71 divine philosophy: Recalling Milton, Comus, l. 475: ‘How charming is divine philosophy!’
85 bitumen lakes: i.e. of naturally occurring pitch.
93 Frequent with: ‘Crowded with’ (a Latinism).
94 chrysolite: A green or yellowish-green gemstone.
101 bloodless food: Vegetable fare; see note to l. 14.
104 brake: Thicket.
suspend: i.e. ‘would suspend’.
106–28 The Poet’s journey is both geographical and historical, taking him through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and up the Nile in search of the origins of European civilization in the great cities of increasingly ancient cultures: Greek (Athens), Phoenician (Tyre, Balbec or Baalbek), Jewish (Jerusalem), Babylonian (Babylon), Egyptian (Memphis, Thebes), finally arriving in Ethiopia, which, according to some writers, was the seat of Paradise. Tyre and Baalbek were in what is now Lebanon; Babylon in Iraq, south of Baghdad.
109–10 the waste … Jerusalem: Jerusalem was sacked by the future Roman emperor Titus Flavius in AD 70.
118 daemons: Spirits that mediate between gods and men.
119–28 The Zodiac’s brazen mystery … birth of time: A celebrated zodiac in the temple of the goddess Hathor at Dendera on the Nile was considered by some contemporary thinkers to be the earliest representation of natural forces as divine, evidence that religion originated in the worship of nature. It is now displayed in the Louvre.
120 mute thoughts … mute walls: Because the temples are now unfrequented and abandoned or, perhaps, as Complete Poetry III suggests, because hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered.
126–7 till meaning … inspiration: Adapting Wordsworth, ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ (1807), ll. 11–16: ‘I gaz’d – and gaz’d [on a crowd of daffodils] … For oft when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.’
140–45 The Poet … vale of Cashmire: Continuing eastward, the Poet passes through Arabia, Iran (Persia), the Kerman desert (‘the wild Carmanian waste’) in south-eastern Iran, then over the Hindu Kush or Indian Caucasus (source of the Indus and Oxus rivers and setting of Prometheus Unbound I) and on into the valley of Kashmir on the border between modern India and Pakistan. Contemporary speculation located the origin of the human race in Kashmir, in which the scene of Prometheus Unbound II.i is laid.
149–91 PBS describes the impulses that generate the Poet’s vision in the Preface. The psychology developed in his prose essay ‘On Love’ also serves as a commentary on the present passage. The portrait of the ‘veiled maid’ draws upon his reading in contemporary ‘Oriental’ prose fiction and poetry, for which see the notes on Alastor in Poems I and Complete Poetry III. The gap between an idealized and an actual erotic object, a major preoccupation of PBS’s life and poetry, is articulated in, for example, Letters I, pp. 95, 429–30.
163 numbers: Verse; here accompanied by a stringed instrument.
167 symphony: Harmony.
172 intermitted: Interrupted, ceasing at intervals.
189 Involved: Enveloped.
193 blue: Often associated with sickness and death in PBS’s verse, e.g. in ll. 216 and 598 and ‘The Plague’s blue kisses’ (Laon and Cythna, l. 2766).
196–200 Whither have fled … exultation: Echoing Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 56–7: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’
207 He overleaps the bounds: i.e. between the imagined and the real.
211–19 Does … delightful realms: The supposition in ‘Mont Blanc’, ll. 49–52, varies the tenor of the question: ‘Some say that gleams of a remoter world / Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber, / And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber / Of those who wake and live’.
228–32 A similar struggle between a serpent and an eagle has an important symbolic function in Laon and Cythna I.viii–xiv.
229–31 precipitates … her blind flight: Rushes headlong, recklessly.
239–44 The Poet reverses direction, now travelling north and west through modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran. Commentators have identified Aornos as modern Pir Sarai in Pakistan, Petra as the Rock of Soghdiana in Uzbekistan: each was the site of a victory won by the armies of Alexander the Great. The city of Balk or Balkh is in Afghanistan. The ‘tombs / Of Parthian kings’ in northern Iran were destroyed by the Roman emperor Caracalla in the third century AD.
