The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

  The footstool of a thing so mean;

  X

  And Earth hath spilt her blood for him,

  Who thus can hoard his own!

  And Monarchs bow’d the trembling limb,

  And thank’d him for a throne!

  Fair Freedom! we may hold thee dear,

  When thus thy mightiest foes their fear

  In humblest guise have shown.

  Oh! ne’er may tyrant leave behind

  A brighter name to lure mankind!

  XI

  Thine evil deeds are writ in gore,

  Nor written thus in vain –

  Thy triumphs tell of fame no more,

  Or deepen every stain:

  If thou hast died as honour dies,

  Some new Napoleon might arise,

  To shame the world again –

  But who would soar the solar height,

  To set in such a starless night?

  XII

  Weigh’d in the balance, hero dust

  Is vile as vulgar clay;

  Thy scales, Mortality! are just

  To all that pass away:

  But yet methought the living great

  Some higher sparks should animate,

  To dazzle and dismay:

  Nor deem’d Contempt could thus make mirth

  Of these, the Conquerors of the earth.

  XIII

  And she, proud Austria’s mournful flower5,

  Thy still imperial bride;

  How bears her breast the torturing hour?

  Still clings she to thy side?

  Must she too bend, must she too share

  Thy late repentance, long despair,

  Thou throneless Homicide?

  If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, –

  ’Tis worth thy vanish’d diadem!

  XIV

  Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle,

  And gaze upon the sea;

  That element may meet thy smile –

  It ne’er was ruled by thee!

  Or trace with thine all idle hand

  In loitering mood upon the sand

  That Earth is now as free!

  That Corinth’s pedagogue6 hath now

  Transferr’d his by-word to thy brow.

  XV

  Thou Timour! in his captive’s cage7

  What thoughts will there be thine,

  While brooding in thy prison’d rage?

  But one – ‘The world was mine!’

  Unless, like he of Babylon8,

  All sense is with thy sceptre gone,

  Life will not long confine

  That spirit pour’d so widely forth –

  So long obey’d – so little worth!

  XVI

  Or, like the thief of fire from heaven9,

  Wilt thou withstand the shock?

  And share with him, the unforgiven,

  His vulture and his rock!

  Foredoom’d by God – by man accurst,

  And that last act, though not thy worst,10

  The very Fiend’s arch mock;

  He in his fall preserved his pride,

  And, if a mortal, had as proudly died!

  XVII

  There was a day – there was an hour,

  While earth was Gaul’s – Gaul thine –

  When that immeasurable power,

  Unsated to resign

  Had been an act of purer fame

  Than gathers round Marengo’s name,

  And gilded thy decline,

  Through the long twilight of all time,

  Despite some passing clouds of crime.

  XVIII

  But thou forsooth must be a king,

  And don the purple vest,

  As if that foolish robe could wring

  Remembrance from thy breast.

  Where is that faded garment? where

  The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear,

  The star, the string, the crest?

  Vain froward child of empire! say

  Are all thy playthings snatched away?

  XIX

  Where may the wearied eye repose

  When gazing on the Great;

  Where neither guilty glory glows,

  Nor despicable state?

  Yes – one – the first – the last – the best –

  The Cincinnatus of the West,

  Whom envy dared not hate,

  Bequeath’d the name of Washington,

  To make man blush there was but one!

  ARIBERT REIMANN: from Unrevealed. Lord Byron to Augusta Leigh, cantata for baritone and string quartet (1979/1980)

  Stanzas to Augusta

  [Stanzas to Augusta I]1

  I

  When all around grew drear and dark,

  And reason half withheld her ray –

  And hope but shed a dying spark

  Which more misled my lonely way;

  II

  In that deep midnight of the mind,

  And that internal strife of heart,

  When dreading to be deem’d too kind,

  The weak despair – the cold depart;

  III

  When fortune changed – and love fled far,

  And hatred’s shafts flew thick and fast,

  Thou wert the solitary star

  Which rose and set not to the last.

  IV

  Oh! blest be thine unbroken light!

  That watch’d me as a seraph’s eye,

  And stood between me and the night,

  For ever shining sweetly nigh.

  V

  And when the cloud upon us came,

  Which strove to blacken o’er thy ray –

  Then purer spread its gentle flame,

  And dash’d the darkness all away.

  VI

  Still may thy spirit dwell on mine,

  And teach it what to brave or brook –

  There’s more in one soft word of thine

  Than in the world’s defied rebuke.

  VII

  Thou stood’st, as stands a lovely tree,

  That still unbroke, though gently bent,

  Still waves with fond fidelity

  Its boughs above a monument.

