Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  1  woof: Texture.

  2  an exhalation: A mist or cloud.

  3  Bethgelert: Beddgelert, a village in the Snowdonia region of north Wales.

  4  aiguilles: Peaks.

  5  awful: Terrifying, inspiring awe and reverence.

  6  Saussure … increase and decay: The Genevan meteorologist, geologist, botanist and progressive political reformer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99) was rector of the University of Geneva 1774–6. In 1787 he led a party to the summit of Mont Blanc; his was the second ascent, Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard having made the first the previous year. Saussure spent four and a half hours on the summit making scientific observations and measurements. He collected his extensive researches in the four volumes of Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96).

  7  Buffon’s … points of the earth: PBS had read (MWS Journal I, p. 100) the Théorie de la Terre in the first volume of Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–1804) by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), which advanced the hypothesis that the earth had been progressively cooling since its separation from the sun.

  8  Ahriman: T. L. Peacock, to whom the original letter was addressed, had begun Ahrimanes, a mythological narrative in verse which he never completed or published. The poem adopts the ancient Zoroastrian belief in the supreme dominion over the world of two opposed divinities, one good (Oromaze), the other evil (Ahrimanes).

  9  adamantine: Unbreakable.

  10 toises: A toise measured nearly two metres.

  11 mauvais pas: A particularly difficult part of a mountain route.

  12 god of the Stoics: The ancient Stoic philosophers held that God was immanent as the active principle in nature, which they conceived of as a single, continuous being composed of directing spirit and passive matter.

  13 aubergistes: Innkeepers.

  14 the Celandine: See ‘Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England’ and notes.

  From Preface to LAON AND CYTHNA

  PBS devoted the period from mid March to late September 1817 to the composition of the epic-romance Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser, which was published in December and is the source of our text. The poem’s 4,818 lines, of which we include only the verse Dedication (here), in effect address the nation in what he intended to be a major literary statement at a time of national crisis. In England the year 1817 was one of unrest and apprehension. The economic depression following the defeat of Napoleon had resulted in extensive unemployment, while a poor harvest and commodity taxes sharply increased the cost of living. Unrest at the consequent hardship, especially for the labouring classes, as well as a widespread conviction that only reform of a narrow parliamentary representation would bring any substantial improvement, provoked riots and demonstrations in several parts of the country, which were met with repressive measures on the part of government. In this tense atmosphere the poem stages ‘such a Revolution as might be supposed to take place in an European nation’ (Letters I, p. 563) – a bloodless rising of modern Greeks against their Ottoman masters which is crushed by a treacherous international alliance of royal power sanctioned by established religion. PBS makes it clear that his narrative looks back to the French Revolution as well as forward to an idealized version of it at some future date. The poem was also highly adventurous in the sphere of personal morality. As first published in late 1817, it places at its centre, as an instance of the love it recommends as supreme moral principle, sexual consummation between the revolutionary leaders, the brother and sister Laon and Cythna. Following the objections of the publisher, the poem was revised so as to alter their blood kinship and to temper the most uncompromising of its anti-religious sentiments, then reissued in early 1818 under a new title, The Revolt of Islam. Laon and Cythna was a daring, provocative and very risky intervention in the febrile literary-political climate of the day, and was to prompt a comprehensive and unrelenting attack on both poem and author in the Quarterly Review for April 1819. Aware of the danger of publishing such a work at such a time, when prosecution for blasphemous libel was a real possibility, PBS takes exceptional pains in the Preface to explain his aims and to present himself, then a little-known author, as a serious commentator on matters of urgent public concern.

  1  tempests … we live: The French Revolutionary (1792–1802) and Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) and their reverberations throughout Europe.

  2  celebrated productions … human mind: The works of the great imaginative writers, such as Homer and Shakespeare (see Letters I, p. 507).

  3  accidental education: The experiences that form the mind independently of any formal instruction or public coercion.

  4  Alps … Mont Blanc: PBS’s visit to Switzerland in spring and summer 1816 proved to be a rich creative period: see ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Mont Blanc’ and the extract from 1817 (p. 595).

  5  sailed … mighty rivers: In late summer 1814, PBS, MWS and Claire Clairmont sailed from Lake Lucerne down the Reuss and the Rhine to Bonn, a journey described in 1817, pp. 55–71.

  6  ravages of tyranny … desolated thresholds: PBS, MWS and Claire Clairmont had observed such scenes in France in August 1814 (see 1817, pp. 19–28).

  7  I have conversed … men of genius: PBS had both spoken and corresponded with William Godwin (from December 1816 his father-in-law) and Lord Byron, who are chiefly intended here.

  8  [Shelley’s note]: PBS advances the hypothesis that poetry, considered broadly as imaginative creation, may like science be advancing towards perfection.

  9  a resemblance … between all the writers of any particular age: This paragraph is PBS’s first formulation of the idea of the ‘spirit of the age’, which he refines upon in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, and to which he gives central importance in the final paragraph of A Defence of Poetry (here).

