Shelley’s further argument was that only an author, and not a publisher, could be held responsible for a book: but legally this was unsound. He added, with more relevance, that Thomas Moore had already read and commented favourably on a copy of the poem which Shelley had sent him, and that it now lay in Ollier’s hands to ‘blast’ his reputation and literary character.55 ‘I do hope you will have too much regard to the well chosen motto of your seal to permit the murmurs of a few bigots to outweigh the serious and permanent considerations presented in this letter.’ The Ollier seal was, ‘In omnibus libertas’.
Ollier’s reply arrived two days later. Shelley was surprised to discover that the publisher’s only objections apparently lay in the specific statements of the blood relation between the two lovers, Laon and Cythna, and the implicit defence of incest in the preface. It was merely a question of a few individual lines and phrases, and Ollier did not mention politics. Shelley replied that his explanation ‘certainly alters the question’ and hastened to invite Ollier down to Marlow to help with the alterations on the spot. Ollier came at once, on 14 December, to find ‘a friendly welcome and a warm fire’ at the end of his journey, and the corrected manuscript was completed in two days, when Ollier returned with it to London.56
The ease with which this was accomplished is perhaps surprising. On the day of Ollier’s departure, Shelley wrote defensively to Moore that Laon and Cythna was to be suppressed and republished shortly after Christmas as The Revolt of Islam. There were ‘some alterations which consist in little else than the substitution of the words friend or lover for that of brother & sister’.57
Yet Shelley was being less than frank. Though sixty-three lines of the poem were corrected, only thirteen were cancelled because of the incest reference. The rest were cancelled because of their controversial references to God, Hell, Christ, republicanism and atheism. In every case Shelley had to retreat to a vague and unsatisfactory circumlocution.[8] Much that had been politically explicit was now weakened and obscured.
These kind of alterations must have caused Shelley considerable heart-searching. But it is clear that once Ollier had forced him to accept alterations in principle, the rest followed. ‘His friends’, wrote Peacock, ‘finally prevailed on him to submit. Still he could not, or would not, sit down by himself to alter it, and the whole of the alterations were actually made in successive sittings of what I may call a literary committee. He contested the proposed alterations step by step . . . .’58 When he wrote to Byron on the next day, Shelley merely told him that ‘My long poem under the title of “The Revolt of Islam” is almost printed’.59
Horace Smith came down on Boxing Day to cheer up the now permanently damp and twilit rooms of Albion House, but he only remained for two days. Mary persuaded Shelley to go on a meat diet, but he soon gave it up. Shelley’s health was bad again, and certain of his letters to Godwin suggest that he may have been relying heavily on laudanum, for the symptoms they describe are characteristic of the extreme fluctuations of mood and sensation usually associated with narcosis. If so, this suggests a state of mental exhaustion comparable to the winter of 1811 when Shelley stated explicitly that he had been taking too much opium at Keswick. ‘My health has been materially worse,’ he wrote to Godwin. ‘My feelings at intervals are of a deadly & torpid kind, or awakened to a state of such unnatural & keen excitement that only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass & the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopical distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of lethargy & inanimation, & often remain for hours on the sofa between sleep & waking a prey to the most painful irritability of thought. Such with little intermission is my condition. The hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant caution from among these periods of endurance.’60 The thoughts which were preying upon Shelley’s mind centred especially on the decision to go to Italy, which he had now put off irretrievably, until the spring. The hopes attached to his poem kept him in England; but fears that he had consumption, fears that he might again be prosecuted and lose his children by Mary, fears that Godwin was yet again preparing a massive financial demand, and fears that he would be subject more and more to social sneers both public and private; — all these weighed upon his mind.
The winter of 1817-18 had become a time of deep depression and self-doubt, which sunk many of the days of December and January in the deepest gloom. Shelley could not help lumping together the possible failure of both his poetical and political hopes. On 4 January he roused himself sufficiently to donate five guineas to a ‘subscription for the permanent Welfare of Mr Hone and his family’. Hone had been prosecuted and acquitted for seditious libel three times in 1817 as part of the government’s policy of active repression. He was almost penniless by the end. The Friends of the Liberty of the Press, a radical and popular group, had advertised the subscription in the radical ‘Champion’. The Hunts subscribed too.
The Revolt of Islam, with its new title leaf, and twenty-seven substituted pages, was finally released in the first days of the new year, 1818. The poem is in twelve cantos, and besides its preface, contains no notes. Canto I contains a formal allegory of the struggle between Revolution and Oppression, in the conflict of a serpent and an eagle above a stormy sea. The serpent, which symbolizes Revolution, drops wounded into the water, and swims into the arms of a beautiful lady, who on being questioned by the Poet, explains the historical development of Liberty from Athens down to the French Revolution, in terms of the eternal struggle. In the manuscript, over the stanza in which the lady first speaks, Shelley wrote: ‘Demon Lover’.61
Cantos II to IV comprise the mythological projection of Shelley’s own persecuted youth in the person of Laon. The passage which describes his friendship with the 12-year-old Cythna, became a favourite of the early reviewers, notably Blackwoods and the Quarterly. It is a good indication of what his contemporaries valued him for; though this is ironic, for it was originally intended to describe an incestuous passion.
