\ NORTON CRITICAL EDITION

Shelley's
Poetry and
Prose

SELECTED
AND EDITED BY
DONALD H. REIMAN
AND
SHARON B. POWERS

AUTHORITATIVE TEXTS
CRITICISM
1|S16 ..is]

12.1^
SHELLEY'S POETRY AND PROSE

AUTHORITATIVE TEXTS
CRITICISM
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^ A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION ^

SHELLEY'S POETRY
AND PROSE
AUTHORITATIVE TEXTS
CRITICISM

Selected and Edited by

DONALD H. REIMAN
THE CARL H. PFORZHEIMER LIBRARY
and

SHARON B. POWERS

-^ «Cfr

WW- NORTON & COMPANY

New York •
London
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
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Copyright © 1977 by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers.

ALL RIGHTS RKSKRVLD.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822.
Shelley's poetry and prose.
(A Norton critical edition)
Bibliography: p.
I. Reiman, Donald H. II. Powers, Sharon B.

PR5403.R4 821'.7 76-26929

ISBN 0-3^3-0MM3b-X
ISBN 0-3^3-0^1^-3 pbk.

2 34 56 7890
 .

Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Textual Introduction xiii

Outline of Shelley's Life xvii

The Poems
From The Esdaile Notebook 3
Zeinab and Kathema 3
The Retrospect 8
Sonnet: To a balloon, laden with Knowledge 12
To the Emperors of Russia and Austria . . 12
Queen Mab H
Alastor 69
Stanzas.— April, 1814 87
Mutability ("We are as clouds") 88
To Wordsworth 88
Mont Blanc 89
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 93
From Laon and Cythna (later The Revolt of Islam) 96
Dedication 96
Canto IX, stanzas 20-28 99
To Constantia 101
Ozymandias 103
Lines written among the Euganean Hills 103
Julian and Maddalo 112
Stanzas written in Dejection— December 1818,
Near Naples 127
The Two Spirits— An Allegory 128
Prometheus Unbound 130
The Sensitive-Plant 210
Ode to Heaven 219
Ode to the West Wind 221
The Cloud 22 3
To a Sky-Lark 226
Ode to Liberty 229
vi • Contents
The Cenci 236
The Mask Anarchy
of 301
Sonnet: England in 1819 3 11
Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento 3
11
Sonnet ("Lift not the painted veil") 3
12
Sonnet ("Ye hasten to the grave") 3
12
Letter to Maria Gisborne 3*3
Peter Bell the Third 3 21
The Witch of Atlas 347
Song of Apollo 367
Song of Pan 368
The Indian Girl's Song 369
Song ("Rarely, rarely comest thou") 370
Epipsychidion 37 1
Adonais 388
Hellas 406
Written on Hearing the News of the Death of
Napoleon 44°
The Flower That Smiles Today 441
When Passion's Trance Is Overpast 442
To ("Music, when soft voices die") 442
Memory 442
To Jane. The Invitation 443
To Jane. The Recollection 444
One Word Is Too Often Profaned 446
The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise 447
With a Guitar. To Jane. 449
To Jane ("The keen stars were twinkling") 45 1
Lines written in the Bay of Lerici 4> 2
The Triumph of Life 453

The Prose
On Love 473
On Life 474
A Defence of Poetry 478

Criticism
General Studies
Kenneth Neill Cameron • The Social Philosophy of
Shelley 511
 Contents • vii

C. E. Pulos [The Role of Scepticism in Shelley's

•

Thought] 519
Earl R. Wasserman [Shelley's Use of Myth] •
524
Donald H. Reiman The Purpose and Method of •

Shelley's Poetry 530

Studies of Individual Works
Evan K. Gibson • Alastor: A Reinterpretation 545
Charles H. Vivian • The One "Mont Blanc" 569
Donald H. Reiman and Theme
• Structure, Symbol, in
"Lines written among the Euganean Hills" 579
M. H. Abrams • Prometheus Unbound]
[Shelley's 596
D. J. Hughes Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound
•
603
Irene H. Chayes ["Ode to the West Wind"]
• 620
Carlos Baker [The Cenci]
•
625
Kenneth Neill Cameron The Planet-Tempest Pas-
sage in Epipsychidion 6yj
Ross Woodman • Adonais 659
CarlWoodring • [Hellas] 675
G. M. Matthews • Shelley's Lyrics 681

Selected Bibliography 695

Index of Titles and First Lines 699
 —

Preface

This edition includes all of Shelley's greatest poetry and other

poems frequently taught or discussed (including Queen Mab,
Alastor, and all the book-length poems Shelley wrote in Italy
except Swellfoot the Tyrant), as well as three of his most important
prose works. The critical selections include what we believe to be
among the best and most helpful scholarly and critical studies that
elucidate Shelley's art and thought and his most difficult poems.
These selections are all recent because it is in the nature of scholar-
ship that the best new work absorbs and builds upon the true
elements of earlier scholarship and in the nature of criticism that
the most sensitive current voices raise and attempt to answer the
literary and philosophical questions that concern present readers.
We have reedited the texts of Shelley's writings from the primary
authorities according to the principles stated in the Textual Intro-
duction, and we have annotated the works with the aim of making
the meaning of the words and allusions in the text immediately
comprehensible without sending the reader to a reference library.
Beyond glossing individual words and allusions, we provide brief
accounts of the circumstances under which each poem was written
and published. We also comment succinctly on the structural divi-
sions of those poems which teaching experience and the history of
Shelley criticism have shown us to require such elucidation. Finally,
for some poems that lend themselves to interpretation at more
than one level, we have mentioned the directions taken by allegorical
seem to us consonant with Shelley's
or symbolic interpretations that
thought and artistic methods. Detailed interpretation of the poems
remains the task and the privilege of students and teachers.
The texts of Shelley's poetry and prose presented here are closer
to the primary authorities (and, we believe, to Shelley's intention)
than those found in any previous edition. Our annotation
though not embodying all that has been known and thought about
Shelley —
is far more detailed and precise than that in earlier
editions and contains considerable information not available other-
wise in Shelley studies. Like all works of scholarship, however, the
Norton Critical Edition of Shelley exists to be used, tested, and
corrected.

New York, Nev? York Donald H. Reiman

Montclair, New Jersey Sharon B. Powers
 :

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank M. H. Abrams of Cornell University and John

Benedict of W. W. Norton & Company, who have generously pro-
vided thoughtful advice and guidance since the inception of this
book. And we are grateful to the following libraries for permission
to consult and utilize manuscripts in their collections to establish
the texts of Shelley's poems (as specified in the textual notes to
individual poems)

Bodleian Library, Oxford

The British Library, London
Cambridge University Library
Edinburgh University Library
The Houghton Library, Harvard University
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California
John Rylands University Library of Manchester
The Library of Congress
The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Yale University Library
Transcriptions of manuscripts in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library
from 'he texts published in Shelley and his Circle and The Esdaile
Notebook have been utilized by permission of The Carl and Lily
Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc., New York.

In correcting this volume for the second printing, we are grate-

ful for the suggestions of (in alphabetical order) Helene Dworzan,
Robert A. Hartley, Parks C. Hunter, Sally Hyman, E. B. Murray,
Charles E. Robinson, Robert Yampolsky, and Curt R. Zimansky.
We welcome further such suggestions.
For additional corrections that appear for the first time in the third
printing, we thank P. H. Butter, David Clark, Helene Dworzan,
David V. Erdman, Neil Fraistat, E. B. Murray, Charles E. Robinson,
Susan Shaw Sailer, and Robert Yampolsky.
 Textual Introduction

The texts of Shelley's poems in this edition have been reedited

after a comparison of the primary authorities —extant holograph
manuscripts, transcripts, the first editions, and later editions (es-
pecially those of Mary Shelley) that may have incorporated authorial
emendations. 1 The resulting texts were then compared with one
another and with the better critical editions: the collected editions
of H. Buxton Forman, CD.
Locock, Thomas Hutchinson (cor-
rected by G. M. Matthews), and Roger Ingpen and Walter E.
Peck, as well as specialized editions and textual studies by Irving
Massey, G. M. Matthews, Judith Chernaik, Neville Rogers, Law-
rence John Zillman, and John E. Jordan. During these steps we
observed certain peculiarities of punctuation and orthography that
seemed persistent (though not universal) in Shelley's holographs
and in texts printed under his direct supervision; all the texts have
been regularized to these preferred forms.
Spelling: Where it can be established that Shelley employed two
distinct forms of a word with a probable or demonstrable difference
in pronunciation like "sat" (rhymed with "hat") and "sate" (rhymed
with "hate") or a possible difference in meaning or function, like
"desert" (which seems usually reserved for the adjectival meaning)
as opposed to "desart" (noun), these distinctions have been main-
tained. In all cases Shelley's original preferred spellings — as nearly
as they could be determined —have
been incorporated, except in
the case of certain repeatedly misspelled words ("thier" for "their,"
"recieve" for "receive") and certain abbreviations like the amper-
sand ("&") or "w° h " (for "which"), often found in Shelley's
manuscripts but not appearing in his printed texts. The shortened
forms "thoV "altho'," and "thro"' ("though," "although," and
"through") were not abbreviations in this sense, but were standard
alternative forms found in the printed books of many writers well
into the nineteenth century; but though these abbreviations appear
frequently in both Shelley's manuscripts and his printed books of
certain periods, they are not in evidence in his late manuscripts or
editions (like Adonais), and we have, therefore, normalized these
words to their unabbreviated forms.

i. On criteria for determiningthe rela- of vol. I of The Complete Works of

tive authority of various kindsof textual Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville Rogers,
evidence, see Donald H. Reiman, review JEGP, 73:250-260 (April 1974).

xiii
xiv • Textual Introduction
The student should find himself less confused by Shelley's few
archaic spellings (e.g., "antient" for "ancient,""controul" for
"control," "gulph" for "gulf") than by the changed pronunciation
in modern American English of words like "again" (which Shelley
rhymed with "pain"), words ending in "-ing" (which were shortened
so that "pursuing" rhymed with "ruin"), and the noun "wind"
(which Shelley often rhymed with "kind" and "find").
Punctuation: The punctuation found in Shelley's surviving holo-
graph manuscripts has been supplemented but has not ordinarily
been altered, unless the change originated in a printed text of
similar authority. The function of Shelley's commas, semicolons,
and dashes from that of standard modern usage. But just as
differs
twentieth-century poets like e. e. cummings and T. S. Eliot often
break their poetry into short lines that identify the patterned group-
ing of phrases and clauses, so Shelley and the poets of his day often
punctuated their poetry to show the reader how the words are to be
grouped when recited aloud. These usages were recognized by the
rhetoric and elocution manuals of the day. William Scott wrote,
for example, in his Elements of Elocution (2nd ed., Edinburgh,
1808):

The comma generallv admits of a very short pause; in some

situations, none: the semicolon requires a pause somewhat longer
than the comma; the colon a still longer pause; and the period a
longer still. The pause at the end of a paragraph, or where a
dash is added to the period, should be greater than at the end
of an ordinary sentence. —
It has been said, that the pauses at
the comma, semicolon, colon, and period, should be in the pro-
portion of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4; which may, in general, be
pretty near the truth." [p. 57]

In Mont Blanc, Shelley inserts commas between the subject and

the verb in lines 115 and 118 (as William Scott does in the last
sentence quoted above) to show where he wants the break in
phrasing. This practice was recognized by the leading grammarian
Lindley Murray, who wrote:

The Comma usually separates those parts of a sentence, which,

though very closely connected in sense and construction, require
a pause between them. ... A simple sentence, when it is . . .

a long one, and the nominative case is accompanied with in-

separable adjuncts, may admit of a pause immediately before the
verb: as, "The good taste of the present age, has not allowed us
to neglect the cultivation of the English language." "To be totally
indifferent to praise or censure, is a real defect in character."
[English Grammar, 2nd ed., improved, York, London, & Edin-
burgh, 1809, I,
376]
 Textual Introduction • xv

In his draft manuscripts Shelley often omitted commas at the

ends of poetic lines (and sometimes full stops at the ends of
stanzas) simply because the natural pause at the end of the line (or
stanza) obviated the need for any punctuation at that early stage of
composition, when the manuscript was meant merely as a guide to
the poet. In his fair copies destined for the press (or for friends to
whom the poems were addressed) Shelley is much more careful in
punctuating, but even in these he often depended on the natural
pause at the end of the line to serve instead of an optional comma;
and in the same position he sometimes employed a comma to
indicate a pause where modern usage would require a colon or
semicolon. While this practice is, again, analogous to that of T. S.
Eliot and other subsequent poets and could easily be accepted by
readers, the printers of Shelley's day generally supplemented his
punctuation and, by not deleting their additions from the volumes
for which he read proofs, Shelley seems to have endorsed, in a
general way, the somewhat more heavily punctuated style of his day.
We must remember, however, that the pointing was primarily
rhetorical rather than grammatical and that it was usually not as
heavy as subsequent editors have tried to impose on Shelley's poems.
In treating those texts for which the primary authority is either a
rough draft manuscript or a safekeeping copy (like The Harvard
Shelley Notebook), we have attempted to approximate the spirit of
the punctuation in Shelley's press copy manuscripts and in The
Cenci and Adonais, which were printed under his direct supervision
by Italian printers who would have been less likely than their
English colleagues to "correct" Shelley's style. By the same rationale,
we have reduced the punctuation of some poems (particu-
slightly
larly those for which the primary authority is the Prometheus Un-
bound volume) that seem to have been overpunctuated without
Shelley's acquiescence.
Capitalization: Though the significance of Shelley's practice of
capitalization is not yet fully understood in all details, he probably
followed the practice of his time in capitalizing common nouns
to indicate rhetorical emphasis. In "A Plain and Compendious
Grammar of the English Tongue" prefixed to The Complete Letter-
Writer (London: J.
Brambles, A. Meggitt, and }. Waters, 1804),
the anonymous author writes, under the heading "Of Capitals, or
great Letters" (rule 2): "It become customary to begin any
is

substantive in a sentence with a capital, if it bears some considerable

the author's sense

stress of upon it, to make it the more remarkable."
This rule is reinforced by rule 6, which states: "Sometimes capitals
are used in whole words and sentences, when something extraor-
dinary great is expressed" (p. 27). This latter mode of emphasis
is clearly used by Shelley in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," lines
xvi ' Textual Introduction

13, 71, and 83. In any case, it seems best to follow Shelley's own
usage (as nearly as that can be determined from the surviving
evidence) rather than to impose the usage of either a typesetter or
a later editor. In every instance where a later editor has attempted
to revise capitalization, he has merely replaced Shelley's usage with
his own equally erratic and personal one.
 Outline of Shelley's Life

1792 Percy Bysshe Shelley born August 4 at Field Place, near

Horsham, Sussex, the son of Timothy Shelley, member
of Parliament, and grandson of Bysshe Shelley, a wealthy
landowner (baronet, 1806).
1798 Studies with his clergyman, the Reverend Evan
Edwards.
1802- Attends Syon House Academy at Isleworth, near
1804 London.
1804- Studies at Eton.
1810
1808 Begins corresponding with his cousin Harriet Grove
(their "engagement" ends in 1810).
1810 Zastrozzi a Gothic novel, published (spring). Original
y

Poetry by Victor and Cazire published and withdrawn

(autumn ) Enters University College, Oxford, and meets
.

Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a college classmate (Oct.).

Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson pub-
lished (Nov.). St. Irvyne, a second Gothic novel, pub-
lished (Dec).

1811 Meets Harriet Westbrook (Jan.). The Necessity of

Atheism published (Feb.). Expelled with Hogg from
Oxford (March 25). Elopes with Harriet Westbrook;
married in Edinburgh on Aug. 29. At York, Hogg tries
to seduce Harriet; the Shelleys move to Keswick.