  VIII

  The winds might rend – the skies might pour,

  But there thou wert – and still wouldst be

  Devoted in the stormiest hour

  To shed thy weeping leaves o’er me.

  IX

  But thou and thine shall know no blight,

  Whatever fate on me may fall;

  For heaven in sunshine will requite

  The kind – and thee the most of all.

  X

  Then let the ties of baffled love

  Be broken – thine will never break;

  Thy heart can feel – but will not move;

  Thy soul, though soft, will never shake.

  XI

  And these, when all was lost beside,

  Were found and still are fix’d in thee; –

  And bearing still a breast so tried,

  Earth is no desert – ev’n to me.

  Stanzas to Augusta

  [Stanzas to Augusta II]1

  I

  Though the day of my destiny’s over,

  And the star of my fate hath declined,

  Thy soft heart refused to discover

  The faults which so many could find;

  Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted,

  It shrunk not to share it with me,

  And the love which my spirit hath painted

  It never hath found but in thee.

  II

  Then when nature around me is smiling,

  The last smile which answers to mine,

  I do not believe it beguiling,

  Because it reminds me of thine;

  And when winds are at war with the ocean,

  As the breasts I believed in with me,

  If their billows excite an emotion,

  It is that they bear me from t
hee.

  III

  Though the rock of my last hope is shiver’d,

  And its fragments are sunk in the wave,

  Though I feel that my soul is deliver’d

  To pain – it shall not be its slave.

  There is many a pang to pursue me:

  They may crush, but they shall not contemn;

  They may torture, but shall not subdue me;

  ’Tis of thee that I think – not of them.

  IV

  Though human, thou didst not deceive me,

  Though woman, thou didst not forsake;

  Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,

  Though slander’d, thou never couldst shake;

  Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me2,

  Though parted, it was not to fly,

  Though watchful, ’twas not to defame me,

  Nor, mute, that the world might belie.

  V

  Yet I blame not the world, nor despise it,

  Nor the war of the many with one;

  If my soul was not fitted to prize it,

  ’Twas folly not sooner to shun:

  And if dearly that error hath cost me,

  And more than I once could foresee,

  I have found that, whatever it lost me,

  It could not deprive me of thee.

  VI

  From the wreck of the past, which hath perish’d,

  Thus much I at least may recall,

  It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d

  Deserved to be dearest of all:

  In the desert a fountain is springing,

  In the wide waste there is still a tree,

  And a bird in the solitude singing,

  Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  (1792–1822)

  Shelley […] was drowned at the age of thirty, and, perpetually young himself, he is one of the supreme poets of and for impetuous enthusiastic youth. He combines in himself and his work two very different things that are often found together in the young. The foundation of his thought is the ultra-rational atheism and philosophical anarchy not uncommon in the later eighteenth century and expressed at length by William Godwin, the desiccated Prospero to whom Shelley was the Ariel. (Godwin’s daughter, Mary, was Shelley’s second wife. She ought to be remembered, if not by readers then by filmgoers, as the creator of Frankenstein.) Using this foundation merely as its runway, Shelley’s poetic imagination took off into the blue. It is an imagination differing in degree but not in kind from that of many enthusiastic romantic young people, to whom this poet always had – and let us hope always will have – a very special attraction. More mature readers are apt to note a lack of ordinary human feeling, a remoteness from common interests, in this poetry; and when it is below its highest level, a certain gaseous quality, a blurring of images, a use of words too reminiscent of the absurd philosophical romances the poet read (and wrote) in his early youth. And Shelley, a rapid and prolific writer, is too often well below his highest level.

  But when he is in full high flight – and he is a poet we associate with air and fire, not earth and water – his poetry is marvellous in its innocence and loveliness, its swiftness and grace, its opalescent colouring and shifting lights; as if it already belonged to – and is indeed celebrating – some future Golden Age.