249 Sered: See l. 8 and note.
272 Chorasmian shore: Probably the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea but possibly the western shore of the Aral Sea. Chorasmia (or Khwarezm) is an area lying between the two along the Oxus (or Amu Darya) river in modern Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
291 wrinkled his quivering lips: PBS substituted the reading ‘convulsed his curling lips’ in a copy of the Alastor volume presented to Leigh Hunt (M. Quinn, KSJ 35 (1986), pp. 17–20).
297 fair fiend: Apparently the ‘veiled maid’ the Poet sees in his dream in ll. 151–91, because the vision of her is both lovely and demonic.
299 shallop: A small boat.
330 genii: Spirits associated with natural phenomena.
352 etherial: Rising high into the air.
353 Caucasus: Mountain range in the Republic of Georgia, to the east of the Caspian Sea, which the Poet has just crossed.
382 knarled: Here and at l. 530 an obsolete (in England) form of ‘gnarled’; perhaps (as Forman 1876–7 suggests) the initial letter k is to be pronounced, as it then was in Scotland.
406 yellow flowers: Narcissi. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses III.344–511, the beautiful youth Narcissus, as punishment for scorning his admirers, is made to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool; dying of grief at not being able to possess the image, he is transformed into a flower.
409 pensive: Frequent in Wordsworth, this is the only occurrence of the word in PBS’s poetry, though ‘pensiveness’ appears in l. 489 in a related context. See note to ll. 126–7.
422 brown: Dark.
424 aëry: High in the air.
425 The caves echo the sound of the wind among the forest trees.
426 implicated: Intertwined.
439–45 The contemporary sense of ‘parasite’ suggested symbiosis rather than exploitation. PBS uses the term in this sense in Queen Mab I.43.
448 lawns: Grassy clearings.
455 PBS varies the image in ‘A Summer-Evening Church-Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’, ll. 5–6: ‘Silence and twilight, unbeloved of men, / Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen’.
465 painted: Brightly and variously coloured.
476 Startled: Started, moved abruptly.
glanced: Sprang aside.
479–88 The Spirit has the appearances of the natural surroundings and communicates with the Poet through its sounds.
490 Two starry eyes: Recalling the ‘beamy bending eyes’ of the veiled maid in l. 179; the crescent-points of the setting moon in l. 654 look back to both images.
507 searchless: Undiscoverable; like the other adjectives in ll. 503–8, this one has a figurative as well as a physical sense.
517–22 The fever-patient, not the Poet, is ‘Forgetful of the grave’.
528 windlestrae: A dry withered stalk of grass.
543–50 Taking ‘it’ as referring to ‘ravine’, the sense of the passage is that while the high rocks darken the depths of the ravine, ‘gulphs and … caves’ which echo the sound of the stream can be discerned higher up.
583 children: i.e. lesser breezes or gusts, the offspring of the ‘autumnal whirlwind’.
588–90 One step … one voice: The ‘step’ is the Poet’s, the ‘voice’ apparently that of the Spirit that in ll. 479–92 beckons him, assuming the sounds of the surrounding natural phenomena.
609–24 The shift of address in this passage is also a shift to a political idiom comparable to that of Queen Mab. The sense is that Death, who rules the world – as w
itness the pernicious instances in ll. 614–17 – is called by his brother Ruin to feast on a ‘rare and regal prey’, apparently including both royal rulers and the Poet himself, who is at the point of death (cp. ll. 690–95). Thereafter, men will die naturally rather than as victims, no longer crushed by oppression and injustice.
610 sightless: Invisible, possibly also ‘blind’.
651 meteor: The moon; in contemporary usage, ‘meteor’ could signify any luminous atmospheric appearance.
654 two lessening points of light: The moon is setting and only the tips of its crescent remain visible above the horizon. See note to l. 490.
657 stagnate: Stagnant.
660 involved: Enveloped.
672–5 The sorceress Medea restored her husband Jason’s aged father to youth by means of a magic potion which she prepared in a cauldron. Leaves and fruit burst from the withered olive branch with which she stirred the mixture, some drops of which, falling to the ground, caused flowers and grass to spring up – according to the account in Ovid’s Metamorphoses VII.275–81.