1812 Political activities in Dublin. Two pamphlets, Address

to the Irish People and Proposals for an Association . . .

published (Feb.). Declaration of Rights printed. Re-

turns to Wales (April 6); moves to Lynmouth, Devon;
writes Letter to Lord Ellenborough. Joined by Elizabeth
Hitchener, a spinster schoolteacher, in July (she leaves
in Nov.) Goes to North Wales (Sept.) Meets William
. .

Godwin in London (Oct.).

1813 Flees Tremadoc, Wales (Feb. 27); goes to Ireland.
Returns to London (April 5). Queen Mab issued
 .

xviii • Outline of Shelley's Life

(May). Ianthe Shelley born (June 23). Settles at

Bracknell (July).

1814 A Refutation of Deism printed. Elopes with Mary

Wollstonecraft Godwin (July 27). They (with Jane
"Claire" Clairmont, Mary's stepsister) tour the Con-
tinent, returning Sept. 13. First son, Charles, born to
Harriet (Nov. 30).

1815 Sir Bysshe Shelley dies (Jan. 5). Mary's first child born
(Feb. 22; dies two weeks later). In June, Shelley begins
to receive annual income £1,000 (£200 paid directly to
Harriet). Moves to cottage near Windsor Great Park
(Aug.).

1816 William Shelley born (Jan. 24). Alastor published

(Feb.). Visits Switzerland; lives near Lord Byron; writes
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and ''Mont Blanc"
(May-Aug.). Returns to England (Sept. 8 uicide o f ^S
t Fan ny Imlay, Mary's half sister (Oct. 9 ) ^Harriet Shelley/
drowns herself ( Nov. q; discove red Dec. 10). Marries
"
|

Mary (Dec 30)!

1817 Develops friendship with Leigh Hunt, poet and editor

of the Examiner. Allegra, Claire's daughter by Byron,
born (Jan. 12). Denied custody of Ianthe and Charles
(March 27). Settles at Marlow near his friend Thomas
Love Peacock, poet and comic novelist (March). Pro-
posal for Putting Reform to the Vote published
(March). Finishes Laon and Cythna and begins Rosa-
lind and Helen (Sept.). Clara Shelley born (Sept. 2).
History of a Six Weeks Tour published. Writes Ad-
dress .on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (Nov.)
. .

Laon and Cythna published and withdrawn (Dec);

reissued as The Revolt of Islam (Jan. 1818).
1818 Sails toContinent (March 11). Sends Allegra to Byron
(April 28). At Leghorn meets John and Maria Gisborne
and Maria's son Henry Reveley (May-June). At Baths
of Lucca completes Rosalind and Helen (July; pub-
lished spring 1819). Goes to Venice with Claire; Mary
follows with children (Aug.-Sept). Clara Shelley dies
(Sept. 24). At and Maddalo, "Eu-
Este, begins Julian
ganean Hills," Prometheus Unbound, Act I. Visits
Rome; settles at Naples (Dec).
 Outline of Shelley s Life • xix

1819 Leaves Naples (Feb. 28). Writes Acts IMII of Prome-

theus in Rome (March-April). William Shelley dies
(June 7). Moves to Leghorn; writes The Cenci (sum-
mer; published spring 1820) and "Mask of Anarchy"
(Sept.). Moves to Florence (Oct. 2); son Percy Flor-
ence born (Nov. 12). Writes Peter Bell the Third,
"West Wind/' and Philosophical View of Reform;
finishes Julian and Maddalo (published 1824) and
Prometheus Unbound (published Aug. 1820).
1820 Moves to Pisa (Jan. 26) and becomes friendly with Lady
Mount Cashell and George Tighe ("Mr. and Mrs.
Mason"); writes "Sensitive-Plant" (March) At Leghorn .

(June-Aug.) writes "Ode to Liberty," "Sky-lark," "Letter

to Maria Gisborne." At Baths of San Giuliano (Aug.-
Oct.) writes "Witch of Atlas," "Ode to Naples," Swell-
foot the Tyrant (published and suppressed, Dec). Re-
turns to Pisa (Oct. 31).

1821 Visits Teresa Viviani; writes Epipsychidion (Jan. -Feb.;

published anonymously, May). Meets Edward and Jane
Williams (Jan. 13). Writes A Defence of Poetry (Feb.-
March). News of Keats's death (Rome, Feb. 23) arrives
on April 1 1 from Horace Smith, London stockbroker and

writer. Writes Adonais (May-June; printed July). Visits

Byron at Ravenna (Aug.) and persuades him to live at
Pisa (arrives Nov. 1). Writes Hellas (Oct.; published
Feb. 1822).
1822 Works on "Charles the First." Edward John Trelawny
arrives 14).
(Jan. Writes poems to Jane (Jan. ff.).
Allegra Byron dies (April 20). Shelleys and Williamses
move to San Terenzo (April 30). Receives the Don
Juan, his boat (May 12). Writes "Triumph of Life"
(May-June). He and Williams sail to Leghorn to meet
Leigh Hunt (July 1) and drown on return voyage
(July 8).
The Poems
 —

From THE ESDAILE NOTEBOOK 1

2
Zeinab and Kathema

Upon the lonely beach Kathema lay;

Against his folded arm his heart beat fast.
Through gathering tears the Sun's departing ray
In coldness o'er his shuddering spirit past
And all unfelt the breeze of evening came
That fanned with quivering wing his wan cheek's feeble flame.

"Oh!" cried the mourner, "could this widowed soul

But where yonder Sun now speeds to dawn."
fly

—
He paused a thousand thoughts began to roll;
Like waves they swept in restless tumult on,
Like those fast waves that quick-succeeding beat
Without one lasting shape the beach beneath his feet.
And now the beamless, broad and yellow sphere
Half sinking lingered on the crimson sea;
A shape of darksome distance does appear 15

Within its semicircled radiancv.

1. In 1813 Shelley planned to have two Wise and H. Buxton Forman, who issued
volumes of poetry published Queen Mab thirty copies of a thin volume entitled
and the volume of miscellaneous short Poems and Sonnets with a false Phila-
poems that has become known as The delphia imprint in 1887, probably in an
Esdaile Notebook. Thomas Hookham de- attempt to provoke the Esdaile family
clined to publish either volume. Shelley, into permitting publication of the whole.
even in proposing the volume to Hook- Though Neville Rogers included im-
ham, showed his mixed feelings about it: perfect texts of a few more in Shelley at
"My poems, will, I fear, little stand the Work (1956), most of the poems con-
criticism even of friendship. Some of the tinued unpublished until Mrs. Lettice A.
later ones have the merit of conveying a Worrall (nee Esdaile), Shelley's great-
meaning in every word, and these are all granddaughter, sold the notebook at
faithful pictures of my feelings at the public auction. It was purchased by The
time of writing them. But they are, in a Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, and two
great measure, abrupt and obscure all — years later Alfred A. Knopf published
breathing hatred to government and re- Kenneth Neill Cameron's edition, The
ligion, but I think not too openly for Esdaile Notebook: A Volume of Early
publication" {Letters, I, 348). Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1966
Shelley gave the notebook in which Oxford University Press published Rogers'
the fifty-seven poems had been tran- version of The Esdaile Poems (based
scribed to his current wife, Harriet West- largely on a photocopy of the notebook
brook Shelley. When Shelley left Harriet obtained some years before), which cor-
to elope with Mary Godwin, the note- rected some errors in Cameron's edition,
book remained with Harriet, and after while introducing others. Cameron then
Harriet's suicide in November or Decem- presented an exact transcription of the
ber 1816 (see Shelley and his Circle, IV, notebook in an Appendix to vol. IV of
769-802), it was preserved for her chil- Shelley and his Circle (1970).
dren, becoming the possession of Shelley's 2. "Zeinab and Kathema" was probably
daughter Eliza Ianthe, who in 1837 mar- composed in 1810 or 1811. It fuses wild
ried Edward Jeffries Esdaile. In the nine- incidents of Gothic and oriental romances
teenth century Edward Dowden was with a violent attack on British im-
granted access to the notebook and, with perialism abroad and social injustice at
the owner's permission, published ex- home. The name "Zeinab" comes from
cerpts from the poems in his two-volume Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer, where
Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886). Zeinab is Thalaba's widowed mother.
These poems were collected by T. J.
 — —
4 • Zeinab and Kathema
All sense 3 was gone to his betrothed one
His eye fell on the form that dimmed the setting sun,

He thought on his betrothed ... for his youth

With herthat was its charm to ripeness grew. 20

All that was dear in love, or fair in truth,

With her was shared as childhood's moments flew,
And mingled with sweet memories of her
Was life's unveiling morn with all its bliss and care.
A wild and lovely Superstition's 4 spell, 25

Love for the friend that life and freedom gave,

Youth's growing hopes that watch themselves so well,
Passion, so prompt to blight, so strong to save,
And childhood's host of memories combine
Her life and love around his being to entwine. 3°

And to their wishes with its joy-mixed pain

Just as the veil of hope began to fall,

The Christian murderers over-ran the plain,

Ravaging, burning and polluting all.
Zeinab was reft 5 to grace the robbers' land; 35

Each drop of kindred blood stained the invaders' brand.

Yes! they had come their holy book to bring
Which God's own had compiled
son's apostles
That charity and peace, and love might spring
Within a world by God's blind ire defiled, 4°

But rapine, 6 war and treachery rushed before

Their hosts, and murder dyed Kathema's bower in gore.

Therefore his soul was widowed, and alone

He stood in the world's wide and drear expanse.
No human ear could shudder at his groan, 45

No heart could thrill with his unspeaking glance;

One only hope yet lingering dared to burn,
Urging to high emprize" and deeds that danger spurn.

The glow has failed on Ocean's western line,

Faded from every moveless cloud above. 5°

—
The moon is up she that was wont to shine
And bless thy childish nights of guileless love,
Unhappy one, ere Christian rapine tore
All ties, and stain'd thv hopes in a dear mother's gore.

The form Sun was seen

that in the setting 55

Now moonlight slowly nears the shore,

in the
The white sails gleaming o'er the billows green
That sparkle into foam its prow before;

3. Emotional consciousness. 6. Pillage, robbery.

4. False or pagan religion. 7. Anundertaking, especially one of ad-
5. Stolen. venture or chivalry.
 —
Zeinab and Kathema • 5

A wanderer of the deep it seems to be,

On high adventures bent, and feats of chivalry. 6o

Then hope and wonder filled the mourner's mind.

He
gazed till vision even began to fail,
When to the pulses of the evening wind
A little boat approaching gave its sail,
Rode o'er the slow raised surges near the strand, 65

Ran up the beach and gave some stranger men to land.

"If thou wilt bear me to far England's shore
Thine is this heap —the Christian's God!"
The chief with gloating rapture viewed the ore
And his pleased avarice gave the willing nod. 70

They reach the ship, the fresh 'ning breezes rise

And smooth and fast they speed beneath the moonlight skies.
What heart e'er felt more ardent longings now?
What eye than his e'er beamed with riper hope
As curbed impatience on his open brow 75

There painted fancy's unsuspected scope,

As all that's fair the foreign land appeared
By ever present love, wonder and hope endeared?
Meanwhile through calm and storm, through night and day,
Unvarying in her aim the vessel went 8o

As if some inward spirit ruled her way

And her tense sailswere conscious of intent
Till Albion's 8 cliffs gleamed o'er her plunging bow
And Albion's river floods bright sparkled round her prow.

Then on the land in joy Kathema leaped 85

And kissed the soil in which his hopes were sown;

These even now in thought his heart has reaped.
Elate of body and soul he journeyed on
And the strange things of a strange land past by
Like motes 9 and shadows prest upon his charmed eye. 90

Yet Albion's changeful skies and chilling wind

The change from Cashmire's vale might well denote.
There Heaven and Earth are ever bright and kind;
Here, blights and storms and damp forever float
Whilst hearts are more ungenial than the zone 95

Gross, spiritless, alive to no pangs but their own.

There flowers and fruits are ever fair and ripe;

Autumn there mingles with the bloom of spring
And forms unpinched by frost or hunger's gripe
A natural veil o'er natural spirits fling; I0°

Here, woe onbut wealth has set its foot.

all
Famine, disease and crime even wealth's proud gates pollute.

8. England's. numerable minute specks seen in a sun-

9. Particles of dust; especially the in- beam.
 —
6 • Tjeinab and Kathema
Unquiet death and premature decay,
Youth tottering on the crutches of old age,
And, ere the noon of manhood's riper day, I0 5

Pangs that no art of medicine can assuage,

Madness and passion ever mingling flames,
And souls that well become such miserable frames
These are the bribes which Art to man has given
To yield his taintless nature to her sway. IIQ

So might dank night with meteors 1 tempt fair Heav'n

To
blot the sunbeam and forswear the day
gleams of baleful light alone might shew
Till
The pestilential mists, the darkness and the woe.
Kathema little feltthe sleet and wind, «s
He little heeded the wide altered scene;
The flame that lived within his eager mind
There kindledall the thoughts that once had been.

He stood alone in England's varied woe,

Safe, mid the flood of crime that round his steps did flow. I2 °

Itwas an evening when the bitterest breath

Of dark December swept the mists along
That the lone wanderer came to a wild heath.
Courage and hope had staid 2 his nature long;
Now cold, and unappeased hunger spent I2 5

His strength; sensation failed in total languishment.

When he awaked to life cold horror crept

Even to his heart, for a damp deathy smell
Had slowly come around him while he slept.
He started . lo! the fitful moonbeams fell
. .
I 3°

Upon dead and naked female form

a
That from a gibbet 3 high swung to the sullen storm.
And wildly in the wind its dark hair swung,
Low mingling with the clangor of the chain
Whilst ravenous birds of prey that on it clung J 35

In the dull ear of night poured their sad strain,

And ghastlily her shapeless visage shone
In the unsteady light, half mouldered through the bone.

Then madness seized Kathema, and his mind

A
prophecy of horror filled. He scaled I4 °

The gibbet which swung slowly in the wind

High
o'er the heath. —
Scarcely his strength avail'd
To grasp the chain, when by the moonlight's gleam
His palsied gaze was fixed on Zeinab's altered frame.

1. Any luminous optical phenomenon in 3. An upright post with projecting arm

the earth's atmosphere. from which the bodies of criminals were
2. Sustained. hung in chains or irons after execution.
 —— —
Zeinab and Kathema • 7

Yes! in those orbs once bright with life and love I45

Now full-fed worms bask in unnatural light;

That neck on which his eyes were wont to rove
In rapture, changed by putrefaction's blight,
Now rusts the ponderous links that creak beneath
x 5°
Its weight, and turns to life the frightful sport of death.

Then in the moonlight played Kathema's smile

—
Calmly. In peace his spirit seemed to be.
He paused, even like a man at ease awhile,
—
Then spoke "My love! I will be like to thee,
A mouldering carcase or a spirit blest, f 55

With thee corruption's prey, or Heaven's happy guest."

He twined the chain around his neck, then leaped

Forward, in haste to meet the life to come.
An iron-souled son of Europe might have wept
To witness such a noble being's doom 1 6o

As on the death scene Heaven indignant frowned

And Night in horror drew her veil the dead around.
For they had torn his Zeinab from her home
Her innocent habits were all rudely shriven 4 —
And dragged to live in love's untimely tomb l6 s

To prostitution, crime and woe was driven.

The human race seemed leagued against her weal
And indignation cased her naked heart in steel.
Therefore against them she waged ruthless war
With their own arms of bold and bloody crime, no
Even like a mild and sweetly-beaming star
Whose rays were wont to grace the matin prime 5
Changed to a comet, horrible and bright,
Which wild careers 6 awhile then sinks in dark-red night.
Thus, like its God, unjust and pityless, *75

Crimes first are made and then avenged by man,

For where's the tender heart, whose hope can bless
Or
man's, or God's, unprofitable plan
A universe of horror and decay,
Gibbets, disease, and wars and hearts as hard as they. l8 °

4. Confessed, absolved; here used ironi- in the Church of England includes

cally.The penance for Zeinab's "innocent matins, lauds, and prime: matin prime
habits" was "prostitution, crime and would be morning prayers generally,
woe." 6. Moves at full speed.
5. The order for public morning prayer
 —
The Retrospect

1
The Retrospect.

Cwm Elan
1812

To trace Duration's lone career,

To check the chariot of the year, 2
Whose burning wheels forever sweep
The boundaries of oblivion's deep. . . .

To snatch from Time, the monster's, jaw 5

The children which she just had borne

And, ere entombed within her maw, 3
To drag them to the light of morn
And mark each feature with an eye
Of cold and fearless scrutiny. ... I0

It asks a soul not formed to feel,

An eye of glass, a hand of steel,
Thoughts that have passed and thoughts that are
With truth and feeling to compare;
A scene which wildered 4 fancy viewed I5

In the soul's coldest solitude,

With that same scene when peaceful love
Flings rapture's colour o'er the grove
When mountain, meadow, wood and stream
2°
With unalloying glory gleam
And to the spirit's ear and eye
Are unison and harmony.

The moonlight was my dearer day:

Then would I wander far away
And lingering on the wild brook's shore 25

To hear its unremitting roar,

Would lose in the ideal flow
All sense of overwhelming woe;
Or at the noiseless noon of night
Would climb some heathy 5 mountain's height 3°

And listen to the mystic sound

That stole in fitful gasps around.
I joyed to see the streaks of day
Above the purple peaks decay
1. In July and August 1811, Shelley 2. The image of the chariot of being ap-
visited Cwm Elan, the Welsh estate of pears repeatedly in Shelley's poetry; see
his cousin Thomas Grove, just before he footnotes to Queen Mab, 1.134 and
returned to London and eloped with IX. 154.
Harriet Westbrook. In June 1812 he re- 3. Cf. the story of Kronos (Saturn), who
turned to Cwm —
Elan this time with devoured his children; through confusion
Harriet. The poem may owe its name and of his name with Chronos, he was identi-
the theme of its opening lines to Sou- fied with Time.
they's "The Retrospect" (1794), but 4. Lost, straying.
Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) is 5. Covered with heather or other low
the chief analogue and exerted the herbage.
strongest influence on Shelley's poem.
 The Retrospect • 9

And watch the latest line of light 35

Just mingling with the shades of night;

For day with me, was time of woe
When even tears refused to flow;
Then would I stretch my languid frame

Beneath the wild-woods' gloomiest shade 4°

And try to quench the ceaseless flame

That on my withered vitals preyed;
Would close mine eyes and dream I were
On some remote and friendless plain
And long to leave existence there 45
Ifwith it I might leave the pain
That with a finger cold and lean
Wrote madness on my withering mien.
It was not unrequited love
That bade my wildered spirit rove; 50

'Twas not the pride, disdaining life,

That with this mortal world at strife
Would yield to the soul's inward sense,
Then groan in human impotence,
And weep, because it is not given 55

To taste on Earth the peace of Heaven.

'Twas not, that in the narrow sphere
Where Nature fixed my wayward fate
There was no friend or kindred dear
Formed to become that spirit's mate, *°

Which, searching on tired pinion, 6 found

Barren and cold repulse around. . . .

Ah no! yet each one sorrow gave

New graces to the narrow grave:
For broken vows had early quelled 65

The stainless spirit's vestal 7 flame.

Yes! whilst the faithful bosom swelled,
Then the envenomed arrow came
And apathy's unaltering eye
Beamed coldness on the misery; 70

And early I had learned to scorn

The chains of clay that bound a soul
Panting to seize the wings of morn, 8
And where its vital fires were born
To soar, and spurn the cold control 75
Which the vile slaves of earthly night
Would twine around its struggling flight.
O, many were the friends whom fame
Had linked with the unmeaning name 9
6. Wing. notice (fame) that had suggested mar-
7. Chaste or virgin. riage between various friends and him-
8. Cf. Psalms 139:9: "If
I take the wings self, heir of a baronet, a title that he
of the morning .
." . considered unmeaning.
9. Shelley refers to the gossip or public
 —— —
JO • The Retrospect
Whose magic marked among mankind 80

The casket of my unknown mind,

Which hidden from the vulgar glare
Imbibed 1 no fleeting radiance there.
My darksome spirit sought. It found
A friendless solitude around. 8s

For who, that might undaunted stand

The saviour of a sinking land,
Would crawl, its ruthless tyrant's slave',
And fatten upon freedom's grave, 2
Though doomed with her to perish where 9°

The captive clasps abhorred despair. 3

They could not share the bosom's feeling,
Which, passion's every throb revealing,
Dared force on the world's notice cold
Thoughts of unprofitable mould, 95

Who bask in Custom's fickle ray,

Fit sunshine of such wintry day!
They could not in a twilight walk
Weave an impassioned web of talk
Till mysteries the spirit press I0°

In wild yet tender awfulness, 4

Then feel within our narrow sphere
How little yet how great we are!
But they might shine in courtly glare,
Attract the rabble's cheapest stare, I0 5

And might command where'er they move

A thing that bears the name of love;
They might be learned, witty, gay,
Foremost in fashion's gilt array,
On Fame's emblazoned pages shine, II0

Be princes' friends, but never mine!

Ye jagged peaks that frown sublime,

Mocking the blunted scythe of Time,
Whence I would watch its lustre pale

Steal from the moon o'er yonder vale! "5

Thou rock, whose bosom black and vast
Bared to the stream's unceasing flow,
Ever its giant shade doth cast
On the tumultuous surge below!
Woods, to whose depth retires to die I2 °

The wounded echo's melody,

And whither this lone spirit bent
The footstep of a wild intent

1. Absorbed or received. 3. I.e., even if he were doomed to die in

2. continue to enjoy the material
I.e., prison, filled with ("embracing") despair,
benefits and prerogatives that the aristoc- 4. Impressive solemnity; dreadfulness.
racy enjoyed.
 — 1

The Retrospect • 1

Meadows! Whose green and spangled breast

These fevered limbs have often pressed I2 5

Until the watchful fiend despair

Slept in the soothing coolness there!
Have not your varied beauties seen
The sunken eye, the withering mien,
Sad traces of the unuttered pain *3°

That froze my heart and burned my brain?

How changed since nature's summer form

Had lastthe power my grief to charm
Since last ye soothed my spirit's sadness
Strange chaos of a mingled madness! *35

—
Changed! not the loathsome worm that fed
In the dark mansions of the dead,
Now soaring through the fields of air
And gathering purest nectar there,
A butterfly whose million hues r 4°

The dazzled eye of wonder views,

Long lingering on a work so strange,
Has undergone so bright a change!

How do I my
happiness?
feel
I cannot tell, may guess
but they I45

Whose every gloomy feeling gone,

Friendship and passion feel alone;
Who see mortality's dull clouds
Before affection's murmur fly,
Whilst the mild glances of her eye x 5°

Pierce the thin veil of flesh that shrouds

The spirit's radiant sanctuary.

O thou! 5
whose virtues latest known,
First in this heart yet claim'st a throne;
Whose downy sceptre still shall share I55

The gentle sway with virtue there;

Thou fair in form and pure in mind,
Whose ardent friendship rivets fast
The flowery band our fates that bind,
Which incorruptible shall last l6 °

When and cold control

duty's hard
Had thawed around the burning soul;
The gloomiest retrospects that bind
With crowns of thorn the bleeding mind,
The prospects of most doubtful hue l65

That on Fancy's shuddering view,

rise
Are gilt by the reviving ray
WTiich thou hast flung upon my day.

5. Harriet Westbrook Shelley.

 —
12 - To the Emperors of Russia and Austria . . .

1
Sonnet
To a balloon, laden with Knowledge

Bright ball of flame that through the gloom of even

Silently takest thine etherial way
And with surpassing glory dimm'st each ray
Twinkling amid the dark blue Depths of Heaven:
Unlike the Fire thou bearest, 2 soon shalt thou 5

Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom

Whilst that, 3 unquencheable, is doomed to glow
A watch light by the patriot's lonely tomb,
A ray of courage to the opprest and poor,
A spark, though gleaming on the hovel's hearth, I0

Which through the tyrant's gilded domes shall roar,

A beacon in the darkness of the Earth,
A Sun which o'er the renovated scene
Shall dart like Truth where Falshood yet has been.

To the Emperors of Russia and Austria

who eyed the battle of Austerlitz from the heights
whilst Buonaparte was active in the
1
thickest of the fight

Coward Chiefs! who while the fight

Rages in the plain below
Hide the shame of your affright
On yon distant mountain's brow,
Does one human feeling creep 5

Through your hearts' remorseless sleep

On that silence cold and deep?
Does one impulse flow
Such as fires the Patriot's breast,
Such as breaks the Hero's rest? 2 I0

1. In August 1812, Shelley was in Devon- 1. Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the

shire distributing his broadsides (single- combined armies of Russia and Austria
sheet publications) entitled The Devil's at Austerlitz in Moravia on December 2,
Walk (a poem) and Declaration of 1805. Shelley completed another poem
Rights (prose). One method he used to in the same relatively sophisticated stanza
disseminate these works was to seal them form in February 1812; this attack on the
in empty wine bottles and set these afloat emperors of Austria and Russia probably
in the sea. Shelley commemorated this dates from 1813, when England sought
gesture in a sonnet entitled, "On launch- them as allies in a new anti-French coa-
ing some bottles filled with knowledge lition. For the classic fictional descrip-
into the Bristol Channel." If he also tion of the battle of Austerlitz, see
launched one or more of his broadsides Tolstoy's War and Peace, Part III,
in "a balloon," there is no outside chaps. Xllff.
evidence. 2. In lines 5-10 Shelley supplied no end
2. Shelley regularly uses fire as the punctuation except for a period at the
—
symbol of spiritual energy here as end of the stanza. One editor has in-
knowledge that can overcome evil error; serted a question mark at the end of line
he held the Socratic view that evil re- 6, after sleep, instead of after deep in
suited from ignorance. line 7.
3. Fire (line 5).
 To the Emperors of Russia and Austria ... • 13
3
No, cowards! ye are calm and still,
Keen frosts that blight the human bud,
Each opening petal blight and kill
And bathe its tenderness in blood.
Ye hear the groans of those who die, J5

Ye hear the whistling death shots fly

And when the yells of Victory
Float o'er the murdered good
—
Ye smile secure. On yonder plain
20
The game if lost begins again.

Think ye the restless fiend

4
who haunts
The tumult of yon gory field,
Whom neither shame nor danger daunts,
Who dares not fear, who cannot yield,
Will not with Equalizing blow 25

Exalt the high, abase the low

And in one mighty shock o'erthrow
The slaves that sceptres wield
Till from the ruin of the storm
Ariseth Freedom's awful form? 30

Hushed below the battle's jar

Night rests silent on the Heath,
Silent savewhen vultures soar
Above the wounded warrior's death.
How now, unfeeling Kings!
sleep ye 35

Peace seldom folds her snowy wings

On poisoned memory's conscience-stings
Which lurk bad hearts beneath:
Nor downy beds procure repose
Where crime and terror mingle throes. 4°

Yet may your terrors rest secure.

Thou, Northern chief, 5 why startest thou?
Pale Austria, 6 calm those fears. Be sure
The tyrant needs such slaves as you.
Think ye the world would bear his sway 45
Were dastards such as you away?
No! they would pluck his plumage gay
Torn from a nation's woe
And lay him in the oblivious gloom
Where Freedom now prepares your tomb. 50

3. When speaking of human emotions, in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound.

Shelley occasionally uses calm in a 5. Czar Alexander I (reigned 1801-1825).
negative sense to mean "unmoved," or 6. Francis Hapsburg reigned as Holy
"insensitive" (e.g., Prometheus Unbound, Roman Emperor Francis II from 1792 to
1.238, 259). 1806, when Napoleon dissolved the Holy
4. Napoleon, portrayed as a "restless Roman Empire, and as Francis I, Em-
fiend." resembles Satan in Paradise Lost; peror of Austria, 1804-1835.
Cf. Shelley's remarks on Paradise Lost
14 - Queen Mab

1
Queen Mab;
A Philosophical Poem

ECRASEZ L'INFAME! 2
Correspondence de Voltaire.

Avia Pieridum peragro loca, nullius ante

Trita solo; juvat integros accedere fonteis;
Atque haurire: juvatque novos decerpere flores.

Unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae.

Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus; et arctis
Religionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo. 3
Lucret. lib. iv.

AOS TTOV (TTU3, KCU KOCFPLOV Ktl/TJCTW. 4

Archimedes.

To Harriet * * * * * 5

Whose isthe love that, gleaming through the world,

Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn?
Whose is the warm and partial praise,
Virtue's most sweet reward?

1. Shelley conceived Queen Mab, his first later had great influence on British
major poem, in December 1811, and com- Marxists, including George Bernard
posed it between June 1812 and February Shaw. Shelley himself, however, when he
19, 1813. On February 19, 1813, Shelley heard of the 1821 reprinting, wrote from
wrote to his publisher friend Thomas Italy in a public letter: "I regret this
Hookham that it was "finished & tran- publication, not so much from literary
scribed," though the notes were then still vanity, as because I fear it is better
in progress. By May 21, 1813, it was in fitted to injure than to serve the cause of
press, but Shelley was by that date con- freedom."
vinced that the poem was too radical to Queen Mab, "the fairies' midwife,"
be published. Instead he distributed about appears in a famous speech by Mercutio
70 of the 250 copies printed to indi- in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (I.iv.
viduals he believed would be sympathetic, 53-94), in which her mischievous dream-
cutting out his name and address, which making is described in terms that Shelley
appeared as those of the printer. was later to echo in "The Witch of
The poem got some notice in 1817, Atlas," lines 617ff. During the eighteenth
when its moral quality figured in the century Queen Mab was the title char-
decision of the Chancery Court to de- acter (like Mother Goose) in numerous
prive Shelley of custody of his children collections of children's stories. Shelley's
by Harriet. In 1821, Queen Mab was choice of this innocent-sounding name
pirated by William Clark of 201 Strand. for the intermediary between the divine
Clark was prosecuted by the Society for and the human who teaches the soul of
the Suppression of Vice; his edition was Ianthe the revolutionary lessons of the
turned over for sale to Richard Carlile, past, situation of the present, and hopes
the most courageous of all the radical of the future is in keeping with his
booksellers, who also discovered, adver- directions to his publisher to have the
tised, and (probably) sold the 180 re- poem printed "on fine paper & so as to
maining copies of Shelley's original 1813 catch the aristocrats: They will not read
edition of the poem. it, but sons & daughters may"
their
Thereafter Queen Mab was reprinted (Shelley Hookham, March 1813;
to
frequently in various editions. It became Letters, 361).
I,
the Bible of the Chartist movement and 2. "Crush the demon!" In his later years
 Queen Mab • IS

Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul 5

Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow?

Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on,
And loved mankind the more?
Harriet! —
on thine: thou wert my purer mind;
Thou wert the inspiration of my song; I0

Thine are these early wilding flowers,

Though garlanded by me.
Then press into thy breast this pledge of love,
And know, though time may change and years may roll,
Each flowret gathered in mv heart *s

It consecrates to thine.

6
I.

Howwonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn 5

When throned on ocean's wave

It blushes o'er the world:
Yet both so passing wonderful!

Hath then the gloomy Power

Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres I0

Seized on her sinless soul?

Must then that peerless form
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, those azure veins

at Ferney, near Geneva, Voltaire in- haps the finest. The whole of that pas-
eluded the phrase in most of his letters. sage about love is full of irresistible
Shelley himself used the phrase at least energy of language as well as the pro-
twice in his letters, once in French (Dec. foundest futh" {Letters, I, 545).
20, 1810; Letters, I, 29) and again in 4. "Give me somewhere to stand, and I
English (Jan. 3, 1811; Letters, I, 35). will move the earth," attributed to the
According to Peter Gay, Voltaire, like Syracusan Greek scientist Archimedes
Shelley, meant Christianity rather than (287-212 B.C.), refers to his enthusiasm
"religion" by the term Vinfame. for the power of the lever.
3. The Latin epigraph comes from the 5. Shelley first intended this tribute to
opening of Book IV of Lucretius' Epi- his first wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley,
curean poem De rerum natura {Of the to stand as the dedicatory poem in the
Nature of Things). The lines may be collection of shorter works now known
translated "I blaze a trail through path- as The Esdaile Notebook; when he failed
less tracks of the Pierian realm, where to find a publisher for that volume, he
no foot has ever trod before. What joy transferred it (slightly revised) to Queen
it is to discover virgin springs and drink Mab.
their waters, and what joy to gather new 6. Shelley described his choice of verse
flowers . . never before wreathed by
. form in a letter to Hogg: "The didactic
the Muses around anyone's head! First, is in blank heroic verse, & the descriptive
I teach of great matters, and [secondly] in blank lyrical measure. If authority is
I free men's minds from the crippling of any weight in support of this singu-
bonds of superstition." The main subject larity, Miltons Samson Agonistes, the
of Book IV the nature of sensation
is Greek Choruses, & (you will laugh)
and erotic Shelley later wrote of
love. Southeys Thalaba may be adduced" (Feb.
Lucretius' poem: "The 4th book is per- 7, 1813; Letters, I, 352).
16 • Queen Mab
Which steal like streams along a field of snow, I5

That lovely outline, which is fair

As breathing marble, perish?
Must putrefaction's breath
Leave nothing of this heavenly sight
20
But loathsomeness and ruin?
Spare nothing but a gloomy theme,
On which the lightest heart might moralize?
Or is it only a sweet slumber
Stealing o'er sensation,
Which the breath of roseate morning *5

Chaseth into darkness?

Will Ianthe 7 wake again,
And give that faithful bosom joy
Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch
Light, life and rapture from her smile? 30

Yes! she will wake again,

Although her glowing limbs are motionless,
And silent those sweet lips,
Once breathing eloquence,
That might have soothed a tyger's rage, 35

Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror.

Her dewy eyes are closed,
And on their lids, whose texture fine
Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,
The baby Sleep is pillowed: 4°

Her golden tresses shade

The bosom's stainless pride,
Curling like tendrils of the parasite 8
Around a marble column.

Hark! whence that rushing sound? 45

'Tis like the wondrous strain

That round a lonely ruin swells,
Which, wandering on the echoing shore,
The enthusiast hears at evening:
'Tis softer than the west wind's sigh; so

'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes

Of that strange lyre 9 whose strings
The genii of the breezes sweep:
Those lines of rainbow light
Are like the moonbeams when thev fall 55

7. The character is modeled on Harriet signed to be placed in an open window

Shelley (Ianthe's name was given to or on a porch, its strings would vibrate
Shelley's and Harriet's first child, a in the wind, producing musical sounds
daughter born June 23, 1813). (like wind chimes). The image of the
8. I.e., ivy. poet as an Aeolian harp moved by the
9. The Aeolian harp or wind lyre was an winds of a spiritual force or being is
instrument popular in Shelley's time; de- prominent in Romantic poetry.
 ——
Queen Mab • 17

Through some cathedral window, but the teints 1

Are such as may not find
Comparison on earth.

Behold the chariot of the Fairy Queen!

Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air; 2 6°

Their filmy pennons 3 at her word they furl,

And stop obedient to the reins of light:
These the Queen of spells drew in,
She spread a charm around the spot,
And leaning graceful from the etherial car, 65

Long did she gaze, and silently,

Upon the slumbering maid.

Oh! not the visioned poet in his dreams,

When silvery clouds float through the 'wildered brain,
When every sight of lovely, wild and grand 7°

Astonishes, enraptures, elevates,

When
fancy at a glance combines
The wondrous and the beautiful,
So bright, so fair, so wild a shape
Hath ever yet beheld, 75

As that which reined the coursers of the air,

And poured the magic of her gaze
Upon the maiden's sleep.
The broad and yellow moon
Shone dimly through her form 8o

That form of faultless symmetry;

The pearly and pellucid 4 car
Movednot the moonlight's line:
'Twas not an earthly pageant:
Those who had looked upon the sight, 8s

Passing all human glory,

Saw not the yellow moon,
Saw not the mortal scene,
Heard not the night-wind's rush,
Heard not an earthly sound, *>

Saw but the fairy pageant,

Heard but the heavenly strains
That filled the lonely dwelling.
The Fairy's frame was slight, yon fibrous cloud,
That catches but the palest tinge of even, 95

And which the straining eye can hardly seize

When melting into eastern twilight's shadow,
Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star
That gems the glittering coronet of morn, 5

1. Hues or tints. 3. I.e., wings ("pinions").

2. The air gives solid footing to the 4. Translucent or transparent,
hooves of "celestial coursers," whose 5. The planet Venus as morning star,
density is no greater than that of air.
18 • Queen Mab
Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful, I0°

As that which, bursting from the Fairy's form,

Spread a purpureal 6 halo round the scene,
Yet with an undulating motion,
Swayed to her outline gracefully.
From her celestial car I0 5

The Fairy Queen descended,

And thrice she waved her wand
Circled with wreaths of amaranth: 7
Her thin and misty form
Moved with the moving air, II0

And the clear silver tones,

As thus she spoke, were such
As are unheard by all but gifted ear.

FAIRY.
your balmiest influence shed!
Stars!
Elements! your wrath suspend! "5
Sleep, Ocean, in the rocky bounds
That circle thy domain!
Let not a breath be seen to stir
Around yon grass-grown ruin's height,
Let even the restless gossamer I2 °

Sleep on the moveless air!

Soul of Ianthe! thou,
Judged alone worthy of the envied boon,
That waits the good and the sincere; that waits
Those who have struggled, and with resolute will I2 5

Vanquished earth's pride and meanness, burst the chains,

The icy chains of custom, and have shone
The day-stars 8 of their age; —Soul of Ianthe!
Awake! arise!

Sudden arose 9 J 3°

Ianthe's Soul; it stood

All beautiful in naked purity,
The perfect semblance of its bodily frame,
Instinct 1 with inexpressible beauty and grace;
Each stain of earthliness I35

Had passed away, it reassumed

Its and stood
native dignity,
Immortal amid ruin.

6. Purple; a poetic usage also found in an immortal, everlasting (sempiternal,

Wordsworth and Byron. 149) soul is strongly present in Shelley's
7. From the Greek meaning "unfading" early poetry through Queen Mab, but
or "incorruptible," the name given to a appears to be more figurative in later
mythical flower whose blossoms never poems like Adonais.
die. 1. Animated, impelled; the word appears
8. Stars so bright that they are visible in Milton's description of the Chariot of
during the day; Milton uses the phrase Paternal Deitie (Paradise Lost, VI.
(Lycidas, 168) to refer to the sun. 749ff.), which underlies this and several
9. The sharp distinction found in lines other descriptions of chariots in Shelley's
130-156 between a perishable body and poetry.
 Queen Mab • 19

Upon the couch the body lay

Wrapt in the depth of slumber: *4o

were fixed and meaningless.

Its features
Yet animal life was there,
And every organ yet performed
Its natural functions: 'twas a sight
Of wonder to behold the body and soul. *45

The self-same lineaments, the same

Marks of identity were there:
Yet, oh, how different! One aspires to Heaven,
Pants for sempiternal heritage,
its

And ever-changing, ever-rising still, I 5°

Wantons in endless being.

The other, for a time the unwilling sport
Of circumstance and passion, struggles on;
Fleets through its sad duration rapidly;
Then, like an useless and worn-out machine, *5S

Rots, perishes, and passes.

FAIRY.

Spirit! who hast dived so deep;

Spirit! who
hast soared so high;
Thou
the fearless, thou the mild,
Accept the boon thy worth hath earned, l6°

Ascend the car with me.

SPIRIT.

Do I dream? is this new feeling

But a visioned ghost of slumber?
If indeed I am a soul,
A free, a disembodied soul, l6 5

Speak again to me.

FAIRY.

I am Mab: to me 'tis given

the Fairy
Trie wonders of the human world to keep:
The secrets of the immeasurable past,
In the unfailing consciences of men, x 7°

Those stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find:

The future, from the causes which arise
In each event, I gather: not the sting
Which retributive memory implants
In the hard bosom of the selfish man; "75

Nor that extatic and exulting throb

Which virtue's votary feels when he sums up
The thoughts and actions of a well-spent day,
Are unforeseen, unregistered by me:
And it is yet permitted me, to rend l8 °

The mortal frailty, that the spirit

veil of
Clothed in its changeless purity, may know
 — ——
20 • Queen Mab
How soonest to accomplish the great end
For which it hath its being, and may taste

That peace, which in the end all life will share. l8 5

This is the meed of virtue; happy Soul,

Ascend the car with me!
The chains of earth's immurement
Fellfrom Ianthe's spirit;
They shrank and brake 2 like bandages of straw I9°

Beneath a wakened giant's strength.

She knew her glorious change,
And felt in apprehension uncontrolled
New raptures opening round:
Each day-dream of her mortal life, ! 95

Each frenzied vision of the slumbers

That closed each well-spent day,
Seemed now to meet reality.
The Fairy and the Soul proceeded;
The silver clouds disparted; 20°

And as the car of magic they ascended,

Again the speechless music swelled,
Again the coursers of the air
Unfurled their azure pennons, and the Queen
Shaking the beamy reins 205

Bade them pursue their way.

The magic car moved on.

The night was fair, and countless stars
Studded heaven's dark blue vault,
2I °
Just o'er the eastern wave
Peeped the first faint smile of morn:
The magic car moved on
From the celestial hoofs
The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew,
And where the burning wheels 2I5

Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak,

Was traced a line of lightning.
Now it flew far above a rock,
The utmost verge of earth,
The rival of the Andes, 3 whose dark brow
Lowered o'er the silver sea.

Far, far below the chariot's path,

Calm as a slumbering babe,
Tremendous Ocean lay.
The mirror of its stillness shewed 225

The pale and waning stars,

2. Broke. mountains of Japan were among those
3. In Shelley's day natural historians be- that rivaled them in height (Buffon.
lieved that the Andes were the highest Natural History).
mountains in the world and that the
 Queen Mab • 21

The chariot's fiery track,

And the grey light of morn
Tinging those fleecy clouds
That canopied the dawn. 2 3°

Seemed it, that the chariot's way

Lay through the midst of an immense concave,
Radiant with million constellations, tinged
With shades of infinite colour,
And semicircled with a belt 2 35

Flashing incessant meteors.

The magic car moved on.

As they approached their goal
The coursers seemed to gather speed;
The sea no longer was distinguished; earth 2 4°

Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere;

The sun's unclouded orb
Rolled through the black concave; 4
Its rays of rapid light
2 *5
Parted around the chariot's swifter course,
And fell, like ocean's feathery spray
Dashed from the boiling surge
Before a vessel's prow.
The magic car moved on.
Earth's distant orb appeared 2S°

The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;

Whilst round the chariot's way
Innumerable systems rolled, 5
And countless spheres diffused
An ever-varying glory. 2 55

It was a sight of wonder: some

Were horned like the crescent moon;
Some shed a mild and silver beam
Like Hesperus 6 o'er the western sea;
Some
dash'd athwart with trains of flame, 26°

Like worlds to death and ruin driven;

Some shone like suns, and as the chariot passed,
Eclipsed all other light.

Spirit of Nature! here!

In this interminable wilderness 26 5

Of worlds, at whose immensity

4."Beyond our atmosphere the sun rightly feelsits mystery and grandeur, is
would appear a rayless orb of fire in the in no danger of seduction from the
midst of a black concave. The equal falshoods of religious systems, or of
diffusion of its light on earth is owing deifying the principle of the universe.
. . .

to the refraction of the rays by the Millions and millions of suns are ranged
atmosphere, and their reflection from around us, all attended by innumerable
other bodies" (the beginning of Shelley's worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmoni-
note). ous, all keeping the paths of immutable
5. "The plurality of worlds, —the indefi- necessity" (from Shelley's note).
niteimmensity of the universe is a most 6. The planet Venus as the evening star;
awful subject of contemplation. He who also called Vesper.
22 • Queen Mab
Even soaring fancy staggers,
Here is thy fitting temple.
Yet not the lightest leaf
That quivers to the passing breeze 27 °

Is less instinct with thee:

Yet not the meanest worm
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead
Less shares thy eternal breath.
2 75
Spirit of Nature! thou!
Imperishable as this scene,
Here is thy fitting temple.

II.
If solitude hath ever led thy steps
To the wild ocean's echoing shore,
And thou hast lingered there,
Until the sun's broad orb
Seemed resting on the burnished wave, 5

Thou must have marked the lines

Of purple gold, that motionless
Hung o'er the sinking sphere:
Thou must have marked the billowy clouds
Edged with intolerable radiancy I0

Towering like rocks of jet

Crowned with a diamond wreath.
And yet there is a moment,
Whenthe sun's highest point
I5
Peeps western edge,
like a star o'er ocean's
When those far clouds of feathery gold,
Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
Like islands on a dark blue sea;
Then has thy fancy soared above the earth,
And furled its wearied wing 20

Within the Fairy's fane. 7

Yet not the golden islands
Gleaming in yon flood of light,
Nor the feathery curtains
2*
Stretching o'er the sun's bright couch,
Nor the burnished ocean waves
Paving that gorgeous dome,
So fair, so wonderful a sight
As Mab's etherial palace could afford.
Yet likest evening's vault, that faery Hall! 3°

As Heaven, low resting on the wave, it spread

Its floors of flashing light,
Its vast and azure dome,
Its fertile golden islands
Floating on a silver sea; 35

7. Temple.
 —
Queen Mab • 23

Whilst suns their mingling beamings darted

Through clouds of circumambient 8 darkness,
And pearly battlements around
Looked o'er the immense of Heaven.

The magic car no longer moved. 40

The Fairy and the Spirit

Entered the Hall of Spells:
Those golden clouds
That rolled in glittering billows
Beneath the azure canopy 45

With the etherial footsteps trembled not:

The light and crimson mists,
Floating to strains of thrilling melody
Through that unearthly dwelling,
Yielded to every movement of the will. 5°

Upon their passive swell the Spirit leaned,

And, for the varied bliss that pressed around,
Used not the glorious privilege
Of virtue and of wisdom.
"Spirit!" the Fairy said, 55

And pointed to the gorgeous dome,

"This is a wondrous sight
And mocks all human grandeur;
But, were it virtue's only meed, 9 to dwell
In a celestial palace, all resigned 6o

To pleasurable impulses, immured

Within the prison of itself, the will
Of changeless nature would be unfulfilled.
Learn to make others happy. Spirit, come!
This is thine high reward: —
the past shall rise; 6s

Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach

The secrets of the future."
The Fairy and the Spirit
Approached the overhanging battlement.
Below lay stretched the universe! 70

There, far as the remotest line

That bounds imagination's flight,
Countless and unending orbs
In mazv motion intermingled,
Yet still fulfilled immutably 75

Eternal nature's law.