  J. B. PRIESTLEY: Literature and Western Man (1960)

  Shelley came from a prosperous Sussex family, was educated at Eton, where he privately published a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), and Oxford, where, during his six-month residence, he co-authored and published The Necessity of Atheism (1811) – among the very first professions of atheism to be printed in England – for which he was summarily expelled. He moved to London, where he met Leigh Hunt and other radicals, and eloped, aged nineteen, with the sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook. His father disapproved and Shelley renounced his inheritance in favour of a small annuity. He now declared himself a disciple of the Necessitarian philosopher and reformer William Godwin, agitated against the English Government in a series of pamphlets, was spied on by the Home Office, and retreated to Tremadoc, Wales, where he observed at first hand the appalling conditions in which the labourers worked and lived during the harsh winter of 1812. All these experiences inspired his revolutionary poem Queen Mab (1813), which, though not well received by the critics, was hugely popular late into the century in radical circles. Harriet bore him a child, but when she became pregnant for a second time, Shelley abandoned her to elope with Mary Godwin, the precocious seventeen-year-old daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneer of women’s liberation who had died giving birth to Mary. Shelley invited the fifteen-year-old Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont to elope with them, which gave rise to a ménage à trois which lasted until they went to Italy. The combined journal of their travels abroad was later reworked by Mary Shelley and published as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817). Back in England, Shelley received news that Harriet had given birth to their second child, Charles, and the following spring Mary gave birth to a daughter, who died prematurely. The couple moved to a cottage on the edge of Windsor Park, where Shelley wrote Alastor (1816), a visionary poem in blank verse. In the same year, Shelley’s son William was born (he was to die aged three), and the family now travelled to Lake Geneva to meet Byron, where Mary began Frankenstein and Shelley composed two philosophical poems, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc. Soon after his return to England in the autumn, Harriet drowned herself, thus permitting Shelley to legalize his union with Mary. When the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Eldon, refused to grant Shelley custody of his two children by Harriet, he emigrated to Italy.

  It was during his sojourn in Italy that Shelley wrote some of his most important poems: Julian and Maddalo (1818), which explored his relationship with Byron; Prometheus Unbound (1820); The Cenci (1819); Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820); Epipsychidion (1821), an autobiographical poem which celebrates his search for eternal Beauty in the terrestrial form of all the women he loved; Adonais (1821), inspired by the death of Keats; Hellas (1822), written in support of the Greek War of Independence; the unfinished and ironically titled The Triumph of Life (1822); a sequence of wonderful lyric poetry; and The Defence of Poetry (1821). It was also in Italy that he wrote The Mask of Anarchy (1819), inspired by the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, one of the most memorable poems of political protest in the English language:

  Rise, like Lions, after slumber

  In unvanquishable number –

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you –

  Ye are many – they are few.

  These final four years were characterized by intense friendships, revolutionary politics, profound meditation and amorous encounters. The death of her three-year-old son William, in 1819, had a profound effect on Mary, and it seems that her deep depression not only cut her from Shelley’s love but killed her own feelings for him. A scarcely punctuated, numb draft poem in Shelley’s notebook describes this sense of loss:

  My dearest M. wherefore hast thou gone

  And left me in this dreary world alone

  Thy form is here indeed a lovely …

  But thou art fled, – gone down the dreary road

  Which leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode

  Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair

  It where

  For thine own sake I cannot follow thee

  Do thou return for mine –

  Shelley stood by her and was pained by her torment, but he sought what he called ‘consolation’ elsewhere – in friendships and a series of liaisons, such as he enjoyed with Jane Williams, the wife of a military officer, Edward Williams. Shelley’s poems to her were written in the winter and spring of 1822. It seems that the relationship, though intense, was unconsummated. Indeed, the poems were headed: ‘For Jane and Williams alone to see; not to be opened unless you are alone.’ To Edward Williams, Shelley wrote: ‘If any of the sta
nzas should please you, you may read them to Jane, but to no one else.’ And in a letter to Jane he confided that he would urge her husband

  to sail with the first fair wind without expecting me. I have thus the pleasure of contributing to your happiness when deprived of every other – and of leaving you no other subject of regret, but the absence of one scarcely worth regretting […] Adieu, my dearest friend – I only write these lines for the pleasure of tracing what will meet your eyes.

  The exquisite short poems that Shelley wrote for Jane include ‘The recollection’, ‘The invitation’, ‘The keen stars were twinkling’, ‘Lines written in the bay of Lerici’, ‘With a guitar’, ‘To Edward Williams’ and, according to some scholars, ‘When the lamp is shattered’ and ‘I arise from dreams of thee’. The poems testify to his infatuation, and he clearly regarded Jane as the ideal woman, who could not only sing beautifully, but also play the flute, harp and guitar. In July 1822, Leigh Hunt arrived in Livorno to begin the editorship of a new journal. Shelley, Edward Williams and Charles Vivian, a young English sailor, sailed across the bay to meet him, and were drowned on the return journey. Because of the strict quarantine laws against the plague, Shelley and Williams were cremated on the beach at Viareggio in the presence of Byron, Edward John Trelawny and Leigh Hunt – a scene captured retrospectively in a fine painting (1889) by Louis Édouard Fournier (Walker Gallery, Liverpool).

  Shelley’s poetry divides critics more than that of any other major English poet. Revered by Browning and Hardy, he was deprecated in his own lifetime by Charles Lamb – an opinion shared, in varying degrees, by Carlyle, Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and Auden. Many were shocked by his dissent in religious matters, and his unorthodoxy in sexual relations. He voiced his own philosophy in a famous passage from Epipsychidion: