Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  38 Who will extort taxes from the poor in order to live in luxury?

  57–8 The king’s buried corpse fertilizes the earth. Poems I compares Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature (1803), IV.383–99: ‘Hence when a monarch or a mushroom dies, / Awhile extinct the organic matter lies / … The wrecks of Death are but a change of forms; / Emerging matter from the grave returns.’

  A Winter’s Day

  Undated in Esdaile, which supplies the text; probably written sometime before Christmas 1811 during PBS’s stay at Keswick (November 1811–January 1812), though possibly while he was at Tremadoc in north Wales (November 1812–February 1813); published in Esdaile 1964. The poem takes a spring-like day in winter as the occasion for a meditation, conventional enough at first glance, on the ‘transitory’ (l. 29) – with a traditional closing emphasis on seizing the day. But PBS gives the poem a personal signature by linking the themes of Genius (in stanza 3, which has only six lines) and Passion (stanza 4). The struggle to realize high artistic aspirations and the troubles that beset early erotic attachment are topics much in evidence in his letters of the period from Keswick (Letters I, pp. 174–246), while in Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) he had read of the trials that attend high creative gifts in both youth (e.g. ‘Resolution and Independence’) and age (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’). These matters had immediate significance for one who had been expelled from Oxford for publishing critical views on religion, married against the wishes of his family, and seen his best friend (T. J. Hogg) make sexual advances to his new wife, while continuing to cherish ambitious plans for literary and political works to benefit his fellow beings.

  1  mockest: The sense is of mimicry, deceptive imitation, in contrast to the sense of ‘mockery’ in l. 20.

  7  balm: Balmy, i.e. soft and fragrant; the adjectival usage appears to be PBS’s coinage.

  26–7 In the inverted word order, ‘springs’ is the subject of the verb ‘tell’, i.e. ‘declare’ or ‘reveal’.

  To the Republicans of North America

  Text from Esdaile, published in Esdaile 1964. Composed on or before 14 February 1812, when Shelley included it in a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, untitled and without the fourth stanza, which, if then written, would have been out of keeping with the letter’s vision of a ‘society of peace and love’ achieved through ‘toleration and patience’ (Letters I, pp. 251–5). Commentators have pointed out the poem’s geographical vagaries. The MSS and PBS’s letters (I, pp. 235, 272) indicate that the poem originally meant to celebrate liberation struggles in Spanish colonies in Central and South America, especially Mexico and perhaps Venezuela. In Esdaile PBS altered the ‘New Spain’ in the title to ‘North America’. Poems I suggests that PBS may ultimately have wished his poem to address all republicans on both American continents.

  15–16 The lines would be particularly appropriate to Dublin Castle, home of the British administration in Ireland, and to the squalor among Dublin’s poor, which shocked PBS.

  21 Cotopaxi: PBS’s invocation of this active volcano in present-day Ecuador is an early instance of what would become his recurrent use of volcanic eruption as an emblem of revolution: e.g. Prometheus Unbound II.iii.1–10; The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 364–7; and ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 181–7.

  35–6 An allusion to Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac’s celebrated speech to the French National Convention in 1792, advocating the death penalty for Louis XVI: ‘L’arbre de la liberté ne croît qu’arrosé par le sang des tyrans’ (The tree of liberty only grows when fed with the blood of tyrants).

  40 A parody of Psalm 103:8: ‘The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.’

  45–50 The inversions in these lines can obscure the sense: ‘When the patriot, whose immortal spirit will be forgiven for violence in the cause of liberty, dies, bereaved Earth may not speak his praise but can mourn him with a tear.’

  On Robert Emmet’s Tomb

  In a letter of c.16 April 1812, PBS mentions having written ‘some verses on Robert Emmet’ (Letters I, p. 282); the lines, probably composed shortly before or just after the end, on 4 April 1812, of his first visit to Ireland, were later included in Esdaile, from which the present text is taken. Lines 21–8 were published in Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886), the entire poem in Esdaile 1964. Long admired by Shelley, Emmet was the leader of a short-lived insurrection in Dublin in July 1803 which aimed to establish a provisional government in hopes of galvanizing the country to a general uprising against British rule. He was executed on 20 September, having been arrested while lingering in the city for an answer to his declaration of love for Sarah Curran, the daughter of the prominent lawyer John Philpot Curran, whom PBS met in Dublin in March 1812. Curran had acted as defence counsel for some members of the Society of United Irishmen, the nationalist movement of which Emmet himself was an active member, and which had carried out the unsuccessful insurrection of 1798 with military aid from France.