Above, below, around,
The circling systems formed
A wilderness of harmony;
Each with undeviating aim, 8o

In eloquent silence, through the depths of space

Pursued its wondrous way.

8. Surrounding. 9. Reward.
 ——
24 - Queen Mob
There was a little light
That twinkled in the misty distance:
None but a spirit's eye 85

Might ken 1 that rolling orb;

None but a spirit's eye,
And in no other place
But that celestial dwelling, might behold
Each action of this earth's inhabitants. .
90

But matter, space and time

In those aerial mansions cease to act;
And all-prevailing wisdom, when it reaps
The harvest of its excellence, o'erbounds
Those obstacles, of which an earthly soul 95

Fears to attempt the conquest.

The Fairy pointed to the earth.

The eve
Spirit's intellectual
Its kindred beings recognized.
The thronging thousands, to a passing view, I0°

Seemed like an anthill's citizens.

How wonderful! that even
The passions, prejudices, interests,
That sway the meanest being, the weak touch
That moves the finest nerve, 10 5

And in one human brain

Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link
In the great chain of nature.

"Behold," the Fairy cried,

"Palmyra's ruined palaces! 2 — IIQ

Behold! where grandeur frowned;

Behold! where pleasure smiled;
What now remains? the memory —
Of senselessness and shame
What is immortal there? u5
—
Nothing it stands to tell
A melancholy tale, to give
An awful warning: soon
Oblivion will steal silentlv
I2 °
The remnant of its fame.
Monarchs and conquerors there
Proud o'er prostrate millions trod
The earthquakes of the human race;
Like them, forgotten when the ruin
I2 5
That marks their shock is past.

1. Recognize. lian successfully besieged Zenobia there.

2. Palmyra, in what is now Syria, was Palmyra's ruins were invoked by authors,
once a flourishing city. Under its princess especially in Volney's Ruins of Empire,
Zenobia Septima (who became first the as an illustration of the ephemeral nature
wife and then the heir of Odenatus, co- of human glory; Shelley's friend Thomas
ruler of the Roman Empire) Palmyra Love Peacock published a poem entitled
challenged Rome itself, but the city was Palmyra on this theme in 1806.
totally destroyed in 273 a.d. after Aure-
 Queen Mab • 25
"Beside the eternal Nile,
The Pyramids have risen.
Nile shall pursue his changeless way:
Those pyramids shall fall;
Yea! not a stone shall stand to tell x 3o

The spot whereon they stood!

Their very site shall be forgotten,
As is their builder's name!

"Behold yon sterile spot;

Where now the wandering Arab's tent J 35

Flaps in the desart-blast.

There once old Salem's haughty fane 3
Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes,
And in the blushing face of day
x 4o
Exposed its shameful glory.
Oh! many a widow, many an orphan cursed
The building of that fane; and many a father,
Worn out with toil and slavery, implored
The poor man's God to sweep it from the earth,
And spare his children the detested task J 45

Of piling stone on stone, and poisoning

The choicest days of life,
To soothe a dotard's 4 vanity.
There an inhuman and uncultured race
Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God; I5 °

They rushed to war, tore from the mother's womb

—
The unborn child, old age and infancy
Promiscuous 5 perished; their victorious arms
Left not a soul to breathe. 6 Oh! they were fiends:
But what was he who taught them that the God J 55

Of nature and benevolence hath given

A special sanction to the trade of blood?
His name and theirs are fading, and the tales
Of this barbarian nation, which imposture
terror credits, 7 are pursuing l6 °
Recites till

Itself into forgetfulness.

"Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood,

There is a moral desart now:
The mean and miserable huts,
The yet more wretched palaces, l6s

Contrasted with those antient fanes,

Now crumbling to oblivion;
3. The Temple at Jerusalem, sacked by eenth century, from Voltaire to Thomas
the Emperor Vespasian and his ;on Titus Paine. Attacks on the Jews were more
in 70 a.d. acceptable in England than attacks on
4. The dotard is King Solomon. Christianity, which was Shelley's ulti-
5. Indiscriminately. mate target.
6. Shelley's attack on the religion of the 7.tales . credits: The Old Testament
. .

Jews grew out of similar attacks by and perhaps the Apocrypha, sacred writ-
moralistic skeptics throughout the eight- ings of the Jews.
 —
26 • Queen Mab
The long and lonely colonnades,
Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks, 8
I7 °
Seem like a well-known tune,
Which, in some dear scene we have loved to hear,
Remembered now in sadness.
But, oh! how much more changed,
How gloomier is the contrast
Of human nature there! I? 5

Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave,

A coward and a fool, spreads death around
Then, shuddering, meets his own.
Where Cicero and Antoninus lived, 9
A cowled and hypocritical monk l8 °

Prays, curses and deceives.

"Spirit! ten thousand years

Have scarcely past away,
Since, in the waste where now the savage drinks
His enemy's blood, and aping Europe's sons, l8 5

Wakes the unholv song of war,

Arose a stately city, 1
Metropolis of the western continent:
There, now, the mossy column-stone,
Indented by time's unrelaxing grasp, x 9°

Which once appeared to brave

All, save its country's ruin;
There the wide forest scene,
Rude in the uncultivated loveliness
Of gardens long run wild, I9 5

Seems, to the unwilling sojourner, whose steps

Chance in that desart has delaved,
Thus to have stood since earth was what it is.

Yet once it was the busiest haunt,

Whither, as to a common centre, flocked 20°

Strangers, and ships, and merchandise:

Once peace and freedom blest
The cultivated plain:
But wealth, that curse of man,
2 °5
Blighted the bud of its prosperity:
Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty,
Fled, to return not, until man shall know
That they alone can give the bliss
Worthv a soul that claims
2I °
Its kindred with eternity.

8. The spirit of Freedom from the Greek Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, also a Stoic
and Roman republics haunts the monu- philosopher, are named as the virtuous
ments of their past glories. spirits of ancient Rome.
9. Cicero, republican orator and Skeptic 1. Lines 182-210 probably refer to the
philosopher, and the good emperor ruins of Mayan cities in Central America.
 Queen Mab • 27
"There's not one atom of yon earth
But once was living man;
Nor the minutest drop of rain,
That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,
But flowed in human veins: 2I 5

And from the burning plains

Where Libyan monsters yell,
From the most gloomy glens
Of Greenland's sunless clime,
To where the golden fields 22 °

Of fertile England spread

Their harvest to the day,
Thou canst not find one spot
Whereon no city stood.

"How
strange is human pride! 22 5

thee that those living things,

I tell

To whom the fragile blade of grass,

That springeth in the morn
And perisheth ere noon,
Is an unbounded world; 2 3°

I tell thee that those viewless

2 beings,

Whose mansion is the smallest particle

Of the impassive 3 atmosphere,
Think, feel live like man;
and
That their affections and antipathies, 2 35

Like his, produce the laws

Ruling their moral state;
And the minutest throb
That through their frame diffuses
The slightest, faintest motion, 2 4o

Is fixed and indispensable

As the majestic laws
That rule yon rolling orbs." 4
The Fairy paused. The Spirit,
In extacy of admiration, felt * 45

All knowledge of the past revived; the events

Of old and wondrous times,
Which dim tradition interruptedly
Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded
In just perspective to the view; 2 5°

Yet dim from their infinitude.

The Spirit seemed to stand
High on an isolated pinnacle;
The flood of ages combating below,

2. Invisible. able to the universe men inhabit (lines

3. Insensate; unable to feel pain. 225-243) is given another form in his
4. Shelley's conception that there are "Ode to Heaven."
minute universes within atoms compar-
28 • Queen Mah
The depth of the unbounded universe 2 55

Above, and all around

Nature's unchanging harmony.

III.
"Fairy!" the Spirit said,
And on the Queen of spells
Fixed her etherial eyes,
"I thank thee. Thou hast given
A boon which I will not resign, and taught 5

A lesson not to be unlearned. I know

The past, and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive
Experience from his folly: I0

For, when the power of imparting joy

Is equal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other Heaven" 5

MAB.
Turn thee, surpassing Spirit!
Much yet remains unscanned. l $

Thou knowest how great is man,

Thou knowest his imbecility: 6
Yet learn thou what he is:
Yet learn the lofty destiny
Which restless time prepares 20

For every living soul.

Behold a gorgeous palace, that amid

Yon populous city, rears its thousand towers
And seems itself a city. Gloom v troops
Of sentinels, in stern and silent ranks, 25

Encompass it around: the dweller there

Cannot be free and happy; nearest thou not
The curses of the fatherless, the groans
Of those who have no friend? He passes on:
The King, the wearer of a gilded chain 3°

That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool

Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave
Even to the basest appetites that man—
Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles
At the deep curses which the destitute 35

Mutter in secret, and a sullen joy

Pervades his bloodless heart when thousands groan

5. The discrepancy between the will to creasing men's knowledge, and he finds
do good and the power of doing so is a no absolute need for Heaven or an after-
major theme throughout Shelley's poetry; life,
in Queen Mab he advocates increasing 6. Weakness, feebleness,
the human power for doing good by in-
 —
Queen Mab • 29
But for those morsels which his wantonness
Wastes in unjoyous revelry, to save
All that they love from famine: when he hears 4°

The tale of horror, to some ready-made face

Of hypocritical assent he turns,
Smothering the glow of shame, that, spite of him,
Flushes his bloated cheek.
Now to the meal
Of silence, grandeur, and excess, he drags 45
His palled 7 unwilling appetite. If gold,
Gleaming around, and numerous viands 8 culled
From every clime, could force the loathing sense
—
To overcome satiety, if wealth
The spring it draws from poisons not, or vice, — so

Unfeeling, stubborn vice, converteth not

Its food to deadliest venom; then that king
Is happy; and the peasant who fulfils
His unforced task, when he returns at even,
And by the blazing faggot 9 meets again 55

Her welcome for whom all his toil is sped,

Tastes not a sweeter meal.
Behold him now
Stretched on the gorgeous couch; his fevered brain
Reels dizzily awhile: but ah! too soon
The slumber of intemperance subsides, *°

And conscience, that undying serpent, calls

Her venomous brood to their nocturnal task.
Listen! he speaks! oh! mark that frenzied eye
Oh! mark that deadly visage.

KING.
No cessation!
Oh! must Awful death,
this last for ever? 6s

I wish, yet fear to clasp thee! —

Not one moment
Of dreamless sleep! O dear and blessed peace!
Why dost thou shroud thy vestal purity
In penury and dungeons? wherefore lurkest
With danger, death, and solitude; yet shunn'st 7°

The palace I have built thee? Sacred peace!

Oh visit me but once, but pitying shed
One drop of balm upon my withered soul.
THE FAIRY.
Vain man! that palace the virtuous heart,
is

And peace defileth not her snowy robes 75

In such a shed as thine. Hark! yet he mutters;

His slumbers are but varied agonies,
They prey like scorpions on the springs of life.
7. Weakened, enfeebled. 9. A bundle of twigs or small sticks tied
8. Articles of food, victuals. together for use as fuel.
30 • Queen Mab
There needeth not the hell that bigots frame
To punish those who err: earth in itself 8o

Contains at once the evil and the cure;

And all-sufficing nature can chastise
—
Those who transgress her law, she only knows
How justly to proportion to the fault
The punishment it merits.
Is it strange 85

That this poor wretch should pride him in nis woe?

Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hug
The scorpion that consumes him? Is it strange
That, placed on a conspicuous throne of thorns,
Grasping an iron sceptre, and immured 9°

Within a splendid prison, whose stern bounds

Shut him from all that's good or dear on earth,
His soul asserts not its humanity?
That man's mild nature rises not in war
Against a king's employ? No
—
'tis not strange. 95

He, like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts and lives

Just as his father did; the unconquered powers
Of precedent and custom interpose
Between a king and virtue. Stranger yet,
To those who know not nature, nor deduce I0°

The future from the present, it may seem,

That not one slave, who suffers from the crimes
Of this unnatural being; not one wretch,
Whose children famish, and whose nuptial bed
Is earth's unpitying bosom, rears an arm I0 5

To dash him from his throne!

Those gilded flies 1
That, basking in the sunshine of a court,
Fatten on its corruption! —
what are they?
— The drones 2 of the community; they feed
On the mechanic's labour: the starved hind II0

For them compels the stubborn glebe 3 to yield

Its unshared harvests; and von squalid form,
Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes
A sunless life in the unwholesome mine,
Drags out in labour a protracted death, II5

To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil,

That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.

Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?

Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heap
I2 °
Toil and unvanquishable penury

1. Thekings' courtiers; the literary allu- Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of

sion isto the description of Sporus in the Bees (1714).
Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 305- 3. hind . glebe: The hired agricultural
. .

333, especially 309-311. laborer plows the stubborn soil or clod

2.The natural analogy is to a beehive of earth,
community and the literary allusion to
 Queen Mab • 31

On those who build their palaces, and bring

—
Their daily bread? From vice, black loathsome vice;
From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong;
From all that genders misery, and makes
Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust, I2 5

Revenge, and murder. And when reason's voice,

. . .

Loud as the voice of nature, shall have waked

The and mankind perceive that vice
nations;
Is and misery; that virtue
discord, war,
Is peace, and happiness and harmony; J 3o

When man's maturer nature shall disdain

The playthings of its childhood; —kingly glare
Will lose its power authority
to dazzle; its

Will silently pass by; the gorgeous throne

Shall stand unnoticed in the regal hall, J 35

Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood's trade

Shall be as hateful and unprofitable
As that of truth is now.
Where is the fame
Which the vainglorious mighty of the earth
Seek to eternize? Oh! the faintest sound w
From time's light footfall, the minutest wave
That swells the flood of ages, whelms in nothing
The unsubstantial bubble. Aye! to-day
Stern is the tyrant's mandate, red the gaze
That flashes desolation, strong the arm x 45

That scatters multitudes. To-morrow comes!

That mandate is a thunder-peal that died
In ages past; that gaze, a transient flash
On which the midnight closed, and on that arm
The worm has made his meal.
The virtuous man, x 5<>

Who, great in his humility, as kings

Are little in their grandeur; he who leads
Invincibly a life of resolute good,
And stands amid the silent dungeon-depths
More free and fearless than the trembling judge, I55

Who, clothed in venal power, vainly strove

To bind the impassive 4 spirit; when he falls, —
His mild eye beams benevolence no more:
Withered the hand outstretched but to relieve;
Sunk Reason's simple eloquence, that rolled l6°

But to appal the guilty. Yes! the grave

Hath quenched that eye, and death's relentless frost
Withered that arm but the unfading fame
:

Which virtue hangs upon its votary's tomb;

The deathless memory of that man, whom kings l6 5

Call to their mind and tremble; the remembrance

4. Unyielding (cf. 11.233).

 —
32 • Queen Mab
With which the happy spirit contemplates
Its well-spent pilgrimage on earth,
Shall never pass away.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; no

The subject, not the citizen: for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, for ever play
A losing game into each other's hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. I7 5

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whatever it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.
When Nero, l8 °

High over flaming Rome, with savage joy

Lowered 5 like a fiend, drank with enraptured ear
The shrieks of agonizing death, beheld
The frightful desolation spread, and felt
A new-created sense within his soul l85

Thrill to the sight, and vibrate to the sound;

Thinkest thou his grandeur had not overcome
The force of human kindness? and, when Rome,
With one stern blow, hurled not the tyrant down,
IO°
Crushed not the arm red with her dearest blood,
Had not submissive abjectness destroyed
Nature's suggestions?
Look on yonder earth:
The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun
Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees,
Arise in due succession; all things speak IQ 5

Peace, harmony, and love. The universe,

In nature's silent eloquence, declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy,
All but the outcast man. He fabricates"
2 °°
The sword which stabs his peace; he chcrisheth
The snakes that gnaw his heart; he raiseth up
The tyrant, whose delight is in his woe,
Whose sport is in his agony. Yon sun,
Lights it the great alone? Yon silver beams,
2 °5
Sleep they less sweetly on the cottage thatch,
Than on the dome of kings? Is mother earth
A step-dame to her numerous sons, who earn
Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil;
A mother onlv to those puling 7 babes
Who, nursed in ease and luxury, make men 2I °

5. Frowned. 7. Whining or complaining.

6. Makes.
 : —
Queen Mab • 33

The playthings of their babyhood, and mar,

In self-important childishness, that peace
Which men alone appreciate?
Spirit of Nature! no.
The pure diffusion of thy essence throbs 2I 5

Alike in every human heart.

