Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  The most important of the poem’s debts to its two principal precursor texts, Dante’s Divina Commedia and Petrarch’s Trionfi, are recorded in the notes. Like those two poems, TofL is composed in terza rima, the Italian verse form of three-line stanzas with interlocking rhymes. The narrative device of a guide interpreting objects, characters and events as they are encountered in a visionary landscape PBS borrows from the Divina Commedia, in which the poet is guided through Hell and part of Purgatory by the figure of the Roman poet Virgil. The successive victories in the Trionfi of love over man, chastity over love, death over chastity, fame over death, time over fame, and God over time, have led some commentators to suggest that PBS might have developed TofL towards an affirmative conclusion.

  Many analogues for the triumphal pageant at the heart of TofL have been suggested, including: the relief sculptures on the triumphal arches of Titus and Constantine at Rome (see note to ll. 111–20); Buonamico Buffalmacco’s fresco The Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo at Pisa; the procession of the chariot of the Hindu deity Jagannath during the festival of Ratha Yatra (to which PBS refers in Queen Mab VII.33–6); and the ‘infamous triumph’ of 6 October 1789, luridly represented by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), when the French royal family were forced to leave the palace at Versailles and escorted by an angry mob to the Tuileries Palace in Paris.

  The extensive critical discussion of the poem includes: Paul de Man, ‘Shelley Disfigured’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), pp. 39–73; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 187–201; Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979); John Hodgson, ‘“The World’s Mysterious Doom”: Shelley’s The Triumph of Life’, ELH 42 (1975), pp. 595–622; Geoffrey Matthews, ‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, RES 45 (1961), pp. 40–48; and Donald Reiman, ‘Shelley’s The Triumph of Life: The Biographical Problem’, PMLA 78 (1963), pp. 536–50, and Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

  7  orison: A prayer.

  8  matin lay: A song or hymn at daybreak.

  11 censers: Vessels for burning incense.

  the element: The air.

  15–20 And in … them: Cp. Prometheus Unbound IV.394–9.

  21 thoughts … untold: Cp. ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’, ll. 35–6: ‘I dare not speak / My thoughts’.

  23 The cone of night: The conical shadow that the earth casts away from the sun into space.

  32–3 As clear … glimmer: As clearly as the evening hills shine when bathed in the light of the setting sun.

  35–6 In Purgatorio I.121–9, Virgil washes Dante’s face with morning dew.

  42 tenour: Theme, substance.

  43 public way: This emblem for the course of life is also used by Dante and Petrarch.

  44–6 a great stream … gleam: Recalling Dante’s first glimpse of the myriad damned in Inferno III.55–7.

  49–51 yet so … bier: The analogy between the dead and autumn leaves is an epic commonplace: e.g. Homer, Iliad VI.146–9; Virgil, Aeneid VI.309–10; Dante, Inferno III.112–17. Cp. also ‘Ode to the West Wind’, l. 2.

  78 with [   ] light: PBS cancelled the word ‘fascinating’ in the draft but provided no substitute.

  79–85 Like … chair: Cp. Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802): epigraph, from the ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence’ (‘I saw the new Moon, / With the old Moon in her arms; / and I fear, I fear, my Master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm’), and ll. 9–14. The new crescent moon with the outline of the old full moon form the natural basis of the image of the triumphal chariot.

  91–3 PBS’s draft of these lines is unpunctuated apart from a semicolon after ‘light’. The present edition takes ‘cloud’ as the subject of ‘Was bent’, but other constructions are possible.

  94 Janus-visaged: Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions and endings, was typically represented with two, or, as here, four faces.

  100 banded: Covered with a blindfold.

  101 the van: The front.

  102 the beams … Sun: The ‘cold glare’ in l. 77.

  105 car: Chariot.

  111–20 such seemed … driven: The narrator compares the spectacle before him to the triumphs of imperial Rome, when a victorious commander would pass through the streets of the city with the spoils of victory, often comprising bound captives, in train behind his chariot. PBS saw representations of such spectacles on the arches of Constantine and Titus at Rome (Letters II, pp. 86, 89–90), which he described as ‘that mixture of energy & error which is called a triumph’.