She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness,
A power, that from its objects scarcely drew
One impulse of her being — in her lightness
Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew,
Which wanders through the waste air’s pathless blue,
To nourish some far desert: she did seem
Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew,
Like the bright shade of some immortal dream
Which walks, when tempest sleeps, the wave of life’s dark stream.62
Less to their taste, though more to Shelley’s purpose, was the conclusion about women’s freedom which Shelley drew from this friendship. He put it into Cythna’s mouth:
‘Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air,
To the corruption of a closed grave!
Can they whose mates are beasts, condemned to bear
Scorn, heavier far than toil or anguish, dare
To trample their oppressors? in their home
Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear
The shape of woman . . .’63
It is for this reason that Cythna goes to start the struggle for freedom in the city on her own, independently of Laon. She is immediately captured by a troop of the tyrant’s armed men. Laon is also captured. His incarceration, madness and escape, and his nursing by the wise old hermit, is based on the familiar mythological pattern with which Shelley explained his own youthful struggles.
In Canto V, Shelley presents the taking of the city by the revolutionary army. It is led by Laon, who is wounded. He manages to plead for the life of the Tyrant. In the evening Cythna, who has also escaped and reappeared under her new revolutionary name of Laone, harangues the troops about victory, political freedom, free love and atheism. Her language contains much of the crude rhetoric of Shelley’s Irish poems. But his description, part realistic and part symbolic, of the emotional effect of her words upon the a
udience, points forward to the mature lyric style.
Her voice was as a mountain-stream which sweeps
The withered leaves of Autumn to the lake,
And in some deep and narrow bay then sleeps
In the shadow of the shores; as dead leaves wake
Under the wave, in flowers and herbs which make
Those green depths beautiful when skies are blue,
The multitude so moveless did partake
Such living change, and kindling murmurs flew
As o’er that speechless calm delight and wonder grew.64
One recognizes at once here the gathering imagery of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’.
In Canto VI, the Tyrant’s troops make a surprise counter-attack at dawn, burn the city and massacre the revolutionaries. This marks what Shelley saw as the almost inevitable counter-reaction of violent revolution. All Laon’s supporters, including even the white-haired old hermit, are killed round him. The scenes of battle are described with violent disgust. Laon notices how in combat the faces of friend and foe are equally distorted with exhaustion and fear and hatred —
. . .their eyes started with cracking stare,
And impotent their tongues they lolled into the air,
Flaccid and foamy, like a mad dog’s hanging . . . .65
At the last moment Laon himself is saved by Laone who appears on a giant black Tartarian horse, and sweeps him out of the butchery. As they ride into the mountains, in a characteristic image, the wind spreads and lashes her dark hair over Laon’s eyes.
She then reveals, what he had already guessed, that she is in fact Cythna. In the original draft, this meant his sister. Lying together on the mossy floor of an old ruin under ‘the eastern stars’ they console each other for the terrible political catastrophe by making love for the first time, ‘the solace of all sorrow’.
The five stanzas which follow are one of Shelley’s most direct attempts to describe the physical and mental sensations of love-making. Although his poetry generally is full of images and metaphors of kissing, caressing, penetration and orgasm it is rare for him to present the actions of lovers very explicitly; but here he does so. He writes with great deliberateness and tenderness. The synonymous physical meanings of words like ‘frame’, ‘heart’, ‘limb’ and ‘life’ are obvious from the context, so that the poetry is biologically explicit. But a sense of wonder, even of amazement, is pervasive. The ruins are first illuminated by the symbolic light of a ‘wandering Meteor’, hung ‘high in the green dome’ which presages a storm.
The Meteor showed the leaves on which we sate,
And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties
Of her soft hair, which bent with gathered weight
My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,
Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies
O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,
Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,
Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,
With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses.
The Meteor to its far morass returned:
The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.
Was it one moment that confounded thus
All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one
Unutterable power, which shielded us
Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone
Into a wide and wild oblivion
Of tumult and of tenderness? or now
Had ages, such as make the moon and sun,
The seasons, and mankind their changes know,
Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below?
I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps
The failing heart in languishment, or limb
Twined within limb? Or the quick dying gasps
Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim
Through tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,
In one caress? What is the strong control
Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb,
Where far over the world those vapours roll,
Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul? . . .