Thou, aye, erectest there
Thy throne of power unappealable:
Thou art the judge beneath whose nod
Man's and frail authority
brief 22 °

powerless as the wind

Is
That passeth idly by.
Thine the tribunal which surpasseth
The shew of human justice,
As God surpasses man. 22 5

Spirit of Nature! thou

Life of interminable multitudes;
Soul of those mighty spheres
Whose changeless paths through Heaven's deep silence lie;

Soul of that smallest being, 2 3°

The dwelling of whose life

Is one faint April sun-gleam;
Man, like these passive things,
Thy unconsciously f ulfilleth
will
Like theirs, his age of endless peace, 2 35

Which time is fast maturing,

Will swiftly, surely come;
And the unbounded frame, which thou pervadest,
Will be without a flaw
Marring its perfect symmetry. 2 4°

IV.

[the fairy continues:]

How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh,
Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear,
Were discord to the speaking quietude
That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon vault, 8
Studded with stars unutterably bright, 5

Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,

Seems like a canopy which love had spread
To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills,
Robed in a garment of untrodden snow;
Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend, 9 I0

So stainless, that their white and glittering spires

Tinge not the moon's pure beam; yon castled steep,
Whose banner hangeth o'er the time-worn tower
8. Black (ebony) arch. 9. Hang down.
34 Queen Mab
So idly, that rapt fancy deemeth it
A metaphor of peace; all form a scene— J 5

Where musing solitude might love to lift

Her soul above this sphere of earthliness;
Where silence undisturbed might watch alone,
So cold, so bright, so still.

The orb of day,

In southern climes, o'er ocean's waveless fiejd 20

Sinks sweetly smiling: not the faintest breath

Steals o'er the unruffled deep; the clouds of eve
Reflect unmoved the lingering beam of day;
And vesper's 1 image on the western main
Is beautifully still. To-morrow comes: 25

Cloud upon cloud, in dark and deepening mass,

Roll o'er the blackened waters; the deep roar
Of distant thunder mutters awfully;
Tempest unfolds its pinion o'er the gloom
That shrouds the boiling surge; the pityless fiend, 3°

With all his winds and lightnings, tracks his prey;

The torn deep yawns, —
the vessel finds a grave
Beneath its jagged gulph.
Ah! whence yon glare
That the arch of heaven?
fires —
that dark red smoke
Blotting the silver moon? The stars are quenched 35

In darkness, and the pure and spangling snow

Gleams faintly through the gloom that gathers round!
Hark to that roar, whose swift and deaf'ning peals
In countless echoes through the mountains ring,
Startling pale midnight on her starry throne! *°

Now swells the intermingling din; the jar

Frequent and frightful of the bursting bomb;
The falling beam, the shriek, the groan, the shout,
The ceaseless clangor, and the rush of men
Inebriate with rage: —
loud, and more loud 45

The discord grows; till pale death shuts the scene,

And o'er the conqueror and the conquered draws
His cold and bloody shroud. Of all the men —
Whom day's departing beam saw blooming there,
In proud and vigorous health; of all the hearts 50

That beat with anxious life at sun-set there;

How few survive, how few are beating now!
All is deep silence, like the fearful calm
That slumbers in the storm's portentous pause;
Save when the frantic wail of widowed love 55

Comes shuddering on the blast, or the faint moan

With which some soul bursts from the frame of clay
Wrapt round its struggling powers.

1. The planet Venus as the evening star (see 1.259).

 —
Queen Mab •
35
The grey morn
Dawns on the mournful scene; the sulphurous smoke
Before the icy wind slow rolls away, 6o

And the bright beams of frosty morning dance

Along the spangling snow. There tracks of blood
Even to the forest's depth, and scattered arms,
And lifeless warriors, whose hard lineaments
Death's self could change not, mark the dreadful path 65

Of the outsallying 2 victors: far behind,

Black ashes note where their proud city stood.
Within yon forest is a gloomy glen
Each tree which guards its darkness from the day,
Waves o'er a warrior's tomb.
I see thee shrink, 7°

Surpassing Spirit! —wert thou human else?

I see a shade of doubt and horror fleet

Across thy stainless features: yet fear not;

This is no unconnected misery,
Nor stands uncaused, and irretrievable. 75

Man's evil nature, that apology

Which kings who rule, and cowards who crouch, set up
For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood
Which desolates the discord-wasted land.
From kings, and priests, and statesmen, war arose, 8o

Whose safety is man's deep unbettered woe,

Whose grandeur his debasement. Let the axe
Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall;
And where its venomed exhalations spread
Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay 85

Quenching the serpent's famine, and their bones

Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast,
A garden shall arise, in loveliness
Surpassing fabled Eden.
Hath Nature's soul,
That formed this world so beautiful, that spread 90

Earth's lap with plenty, and life's smallest chord

Strung to unchanging unison, that gave
The happy birds their dwelling in the grove,
That yielded to the wanderers of the deep
The lovelv silence of the unfathomed main, 95

And filled the meanest worm that crawls in dust

With spirit, thought, and love; on Man alone,
Partial in causeless malice, wantonly
Heaped ruin, vice, and slavery; his soul
Blasted with withering curses; placed afar I0 °

The meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp,

2. A sally was a sudden charge out of a besieged place in an attack upon the besiegers.
36 • Queen Mab
But serving on the frightful gulpli to glare,
Rent wide beneath his footsteps?
Nature! no! —
Kings, priests, and statesmen, blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts IQ 5

Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins

Of desolate societv. The child,
Ere he can lisp his mother's sacred name,
Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and lifts
His baby-sword even in a hero's mood. uo
This infant-arm becomes the bloodiest scourge
Of devastated earth; whilst specious names,
Learnt in soft childhood's unsuspecting hour,
Serve as the sophisms 3 with which manhood dims
Bright reason's ray, and sanctifies the sword II5

Upraised to shed a brother's innocent blood.

Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man
Inherits vice and misery, when force
And falshood hang even o'er the cradled babe,
Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good. I2 °

Ah! when first it peeps

to the stranger-soul,
From new tenement, 4 and looks abroad
its

For happiness and sympathy, how stern

And desolate a tract is this wide world!
How withered all the buds of natural good! I2 5

No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms

Of pityless power! On its wretched frame,
Poisoned, perchance, by the disease and woe
Heaped on the wretched parent whence it sprung
I3 °
By morals, law, and custom, the pure winds
Of heaven, that renovate the insect tribes, 5
Mav breathe not. The untainting light of day
May visit not its lodgings. It is bound
Ere it has life: yea, all the chains are forged
I35
Long ere its being: all liberty and love
And peace is torn from its defencelessness;
Cursed from its birth, even from its cradle doomed
To abjectness and bondage!

Throughout this varied and eternal world

I4 °
Soul the onlv element; the block
is

That for uncounted ages has remained

The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
Is active, living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part,

3. False yet plausible arguments, espe- 5. pure winds insect tribes: Accord-
.

cially those urging expediency. ing to Natural History, locusts.

Pliny's
4. stranger-soul tenement: The image
. . . 6. Though the first edition reads long-
is that of a complete soul coming from would suggest that this
toff, the context
another realm to enter the "house" or was a typographical error that slipped
"dwelling-place" of the human body. through unnoticed.
 Queen Mab • 37
And the minutest atom comprehends J 45

A world of loves and hatreds; these beget

Evil and good: hence truth and falshood spring;
Hence will and thought and action, all the germs
Of pain or pleasure, sympathy or hate,
That variegate the eternal universe. J so

Soul is not more polluted than the beams

Of heaven's pure orb, ere round their rapid lines
The taint of earth-born atmospheres arise. 7
Man is of soul and body, formed for deeds
Of high resolve, on fancy's boldest wing x 55

To soar unwearied, fearlessly to turn

The keenest pangs to peacefulness, and taste
The joys which mingled sense and spirit yield.
Or he is formed for abjectness and woe,
To grovel on the dunghill of his fears, l6°

To shrink at every sound, to quench the flame

Of natural love in sensualism, to know
That hour as blest when on his worthless days
The frozen hand of death shall set its seal,

Yet fear the cure, though hating the disease. l6 5

The one is man that shall hereafter be;

The other, man as vice has made him now.
War the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
is

The jest, the hired assassin's trade,

lawyer's
And, to those royal murderers, whose mean thrones I7 °

Are bought by crimes of treachery and gore,

The bread they eat, the staff on which they lean.
Guards, garbed in blood-red livery, surround
Their palaces, participate 8 the crimes
That force defends, and from a nation's rage I75

Secure the crown, which all the curses reach

That famine, frenzy, woe and penury breathe.
These are the hired bravos who defend
—
The tyrant's throne the bullies of his fear: 9
l8 °
These are the sinks and channels of worst vice,
The refuse of society, the dregs
Of all that is most vile: their cold hearts blend
Deceit with sterness, ignorance with pride,
All that is mean and villainous, with rage
Which hopelessness of good, and self-contempt, l8 5

Alone might kindle; they are decked in wealth,

7. Shelley's doctrine in lines 139-153 is "A soldier is aman whose business it is

that good and evil arise from the nature to kill those who never offended him,
of soul, or active, living spirit, which is and who the innocent martyrs of
are
sentient and exhibits loves and hatreds other men's iniquities. Whatever may be-
(attractions and repulsions), whence come of the abstract question of the
spring all moral qualities. justifiableness of war, it seems impossible
8. Share, take part in. that the soldier should not be a depraved
9. Shelley, in a long note, quotes from and unnatural being."
Essay V of William Godwin's Enquirer:
38 • Queen Mab
Honour and power, then are sent abroad
To do their work. The pestilence that stalks
In gloomy triumph through some eastern land
Is less destroying. They cajole with gold, l ^°

And promises of fame, the thoughtless youth

Already crushed with servitude: he knows
His wretchedness too late, and cherishes
Repentance for his ruin, when his doom .

Is sealed in gold and blood! ^5

Those too the tyrant serve, who, skilled to snare
The feet of justice in the toils of law,
Stand, ready to oppress the weaker still;
And, right or wrong, will vindicate for gold,
2 °°
Sneering at public virtue, which beneath
Their pityless tread lies torn and trampled, where
Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.

Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,

Without a hope, a passion, or a love,
Who, through a life of luxury and lies,
2 °5

Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,

Support the system whence their honours flow. . . .

—
They have three words: well tyrants know their use,
Well pay them for the loan, with usury
—
Torn from a bleeding world! God, Hell, and Heaven. 2I °

A vengeful, pityless, and almighty fiend,

Whose mercy is a nickname for the rage

Of tameless tygers hungering for blood.

Hell, a red gulph of everlasting fire,
Where poisonous and undving worms prolong 2I 5

Eternal misery to those hapless slaves

Whose life has been a penance for its crimes.
And Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie
Their human nature, quake, believe, and cringe
22 °
Before the mockeries of earthly power.

These tools the tyrant tempers to his work,

Wields in his wrath, and as he wills destroys,
Omnipotent in wickedness: the while
Youth springs, age moulders, manhood tamely does
22 5
His bidding, bribed by short-lived joys to lend
Force to the weakness of his trembling arm.

They rise, thev fall; one generation comes

Yielding itsharvest to destruction's scythe.
It fades, another blossoms: yet behold!
2 3°
Red glows the tyrant's stamp-mark on its bloom,
Withering and cankering deep its passive prime.
He has invented lying words and modes,
Empty and vain as his own coreless heart;
 Queen Mob • 39
Evasive meanings, nothings of much sound,
To lure the heedless victim to the toils 2 35

Spread round the valley of its paradise.

Look to thyself, priest, conqueror, or prince!

Whether thy trade is falshood, and thy lusts
Deep wallow in the earnings of the poor,
—
With whom thy master 1 was: or thou delight'st 2 4°

In numbering o'er the myriads of thy slain,

All misery weighing nothing in the scale
Against thy short-lived fame: or thou dost load
With cowardice and crime the groaning land,
A pomp-fed king. Look to thy wretched self! 2 *5

Aye, art thou not the veriest slave that e'er

Crawled on the loathing earth? Are not thy days
Days of unsatisfying listlessness?
Dost thou not cry, ere night's long rack 2 is o'er,
"When will the morning come?" Is not thy youth 2 so

A vain and feverish dream of sensualism?

Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease?
Are not thy views of unregretted death
Drear, comfortless, and horrible? Thy mind,
Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame, 2 55

Incapable of judgment, hope, or love?

And dost thou wish the errors to survive
That bar thee from all sympathies of good,
After the miserable interest
Thou hold'st in their protraction? When the grave 26°

Has swallowed up thy memory and thyself,

Dost thou desire the bane that poisons earth
To twine its roots around thy coffined clay,
Spring from thy bones, and blossom on thy tomb,
That of its fruit thy babes may eat and die? 26 5

V.

[the fairy continues:]

Thus do the generations of the earth
Go to the grave, and issue from the womb,
Surviving the imperishable change
still

That renovates the world; even as the leaves

Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year 5

Has scattered on the forest soil, and heaped

For many seasons there, though long they choke,
Loading with loathsome rottenness the land,
All germs of promise. Yet when the tall trees
From which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes,
I0

1. Jesus Christ. compared to the instrument of torture

2. The would-be sleeper's bed is here on which victims were stretched.
 .

40 • Queen Mab
Lie level with the earth to moulder there,
They fertilize the land they long deformed,
Till from the breathing lawn a forest springs
Of youth, integrity, and loveliness,
Like that which gave it life, to spring and die. x 5

Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights

The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war 2°

With passion's unsubduable array.

Twin-sister of religion, selfishness!

Rival in crime and falshood, aping all

The wanton horrors of her bloody play;

25
Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,
Shunning the light, and owning not its name;
Compelled, by its deformity, to screen
With flimsy veil of justice and of right,
Its unattractive lineaments, that scare
brood of ignorance: at once
All, save the 3°

The cause and the effect of tyranny;

Unblushing, hardened, sensual, and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness,
With heart impassive* to more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame; 35

Despising its own miserable being,

Which still it longs, yet fears to disenthrall.
Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange
Of all that human art or nature yield;
Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, 4°

And natural kindness hasten to supplv

From the full fountain of its boundless love,
For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.
Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade
No solitary virtue dares to spring, 4 45

But povertv and wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold
The doors of premature and violent death,
To pining famine and full-fed disease,
To all that shares the lot of human life, so

WTiich poisoned, bodv and soul, scarce drags the chain.

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind.
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold: 55

3. Impassible; Shelley uses the word with miles of it. figures prominently in similes
two different meanings at 11.233 and poetry (see also IV.82-
in Shelley's early
III. 157. 83 and VI. 207-208). Its story was in-
4. The mythical upas tree of Java, a vented ca. 1783 and appears in Erasmus
poisonous tree that killed all life within Darwin's Loves of the flams (1789).
 ——
Queen Mab • 41

Before whose image bow the vulgar great,

The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery. 5 6°

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn
All earthly things but virtue.