  The circumstances of Emmet’s arrest, together with his youth (he was twenty-five) and the eloquence of his final speech from the dock, won him both popular and poetic acclaim as a Romantic exemplar of patriotic nationalism. Robert Southey’s ‘Written Immediately after Reading the Speech of Robert Emmet’ (1803) and Thomas Moore’s ‘Oh! breathe not his name’ (1807) and ‘She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps’ (1811) are only three of the many lyric responses to Emmet’s fate. As well as the sentiments, PBS’s poem shares the line of four anapaests (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one) of the first of Moore’s poetic tributes mentioned above and the stanza rhyming abab of the second. Lines 21–4 allude to Emmet’s celebrated last injunction, which tradition has preserved with variations: ‘let no man write my epitaph … and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; – when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then – let my epitaph be written’ (cited in Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London: Profile Books, 2003), p. 85). The location of Emmet’s unmarked tomb (‘distinguished in lowliness’, l. 10) was, and remains, unknown; in the early nineteenth century it was presumed to be the only blank slab in St Michan’s churchyard in Dublin, which PBS visited, but some now suggest that it is in Glasnevin cemetery. The poem expands upon the revolutionist sentiments in PBS’s other poetic reactions to the condition of Ireland, including ‘The Irishman’s Song’.

  7  shamrock: The three-leaved national symbol of Ireland.

  10 relics: Remains.

  17–24 PBS suggests that the responses elicited by the lowliness and anonymity of Emmet’s burial place are guarantors of Ireland’s eventual freedom. Compare the similar view of the patriot’s grave in ll. 21–5 of ‘To Liberty’.

  18 Recalling Emmet’s speech from the dock: ‘I am going to my cold and silent grave … I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world, it is the charity of its silence!’ (Elliott, Robert Emmet, p. 85).

  23 caressed: Spelled ‘carest’ in Esdaile.

  26–7 its lifespring … their memory: The ‘lifespring’ of Emmet’s name, the ‘memory’ of his ‘foes’ (l. 23).

  To Liberty

  Text from Esdaile, published in Dowden, Life (see headnote to previous poem). The exact date of composition is unknown, but strong verbal and thematic similarities suggest a time shortly before PBS began work on Queen Mab in spring 1812. The ‘Tyrant’ of stanzas 1–3 may have been suggested by Napoleon, who in the period mid 1810–late 1811 reached the zenith of his power in Europe; but the stanzas have an evident general application as well. PBS’s generation inherited a rich literary and pictorial tradition that attributed symbolic value to ruins. The tenor of stanzas 4 and 5 – which anticipate Canto IX of Queen Mab and parallel the sentiments and images of T. L. Peacock’s poem Palmyra (1806) – derives particularly from Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur les révolutions des
empires (1791) by Constantin, Comte de Volney (1757–1820): the defining assertion, by a French revolutionary theorist, of the transience of monarchical authority as evidenced in its decayed monuments. Volney’s book, translated as Ruins of Empires (1795), had considerable currency in England from the late 1790s and was a favourite of the young Shelley. Lines 21–5 can be compared with ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’ and ‘The Tombs’ (1812), poems which similarly invest the grave of the patriot with the power to inspire revolutionary revenge, a defiant note which somewhat abruptly heralds the dawn of ‘Virtue, Truth and Peace’ (l. 45) in the present poem. PBS developed such a moral evolution in detail in Prometheus Unbound: see especially I.218–305, III.iii.

  16 pure: Complete Poetry II and Esdaile 1964 read the word, ambiguously formed in the MS, as ‘free’.

  28 her Atlantic throne: America.

  36–9 Both Volney’s Ruines and his Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1787) express indignation at the cost in human suffering of constructing the pyramids, as does Peacock’s Palmyra.

  38 footstone: The foundation stone of the pyramid; or – perhaps the meaning here – its base.