  123 in weal or woe: In prosperity or misfortune.

  126 the great winter: The end of the world. In a letter to Peacock from Chamonix of 22 July 1816, PBS outlines the French naturalist Buffon’s ‘sublime but gloomy theory, that the earth which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost’ (Letters I, p. 499).

  128 the sacred few: The leading figures of the Hellenic and Judaeo-Christian traditions; ‘they of Athens and Jerusalem’ in l. 134 would include Socrates and Jesus, whom PBS greatly admired.

  143–6 They … begun: In Inferno V.27–45, the damned who have yielded to lust are swept about in a whirlwind.

  175 Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost II.594–5: ‘the parching air / Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.’

  187–8 the holes … eyes: Cp. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra II.vii.15–17.

  190 grim Feature: The phrase used to describe the monstrous figure of Death in Paradise Lost X.279. ‘Feature’ = ‘form’ or ‘shape’.

  204 Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). PBS’s opinions of Rousseau varied over time. In TofL he considers him not as political theorist and inspirer of the French Revolution but as an author who, by representing his personal longings and afflictions, whether fictionalized in the novel Julie; ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) or directly in his Confessions (1781–8), introduced a powerful and infectious strain of sentiment into literature – as the figure of Rousseau himself indicates in ll. 240–43, 274–81.

  206–7 These lines are cancelled in PBS’s draft. Cp. ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ll. 66–8.

  210–11 Mitres … thought: The first three (‘Mitres and helms and crowns’) are worn by religious leaders, military commanders and monarchs respectively; ‘wreathes of light’ distinguish thinkers and artists, combining the laurel wreath of the poet and the halo (as Webb 1995 points out).

  211 lore: Learning, knowledge.

  217 The Child … hour: Napoleon Bonaparte. See ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’.

  222 pinion: Wing.

  227 every pigmy: May signify the monarchies restored by the Treaty of the Holy Alliance after the defeat of Napoleon.

  228–31 Cp. Prometheus Unbound I.625–8.

  235–6 François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694–1778), whose works, along with those of Rousseau, were widely held by PBS’s contemporaries to have provided intellectual stimulus for the French Revolution. Frederick II (‘the Great’) of Prussia (1712–86), Catherine II (‘the Great’) of Russia (1729–96), and Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor (1747–92), were three proponents of so-called ‘enlightened absolutism’. The reclusive German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) developed the transcendental idealist philosophy which PBS mocks in Peter Bell the Third, ll. 518–32. PBS’s draft of this passage also mentions ‘Pitt’, a reference to either William Pitt the Elder (1708–78) or (more likely) the Younger (1759–1806), both of whom had served as prime minister of Great Britain.

  237 anarch: An absolute ruler who by definition promotes misrule. Cp. ‘Ode to Liberty’, l. 43, and ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’, l. 152 (p. 157).

&n
bsp; 254–9 Usually taken as a reference to Aster (the Greek word for ‘star’), a youth with whom Plato, disciple of Socrates (‘his master’), is reputed to have been in love. See epigraph to Adonais. Socrates and Plato also appear together in Inferno IV.134.

  260 PBS’s draft of this line is incomplete.

  261 The tutor and his pupil: Aristotle (384–322 BC) and Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), who was the philosopher’s pupil until the age of sixteen. Aristotle is honoured as pre-eminent among philosophers in Inferno IV.130–33.

  269 Bacon’s spirit: Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an early advocate of empirical scientific method, i.e. induction based on experimentation and evidence rather than deduction from first principles.

  271 The Proteus shape: Proteus, a Greek god of the sea, could change his shape at will. Bacon’s empirical method began an orderly consideration of the varying phenomena of the natural world, just as in Homer, Odyssey IV, Menelaus compels Proteus to reveal the truth by holding him fast.

  274 the great bards of old: A cancelled draft for this line reads ‘Homer & his brethren’.

  278–9 PBS struggled with this portion of the draft and there is a line missing in this stanza. In 1824, MWS noted ‘there is a chasm here in the MS which it is impossible to fill up. It appears from the context, that other shapes pass, and that Rousseau still stood beside the dreamer.’

