269–71 The night watchman acts as pimp for the drunken prostitute.
272–3 MWS wrote this couplet in the margin of PBS’s draft; it was printed in 1840, though not in 1824 or 1839. Nor is it in MWS’s transcript, though it is in John Gisborne’s. Rather than PBS’s, it may be the work of MWS or of Maria Gisborne. The allusion is to Apollonia (Pollonia) Ricci, the daughter of the Gisborne’s landlord at Livorno, whose attraction to Henry Reveley (apparently reciprocated) is jokingly referred to by MWS in a letter to Maria Gisborne of 18 June 1820 (MWS Letters I, pp. 146–8).
274–7 PBS describes the garden of Casa Ricci, the Gisborne’s house at Livorno.
278 unsickled: Not cut or harvested.
286 contadino: A countryman, peasant.
294 low-thoughted care: Echoing Milton, Comus, l. 6.
299–301 Replaced by lines of asterisks in 1824 and 1839, to suppress the reference to PBS’s estrangement from his father, Sir Timothy Shelley.
305 syllabubs: Flavoured mixtures of milk or cream to which wine has been added.
308 Grand Duke: Ferdinando III was Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1790 to 1801, and again from 1814 to 1824.
310–15 PBS says that, should his nerves become agitated during the Gisbornes’ visit, he will settle them by studying geometry, avoiding altogether the excitement of composing poetry or falling in love.
312 descant: Discussion.
316 laudanum: Tincture of opium; prescribed for a variety of ailments.
317 Helicon … [Shelley’s note]: The spring of Hippocrene on Mount Helicon was sacred to the Muses; the river Himera, in Sicily, gave its name to the Greek colony which grew up around it. (Himeros was a deity of erotic desire.)
318 God: Replaced by three asterisks in MWS’s editions.
323 The last line of Milton’s Lycidas.
To —– [the Lord Chancellor]
As the MSS make clear, this exercise in sustained vituperation, written between summer and early autumn 1820 and published in part in 1839, complete in 1840, is addressed to John Scott, Earl of Eldon (1751–1838). In 1801–6 and 1807–27, Eldon held the office of Lord Chancellor; as such he was head of the judiciary and presided in the House of Lords. It was he who in March 1817 delivered the legal judgement that deprived PBS of the custody of the two children of his first marriage, to Harriet Westbrook, following her suicide the previous autumn. The court’s decision cited the necessity of preventing PBS from inculcating in the children (what in its view were) the ‘immoral and vicious’ principles that his behaviour had demonstrated in leaving his first wife to cohabit with the then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. T. L. Peacock remembered that PBS spoke of Eldon with ‘feelings of abhorrence’ only equalled by his revulsion at the bullying he had suffered at Eton (Life II, pp. 312–13). The present poem may be compared to the curse which the Phantasm of Jupiter recalls Prometheus had directed against Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound I.262–301. Our text is taken from MWS’s transcription with corrections by PBS in the Houghton Library at Harvard University: the title ‘To Lxxd Exxxn’ is cancelled, suppressing the reference to one of the most powerful men in the country, and ‘To —–’ substituted for it. In an earlier fair draft, ‘Lord Chancellor’ is scored through in the title (for both, see MYR (Shelley) V). Minor modifications to punctuation have been made.
2 many-headed worm: The mythical Hydra was a serpent with several heads.
3 Priestly Pest: Eldon was a devoted advocate of the Church of England’s role in public life.
4 buried form: In 1839 MWS identifies this as the court of Star Chamber, abolished in 1641, which delivered arbitrary judgements in secret proceedings and was held to be politically motivated.
7 fraud-accumulated gold: Eldon grew wealthy in office.
14 daughter’s hope: PBS’s children with his first wife were Eliza Ianthe, born 23 June 1813, and Charles, whom he never knew, born 30 November 1814.
19 prove: Feel, experience.
21–4 This stanza was first cancelled then restored in the MS.
22 were: Were as.
stranger’s hearth: Ianthe and Charles were in the care of guardians.
36 why not fatherless: Poems III glosses the phrase ‘since they are to lose their father, why not execute him?’
40–41 Between these two stanzas another is cancelled in the copy-text:
By thy most impious Hell, and all its terror,
By all the grief, the madness, & the guilt
Which [for Of] thine impostures, which must be their error
That sand on which thy crumbling Power is built.
47–8 Eldon was known to weep in court. See The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 14–21.
48 millstones: Ironically recalling Christ’s words in Matthew 18:6: ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’
THE WITCH OF ATLAS
As he declares in l. 36, PBS composed the 672 lines of The Witch of Atlas (WA) in three days, 14–16 August 1820. This prodigious creative performance followed immediately upon his return from a two-day excursion from Bagni di San Giuliano near Pisa to Monte San Pellegrino (1,529 metres high) in the Apennines, where a shrine on the summit attracted pilgrims in the summer months. On 20 January 1821 the poem was posted to Charles Ollier in London, who chose not to publish it. MWS included it in 1824 without the dedication, the first three stanzas of which she supplied in 1839, and the remaining three in 1840. Our text is based on 1824 and, for the dedication, 1839 and 1840. The punctuation of these editions has been modified and some readings have been adopted from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley d. 1 (see BSM IV).
Leigh Hunt astutely defined the scope of WA as encompassing both the ‘fairy region’ of imagination and the ‘mortal strife’ of the world as it is (Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1828) I, p. 352). PBS’s vehicle for bringing the fanciful and the real into critical relation is loosely constructed around major elements of story – birth, artistic creation and voyage of discovery – which he ends abruptly, conspicuously refusing to bring it to any narrative completion. For the details of WA’s episodes he drew upon a rich variety of sources in myth and poetry, history, philosophy and prose fiction. These range from Herodotus’ Histories and Plato’s dialogues through Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost to the modern mythological poetry of T. L. Peacock’s Rhododaphne (1818) and Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810). The ottava rima stanza of eight lines, rhyming abababcc, which PBS had adopted in July 1820 for his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury, he had most recently encountered in the Italian comic epic Il Ricciardetto (1738) by Niccolò Forteguerri, which he read aloud in that month, as well as in Byron’s Don Juan I and II, which he read the previous January. Poems III, pp. 380–85, assesses the role of these and other sources.
WA celebrates the animation of nature to be found in ‘the graceful religion of the Greeks’ which PBS considered as having been deformed and rejected by Christianity (Letters II, p. 230) – and in particular the natural eroticism represented by Pan, together with his Sylvans and Fauns, beings originally imagined as embodying ‘all that could enliven and delight’ (see the extract from ‘On the Devil, and Devils’). Poet that she is, the Witch is captivated by the beauty and strangeness of the world and creates from its materials with exhilaration, not neglecting on occasion to work the touch of mischief to which her powers tempt her. MWS found that the poem illustrated ‘that sense of mystery that formed an essential portion of [PBS’s] perception of life’ (Preface to 1840). Nevertheless, in the ‘Note’ on WA in 1840 she argues her conviction, playfully mocked in the dedication, that PBS would have taken ‘his proper rank among the writers of the day’ had he adopted ‘subjects that would more suit the popular taste’.
Important readings of WA include: Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Myt
hmaking (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 165–204; Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 55–76; Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 126–56; and Stuart Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 143–57.
9 fly: The ephemerid or mayfly, one of an order of winged insects whose life lasts a day or less.
12 swan … sun: The swan, fabled to sing just before its death, was sacred to Apollo, god of the sun, poetry and music.
17–24 PBS dedicated his poem Laon and Cythna (1817), revised as The Revolt of Islam (1818), to MWS, laying it metaphorically ‘at thy feet’ (Dedication, l. 11). It includes a scene in which ‘a winged youth’ appears in a dream (l. 500). The sales of the poem had been disappointing and it had been harshly reviewed. See the Dedication before Laon and Cythna’ and the headnote to Peter Bell the Third.
21 watery bow: Rainbow.
25–32 Wordsworth claimed in the Dedication before his Peter Bell (1819) that he had worked intermittently at improving the poem since finishing it in 1798. See headnote to Peter Bell the Third.
34 Ruth or Lucy: Characters in Wordsworth’s poems ‘Ruth’ and ‘Lucy Gray’ in Lyrical Ballads (1800).
37–8 Contrasting the ‘Light’ and ‘flowing’ verse that clothes his Witch with the ‘stays’ (as in a corset) that constrict Wordsworth’s style.
40 The quotation is from Shakespeare, King Lear III.iv.31, in which Lear pities the poor whose tattered clothes offer no protection against the storm.
42–3 See Peter Bell the Third, ll. 21–5. In his review of Peter Bell, Leigh Hunt had accused Wordsworth of promoting fear of hell.
42 hyperequatorial: Hotter than at the equator.
44 mark: Target.
45 Scaramouch: A cowardly braggart in Italian farce.
47 shrive you: Absolve you.
55 lady-witch: Commentators have noted the resemblance of PBS’s Witch to the Massylian priestess evoked in Virgil’s Aeneid IV.480–91, guardian of the Hesperides’ temple (see note to l. 57 below), who with her spells can bring ease or care to human minds and has the power to alter the course of nature and raise the dead.
Atlas’ mountain: The highest peak of the Atlas range of mountains in present-day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia is Toubkal in south-western Morocco. PBS here intends the mythical mountain into which the giant Atlas – forced by Zeus to bear the weight of the heavens on his shoulders – was transformed when shown the Medusa’s head by Perseus.
57 Atlantides: Daughters of Atlas, also called the Hesperides; after their death they became the constellation Pleiades.
58–64 The stanza is indebted to Spenser’s Faerie Queene III.vi.7 ff., recounting the conception and birth of the twin sisters Belphoebe and Amoret.
70 in a fit: Temporarily obscured; cp. ‘To S[idmouth] and [Castlereagh]’, l. 9.
73 the Mother of the Months: The moon.
74 the folding-star: Venus as the evening star, which appears at the time sheep are gathered into the fold.
89 spotted cameleopard: Giraffe.
92 Of his own volumes intervolved: Coiled in his own spirals.
93 sanguine: Bloody, carnivorous.
97 brinded: Brindled: tawny or brownish with differently tinted streaks or spots.
99 pard: Leopard or panther.
104 imparadise: Enrapture.
105 Silenus: A satyr-like minor woodland deity, a repository of wisdom and tutor to Dionysus – represented as fat, ugly, often drunk, and riding on an ass.
108 Cicadae: Cicadas were proverbially happy and carefree and supposed to drink dew, as in Anacreon, Ode 34.
109 Dryope … Faunus: In Ovid, Metamorphoses IX.329–93, Dryope is transformed into a lotus tree as punishment for having plucked one of its flowers, which shed the blood of a nymph who had herself been metamorphosed into the tree. She is mentioned as the mother of the warrior Tarquitus, fathered by Faunus, in Aeneid X.550–51. Originally a benevolent Roman god, Faunus was known as the protector of shepherds and flocks, associated with the forest demons known as fauns, who were half men and half goat. He was also revered as a legendary king of Latium before the founding of Rome.
110 the God: Silenus, who is teased to sing a song in Virgil, Eclogues VI.
113 Universal Pan: An Arcadian rural deity of shepherds and flocks, a satyr (half man and half goat), a follower of Dionysus and endowed with prodigious sexual energy. The Greek word pan means ‘all’, and in Greek religion of late antiquity Pan became known as a ‘universal’ god.
116 want: A mole (Norton 2002).
122 every shepherdess of Ocean’s flocks: Oceanides, daughters of Oceanus (l. 124).
125 quaint Priapus: Priapus was a god of gardens, vineyards and orchards. Statues represent him as a small man with enormous genitalia – hence ‘quaint’ in the sense of ‘strange’ (OED III.8) or, perhaps ironically, ‘cunningly contrived’ (OED I.3a).
129–36 Commentators have traced the human and other creatures mentioned in this stanza to various Classical sources, especially Herodotus’ Histories and Pliny’s Natural History. See Poems III.
130 Garamant: A region in Libya said to be inhabited by a primitive people.
133 Polyphemes: One-eyed giants or Cyclopes such as Polyphemus in Homer, Odyssey IX.187 ff.
134 Centaurs and Satyrs: Centaurs were mythical creatures, half man and half horse. For Satyrs, see note to l. 113.
135 clefts: Crevices.
141 betrayed: Revealed.
156 cells: Small compartments as in a honeycomb.
161 quaint: see note to l. 125.
171 Clipt: Tightly enclosed.
174 vans: Wings.
185–95 Stored on scrolls in the Witch’s cave, the wise spells of a benevolent sorcerer of the Age of Gold (when Saturn ruled the earth) could teach men how to recover the Golden Age by redeeming the vice they acquired as a birthright by being born in the Age of Iron. See Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 109 ff., and Ovid, Metamorphoses I.89 ff.; ll. 189–91 clearly refer to the Age of Iron as described in Metamorphoses I.
186 Archimage: A chief or great enchanter, and the name of the wicked magician in Spenser’s Faerie Queene whose books contain evil charms (I.i.36–8). See ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 106 ff.
199 the prophane: The uninitiated.
217–24 The nymphs specific to various natural locations ask the Witch if they might become immortal in her service. Hamadryades, Oreads and Naiads are nymphs, respectively, of trees, mountains and streams/rivers.
224 satellite: Attendant.
245 knell: A sound resembling a knell, i.e. the sound of a bell or other sound announcing a death (OED 3, citing this text).
247 serene: ‘Unruffled expanse’ (OED serene, adj. and n. B b).
253 woof: Woven fabric.
274 that cold hill: Mount Atlas.
276 asphodel: See note to ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, Part First, l. 54.
283 bearded star: A comet (with its following tail).
289–90 Vulcan, the blacksmith god of fire and husband of the goddess of love, makes a chariot in which the planet Venus, morning and evening star, travels across the sky.
292 that sphere: The third of the heavenly spheres, that of Venus. See note to ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, Part First, l. 88, and to l. 338 below.
294 car: Chariot.
297–9 Love is the first of the gods to be born, according to Plato’s Symposium, which PBS translated in summer 1818 (Ingpen and Peck VII, p. 171). See also Prometheus Unbound II.iv.32–3.
301 mould: Soil as a growing medium.
302 his mother’s star: The planet Venus.
312 circumfluous: Flowing around; in ancient geography the ocean was imagined as a stream surrounding the earth.
317 Evans: Evan was a name of Bacchus, often represented in a chario
t drawn by panthers.
318 Vesta: The Roman goddess of the hearth in whose temple a perpetual flame, held to preserve the Roman state, was tended by the Vestal Virgins.
327–8 Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue of a beautiful woman he had sculpted and which Venus brought to life in response to his prayer.
329 sexless thing: Hermaphroditus (as the creature is addressed in l. 388), offspring of Hermes/Mercury and Aphrodite/Venus, was a youth desired so passionately by the nymph Salmacis that the gods answered her prayer and moulded them together into a single being uniting both sexes (Metamorphoses IV.285 ff.). According to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, a third (androgynous and very powerful) sex originally existed but was divided into male and female as a punishment for challenging the gods. PBS’s translation of the passage is in Ingpen and Peck VII, p. 183.
338 the seventh sphere: The sphere of Saturn, the seventh of the nine or ten concentric hollow globes that in the Ptolemaic astronomy made up the basic structure of the heavens. The first seven revolved round the earth, carrying the planets.
344 with opposing feet: i.e. she sat facing Hermaphroditus.
349 pinnace: Small boat.
369 prone vale: Descending valley.
382 sunbows: Miniature rainbows formed by sunlight on spray or mist.
399 rime: Frozen mist or fog.
401 Elysian: Exquisitely delightful, as in Elysium. See ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, Part First, l. 108 and note.
417–18 Or … Or: Either … Or.
418 interlunar: Between the old and the new moon.
421 amain: ‘At once and fully’ (Concordance).
423 Austral: Of the southern hemisphere, southern generally.
424 Thamondocana: Timbuktu (Timbuctoo), in sub-Saharan Africa.
428 Canopus: The brightest star in the southern constellation, formerly known as Argo Navis, after the mythical ship in which Jason and the Argonauts sailed.
th’ Austral lake: Probably the Ethiopian lake that is the source of both the Nile and the Niger (Poems III).
Selected Poems and Prose Page 95