  Written on a Beautiful Day in Spring

  Probably composed in spring 1812 at Nant Gwyllt (‘Wild Brook’ in Welsh, pronounced nant guithlt) in central Wales, near PBS’s cousin Thomas Grove’s estate at Cwm Elan (the valley of the Elan river, pronounced coom eelan), where PBS had stayed for about four weeks the previous summer. The text is from Esdaile, first publication in Esdaile 1964. Poems I notes the resemblance between ll. 1–2 and the opening lines of Fragment VII in Sydney Owenson’s The Lay of an Irish Harp; or, Metrical Fragments (1807) – ‘There was a day when simply but to BE, / To live, to breathe, was purest ecstasy’ – which develop a conventional opposition between carefree childhood and careworn age. The contrast in PBS’s poem is rather between self-consciousness and that self-forgetfulness (the ‘strange mental wandering’ of l. 1) in which mind and feeling become as one under the influence of exquisitely pleasurable sensations offered by the natural world – a state which anticipates the pure bliss of Heaven. This Shelleyan theme modifies the evident debt to Wordsworth’s early poems, such as ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ and ‘Lines written at a small distance from my house’. David Duff, ‘Shelley’s “Foretaste of Heaven”’, Wordsworth Circle 31 (2000), pp. 149–58, provides an informative consideration of the poem, its sources and its place in PBS’s poetic development.

  5  unpercipient: Not perceiving; the word appears to be PBS’s coinage.

  10 it: The ‘mental wandering’ of l. 1.

  11 it: The antecedent is ‘Sensation’ (l. 8).

  15 the frame: The body.

  ‘Dark Spirit of the desart rude’

  Text from Esdaile, published in Esdaile 1964. Date of composition uncertain but probably spring 1812. PBS and his wife Harriet spent the period from mid April to late June in Wales, at Nant Gwyllt and Cwm Elan (see headnote to previous poem), in the country of mountains and valleys through which the river Elan (named in l. 10) flows; ll. 30–33 set the poem in spring. In ‘Dark Spirit’ PBS imagines a natural scene near his current residence as expressing what eighteenth-century aesthetics had defined as the ‘sublime’ – a relation between an observer and a landscape in which the fear and awe inspired by such phenomena as the dark woods and jagged peaks of the present poem convey insights inaccessible to reason. See headnote to ‘Mont Blanc’. The poet’s search for a natural equivalent of the genius loci, or presiding spirit of the place, settles at last on the oak (traditional symbol of royalty), which, blasted by lightning, represents all kings, who despoil their subjects, yet themselves waste away. Milton had compared the fallen Satan to a ‘scathed’ oak in Paradise Lost I.612–15; PBS is probably also remembering Coombe-Ellen, a poem written by the Reverend William Lisle Bowles in 1798 while a guest of PBS’s cousin Thomas Grove at Cwm Elan. See note to l. 35 below.

  Title ‘desart’ is the usual spelling in PBS’s verse.

  1–15 Grammatically the lines make a single sentence, addressing a question (‘Art thou … ?’, ll. 12–15) to the ‘Dark Spirit’ (l. 1) that ‘Wavest … force’ (l. 11).

  6  jetty: Jet-black.

  12 sooty and fearful fowl: A raven.

  35 desolate Oak: Cp. Bowles’s Coombe-Ellen, ll. 54–7: ‘Upon the adverse bank, wither’d and stript / Of all its pleasant leaves, a scathed oak / Hangs desolate; once sov’reign of the scene, / Perhaps, proud of its beauty and its strength.’ To Bowles the barren oak stands as a reminder of the inevitable coming of age and infirmity.

  45 that race: The race of kings.

  The Retrospect: Cwm Elan 1812

  Composed between early May and mid June 1812 while PBS and his wife Harriet, just returned in disappointment from their first campaign for reform in Ireland, were staying in Wales at Nant Gwyllt, then at nearby Cwm Elan (see headnote to ‘Written on a Beautiful Day in Spring’). The text is from Esdaile: lines 15–168 were first published in Edward Dowden’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886), the complete poem in Esdaile 1964. The previous year PBS had spent about four weeks (early July to early August) at Cwm Elan. Expelled from Oxford in March, at odds with his father, anxious about his health, and contemplating an elopement with Harriet, his mental state had been intensely agitated, even to entertaining suicidal thoughts (Letters I, pp. 117–31). ‘The Retrospect’ develops from a contrast between the two sojourns which produced in him, he wrote to William Godwin on 25 April 1812, a divided consciousness: ‘the place where we now reside is in the neighbourhood of scenes marked deeply on my mind by the thoughts which possessed it when present among them. The ghosts of these old friends have a dim & strange appearance when resuscitated in a situation so altered as mine is, since I felt that they were alive’ (Letters I, p. 287).

