may professedly support, they actually advance the interests of Liberty’ (here). See also the final paragraph of A Defence of Poetry (here).
233 power unknown: From Queen Mab onwards, PBS’s work makes reference to a force which animates the natural world and which is distinct from the human mind and will. Cp., for example, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’.
234–40 PBS evinces an acute awareness of the limitations and distortions of language, in e.g. ‘On Life’ and in his MS note to ‘On Love’: ‘These words inefficient & metaphorical—Most words so—No help—’ (here).
240 In this secular version of the Last Judgement, words finally stand ‘before their Lord’, presumably the ‘aweless soul’ or ‘power unknown’ (l. 233).
241 He: Commentators have suggested that the antecedent is ‘their Lord’ in the previous line, or that ‘He who’ is used for ‘Whoever’.
243–5 Cp. ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’.
246–7 A challenge to Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which had identified famines and wars as necessary means of keeping in check a population whose growth threatened to exceed the increase of natural resources available to support it. Cp. l. 263 and note.
254 Cp. Coleridge, ‘France: An Ode’, l. 60: ‘them that toil and groan’.
255 thy … hers: Liberty’s and Nature’s.
258 Eoan: Eastern; from ‘Eos’, the Greek goddess of the dawn.
259 pennons: Wings.
263 life’s ill-apportioned lot: Poems III suggests a possible reference to Malthus’s notorious phrase ‘the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank’ (An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), chapter 10).
273 a wild swan: Cp. PBS’s portrait of Byron as ‘a tempest-cleaving Swan / Of the songs of Albion’ in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’, ll. 174–5.
To a Sky-Lark
This well-known and much-anthologized lyric was composed at Livorno in late June 1820 and published in 1820, which supplies our copy-text, though its punctuation and capitalization have been modified with reference to PBS’s fair copy in Harvard MS Eng. 258.2 (see MYR (Shelley) V). MWS later recalled the occasion that provided the germ of the poem: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems’ (1839 IV, p. 50). In the letter from Livorno to T. L. Peacock of 12 July 1820 that probably enclosed the press copy of the poem, PBS wrote: ‘I wonder why I write verses, for nobody reads them’ (Letters II, p. 213). Together with several other poems published in 1820 – ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, ‘The Cloud’, ‘An Exhortation’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ – ‘To a Sky-Lark’ takes a closely observed aspect of the natural world as the starting place for a meditation on imaginative creation. Recent lyrics apostrophizing a bird, which PBS knew and which bear interesting comparison with his poem, include Wordsworth’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’, ‘To the Cuckoo’ and ‘The Green Linnet’ – all in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The stanza of four lines of five or six syllables followed by an alexandrine of twelve syllables has been compared both to the lark’s song and to its slowly rising flight and sudden fall.
5 unpremeditated: The word had come to describe genuine inspiration following Milton’s allusion to his ‘celestial’ Muse Urania, who inspires his ‘unpremeditated verse’ in Paradise Lost IX.21–4.
8 cloud of fire: A cloud lit up by the setting sun, as in ll. 11–13 or, as G. M. Matthews suggests (Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)), a burst of smoke and flame sent up by a volcano.
22 silver sphere: The planet Venus as the morning star.
33–5 The ‘Drops’ are those that continue to fall from a cloud after the sun has appeared, creating a rainbow.
45 bower: Abode, or perhaps a chamber or bedroom (OED 2a).
64 love or wine: Themes traditionally associated with the Greek lyric poet Anacreon (born c.570 BC) and his imitators.
66 Chorus Hymeneal: Song sung at a wedding; Hymen was the Greek god invoked at marriage ceremonies.
86 Adapting Hamlet’s words on human mental powers: ‘he that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and god-like reason / To fust in us unused’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, ‘Additional Passages’ in Wells and Taylor OUP edition, here; see headnote to Notes).
103 madness: The traditional idea of the poet’s inspiration as ‘divine madness’, without which he could not create true poetry whatever his technical skill, PBS will have encountered in Plato’s Phaedrus, which he read in May 1819, and perhaps in Plato’s Ion, which he was to translate in early 1821.