675–81 The narrator asks that God, who has inflicted so many ills on humanity, would grant it the gift of immortality. The ‘one living man’ is Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew of legend, the subject of an early poem by PBS and a character in both Queen Mab (note to VII.67) and Hellas (ll. 135–61, 738 ff.). Ahasuerus was condemned to roam the earth eternally as a punishment for having refused help to Christ on the road to Calvary.
681–6 The ‘dark magician’ is an alchemist attempting to concoct the elixir of life, which confers immortality. See ll. 31–2, 672–5 and note.
694 vesper: Evening prayer.
705 senseless: That cannot feel or perceive.
713 The quotation is from the concluding line of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’: ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England
PBS drafted this poem in Switzerland in summer 1816; MWS transcribed a fair copy at Marlow the following year; it was not published until 1925 in the Boston Herald for 21 December: see BSM XI and MYR (Shelley) V. The fair copy, on which the present text is based, is very lightly punctuated; a minimum of additional punctuation has been supplied. The celandine of the title (see notes on ll. 1–3 below) was apparently included in a letter sent from England by Shelley’s friend T. L. Peacock. Years later Claire Clairmont recalled her and MWS’s delight when PBS came from his study and handed them the ‘Verses’ (MYR (Shelley) V.17, 28). Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (London: Longman, 1807) contains three poems on the lesser celandine, which is identified (vol. I, p. 15) by its familiar name, common pilewort, and whose bright yellow blossoms can be seen in March and April opening to the sun and closing at evening or in cloudy weather. PBS’s ‘Verses’ makes a critical address to Wordsworth with an eye on these poems – taking off from ‘There’s a flower that shall be mine, / ’Tis the little Celandine’ in the first of them, while turning to sarcastic use the role Wordsworth assigns to the flower in the third poem as emblem of the human passage from prodigal youth to helpless age. PBS adapts further details from these and other of Wordsworth’s poems (see M. Quinn, KSJ 36 (1987), pp. 88–109).
In 1813 Wordsworth had accepted a salaried government post as a Distributor of Stamps for his region, in effect a collector of revenue; PBS and Peacock regarded the appointment as a political reward for his increasing conservatism as well as the motive for his support for post-Waterloo conservatism in Britain. See ‘To Wordsworth’ and ‘An Exhortation’. Strategic echoes of Milton and Shakespeare (ll. 30, 62–3) introduce a comparison on the themes of artistic integrity and posthumous fame which is unflattering to Wordsworth – although PBS is careful to acknowledge the power of what he considered to be the older man’s immortal early verse.
1–2 These frankly puzzling lines have occasioned much commentary. The blossom of both the lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) and the greater celandine (Chelidonium majus) is yellow, as PBS well knew. Otherwise the two flowers are botanically distinct, the former a member of the buttercup family, the latter of the poppy family. PBS’s ‘blue’ may allude, for the benefit of the Greek scholar Peacock, to the derivation of ‘celandine’ from the Greek chelidon = ‘swallow’, whose steel-blue upper feathers in flight might suggest the image of ‘a flower aery blue’. Complete Poetry III, citing PBS’s phrase ‘the classic celandine’ (see following note), points out that there is a celandine described as blue in Theocritus’ Idyll XIII.41 and glosses the lines plausibly: ‘When I received a withered specimen of a Celandine, I thought of an ideal Celandine – classically blue and unwithered.’ One might also suggest a tongue-in-cheek reading: ‘I thought that the Celandine, even the smaller variety, was blue’ – which would allude to private coded meanings involving both varieties of celandine, and both colours, which PBS and Peacock entertained, perhaps preferring the ‘classic’ blue greater celandine as a playful jibe against Wordsworth’s association with the smaller flower. See also ll. 65–72 and notes.