Cythna’s sweet lips seemed lurid in the moon,
Her fairest limbs with the night wind were chill,
And her dark tresses were all loosely strewn
O’er her pale bosom: — all within was still,
And the sweet peace of joy did almost fill
The depth of her unfathomable look; —
And we sate calmly, though that rocky hill,
The waves contending in its caverns strook,
For they foreknew the storm, and the gray ruin shook.66
The psychological acuity retained in ‘even from our own cold looks’ in the third stanza, and of ‘almost fill’ in the last stanza, is remarkable in such a molten passage of lyric and erotic intensity. Again, it is characteristic of the mature Shelley.
In the next two cantos, VII and VIII, Cythna relates to Laon the story of her own capture, incarceration, madness and final escape to the city with the help of friendly mariners. Her hallucinations include the grim fact that she is raped, and gives birth to a child; and she also is convinced that she has been forced to eat bits of Laon’s murdered body. On board ship, she rapidly recovers and converts the mariners to Atheism. She then persuades them to release their cargo of chained slaves and slavegirls, and encourages the crew and the slaves to put the principles of free love into practice. They do so, and on arrival at the city harbour, they are the first to join the revolution. Sexual liberation precedes political liberation. In the city, Cythna triggers off the start of the insurrection by her speeches, appealing chiefly to the women ‘who my voice did waken From their cold, careless, willing slavery’. It is at this point that Laon arrives to take charge of the revolutionary forces. Cythna’s reminiscences finish. Together, they contemplate the possible future for the revolution and for their own lives. Neither appears very promising. But Laon breaks into an impassioned paean of hope and love. This ends the Canto IX, and forms one of the great climaxes of the poem.
‘The seeds are sleeping in the soil: meanwhile
The Tyrant peoples dungeons with his prey,
Pale victims on the guarded scaffold smile
Because they cannot speak; and, day by day,
The moon of wasting Science wanes away
Among her stars, and in that darkness vast
The sons of earth to their foul idols pray,
And gray Priests triumph, and like blight or blast
A shade of selfish care o’er human looks is cast.
‘This is the winter of the world; — and here
We die, even as the winds of Autumn fade,
Expiring in the frore and foggy air. —
Behold! Spring comes, though we must pass, who made
The promise of its birth, — even as the shade
Which from our death, as from a mountain, flings
The future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed
As with the plumes of overshadowing wings,
From its dark gulf of chains, Earth like an eagle springs.’67
The extraordinarily free and forceful command of the metric pattern and cross-rhythms of the difficult Spenserian stanza is a great technical achievement, while much of the gaseous abstraction has been taken out of the rhetoric. The condemned man, like Cashman, smiling grimly on the scaffold, is a new kind of detailing, and the seasonal imagery has gained new intellectual precision, especially in lines like ‘The moon of wasting Science wanes away’.
Moreover not only the style but the actual argument has grown austere. Shelley allows Laon to contemplate a long and severe political ‘winter’, and even the destruction of his own personal hopes, without despairing of the eventual spring of political and social liberty.
The image of ‘Earth like an eagle springs’ illustrates the range at which Shelley’s imagination was now working. The comparison of Earth and eagle appears at first sight to have no visual component, but seems merely to be a vague invocation of power, action, natural grandeur. Yet in fact the visual comparison is the primary one. In earlier stanzas Shelley wrote of the ‘winged seeds’, and the ‘wind-winged emblem’.[9] These ‘wings’ produce the dispersion of the seeds on the wind, and in the ‘eagle’ image, Shelley is imagining the whole earth as a ‘winged seed’. The round globe is the central pod, and the earth shadow, cast into space by the alternative paths of solar and lunar light, becomes the wings.
thus arrayed
As with the plumes of overshadowing wings
The whole earth, tipped by its seasonal wings of solar and lunar shadow-casts, becomes one enormous ‘wind-winged emblem’. It thus becomes like a bird. The earth looks like an eagle, and in Shelley’s full image is transformed into a gigantic space-bird of the solar system. So the pun on ‘spring’ gains its full force: the global bird leaps into the sunlight; the global seed fructifies — ‘springs’ — as one might say something winters, or indeed, summers. The two will happen simultaneously at the season of the revolution.[10]
Canto x describes the fate of the people in the city under the new tyranny, which Laon discovers during his clandestine ride from the mountain. They are being destroyed by plagues and famines and droughts, while their new rulers are reverting to the old superstitions of divine appeasement. The priests have ruled that the capture and execution of Laon and Cythna alone will save the remnant of the populace from divine vengeance. This canto contains some of Shelley’s most powerful and most violent writing. It shows clearly the continuing strength of the gothic and grotesque inheritance which had run through his poetry and prose from the beginning. The sense of horror, physical revulsion and disgust are strongly at work. Ugliness and anger bring out a deadly accuracy in Shelley’s language.
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 60