Letter to Maria Gisborne
Composed between late June and early July 1820, and probably sent to Maria Gisborne in London, with a letter from MWS, on 7 July. PBS’s draft survives in the Bodleian Library (see BSM XIV). The fair copy he sent to Maria Gisborne has been lost, as has a transcript made of that copy by the Gisbornes in 1822, at MWS’s request. MWS’s transcript, now in the Huntington Library (MS 12338: see MYR (Shelley) III), probably derives from the copy made by the Gisbornes. A further copy, made by John Gisborne in 1831, presumably from the original sent by PBS, also survives in the Bodleian Library (MS Abinger d.19). Our text is based on the John Gisborne transcript, with some readings supplied from PBS’s draft and MWS’s transcript (see also note to ll. 272–3). First published in 1824, the poem was given the present title in 1839. MWS records in her ‘Note on the Poems of 1820’ in 1839:
We spent a week or two near Leghorn [actually 15 June–4 August], borrowing the house of some friends who were absent on a journey to England … [PBS] addressed the letter to Mrs. Gisborne from this house, which was hers: he had made his study of the workshop of her son, who was an engineer. Mrs. Gisborne had been a friend of my father in her younger days. She was a lady of great accomplishments, and charming from her frank and affectionate nature. She had the most intense love of knowledge, a delicate and trembling sensibility, and preserved freshness of mind after a life of considerable adversity. As a favourite friend of my father, we had sought her with eagerness; and the most open and cordial friendship was established between us. (IV, p. 50)
PBS first met Maria Gisborne, to whom William Godwin had proposed marriage in 1799 after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, her husband John, and son Henry, at Livorno (Leghorn) on 9 May 1818. A close friendship soon developed between the two families. PBS, in a letter to T. L. Peacock, described Maria Gisborne as ‘a sufficiently amiable & a very accomplished woman’ (Letters II, p. 114). She introduced him to the work of the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) and began to tutor him in Spanish (see ll. 175–86). PBS, for his part, lent financial backing to Henry Reveley (her son by a previous marriage) for his (ultimately abandoned) plan to construct a steamboat to sail between Livorno and Marseilles (see ll. 15–21). MWS, in 1840 (ELTF), writes:
He [PBS] set on foot the project of a steam-boat to ply between Marseilles and Leghorn, for their benefit, as far as pecuniary profit might accrue; at the same time that he took a fervent interest in the undertaking, for its own sake. It was not puerile vanity, but a nobler feeling of honest pride, that made him enjoy the idea of being the first to introduce steam navigation into the Gulf of Lyons, and to glory in the consciousness of being in this manner useful to his fellow-creatures. (I, pp. xxii–xxiii)
The light-hearted tone of the poem contrasts with the domestic difficulties facing the Shelleys in June 1820: the result of ongoing financial wrangling with Godwin, who was importuning PBS for yet another in a series of loans (see ll.196–201), and of accusations that PBS had fathered an illegitimate child that was born in Naples during the winter of 1818–19 (Bieri II, pp. 102–15).
The verse epistle in rhyming couplets addressed to a friend or acquaintance was a form practised by Ben Jonson and
Alexander Pope, and by Leigh Hunt, Thomas Moore and Keats among PBS’s contemporaries. PBS’s ‘Letter’, not intended for publication, encompasses private allusions, some acerbic personal opinions, and a range of literary references appropriate to the cultivated set of friends among whom it was intended to circulate. Relaxed and conversational in tone, its detailed observations and delighted attention to the ordinary contribute to its celebration of the varied pleasure of friendship.
For critical comment on the poem, see Ann Thompson, ‘Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne”: Tact and Clutter’, in Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 144–59; and Timothy Webb, ‘Scratching at the Door of Absence: Writing and Reading “Letter to Maria Gisborne”’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 119–36.
1 The spider: In The Battle of the Books (1704), Jonathan Swift contrasts the spider as an emblem of the modern writer, who spins his subjects out of his own entrails, with the bee representing the ancient writer, who seeks his subjects far and wide.