Since tyrants, by the sale of human life,

Heap luxuries to their sensualism, and fame 65

To their wide-wasting and insatiate pride,

Success has sanctioned to a credulous world
The ruin, the disgrace, the woe of war.
His hosts of blind and unresisting dupes
The despot numbers; from his cabinet 70

These puppets of schemes he moves at will,

his
Even as the slaves by force or famine driven,
Beneath a vulgar master, to perform
A task of cold and brutal drudgery;
Hardened to hope, insensible to fear, 75

Scarce living pullies of a dead machine,

Mere wheels of work and articles of trade,
That grace the proud and noisy pomp of wealth!
*

The harmony and happiness of man

Yields to the wealth of nations; 6 that which lifts 8o

His nature to the heaven of its pride,

Is bartered for the poison of his soul;

The weight that drags to earth his towering hopes,

Blighting all prospect but of selfish gain,
Withering 85
passion but of slavish fear,
all

Extinguishing all free and generous love

Of enterprize and daring, even the pulse

That fancy kindles in the beating heart
To mingle with sensation, it destroys,
Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self, 9°

The groveling hope of interest and gold,

Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed
Even by hypocrisy.
And statesmen boast
Of wealth! 7 The wordy eloquence, that lives
After the ruin of their hearts, can gild 95

The bitter poison of a nation's woe,

5. In a note Shelley quotes the first gold and the vallies of silver, the world
fourteen lines of book II of Lucretius' would not be one grain of corn the
De rerum natura, ending: "O wretched richer; no one comfort would be added
minds of men! O blinded hearts!" to the human race. . . .

6. Shelley alludes here to the title of "I will not insult common
sense by
Adam Smith's classic rationale for laissez- insistingon the doctrine of the natural
faire capitalism. equality of man. The question is not
7. "There is no real wealth but the concerning its desirableness, but its prac-
labour of man. Where the mountains of ticability: so far as it is practicable, it
42 • Queen Mab
Can turn the worship of the servile mob
To their corrupt and glaring idol, fame,
From virtue, trampled by its iron tread,
Although itsdazzling pedestal be raised I0°

Amid the horrors of a limb-strewn field,

With desolated dwellings smoking round.
The man of ease, who, by his warm fire-side,
To deeds of charitable intercourse
'
And bare fulfilment of the common laws 10 5

Of decency and prejudice, confines

The struggling nature of his human heart,
Is duped by he sheds
their cold sophistry;
A passing tear perchance upon the wreck
Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling's door II0

The frightful waves are driven, when his son —

Ismurdered by the tyrant, or religion
Drives his wife raving mad. 8 But the poor man,
Whose life is misery, and fear, and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil; "3
Who ever hears his famished offsprings' scream,
Whom their pale mother's uncomplaining gaze
For ever meets, and the proud rich man's eye
Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene
Of thousands like himself; he little heeds — I2 °

The rhetoric of tyranny; his hate

Isquenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scorn
The vain and bitter mockery of words,
Feeling the horror of the tyrant's deeds,
And unrestrained but bv the arm of power, I2 s

That knows and dreads his enmity.

The iron rod of penury still compels

Her wretched bow
the knee to wealth,
slave to
And poison, with unprofitable toil,
A life too void of solace to confirm I3 °

The very chains that bind him to his doom.

Nature, impartial in munificence,
Has gifted man with all-subduing will.
Matter, with all its transitory shapes,
I35
Lies subjected and plastic 9 at his feet,
That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread.
How many a rustic Milton has past by,
Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,

is That state of human society

desirable. mother of a numerous family, whom the
which approaches nearer to an equal Christian religion has goaded to incurable
partition of its benefits and evils should insanity. A parallel case is, I believe,
... be preferred .
." (from Shelley's
. within the experience of every physician"
note). (Shelley's note).
8. "I am acquainted with a lady of 9. Susceptible of being molded or shaped,
considerable accomplishments, and the
 —
Queen Mab • 43
In unremitting drudgery and care!
How many a vulgar Cato has compelled ho
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail!
How many a Newton, to whose passive ken
Those mighty spheres that gem infinity
Were only specks of tinsel, fixed in heaven *45

To light the midnights of his native town! 1

Yet every heart contains perfection's germ:
The wisest of the sages of the earth,
That ever from the stores of reason drew
Science and truth, and virtue's dreadless tone, x 5o

Were but a weak and inexperienced boy,

Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued
With pure desire and universal love,
Compared to that high being, of cloudless brain,
Untainted passion, elevated will, I5 $

Which death (who even would linger long in awe

Within his noble presence, and beneath
His changeless eyebeam) might alone subdue.
Him, every slave now dragging through the filth
Of some corrupted city his sad life, l6 °

Pining with famine, swoln with luxury,

Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense
With narrow schemings and unworthy cares,
Or madly rushing through all violent crime,
To move the deep stagnation of his soul, l6 5

Might imitate and equal.

But mean lust 2
Has bound its chains so tight around the earth,
That all within it but the virtuous man
Is venal: gold or fame will surely reach
The price prefixed by selfishness, to all J 7°

But him of resolute and unchanging will;

Whom, nor the plaudits of a servile crowd,
Nor the vile joys of tainting luxury,
Can bribe to yield his elevated soul
To tyranny or falshood, though they wield x 75

With blood-red hand the sceptre of the world.

All things are sold: the very light of heaven
Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,
The smallest and most despicable things
That lurk in the abysses of the deep, l8 °

1. John Milton, Marcus Porcius Cato in writing, political life, and scientific
Uticensis (140), a staunch defender of inquiry, respectively,
the Roman Republic against Catiline and 2. In the broad sense of strong desire
Julius Caesar, and Sir Isaac Newton (143) for mean (small, low, unexalted) things,
are representatives of noble achievements
44 • Queen Mab
All objects of our life, even life itself,
And the poor pittance which the laws allow
Of liberty, the fellowship of man,
Those duties which his heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively, l8 5

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising selfishness, that sets
On each its price, the stamp-mark of her jeign.
Even love is sold; 3 the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age 1 ^°

Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms,

And youth's corrupted impulses prepare
A life of horror from the blighting bane
Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs
From unenjoying sensualism, has filled x 95

All human life with hydra-headed 4 woes.

Falshood 5 demands but gold to pay the pangs

Of outraged conscience; for the slavish priest
Sets no great value on his hireling faith:
A little passing pomp, some servile souls, 2 °°

Whom cowardice itself might safelv chain,

Or the spare mite of avarice could bribe
To deck the triumph of their languid zeal,
Can make him minister to tyranny.
More daring crime requires a loftier meed: 2 °s

Without a shudder, the slave-soldier lends

His arm to murderous deeds, and steels his heart,
When the dread eloquence of dying men,
Low mingling on the lonely field of fame,
2I °
Assails that nature, whose applause he sells
For the gross blessings of a patriot mob,
For the vile gratitude of heartless kings,
And for a cold world's good word, — viler still!

There is a nobler glory, which survives

Until our being fades, and, solacing 2I5

All human care, accompanies its change;

Deserts not virtue in the dungeon's gloom,
And, in the precincts of the palace, guides
Its footsteps through that labyrinth of crime;
Imbues 22 °
his lineaments with dauntlessness,

3. "Not even the intercourse of the sexes 4. The Hydra was a monster in Greek
is exempt from the despotism of positive mythology that had many heads (various
institution. Love withers under con-
. . . authorities number them from nine to one
straint: its very essence is liberty. . . . hundred); whenever one head was cut
A husband and wife ought to continue off, two grew unless the neck was im-
so long united as they love each other: mediately cauterized by fire,
any law which should bind them to 5. Shelley uses the word "falsehood"
cohabitation for one moment after the (usually spelled by him without the silent
decay of their affection, would be a most "e") to mean organized Christian re-
intolerable tyranny ." (from Shelley's
. . ligion.
note).
 —
Queen Mab 45
Even when, from power's avenging hand, he takes
Its sweetest, last and noblest title —death;
—The consciousness of good, which neither gold,
Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss
Can purchase; but a life of resolute good, 22 5

Unalterable quenchless desire

will,
Of universal happiness, the heart
That beats with it in unison, the brain,
Whose ever wakeful wisdom toils to change
2 3°
Reason's rich stores for its eternal weal.

This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No mediative signs of selfishness,
No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,
No balancings of prudence, cold and long;
In just and equal measure all is weighed, 235

One scale contains the sum of human weal,

And one, the good man's heart.
How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,
Who hope for peace amid the storms of care, 24°

Who covet power they know not how to use,

And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give,
Madly they frustrate still their own designs;
And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy
Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul, 245

Pining regrets, and vain repentances,

Disease, disgust, and lassitude, pervade
Their valueless and miserable lives.

But hoary-headed selfishness has felt

Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave: 2 5°

A brighter morn awaits the human day,

When every transfer of earth's natural gifts
Shall bea commerce of good words and works;
When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,
The fear of infamy, disease and woe, 25 5

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell

Shall live but in the memory of time,
Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,
Look back, and shudder at his younger years.

VI.
All touch, all eye, all ear,
The Spirit felt the Fairy's burning speech.
O'er the thin texture of its frame,
The varying periods painted changing glows,
As on a summer even, 5
46 • Queen Mab
When soul-enfolding music floats around,
The stainless mirror of the lake
Re-images the eastern gloom,
Mingling convulsively its purple hues
With sunset's burnished gold. I0

Then thus the Spirit spoke:

"It is a wild and miserable world!
Thorny, and full of care,
Which every fiend can make his prey at will.
O Fairy! in the lapse of years, '3

there no hope in store?

Is
Will yon vast suns roll on
Interminably, still illuming
The night of so many wretched souls,
And see no hope for them? 20

Will not the universal Spirit e'er

Revivify this withered limb of Heaven?"

The Fairy calmly smiled

In comfort, and a kindling gleam of hope
Suffused the Spirit's lineaments. 25

"Oh! rest thee tranquil; chase those fearful doubts,

Which ne'er could rack an everlasting soul,
That sees the chains which bind it to its doom.
Yes! crime and misery are in yonder earth,
Falshood, mistake, and lust; 3°

But the eternal world

Contains at once the evil and the cure.
Some eminent in virtue shall start up,
Even in perversest time:
The truths of their pure lips, that never die, 35

Shall bind the scorpion falshood with a wreath

Of ever-living flame,
Until the monster sting itself to death. 6

"How
sweet a scene will earth become!
Of spirits, a pure dwelling-place,
purest 40

Symphonious with the planetarv spheres; 7

When man, with changeless Nature coalescing,
Will undertake regeneration's work,
When its ungenial poles no longer point
To the red and baleful sun 45

That faintly twinkles there. 8

6. scorpion . death: Pliny and other

. . cording to classical and Renaissance au-
natural historians of antiquity wrote that thorities, the planets make in their
scorpions commit suicide if surrounded courses.
by fire; Shelley used the metaphor more 8. "The north polar star, to which the
than once for the self-destructive nature axis of the earth . points" (from
. .

of evil. (See The Cenci, II. ii. 70-71.) Shelley's note). Shelley goes on to sug-
7. An allusion to the music of the gest that the angle of the earth's axis is
spheres, the harmonious sound that, ac- gradually diminishing and that someday.
 Queen Mab • 47
"Spirit! on yonder earth,
Falshood now
triumphs; deadly power
Has fixed its seal upon the lip of truth!
Madness and misery are there! 50

The happiest is most wretched! Yet confide,

Until pure health-drops, from the cup of joy,
Fall like a dew of balm upon the world.
Now, to the scene I shew, in silence turn,
And read the blood-stained charter of all woe, 55
Which nature soon, with recreating hand,
Will blot in mercy from the book of earth.
How bold the flight of passion's wandering wing,
How swift the step of reason's firmer tread,
How calm and sweet the victories of life, *°

How terrorless the triumph of the grave!

How powerless were the mightiest monarch's arm,
Vain his loud threat, and impotent his frown!
How ludicrous the priest's dogmatic roar!
The weight of his exterminating curse, 65

How light! and his affected charity,

To suit the pressure of the changing times,
What palpable deceit! —
but for thy aid,
Religion! 9 but for thee, prolific fiend,
Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, 70

And heaven with slaves!

"Thou taintest all thou lookest upon! —the stars,
Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet,
Were gods to the distempered playfulness
Of thy untutored infancy: the trees, 75
The grass, the clouds, the mountains, and the sea,
All living things that walk, swim, creep, or fly,
Were gods: the sun had homage, and the moon
Her worshipper. Then thou becamest, a boy,
More daring in thy frenzies: every shape, 8o

Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild,

Which, from sensation's relics, fancy culls;
The spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost,
The genii of the elements, the powers
That give a shape to nature's varied works, 85

Had life and place in the corrupt belief

Of thy blind heart: yet still thy youthful hands

when "the equator coincides with the fleeted by Milton in Paradise Lost, Book
ecliptic" (the line marking the points X. 668-687, that the discrepancy be-
closest to the sun), "the nights and days —
tween the equator and the ecliptic the
will then become equal on the earth variation in the seasons and in the length
during the year, and probably the sea- —
of days and nights was a physical
sons also." He quotes contemporary manifestation of the moral Fall of Man.
scientists in support of his idea, but his 9. In lines 72-145, Shelley personifies
real motivation (like that of some of the Religion and addresses "him" on his life
scientists) was the mythical notion, re- cycle.
48 • Queen Mab
Were pure of human blood. Then manhood gave
Itsstrength and ardour to thy frenzied brain;
Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene, 90

Whose wonders mocked the knowledge of thy pride:

Their everlasting and unchanging laws
Reproached thine ignorance. Awhile thou stoodst
Baffledand gloomy; then thou didst sum up
The elements of all that thou didst know; 95

The changing seasons, winter's leafless reign,

The budding of the heaven-breathing trees,
The eternal orbs that beautify the night,
The sun-rise, and the setting of the moon,
Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease, I0°

And all their causes, to an abstract point

Converging, thou didst bend, and called it God!
The self-sufficing, the omnipotent,
The merciful, and the avenging God!
Who, prototype of human misrule, sits I0 5

High in heaven's realm, upon a golden throne,

Even like an earthly king; and whose dread work,
Hell, gapes for ever for the unhappy slaves
Of fate, whom he created, in his sport,
To triumph in their torments when they fell! II0

Earth heard the name; earth trembled, as the smoke

Of his revenge ascended up to heaven,
Blotting the constellations; and the cries
Of millions, butchered in sweet confidence
And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds II5

Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths

Sworn in his dreadful name, rung through the land;
Whilst innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear,
And thou didst laugh to hear the mother's shriek
I2 °
Of maniac gladness, as the sacred steel
Felt cold in her torn entrails!