  280 my words … misery: Recalling Ugolino’s speech in Inferno XXXIII.7–8: ‘if my words will be seed to bear the fruit of infamy for the traitor’.

  283–4 the heirs / Of Caesar’s … Constantine: The Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar, who transformed the Republic into an empire, to Constantine I (‘the Great’), who made Christianity its official religion.

  288 Gregory and John: Commentators have identified these as Gregory I, ‘the Great’ (Pope 590–604), or Gregory VII, ‘Hildebrand’ (Pope 1073–85), and John XXII (Pope 1316–34) but many popes took the name ‘Gregory’ or ‘John’.

  288–92 Theologians and the church hierarchy created a dogmatic institutional Christianity which obscured true divinity.

  289 Man and god: ‘The manuscript capital and lower-case reinforce S.’s heterodox meaning’ (Major Works).

  299 one sad thought: Cp. l. 21.

  331 the oblivious spell: The ‘spell’ that obliterates all memory.

  336–9 Recalling Wordsworth’s lament, in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), for the fading of the ‘vision splendid’ of youth into ‘the light of common day’ (ll. 73–6).

  354 PBS made a number of cancelled attempts at this line, and the present text is conjectural.

  357 Iris: Goddess who personified the rainbow; a messenger of the gods to humans, she is often represented as a winged female.

  358–9 The glass froths (‘Mantling’) with nepenthe, a drug that banishes sorrow and grief, given by Helen of Troy to Telemachus in Odyssey IV.219–32; cp. also Milton, Comus, ll. 63–6, 674–7.

  361 palms: The soles of the feet; cp. Adonais, l. 212.

  386 As if the gazer’s mind: PBS’s draft of ll. 386–8 is very heavily worked and the present text is conjectural.

  392–405 PBS’s draft of these lines has been lost and the present text is based on 1824, which remains the sole textual witness.

  398 The questions Rousseau asks of the Shape here parallel those which the narrator asks of Rousseau in l. 296. Cp. Eve’s account of Eden in Paradise Lost IV.449–52.

  404 Touched with faint lips the cup: As a number of commentators have observed, this phrase might imply that Rousseau does not actually drink from the cup.

  414–15 ‘Lucifer’ is here the planet Venus, ‘that fairest planet’ (l. 416), seen amid the yellowish-green (the colour of ‘chrysolite’, i.e. the precious stone olivine) sky just before dawn.

  417–19 one who … smile: Although Classical authors often have Venus appearing as morning and evening star on the same day, this is not actually possible.

  420 jonquil: A type of narcissus, known for its intense fragrance.

  422–3 Brescia is a province and a city in northern Italy. In 1824, MWS added a note explaining that ‘The favourite song, “Stanco di pascolar le peccorelle” [I am tired of grazing my sheep], is a Brescian national air’.

  432 tenour: Course or direction.

  446 atomies: Tiny particles.

  463 Lethean song: In Greek myth, the waters of Lethe, one of the five rivers of the underworld, induced forgetfulness in those who drank them. See Purgatorio XXXI, where Mathilda compels Dante to drink from Lethe.

  471–6 The Divina Commedia is a visionary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in which the pilgrim Dante comes to understand that all human love has its source in transcendent Divine Love. The phrase ‘Behold a wonder’ echoes Paradise Lost I.777.

  473 Through every Paradise: In the Divina Commedia Paradise is imagined as made up of nine concentric celestial spheres plus the immaterial region of the Empyrean.

  477–548 Some commentators have found in these lines PBS’s adaptation of the simulacra of De Rerum Natura IV.30–468, in which Lucretius accounts for visual perception, but also for dreams and visions of ghosts (‘phantoms’), on the hypothesis that thin, film-like replicas of things detach themselves from their surfaces and move about in the atmosphere.

  479 The Third Sphere of Heaven in Dante’s Paradiso, the sphere of Venus.

  494 PBS’s draft of this line is unresolved; his latest intentions for the second phrase can only be conjectured.

  496–7 tiar / Of pontiffs: The tiara or triple crown worn by popes.

