Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  58 Cp. Song of Solomon 4:12: ‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.’

  60–61 A Star … moving Heavens: The pole star, around which the other stars seem to rotate.

  67 fond: Doting, tender.

  72 Stranger: ‘Reader’ in PBS’s draft.

  84 honey-dew: Perhaps an echo of Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816), l. 53, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), ll. 400–401 (1805 version).

  85 the sense: Both ‘sensation’ and ‘understanding’.

  stops: Notes.

  85–6 sweet … planetary music: The so-called ‘music of the spheres’, the harmony produced by the planets in their orbits, a familiar trope of Classical and medieval literature. See A Defence of Poetry.

  90 fathom-line: A line bearing a weight, used to take depths at sea.

  98 unintermitted: Uninterrupted (flow of).

  100 quiver: The plural form of the verb with a singular subject (‘pulse’) may be an inadvertence on PBS’s part, a deliberate solecism in the interest of rhyme, or (as Forman 1876–7 suggests) an unusual subjunctive.

  114 Cp. ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’, ll. 2–3, on the moon: ‘To whom alone it has been given / To change and be adored for ever’.

  116–17 a Splendour … pilotless: Dante uses the term ‘splendori’ to refer to angels. In medieval astronomy, each of the spheres that composed the heavens was imagined as piloted by an angel; the ‘third sphere’ of heaven is the sphere of love (Venus).

  122 Anatomy: Skeleton.

  128–9 See the variant on these lines in ‘Lines to —– [Sonnet to Byron]’, ll. 13–14.

  133 the fields of immortality: The Elysian Fields, where, according to Greek myth, souls exist before being born into the body and to which they can eventually return. Cp. l. 189.

  139–40: Cp. Song of Solomon 8:6: ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart.’

  162–73 Major Works suggests that PBS reworks in these lines Dante’s explanation of the nature of divine love in Purgatorio XV.46–75.

  167–9 Perhaps an allusion to the Greek myth of Python, the enormous serpent killed by the arrows of Apollo, god of the sun.

  184–5 This truth … hope: The Greek philosopher Democritus was (incorrectly) supposed to have said that the truth lies hidden in a well.

  213 that best philosophy: Convictions that find meaning and purpose in life despite cruelty and suffering, rather than any specific philosophical system.

  219 loadstar: i.e. ‘lodestar’, a star by which one navigates; figuratively, ‘an object of pursuit’.

  221 the owlet light: Twilight, when owls hunt.

  222 Hesper: The planet Venus, appearing as the evening star.

  226 winged planet: i.e. a comet; cp. Prometheus Unbound IV.316–18.

  228 dreary cone: The conical shadow which the earth casts, away from the sun, into space.

  238 Whither ’twas fled: Cp. Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), l. 56: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam?’

  this soul out of my soul: Cp. ‘On Love’.

  240 sightless: Invisible.

  249 wintry forest: Dante uses the forest as an image of life in Inferno I.

  253 untaught foresters: Those who have not shared the speaker’s visionary experience.

  256–66 These lines are commonly interpreted as referring to a youthful encounter with a prostitute and the resulting venereal disease. See Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 148.

  257 night-shade: A poisonous plant, sometimes known as belladonna.

  265 unblown: Not yet in flower.

  267–383 In an influential interpretation of this passage, Kenneth Neill Cameron associates the ‘One’ (l. 271) with PBS’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself in 1816 (cp. the ‘Planet … quenched’ in l. 313); the ‘cold chaste Moon’ (l. 281) with MWS; the ‘Tempest’ (l. 312) with the impact on PBS of Harriet’s death and his unsuccessful attempt to secure custody of their two children, the ‘twin babes’ (l. 303), in a legal battle opposing him to Harriet’s father and sister; the ‘Sun’ (l. 335) as Teresa Viviani; and the ‘Comet’ (l. 368) as Claire Clairmont. See ‘The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion’, PMLA 63 (September 1948), pp. 950–72. As Poems IV notes, the ‘One’ of l. 271 is more likely to refer to PBS’s cousin Harriet Grove, for whom see headnote to ‘How eloquent are eyes!’.