4 His: PBS’s draft and John Gisborne’s transcript both read ‘Her’; ‘His’, the reading in MWS’s transcript and 1824, strengthens the identification of the ‘silkworm’ (l. 3) with PBS himself, but might not have his authority.
5 PBS refers to the attacks on his work and character made by Quarterly Review XXI (April 1819), in a review of Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam (1817–18). See also ll. 106–14.
6–14 PBS spins words and ideas to make a cocoon from which when he is dead his winged verse will emerge to win fame and loving remembrance.
10 that: i.e. the ‘decaying form’ (l. 6) of PBS’s body.
12 asphodels: Lily-like plants, in Greek myth growing in the Elysian Fields, immortal resting place of the heroic and the good after death.
15 I wist: I know.
16 mighty mechanist: One skilled in the construction of machines (but also, as Poems III observes, comprising the sense of one holding a mechanistic view of the universe), here associated with the Greek mathematician, scientist and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287–212 BC). A claim attributed to Archimedes – ‘Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth’ – serves as epigraph to Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna (1817).
19–21 PBS alludes to the steamboat which Maria Gisborne’s son, Henry Reveley, was planning to build, with his financial backing (see headnote). A ‘gin’ is an intricate or clever device (see OED n. 12).
23–4 Vulcan … Titans: Vulcan was the Classical god of the forge. On the orders of Jove (Jupiter), Vulcan constructed an ever-spinning wheel to which Ixion was bound in punishment for having committed parricide and for having attempted to seduce Juno, the wife of Jove. Vulcan also fashioned a number of the restraints with which Jove imprisoned the defeated Titans, including the chains which bound Prometheus to his mountain prison.
25 St. Dominic (c.1170–1221): The founder of the Dominican Order, which conducted the Spanish Inquisition, notorious for its severity in repressing heresy.
27–43 These lines allude to the disastrous fate of the Spanish Armada, which the Catholic Philip II of Spain and his council (ironically qualified as ‘philanthropic’), sent against the Protestant England of Elizabeth I in 1588. After defeat by the English fleet, the Armada, in attempting to flee back to Spain, suffered heavy losses in storms off Scotland and Ireland.
33–4 who now … Freedom’s hearth: After a military insurrection earlier in 1820, King Ferdinand VII of Spain had accepted demands for a constitutional government, inaugurating three years of liberal rule. See ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 1–5.
35 Instruments of torture associated with the Spanish Inquisition.
45 Proteus: In Greek myth, a sea god who could change shape at will.
51 Tubal Cain: In Genesis 4:22 ‘an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron’.
53 what: The planned steamboat.
55 knacks and quips: ‘Ingenious contrivances’ (OED 3) and ‘curious objects’ (OED 2), respectively.
56 catalogize: Make a catalogue of.
58 quicksilver: Mercury, which is liquid at room temperature.
gnomes: Diminutive goblin-like creatures dwelling underground, guardians of mines.
59 swink: Work.
60 daemons of the earthquake: Cp. ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 72.
65 rouse: A large or full cup, drunk as a toast (OED n. 21).
75 A rude idealism: A rough imitation of; PBS loved to make and sail paper boats.
83 statical: ‘Of or relating to the science of statics’ (OED 1b); that is, concerned with the effects of weight and the distribution of forces.
84 rosin: Resin.
95 Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) was a French mathematician and astronomer; PBS drew on his influential Exposition du système du monde (1796) in Queen Mab. Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739), professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and disciple of Isaac Newton, designed an abacus for complex calculations and published a treatise on algebra. Sims is usually identified as Robert Simson (1687–1768), whose textbook Elements of Euclid (1756) went through many editions.
98 Baron de Tott’s memoirs: François Baron de Tott (1733–93), a French diplomat, served in Istanbul and the Crimea, and published his widely read Mémoires sur les Turcs et les Tartares in 1784.
103 mo: More; this form occurs in Spenser and other Renaissance writers, and in Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto I (1812), stanza 93, l. 4, where the form is ‘moe’.
104 the pregnant womb of time: Echoing Shakespeare, Othello I.iii.368–9: ‘There are many events in the womb of time.’
106 Archimage: Chief ‘mage’ or magician, recalling ‘Archimago’, the evil enchanter in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. See note to l. 186 of The Witch of Atlas.
107–14 PBS likens the nautical steam engine Henry Reveley was planning to the mental mechanism of his own imagination which produces poetry that attracts abusive reviews. See notes to Adonais, ‘Preface’.
114 Libeccio: The south-west wind. On 12 July 1820, PBS wrote to Peacock: ‘the Libecchio [sic] here howls like a chorus of fiends all day’ (Letters II, p. 213).
129–30 war / Of worms: Cp. ‘Ode to Liberty’, l. 29
132 quaint: Cunning, wise, insightful (OED 1).
137 second-sighted: Gifted with second sight, visionary, prophetic.
141 sweet oracle: i.e. ‘Hope’ (l. 139).
142 the sad enchantress: i.e. ‘the quaint witch Memory’ (l. 132).
149 transverse lightning: Lightning extending across the sky.
157–8 or is … believe: Cp. ‘The flower that smiles today’, ll. 3–7.
160 anatomize: Examine in minute detail.
164–6 ‘When we shall be as safe in death as we were before we were born’ (G. M. Matthews, Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)).
168 visionary rhyme: Poems III suggests that PBS may refer to Prometheus Unbound, which he read to the Gisbornes in the autumn of 1819. Cp. The Witch of Atlas, l. 8.
175–86 See headnote and note to ll. 33–4.
175 indued: ‘Put on’, as an article of clothing.
180 ‘My name … Legion!’: A demon in Mark 5:9 answers Jesus: ‘My name is Legion: for we are many.’
181 Calderon: See headnote.
196–201 PBS describes his father-in-law, the novelist and political philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836), adapting Milton’s description of himself in Paradise Lost VII.24–6: ‘with mortal voice, unchanged / To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen’. In summer 1820, Godwin was causing MWS and PBS considerable distress with requests for money.
202–8 See note on Coleridge in Peter Bell the Third, ll. 373–97.
209–25 Hunt: James Henry (Leigh) Hunt (1784–1859) was a poet, journalist and editor of the liberal weekly The Examiner, which published some of PBS’s poetry. PB
S dedicated The Cenci to Hunt, one of his closest friends.
210 the salt of the earth: In Matthew 5:13, Jesus thus describes his followers.
213 Shout: Robert Shout (1764–1843), a London sculptor who made plaster copies of Classical statuary.
215 coronals of bay: Wreathes of laurel (bay) leaves, symbolic of literary achievement.
220 duns: Debt collectors.
226–32 Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862), PBS’s friend since student days in Oxford, from which they were both expelled in March 1811. MWS characterizes Hogg in a letter to Leigh Hunt of 6 April 1819: ‘You say that you think that he has a good heart – and so do I – but who can be sure of it – he wraps himself up in a triple veil – and places or appears to place a high wall between himself & his fellows’ (MWS Letters I, p. 91).
232–47 Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), PBS’s friend since 1812, married Jane Gryffydh from the mountainous Snowdonia region in north Wales on 22 March 1820, having become an employee of the British East India Company (hence ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindoo’ in ll. 235–6) the previous year. Poet, author of a number of satirical novels, including Headlong Hall (1815), Melincourt (1817) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), and of The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), which provoked PBS’s reply in A Defence of Poetry.
240 cameleopard: Giraffe.
250 Horace Smith (1779–1849): Poet, parodist (with his brother James), banker, friend and financial adviser to PBS since 1816.
257 unpavilioned: The sense seems to be ‘without clouds’; cp. Prometheus Unbound IV.181–4.
260 Cp. ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’, ll. 8–9.
261 the inverse deep: The sky as counterpart to the sea.
266 hackney-coaches: Horse-drawn carriages available for hire.
267 lordly: MWS’s transcript, 1824 and John Gisborne’s transcript all read ‘lonely’, apparently the result of miscopying: PBS’s draft has ‘lordly’.
Selected Poems and Prose Page 94