3 Yet small: The name Chelidonium was principally applied (as in Pliny, Natural History XXXV.89) to the greater celandine, popularly called ‘swallowwort’ because its blossoms appeared with the arrival of the swallow and disappeared when it departed. It may be the blossom of this plant that PBS was sent (see previous note) and that he writes of to Peacock on 27 July 1816 (Letters I, p. 501), in relation to the Alpine seeds he has purchased to cultivate in England: ‘They are companions which the celandine, the classic celandine, need not despise.’
25–6 A type of … thus familiar: An emblem of that (i.e. the ‘deathless Poet’ of the next line) which now brings us intimately together.
30 Recalling Milton’s reference (Paradise Lost VII.25–6) to the dangers surrounding him immediately after the Restoration because of his support for Parliament during the Civil Wars: ‘though fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues’.
45–8 Alluding to Wordsworth’s celebration of the Allied victory at Waterloo in ‘Ode. The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’ (1816); liberal opinion was especially outraged by ll. 277–82: ‘We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud / And magnify thy name, Almighty God! / But thy most dreaded instrument, / In working out a pure intent, / Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter,— / Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!’
49–56 The stanza is tortuously phrased. The sense appears to be: ‘He scorns hopes that had been his own; the victors he now praises were once his foes. He no longer promotes hope or condemns tyranny. But neither hope nor opposition to tyranny needs his approval. Truth need not lament that he disowned her before his inspiration had waned.’
56 overlive: Outlive.
57–60 The praise of Wordsworth’s early poetry in these lines ironically recalls the compensations he discovers in age for loss of youthful vision (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), ll. 182–9): ‘We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind … In years that bring the philosophic mind.’
62–3 Echoing Shakespeare’s claim in Sonnet XVIII.13–14: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’
65–72 In fact each stem of the lesser celandine bears only one flower. The greater celandine bears several blossoms on an umbel at the end of its stem.
67 priest of Nature: Apparently Peacock, who sent the celandine and who perhaps had written that he had placed the original stem in his window; PBS humorously refers to him as a priest about the time the poem was written (Letters I, p. 490) – though ll. 67–8 also glance at Wordsworth, who describes the visionary Youth in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (l. 72) as ‘Nature’s Priest’.
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Before leaving Switzerland for England at the end of August 1816, MWS transcribed into a notebook three poems that PBS had written that sum
mer: ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and two otherwise unknown sonnets. PBS himself entered into the same notebook, which remained with Byron in Geneva, a copy of the poem then entitled ‘Scene—Pont Pellisier in the vale of Servox’, later to be retitled ‘Mont Blanc’. The following month the notebook would appear to have been entrusted by Byron to his friend Scrope Davies, who brought it to England but neglected to return it to PBS; when he left England in 1820, Davies deposited a trunk containing the notebook and other papers with his bankers. The trunk was only rediscovered in 1976 in a branch of Barclay’s Bank in London. The texts of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and of ‘Mont Blanc’ in the Scrope Davies notebook differ significantly from their first appearance in print. On PBS’s return to England, he sent a version of the ‘Hymn’ derived from his first draft for publication to the liberal weekly The Examiner, but the editor, Leigh Hunt, mislaid it. As the fair copy in the Scrope Davies notebook had not been delivered, PBS would seem to have returned to his draft and produced a finished version of the poem for the second time. This was eventually published in The Examiner on Sunday 19 January 1817. Probably ‘Mont Blanc’ was similarly recovered from the draft MS for publication at the end of 1817. Judith Chernaik and Timothy Burnett reconstruct the complex textual history of each poem in RES n.s. 29 (1978), pp. 36–49.
Although not prepared for the press, the texts of PBS’s poems in the Scrope Davies notebook are clean, legible and complete in themselves. They are reproduced here, each headed ‘Version B’, facing the versions published in The Examiner and in 1817, which are headed ‘Version A’ and which are the ones to which the annotations are keyed. The Version B texts are given as they appear in the MSS transcribed by MWS and PBS – with insufficient punctuation, inconsistent capitalization and indentation, unexpanded ampersands and peculiar spellings. As such, they offer not only a rare occasion to compare the published texts of two of PBS’s major poems with an earlier variant derived from the same draft, but also display the features of a stage of composition immediately preceding final submission for print.
Selected Poems and Prose Page 81