  268 that idol of my thought: An image which is both ‘an object of worship’ and ‘a creation’ or ‘personification’. Cp. PBS’s letter to John Gisborne of 18 June 1822, in which he says of the ‘idealized history of my life and feelings’ contained in Epipsychidion: ‘I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal’ (Letters II, p. 434).

  272–4 Recalling the Greek myth of Actaeon, transformed into a deer and killed by his own hounds after seeing Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, bathing. PBS compares himself to Actaeon again in Adonais, ll. 274–9.

  277 One: MWS.

  286 that sphere: That of the moon, closest to the earth of the planetary spheres.

  294 Endymion: In Greek myth, a shepherd beloved of Selene, goddess of the moon, who caused him to fall into an eternal sleep so that she should never be deprived of the sight of him. The myth is the subject of Keats’s Endymion (1818).

  308–19 The passage seems to refer to the suicides of Fanny Godwin in October 1816 and of Harriet Shelley in November and to the legal struggle for custody of Harriet’s and PBS’s two children. See note to ll. 267–383.

  321 the obscure Forest: Alluding to the ‘selva oscura’ (dark wood) in Dante’s Inferno I.2. See ll. 249, 253 and notes.

  331 Perhaps recalling the ‘still small voice’ of God in 1 Kings 19:11–13.

  334 frore: Freezing, frosty.

  345 Twin Spheres: Emily (Teresa Viviani: the Sun) and MWS (the Moon).

  355 married lights: The Sun and Moon (see previous note).

  365 sere: Dry, withered.

  368–83 Claire Clairmont, held by PBS in great affection but between whom and MWS there was much tension and strife, had gone to live in Florence in October 1820. See note to ll. 267–383.

  374 love’s folding-star: The planet Venus, evening star, when shepherds are returning their sheep to the fold.

  379–80 star of Death / And Birth: The stars whose influence governs the life of an individual from beginning to end.

  390 vestal: Virginal, from the virgin priestesses who tended the shrine of Vesta in ancient Rome.

  405 charnel: See Adonais, l. 60 and note.

  412 halcyons: In ancient legend, the halcyon bird (now usually identified with the kingfisher) was able to calm the sea in order to nest on it for a period round the winter solstice. Cp. ‘Far, far away, O ye / Halcyons of Memory’.

  416–17 Cp. ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’, ll. 10–14.

  422 The reference appears to be to the Aegean Islands off the west coast of Asiatic Turkey, an area known as Ionia in Classical times.

  424 for: Because.

  428 the age of gold: Hesiod, Works and Days 110–120, and Ovid, Metamorphoses I.89 ff., describe the first age of mankind, under the rule of Saturn, as a Golden Age of innocence, plenty and peace. See ll. 487–90.

  445 Cp. Shakespeare, The Tempest III.ii.138–9: ‘The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.’

  459 Lucifer: The name, which means ‘light bearer’, refers to the planet Venus as the morning star.

  473 zephyr: The mild and gentle west wind.

  492 his sister … spouse: Cp. Song of Solomon 4:9: ‘Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse.’

  494 Titanic: In Greek myth, the Titans were giant gods who ruled the earth until they were deposed by Zeus and his allies.


  501 volumes: Coils.

  504 woof: Weave; i.e. the pattern formed by the bare branches in winter.

  506 serene: Calm radiance.

  507 Parian floors: The island of Paros was renowned in the Classical world as a source of white marble.

  512 call reality: Indirectly affirming that there is a true reality underlying the mere appearances of nature which we commonly mistake for true – e.g. the permanent and intelligible ideas which, in Platonic philosophy, constitute the ultimate reality.

  540 Conscious: ‘Aware, but also “co-knowing”, knowing as though they were one person’ (Major Works).

  545 paramour: Lover; here, the island.

  557 lights: Eyes.

  568–72 Norton 2002 finds here an allusion to the myth of the nymph Arethusa, who was pursued by the river god Alpheus; when Arethusa was transformed into a fountain, Alpheus mingled his waters with hers.

  571 Confused: Mingled.

  577 instinct with: Animated by.

