley’s poems on erotic themes in broadly chronological order, together with the rapturous celebration of both individual and cosmic love in Acts III and IV of Prometheus Unbound, is to follow one of the most distinctive and absorbing sequences on love in English poetry.

  The finely tuned verbal music and masterful versification which Wordsworth admired, and which complement the copiousness and variety of Shelley’s poetry, make an appropriate vehicle for the intensity and precision of his response to the things of the world. This ‘animation of delight’, in the phrase of the Earth regenerated by Love in Prometheus Unbound IV.322, is the expression of the sensual – at its highest pitch erotic – energy that quickens that response at its most memorable and characteristic. The resultant visionary quality of Shelley’s verse typically remains anchored to its source in natural experience. In The Witch of Atlas, to take the example of that ‘visionary rhyme’ (as Shelley describes it in line 8), the speaker interrupts the description of the hearth in the witch’s cavern to reflect on a neglected source of loveliness:

  Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is—

  Each flame of it is as a precious stone

  Dissolved in ever moving light, and this

  Belongs to each and all who gaze upon.

                (here)

  The process of creative observation is unfolded before our eyes in a reciprocal movement from fire to gem and back again, from the fluidity of motion, to the brilliantly fixed, to dissolution – suggesting a perpetual negotiation between the flame and the jewel, between the natural and visionary planes of reality. One could hardly find a more appropriate guide to the creative reading of Shelley’s poems than this display of the discovery of a beauty that is open to all.

  NOTES

  For bibliographical details of the abbreviated references Letters, Poems, Complete Poetry, Prose Works and Prose, see Abbreviations.

  1 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 649–51 and Appendix 9.

  2 Stephen Behrendt, ‘Shelley and His Publishers’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 83–97; Letters II, pp. 372, 387–8, 395.

  3 Leigh Hunt, ‘Young Poets’, The Examiner (1 December 1816, 19 January 1817), in Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) – hereafter Critical Heritage; Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi
ty Press, 2004).

  4 Reprinted with some modifications and additions as a note to Queen Mab, VII.13 (p. 94).

  5 Letters I, p. 540, II, p. 326; Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–94), VI, p. 76.

  6 Maria Gisborne and Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. F. L. Jones (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 111.

  7 Poems II, p. 32; Letters II, pp. 363, 388.

  8 St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 649–51.

  9 Letters II, pp. 323, 374.

  10 Letters I, p. 265.

  11 Poems I, pp. 238–9; Complete Poetry II, pp. 65–6.

  12 Robin Jarvis, ‘The Literary Marketplace’, in his The Romantic Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1789–1830 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004), pp. 50–73; St Clair, The Reading Nation; Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

  13 Letters I, p. 20.

  14 Letters I, p. 361.

  15 Poems II, pp. 268–9.

  16 Letters II, p. 174.

  17 Letters II, p. 102; Poems II, pp. 733–4.

  18 Letters II, pp. 191, 201, 164.

  19 Letters II, p. 365.

  20 See Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1938; reprinted New York: Octagon Books, 1966); a broad selection of periodical criticism and opinion up to the mid nineteenth century is gathered in Critical Heritage; for a complete collection of contemporary reviews, see The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers 1793–1830, Part C: Shelley, Keats, and London Radical Writers, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1972).