  499 A baby’s … brow: Perhaps recalling Thomas Paine’s critique of hereditary monarchy, in Rights of Man, Part II (1792), as ‘an office which any child or idiot may fill’ (ed. Eric Foner and Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 174). PBS may also allude to the mental incapacity of George III. Cp. also the ‘Embryos and idiots’ consigned to Limbo in Paradise Lost III.474.

  500 anatomies: Skeletons.

  505 charnel: A house for storing the bones of the dead or corpses.

  544–8 These lines were first published in Locock.

  544 the cripple cast: These words are cancelled in PBS’s draft.

  548 Of: The MS breaks off at this point.

  To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)

  PBS’s draft is now in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. c. 4: see BSM I). Our text is based on the fair copy (Box A, Special Collections, in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester: see MYR (Shelley) VIII). PBS gave this copy to Jane Williams (see headnote to ‘To —–’ (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)) in June 1822, with the following note:

  I sate down to write some words for an ariette [a brief song] which might be profane—. but it was in vain to struggle with the ruling spirit, who compelled me to speak of things sacred to yours & Wilhelmeister’s [Edward Williams’s, playfully nicknamed after the hero of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6)] indulgence—. I commit them to your secrecy & your mercy & will try & do better another time.

  The skilfully varied line-lengths and the deft use of single and double rhymes create a verbal and formal analogy for the musical occasion which the poem evokes and which, it suggests, had the power to intimate a reality beyond the pleasures of the moment. Lines 7–24 were published in The Athenaeum for 17 November 1832 as ‘An Ariette for Music’ and the complete poem in 1840, where it was entitled simply ‘To —–’.

  4  guitar: See headnote to ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’.

  22–4 PBS describes an evening’s sailing with the Williamses in a letter of 18 June 1822: ‘we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world’ (Letters II, p. 435).

  23–4 Cp. ‘To Jane. The Invitation’, ll. 47–68.

  Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici

  PBS drafted these lines while composing The Triumph of Life (TofL), evidently in mid to late June 1822. His much-cancelled and untitled
draft interrupts the draft of TofL (see headnote thereto (p. 847) and BSM I); it is uncertain whether he meant to add further lines (see BSM I). The details of time and place suggest that the poem had its origin in an evening spent in the company of Jane Williams near the village of San Terenzo on the Bay of Lerici, on the north-west coast of Italy, where the Shelleys were sharing a house for the summer with Jane and her common-law husband Edward. (For PBS’s relationship with the Williamses, see headnote to ‘To —–’ (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’).) In common with TofL the lines question the nature and significance of fleeting moments of pleasure. Cp. PBS’s letter to John Gisborne of 18 June 1822, in which he says of an evening’s sailing with Edward and Jane: ‘if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful”’ (Letters II, pp. 435–6, alluding to Goethe, Faust (1808), I.vii.1699–706). Richard Garnett published ll. 7–58 in Macmillan’s Magazine for June 1862, under the present title, by which the poem has become known; he included the full text in Relics of Shelley (1862) later that year.

  10–11 The albatross was supposed to sleep in flight because of the long distances it travels over the sea.

  21–4 Cp. ‘The Magnetic lady to her patient’, l. 2.

  32 As they: As if they.

  57–8 PBS’s draft of ll. 57–8 is not resolved. There is no word after ‘pleasure’ in l. 57; in l. 58 ‘Destroying’ is cancelled; ‘Seeking’ is written below it, and ‘alone’ above the line; ‘not peace’ is underlined. Various readings of the final line have been conjectured: ‘Destroying life alone not peace’ (Norton 2002); ‘Seeking life not peace’ (Chernaik); ‘Seeking Life alone not peace’ (G. M. Matthews (ed.), Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)).

  THE PROSE

  From History of a Six Weeks’ Tour

  In August 1816, PBS sent from Geneva to T. L. Peacock in England a long journal-letter recounting the excursion to Chamonix (‘Chamouni’) and Mont Blanc which he, MWS and Claire Clairmont had made between 21 and 27 July (Letters I, pp. 495–502). The following year a somewhat modified version of the letter, the text given here, was published in 1817, where it immediately precedes ‘Mont Blanc’. The present extract excludes the first four paragraphs.