  10 tragic Poets of the age of Pericles: The ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who flourished in Athens in the fifth century BC. Pericles (c.495–429 BC) was the chief statesman of Athens.

  11 [Shelley’s note]: PBS considered the literature of the period in which Milton’s major poems were published, beginning with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, as vitiated by the restored monarchy. See A Defence of Poetry.

  Lord Bacon: Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans (1561–1626), held several high political offices as well as writing widely on philosophical, legal and scientific subjects.

  12 Ford: The dramatist John Ford (1586–c.1640) was Shakespeare’s younger contemporary.

  An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte

  Princess Charlotte, daughter and only child of the Prince Regent and Princess Caroline of Brunswick, and wife since the previous year of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, died on 6 November 1817, at the age of twenty-one, having given birth to a stillborn boy two days previously. The two deaths left the British throne without a direct heir and occasioned extraordinary public demonstrations of grief. Unlike her unpopular father and her mentally disabled grandfather George III, the princess was widely held in affection; and hopes were entertained that, on acceding to the throne, she would be favourable to political reform. Her funeral was scheduled for 19 November, the intervening fortnight having been declared a period of national mourning. The day after the princess’s death, three men, Jeremiah Brandreth, William Turner and Isaac Ludlam, were executed at Derby for their part in the ‘Pentridge Rising’ of 9 and 10 June 1817, a poorly planned and ineptly executed insurrection in the form of an armed march on Nottingham by about two hundred artisans and workers desperate at the widespread hardship resulting from unemployment, high prices and an unrepresentative electoral system. At Nottingham the group was quickly dispersed by a small detachment of mounted troops. The coincidence of the royal death and the execution of the working men PBS took as the occasi
on of An Address, which he began in the evening of 11 November 1817 and finished the following day (Letters I, p. 566; MWS Journal I, p. 184). No MS is known to survive. Modern texts, including this one, derive from an edition published in 1843 by the bookseller Thomas Rodd, who described it as a ‘fac-simile reprint’ of an original that was limited to only twenty copies. If Rodd was correct, it may be that Charles Ollier and/or the publisher Thomas Hookham, both of whom PBS visited on 15 November, declined to offer the pamphlet for sale for fear of prosecution, and that only twenty copies were run off for private circulation. No date or publisher’s name appears on the title-page of Rodd’s edition, where the author is identified only as ‘The Hermit of Marlow’, the nom de plume that PBS had assumed for A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom, his pamphlet recommending an extension of the suffrage and annual parliaments, which Ollier had published in March 1817. That assumed name and a reference to An Address as PBS’s by his cousin Thomas Medwin in The Shelley Papers (1833), together with similarities to other poems and prose by PBS, form the basis for accepting his authorship.

  Stephen C. Behrendt, Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte (London: Macmillan, 1997), examines literary responses to the death of the princess in the arts and popular culture. E. P. Thompson provides an account of the Pentridge Rising in The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 723–34.

  1  The Hermit of Marlow: PBS resided at Marlow in Buckinghamshire for a year from March 1817. The nom de plume suggests the retired sage, a role that he regularly imagined for himself.

  2  ‘We Pity … Dying Bird’: In Rights of Man (1791) Thomas Paine wrote of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that ‘He pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird’ as a challenge to Burke, who had lamented the disdain of the French revolutionaries for the traditional graces and virtues of the aristocracy while disregarding the plight of the people, who had suffered under arbitrary aristocratic power.

  3  illustrated it with their genius: Rendered it illustrious.

  4  ‘that bourne … returns’: Quoting Shakespeare, Hamlet III.i.80–82: ‘death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’.

  5  Horne Tooke and Hardy … high treason: In the repressive political atmosphere following the declaration of war against France in 1793, several of those calling for constitutional reform were arrested and imprisoned before being tried for treason in autumn 1794 – among them the philologist and veteran activist John Horne Tooke (1736–1812) and Thomas Hardy (1752–1832), a shoemaker who was the founding secretary and treasurer of the London Corresponding Society, which advocated a broadening of the suffrage and annual parliaments as a condition for reforming the country’s economic and social ills. After celebrated trials, both were acquitted to widespread public rejoicing.

  6  hurdle: ‘A frame or sledge on which a traitor was drawn through the streets to execution’ (OED).

  7  [Shelley’s note]: PBS misquotes Shakespeare, Cymbeline V.v.272–3: ‘Your death has eyes in ’s head, then. I have not seen him so pictured.’

  8  depending on: Suggested by, related to.

  9  a check: Prose Works I suggests that this is the ‘Sinking Fund’, into which state revenue was paid in order to reduce the size of the national debt. See note 12 below.

  10 fundamental defect: An unrepresentative parliament.

  11 pensioners … placemen: Those in receipt of state funds as a salary, reward for services or loyalty, and those appointed to public sinecures.

  12 The effect … civilized life: In common with many liberals, PBS deplored the size of the national debt which had grown to fund the wars against the American colonies and against revolutionary France and which required an increase in taxation, falling most heavily on the poor, merely to pay the interest on the large sums borrowed.