  PBS took the occasion to give imaginative form in a condensed poetic narrative to what he regarded as the chief formative elements of his life to date. He would undertake such a self-examination in verse at later periods – in, for example, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, the Dedication before Laon and Cythna and Epipsychidion. His poem works a variation on a type practised by the earlier generation of Romantic poets, a meditative review of the author’s personal life set in a particularized landscape. It shares the title and other features of Southey’s ‘The Retrospect’ (1795) and shows the influence of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807). David Duff analyses the poem in ‘“The Casket of my Unknown Mind”: The 1813 Volume of Minor Poems’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 55–60.

  5–7 In ancient Greek myth, the Titan Kronos, traditionally assimilated to Chronos (Time), devoured his children to prevent them from usurping his place in the heavens. PBS’s reference to Time as feminine may appropriate the sex of the earth as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet XIX.1–2: ‘Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, / And make the earth devour her own sweet brood.’

  15 wildered: Lost, gone astray.

  24–8 The rushing of the ‘wild brook’, as internalized in the mind of the poet, drives out his baleful thoughts.

  65–70 In 1810 an informal engagement between PBS and his cousin Harriet Grove (see headnote to ‘How eloquent are eyes!’) was terminated against his wishes, Harriet’s family regarding his opinions, writings and conduct as unsuitable for her. PBS considered that both she and they had betrayed him.

  73 The biblical language recalls two passages from Psalms: ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God’ (42:1); and ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me’ (139:9–10).

  78–83 The allure of his family name attracted many but they neither perceived nor influenced his inner self.

  84–91 The patriot willing to perish for freedom’s sake could never f
ind friends among those who benefit from tyranny.

  95 of unprofitable mould: Of a kind that brought no worldly reward.

  112–13 Adapting ll. 8–9 of ‘Dark Spirit of the desart rude’. Other adaptations of PBS’s own verse up to l. 123 are noted in Poems I and Complete Poetry II.

  120–21 In Classical myth, the nymph Echo, rejected by Narcissus, concealed herself in the woods to hide her grief.

  136–43 PBS imagines his change from summer 1811 to summer 1812 as the metamorphosis of a grave-worm into a butterfly. Cp. ‘Written on a Beautiful Day in Spring’, l. 18.

  QUEEN MAB

  Originally conceived in December 1811 as a portrait of ‘a perfect state of society; though still earthly’ (Letters I, p. 201), and written mostly between spring 1812 and spring 1813, Queen Mab (QM) was not offered for sale but printed in a limited edition of 250 copies and distributed privately, to avoid the risk of prosecution for the poem’s forthright anti-monarchical and anti-religious opinions. Our text is from this edition (1813). The Queen Mab of the title is the ‘fairies’ midwife’ who is evoked in a celebrated passage of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (I.iv.53–95) as the architect of sleepers’ dreams, and who features in the title of popular eighteenth-century collections of fairy tales and stories for children. The visionary frame of the poem intends to recall these precedents as well as the scenes of instruction delivered by a supernatural being in ancient and modern epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid VI and Milton’s Paradise Lost XI–XII. The polemical conspectus of past, present and future that Mab unveils to the spirit of the sleeping Ianthe in QM II–IX draws upon a long tradition of critical thought. Its principal sources range from the Roman poet Lucretius (98–c.55 BC) through the French materialist Baron d’Holbach (1723–89) and the revolutionary theorist Constantin, Comte de Volney (1757–1820) to the sceptical empiricism of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) and the English political radicals Thomas Paine (1737–1809), William Godwin (1756–1836) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) – and extends to contemporary writers on astronomy, diet and health. Ideas gathered from these form the chief intellectual underpinning of Mab’s revelations as well as of the seventeen prose notes, which provide a further dimension of philosophical and scientific authority.