  579 Cp. Exodus 3:2: ‘the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.’

  581 unimbued: Free from intermixture.

  592–604 Dante often addresses his own verse directly in his Vita Nuova and Convivio, insisting on the inadequacy of words to express the experience of love.

  601 Marina, Vanna, Primus: The names are usually taken to refer to MWS, Jane (in Italian ‘Giovanna’) Williams and Edward Williams (who became PBS’s closest friend in Italy). See ‘Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante’.

  ADONAIS

  John Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 at the age of twenty-five. PBS (who was three years older) learned of his death on 11 April and began to compose this elegy on Keats shortly thereafter. Composition went on until mid June; by about mid July the poem had been printed in Pisa. Copies were quickly sent to Charles Ollier to be put on sale in London, where they sold poorly.

  PBS and Keats were not close friends, though they were personally acquainted, having met on a number of occasions in London between 1816 and 1818. When, in July 1820, PBS learned that Keats was seriously ill, he immediately wrote to invite him to the warmer climate of Pisa for his health, an invitation that Keats provisionally accepted in August. Their exchange of letters includes a brief estimate by each of the poets of the other’s verse. PBS praises Endymion (1818) for ‘the treasures of poetry it contains’ while regretting that they are ‘treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion’. (PBS judged that Keats’s powers had developed to quite another level upon reading ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’ in October 1820, three months after it was published.) For his part, Keats advises that ‘you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore’ (Letters II, 220–22). Whatever their different taste and practice as poets, both had suffered from severe, vituperative and politically biased criticism in the Quarterly Review, where each was identified as an associate of Leigh Hunt, the editor of the liberal weekly The Examiner. Hunt had introduced them as promising young poets in an article of December 1816 and published some of their poems in his newspaper. In the Preface, PBS accuses the Quarterly’s article on Endymion of initiating a process of decline that issued in Keats’s death. That he saw in this cruel handling of Keats a resemblance to the reception of his own Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam in the April 1819 issue of the same periodical is clearly suggested in l. 300 of the elegy and was explicit in the drafts for the Preface, where PBS presents himself as the victim of calumny and despotic power as well as critical prejudice – traces of personal grievance which he removed from the final version.

  As it was nearing completion, PBS described Adonais as ‘a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than any thing I have written’ (Letters II, p. 294). Self-consciously literary and densely allusive, the poem borrows many of its features – invocation of the Muse, repeated formulaic lament, rhetorical questioning, the generalized grief of nature, the succession of mourners and profusion of symbolic flowers – from the Classical elegy, especially from two Greek examples of late antiquity: the ‘Lament for Adonis’ by Bion (fl. c.100 BC) and the ‘Lament for Bion’, attributed to Moschus (fl. c.150 BC). PBS translated parts of each of these (see Poems II, pp. 348–9, 697–700). The narrative of Adonais reworks the vegetation myth of Adonis, the young man beloved of Venus who, having been killed by a boar, was revived annually to spend part of the seasonal cycle in the world, the rest sleeping in the underworld. Keats had himself included a version of the myth in Endymion II.457–92. For the consolatory theme that is a feature of English elegies such as Spenser’s Astrophel and Milton’s Lycidas, PBS adopts a philosophical idiom which nuances the traditional claim for the immortality bestowed on true poets by the permanence of their verse.

  The title has been interpreted as a conflation of ‘Adonis’ and of ‘Adonai’, the Hebrew word signifying ‘Lord’, and also (as Poems IV suggests) as a formation from a Greek word for nightingale, aēdōn, and so a learned allusion to Keats himself, who is recalled as the author of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) in ll. 145 and 372. The Spenserian stanza, described by PBS as ‘inexpressibly beautiful’ and capable of ‘brilliancy and magnificence of sound’ in the Preface to the heroic poem Laon and Cythna (see headnote to the Dedication before Laon and Cythna), lends an air of dignified seriousness to the memorializing of Keats.

  Our text is that of the Pisa edition of 1821, though a few readings have been adopted from 1839. The most important of these is in l. 72.