  13 double aristocracy: PBS elaborates on the character of this ‘new aristocracy’ in A Philosophical View of Reform.

  14 sans peur et sans tache: ‘Without fear or stain’; the qualities of bravery and upright conduct proper to a knight.

  15 gambling in the funds: Investing for gain in the stock of the national debt; in effect, lending to the state.

  16 ‘Corinthian capital of polished society’: Edmund Burke’s characterization of aristocracy in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was derided by Thomas Paine in Rights of Man, Part II (1792).

  17 two chasms: Those of anarchy and misrule.

  18 manufacturers, the helots: Factory-workers as serfs.

  19 spies were sent forth: Cp. Luke 20:20: ‘And they [chief priests and scribes] watched him [Jesus], and sent forth spies, which should feign themselves just men, that they might take hold of his words, that so they might deliver him unto the power and authority of the governor.’

  20 extraordinary powers: In March 1817, Parliament suspended Habeas Corpus and granted magistrates the power to disperse meetings of more than fifty persons which they judged to be seditious.

  21 OLIVER: The paid government informer who had acted as an agent provocateur in the Pentridge affair.

  22 chaplain prevented … observations: So forestalling the traditional right of the condemned man to speak his last words, which might have embarrassed the government.

  23 [Shelley’s note]: The liberal weekly The Examiner, edited by PBS’s friend Leigh Hunt, carried a report to which An Address is indebted for its account of the executions.

  24 glorious Phantom: PBS introduces similar emblematic figures in ‘England in 1819’, The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 102 ff., and ‘God save the Queen!’.

  From On Christianity

  PBS set down this untitled series of reflections on the teachings of Jesus in late 1817 in a notebook containing other writings and notes on religion (Bodleian MS Shelley e. 4; see BSM III). They were not published until after his death: in Shelley Memorials, edited by Jane, Lady Shelley (1859). The complete text, which includes some pages from a separate MS (Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4; see BSM XXI), is included in Prose Works; the whole makes a substantial essay of over ten thousand words, of which about one-fifth is excerpted here.

  PBS had an abiding interest in the Christian religion and writings. He regarded the essential moral message of the Gospels as of great potential benefit to the age, provided it was purged of its supernatural elements (the report of miracles, for example) as well as freed from the accreted distortions and perversions of institutional Christianity. To this end he prepared ‘Biblical Extracts’, a little volume featuring Christ’s ‘moral sayings’ which in late 1812 he attempted unsuccessfully to have published (Letters I, pp. 265, 332, 348). Then in late 1819 he made notes on Luke’s Gospel 1–20 which identify passages relevant to contemporary social and political concerns (see BSM XIV). ‘On Christianity’ proposes a rational and benevolent interpretation of Christ’s doctrines, insisting on their revolutionary character, in three broad divisions: the nature of God, the iniquity of revenge and the equality of humankind. Each of these is represented by one of the three extracts offered here.

  Bodleian MS Shelley e. 4, our copy-text, is unfinished: the argument sometimes breaks off abruptly, and PBS has left blank spaces for words or phrases to be filled in later. The punctuation of the MS has been supplemented, ampersands and abbreviations expanded. Summaries are provided in the notes for substantial editorial omissions.

  Examination of PBS’s views on Christianity and the Gospels can be found in: David Fuller, ‘Shelley and Jesus’, Durham University Journal 85.54 (2) (1993), pp. 211–23; Michael O’Neill, ‘“A Double Face of False and True”: Religion in Shelley’, Literature and Theology 25/1 (March 2011), pp. 32–46; Bryan Shelley, Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), chapter 3; and Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), chapter 6.

  1  [im
bued by their Spirit]: A conjectural reading of a passage left unresolved in PBS’s MS.

  2  Utter darkness … mountains: See Matthew 27:45–53.

  3  Universal Pan: Pan was a proverbially amorous deity who ensured the fertility of flocks; represented as half goat and half man, he frequented mountains, caves and wildernesses and was sometimes regarded as a universal god. Cp. The Witch of Atlas, l. 113.

  4  who: PBS’s draft breaks off at this point.

  5  Vesta: In this list of Roman deities, Vesta was the goddess of fire in the domestic hearth.

  6  Proteus: Proteus was a sea god who had the power to change his shape.

  7  capable: PBS’s draft breaks off at this point.

  8  Blessed … God: One of the Christian ‘Beatitudes’; see, for example, Matthew 5:8.

  9  motionless lyre: An Aeolian harp, whose strings respond to the motions of the wind. See Alastor, ll. 41–9, and cp. Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1796).

  10 consentaneity: A state of accordance.

  11 There is a power … over their frame: PBS explores similar intuitions in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and in Alastor, ll. 37–49.

  12 it: PBS’s draft breaks off at this point.

  13 be perfect … various shapes: See Matthew 5:39–48: ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’ (48); ‘whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also’ (39).

  14 […]: In the MS, PBS concludes this paragraph by quoting in Greek from Diogenes Laërtius’ ‘Life of Diogenes’, in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (third century AD). The quotation derides fame and distinctions of birth and asserts that the only true nation is the universe.