  Epigraph This Greek epigram attributed to Plato was translated by PBS under the title ‘To Stella’ (see Poems III, pp. 721–2):

  Thou wert the morning star among the living,

  Ere thy fair light had fled;—

  Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving

  New splendour to the dead.

  Hesperus: The evening star.

  PREFACE

  Epigraph The Greek quotation from ‘Lament for Bion’, attributed to Moschus (see headnote), is translated by Anthony Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 190–91:

  Poison, Bion, poison came to your lips,

  and you took it. How could it touch

  such lips without becoming nectar?

  And what man on earth could be so vicious

  as to mix poison and give it you

  when you asked? He has poisoned music.

  p. 491 London edition … highest genius: PBS’s plan for such an edition was never carried out.

  twenty-fourth year: Actually his twenty-sixth year: Keats was born on 31 October 1795.

  cemetery of the protestants: PBS described the ‘English burying-place’, the cimetero acattolico, in Rome in a letter of December 1818 as ‘the most beautiful & solemn cemetery I ever beheld … one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they [the dead buried there] seem to sleep’ (Letters II, pp. 59–60). His and MWS’s three-year-old son, William, who died on 7 June 1819, was buried there, as are the ashes of PBS himself.

  Cestius: Gaius Cestius Epulo, a Roman senator whose tomb in the form of a pyramid (built between 18 and 12 BC) was incorporated into the ancient city walls bordering the cemetery. See ll. 444–7.

  p. 492 savage criticism … succeeding acknowledgements: Endymion was reviewed with dismissive contempt by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review XIX (April 1818) as an example of the ‘Cockney poetry’ whose leading exponent was Leigh Hunt. Francis Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review XXXIV (August 1820), while noting the ‘extravagance’ of Endymion, recognized its richly imaginative qualities as well as those of Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). In autumn 1820, PBS drafted a letter to the editor of the Quarterly protesting against its treatment of Keats (Letters II, pp. 251–3).

  candid: Unbiased, impartial.

  know not what they do: Appropriating the words of the crucified Christ on his executioners: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23:34).

  p
enetrable stuff: From the Prince’s words of accusation to his mother Gertrude in Shakespeare, Hamlet III.iv.34–5: ‘let me wring your heart; for so I shall / If it be made of penetrable stuff.’ Byron borrows the phrase in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1808), l. 1050, in a passage on hostile criticism of poets.

  One of their associates … calumniator: PBS believed that the Laureate Robert Southey was the author of severely critical reviews both of Keats’s Endymion and of his own Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam in the Quarterly Review. But about the time he finished composing Adonais he ‘discovered’, he wrote on 11 June 1821 (Letters II, pp. 298–9), that his ‘calumniator’ in the Quarterly was the Reverend Henry Hart Milman, for whom see the following note.

  Paris … and Lord Byron: The poem Paris in 1815 (1817) by the conservative Church of England clergyman George Croly (1780–1860), the very popular Woman: A Poem (1810) by the satirist Eaton Stannard Barrett (1786–1820) and Ilderim: A Syrian Tale (1816, 1819) by the architectural historian Henry Gally Knight (1786–1846) had been reviewed with varying degrees of approbation in the Quarterly Review. The last-named was published by the Quarterly’s publisher John Murray. Alicia Lefanu (1791–c.1844) was an Irish poet and novelist. John Howard Payne (1791–1852) was an American actor and dramatist; his play Brutus; or, The Fall of Tarquin, an Historical Tragedy (1818) was successfully produced in London but unfavourably reviewed in the Quarterly XXII (January 1820). On MWS’s return to England in 1823, Payne became her admirer and unsuccessful suitor. Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868) – a contemporary of PBS’s at Eton and Oxford, Church of England clergyman, fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford (1814) – became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1821. Poet, dramatist and historian, his Fall of Jerusalem: A Dramatic Poem (1820) was approvingly reviewed as an orthodox antidote to Byron’s pessimism in the Quarterly XXIII (May 1820).

  gnat … camels: Recalling Christ’s accusation of hypocrisy addressed to scribes and Pharisees: ‘Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel’ (Matthew 23:24).