"Religion! thou wert then in manhood's prime:

But age crept on one God would not suffice
:

For senile puerility; thou framedst

A tale to suit thy dotage, and to glut I25

Thy misery-thirsting soul, that the mad fiend

Thy wickedness had pictured, might afford
A plea for sating the unnatural thirst
For murder, rapine, violence, and crime,
I3 °
That still consumed thybeing, even when
Thou heardst the step of fate; —
that flames might light
Thy funeral scene, and the shrill horrent 1 shrieks
Of parents dying on the pile that burned
To light their children to thy paths, the roar
Of the encircling flames, the exulting cries ! 35

1. Shuddering, expressing horror.

 Queen Mab • 49
Of thine apostles, loud commingling there,
Might sate thine hungry ear
Even on the bed of death!
"But now contemptis mocking thy gray hairs;

Thou descending to the darksome grave,

art x 4o

Unhonoured and unpitied, but by those

Whose pride is passing by like thine, and sheds,
Like thine, a glare that fades before the sun
Of truth, and shines but in the dreadful night
That long has lowered above the ruined world. f 45

"Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,

Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffused
A spirit of activity and life,
That knows no term, cessation, or decay;
That fades not when the lamp of earthly life, J 5°

Extinguished in the dampness of the grave,

Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe
In the dim newness of its being feels
The impulses of sublunary 2 things,
And wonder to unpractised sense:
all is J 55

But, active, steadfast, and eternal, still

Guides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars,
Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves,
Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease;
And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly 1 60

Rolls round the eternal universe, and shakes

Its undecaying battlement, presides,
Apportioning with irresistible law
The place each spring of its machine shall fill;
So that when waves on waves tumultuous heap l6 5

Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven

Heaven's lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords,
Whilst, to the eye of shipwrecked mariner,
Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock,
All seems unlinked contingency and chance: J 7°

No atom of this turbulence fulfils

A vague and unnecessitated task,
Or acts but as it must and ought to act.3
Even the minutest molecule of light,
That in an April sunbeam's fleeting glow J 75

Fulfils its destined, though invisible work,

The universal Spirit guides; nor less,
When merciless ambition, or mad zeal,
Has led two hosts of dupes to battle-field,
That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, l8 °

2. Because, in classical and Renaissance 3. In a note to lines 171-173, Shelley

thought, all things beneath the moon quotes from Baron d'Holbach's Systeme
were subject to change and decay, sub- de la nature, illustrating the operation of
lunar(y) came to mean "mortal," "mun- Necessity in the realms of physical na-
dane." ture and social interaction.
SO • Queen Mab
And call the sad work glory, does it rule
All passions: not a thought, a will, an act,
No working of the tyrant's moody mind,
Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast
Their servitude, to hide the shame they feel, l8 5

Nor the events enchaining every will,

That from the depths of unrecorded time
Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass
Unrecognized, or unforeseen by thee,
Soul of the Universe! eternal spring *9o

Of life and death, of happiness and woe,

Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene
That floats before our eyes in wavering light,
Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison,
Whose chains and massy 4 walls x 95

We
feel, but cannot see.

"Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power,

Necessity! 5 thou mother of the world!
Unlike the God of human error, thou
Requirest no prayers or praises; the caprice 20 °

Of man's weak will belongs no more to thee

Than do the changeful passions of his breast
To thy unvarying harmony: the slave,
WTiose horrible lusts spread miserv o'er the world,
And the good man, who lifts, with virtuous pride, 2 °5

His being, in the sight of happiness,

That springs from his own works; the poison-tree,
Beneath whose shade all life is withered up,
And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords
A temple where the vows of happy love 2I °

Are registered, are equal in thy sight:

No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge
And favoritism, and worst desire of fame
Thou knowst not: all that the wide world contains
Are but thy passive instruments, and thou 2I 5

Regardst them all with an impartial eye,

Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel,
Because thou hast not human sense,
Because thou art not human mind.
4. Solid, weighty. spring from an ignorance of the certainty
5. "He who asserts the doctrine of Neces- of the conjunction of antecedents and
sity means that, contemplating the events consequents. . The doctrine of Neces-
. .

which compose the moral and material sity tends to introduce a great change
universe, he beholds only an immense into the established notions of morality,
and uninterrupted chain of causes and and utterly destroy religion. ... we are
effects,no one of which could occupy taught, by the doctrine of Necessity,
any other place than it does occupy. . . . that there is neither good nor evil in the
Motive is, to voluntary action in the universe, otherwise than as the events to
human mind, what cause is to effect in which we apply these epithets have rela-
the material universe. The word liberty, tion to our own peculiar mode of being"
as applied to mind, is analogous to the (from Shelley's note).
word chance, as applied to matter: they
 —
Queen Mab • 51

"Yes! when the sweeping storm of time 22 °

Has sung its death-dirge o'er the ruined fanes

And broken altars ofthe almighty fiend, 6
Whose name usurps thy honors, and the blood
Through centuries clotted there, has floated down
The tainted flood of ages, shalt thou live 22 5

Unchangeable! A shrine is raised to thee,

Which, nor the tempest-breath of time,
Nor the interminable flood,
Over earth's slight pageant rolling,
Availeth to destroy, 2 3°

The sensitive extension of the world.

That wondrous and eternal fane,
Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join,
To do the will of strong necessity,
And life, in multitudinous shapes, 2 35

Still pressing forward where no term can be,

Like hungry and unresting flame
Curls round the eternal columns of its strength."

VII.

SPIRIT.
Iwas an infant when my mother went
To see an atheist burned. She took me there:
The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;
The multitude was gazing silently;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien, 5

Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,

Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth:
The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;
His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;
His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate 7 mob I0

Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.

"Weep not, child!" cried my mother, "for that man
"
Has said, There is no God.'
FAIRY.
There is no God! 8
Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed:
Let heaven and earth, let man's revolving race, J5

His ceaseless generations tell their tale;

Let every part depending on the chain
That links it to the whole, point to the hand
6. The ordinary conception of God. From the phenomena, which are the
7. Unfeeling; devoid of moral feeling. objects of our senses, we attempt to
8. "This negation must be understood infer a cause, which we call God. . . .

solely to affect a creative Deity. The From this hypothesis we invent this
hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co- general name, to conceal our ignorance
eternal with the universe remains un- of causes and essences .
."
. (from
shaken. . God is an hypothesis, and,
. . Shelley's note).
as such, stands in need of proof. . . .
52 • Queen Mab
That grasps its term! let every seed that falls
In silent eloquence unfold its store 2°

Of argument; infinity within,

Infinity without, belie creation;
The exterminable spirit it contains
Is nature's only God; but human pride
Is skilful to invent most serious names 25

To hide its ignorance.

The name of God
Has fenced about all crime with holiness,
Himself the creature of his worshippers,
Whose names and and passions change,
attributes
Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord, 9 30

Even with the human dupes who build his shrines,

Still serving o'er the war-polluted world
For desolation's watch-word; whether hosts
Stain his death-blushing chariot wheels, as on
Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise 35

A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans; 1

Or countless partners of his power divide
His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke
Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness,
Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy, 4°

Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven

In honor of his name; or, last and worst,
Earth groans beneath religion's iron age, 2
And priests dare babble of a God of peace,
Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, 45

Murdering the while, uprooting every germ

Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,
Making the earth a slaughter-house!

O Spirit! through the sense

By which thy inner nature was apprised 5°

Of outward shows, vague dreams have rolled,

And varied reminiscences have waked
Tablets that never fade;
All things have been imprinted there,
The stars, the sea, the earth, the sky, 55

9. Seeva, or Shiva, Hindu name

is the 1. hosts . . . groans: The reference is to
for God Buddh
in his role as destroyer; the massive car of Vishnu, a title of
is the Buddha; Foh, or Fohi, was the whom is Jagannath (hence "Jugger-
name used in England in Shelley's day naut"), under whose wheels devotees
for Fu Hsi, the legendary or quasi- were said sometimes to have immolated
historical "first king of China, who is themselves; in general, an overwhelming
said to have founded this empire soon force. Brahmins are highest caste Hindus,
after the deluge" (George Crabb, Uni- 2. There were four traditional ages in
versal Historical Dictionary, London, classical thought: the Golden Age. the
1833); Jehovah (or "Yahweh"), the He- Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron
brew god; Lord (the Hebrew "Adonai"), Age; Shelley implies that religion h.is
the name used instead of "Yahweh" descended to its last, least noble phase,
when the name was pronounced.
 Queen Mab • 53

Even the unshapeliest lineaments

Of wild and fleeting visions
Have left a record there
To testify of earth.

These are my empire, for to me is given 6°

The wonders of the human world to keep,

And fancy's thin creations to endow
With manner, being, and reality;
Therefore a wondrous phantom, from the dreams
Of human error's dense and purblind 3 faith, 65

I will evoke, to meet thy questioning.

Ahasuerus, 4 rise!

A strange and woe-worn wight 5

Arose beside the battlement,
And stood unmoving there. 7°
His inessential figure cast no shade
Upon the golden floor;
His port and mien bore mark of many years,
And chronicles of untold antientness
Were legible within his beamless eye: 75

Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth;

Freshness and vigor knit his manly frame;
The wisdom of old age was mingled there
With youth's primaeval dauntlessness;
And inexpressible woe, 8o

Chastened by gave
fearless resignation,
An awful grace to his all-speaking brow.

SPIRIT.

Is there a God?
AHASUERUS.
Is there a God! — aye, an almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice 8s

Was heard on earth: earth shuddered at the sound

The fiery-visaged firmament expressed
Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawned
To swallow all the dauntless and the good
That dared to hurl defiance at his throne, 9o

3. Of impaired or defective vision. dignantly, 'Barbarian! thou has denied

4. The Wandering Jew of ancient legend. rest to the Son of Man: be it denied
Shelley's note, quoting from a German thee also, until he comes to judge the
source, reads in part: "When our Lord world.'. . .

was wearied with the burthen of his "A black demon . . goads him now
.

ponderous cross, and wanted to rest be- from country to country: he is denied
fore the door of Ahasuerus, the unfeeling the consolation which death affords, and
wretch drove him away with brutality. precluded from the rest of the peaceful
The Savior of mankind staggered, sinking grave."
under the heavy load, but uttered no 5. A human being; usually used to ex-
complaint. An angel of death appeared press either contempt or sympathy,
before Ahasuerus, and exclaimed in-
54 - Queen Mab
Girt as it was with power. None but slaves
Survived, —
cold-blooded slaves, who did the work
Of tyrannous omnipotence; whose souls
No honest indignation ever urged
To elevated daring, to one deed 95

Which gross and sensual self did not pollute.

These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend,
Gorgeous and vast: the costly altars smoked
With human blood, and hideous paeans 6 rung
Through all the long-drawn aisles. A murderer 7 heard IO°

His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and arts

Had raised him to his eminence in power,
Accomplice of omnipotence in crime,
And confidant of the all-knowing one.
These were Jehovah's words. I0 5

"From an eternity of idleness

I, in seven days' toil made earth
God, awoke;
From nothing; rested, and created man:
I placed him in a paradise, and there

Planted the tree of evil, so that he II0

Might eat and perish, and my soul procure

Wherewith to sate its malice, and to turn,
Even like a heartless conqueror of the earth,
All misery to my
fame. The race of men
Chosen Mv
honor, with impunity
to II5

Mav sate the lusts I planted in their heart.

Here I command thee hence to lead them on,
Until, with hardened feet, their conquering troops
Wade on the promised soil through woman's blood,
And make mv name be dreaded through the land. I2 °

Yet ever-burning flame and ceaseless woe

Shall be the doom of their eternal souls,
With every soul on this ungrateful earth,
Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong, even — all
I25
Shall perish, to fulfil the blind revenge
(Which you, to men, call justice) of their God."

The murderer's brow

Quivered with horror.
"God omnipotent,
Is there no mercv? must our punishment
I3 °
Be endless? will long ages roll away,
And no term? Oh! wherefore hast thou made
see
In mockery and wrath this evil earth?
Mercy becomes the powerful be but just: —
O God! repent and save."
6. Songs of praise or thanksgiving; shouts 7. Moses,
of joy.
 Queen Mab • SS
"One way remains:
I beget a son, and he shall bear
will 135

The sins of all the world; 8 he shall arise

In an unnoticed corner of the earth,
And there shall die upon a cross, and purge
The universal crime; so that the few
On whom my grace descends, those who are marked r 4°

As vessels to the honor of their God,

May credit this strange sacrifice, and save
Their souls alive: millions shall live and die,
Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name,
But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave. J 45

Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale,

Such as the nurses frighten babes withal:
These in a gulph of anguish and of flame
Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,
Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow, x 5°

Even on their beds of torment, where they howl,

My honor, and the justice of their doom.
What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts
Of purity, with radiant genius bright,
Or human I55
lit with reason's earthly ray?
Many are called, but few will I elect.
Do thou my bidding, Moses!"
Even the murderer's cheek
Was blanched with horror, and his quivering
Scarce faintly uttered
—
"O almighty One,
lips

I tremble and obey!" l6°

O Spirit! centuries have set their seal

On this heart of many wounds, and
loaded brain,
Since the Incarnate came: humbly he came,
Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape
Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard, l6 5

Save by the rabble of his native town,

Even as a parish demagogue. He led
The crowd; he taught them and peace,
justice, truth,
In semblance; but he lit within their souls
The quenchless flames of zeal, and blest the sword l i°

He brought on earth to satiate with the blood

8. Shelley attacks Christianity and the the honour of that God with whom he
Bible in a long note that reads, in part: was afterwards confounded. It is of im-
"A Roman governor of Judea, at the portance, therefore, to distinguish be-
instances of a priest-led mob, crucified tween the pretended character of this
a man called Jesus eighteen centuries being as the Son of God and the Saviour
ago. He was a man of pure life, who of the world, and his real character as
desired to rescue his countrymen from a man, who, for a vain attempt to re-
the tyranny of their barbarous and de- form the world, paid the forfeit of his
grading superstitions. The common fate life to that overbearing tyranny which
of all who desire to benefit mankind has since so long desolated the universe
awaited him. . . . Jesus was sacrificed to in his name."
56 • Queen Mab
Of truth and freedom
his malignant soul.
At length mortal frame was led to death.
his
I stood beside him on the torturing cross
:

No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense; J 75

And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed

The massacres and miseries which his name
Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried,
"Go! go!" in mockery.
A smile of godlike malice reillumcd l8 °

His fading lineaments.

—
"I go," he cried,
"But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth
Eternally." The dampness of the grave
Bathed my
imperishable front. I fell,
And long lay tranced upon the charmed soil. l8 5

When I awoke hell burned within my brain,

Which staggered on its seat; for all around
The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,
Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them,
And I9°
in their various attitudes of death
My murdered children's mute and eyeless sculls
Glared ghastily upon me.
But my soul,
From sight and sense of the polluting woe
Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer
Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven. ! 95

Therefore I rose, and dauntlesslv began

My lonelv and unending pilgrimage,
Resolved to wage unweariable war
With mv almightv tyrant, and to hurl
2 °°
Defiance at his impotence to harm
Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand
That barred my passage to the peaceful grave
Has crushed the earth to misery, and given
Itsempire to the chosen of his slaves.
I seen, even from the earliest dawn
2 °5
These have
Of weak, unstable and precarious power,
Then preaching peace, as now they practise war;
So, when they turned but from the massacre
Of unoffending infidels, to quench
2I °
Their thirst for ruin in the very blood
That flowed in their own veins, and pityless zeal
Froze every human feeling, as the wife
Sheathed in her husband's heart the sacred steel,
Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love;
And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood 2I 5

Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war,

Scarce satiable bv fate's last death-draught, waged,
Drunk from the winepress of the Almighty's wrath;
Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace,
 Queen Mab 57
Pointed to victory! When the fray was done, 22 °

No remnant of the exterminated faith

Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh,
With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere,
That rotted on the half-extinguished pile.

Yes! have seen God's worshippers unsheathe

I 22 5

The sword of his revenge, when grace descended,

Confirming all unnatural impulses,
To sanctify their desolating deeds;
And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross
2 3°
O'er the unhappy earth: then shone the sun
On showers of gore from the upflashing steel
Of safe assassination, and all crime
Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord,
And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.
Spirit! no year of my eventful being 2 35

Has passed unstained by crime and misery,

Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his slaves
With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile
The insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was red
With murder, feign to stretch the other out 2 4°

For brotherhood and peace; and that they now

Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds
Are marked with all the narrowness and crime
That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise,
Reason may claim our gratitude, who now 245

Establishing the imperishable throne

Of truth, and stubborn virtue, maketh vain
The unprevailing malice of my foe,
Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave,
Adds impotent eternities to pain, 2 5°

Whilst keenest disappointment racks his breast

To see the smiles of peace around them play,
To frustrate or to sanctify their doom.

Thus have I stood, —

through a wild waste of years
Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony, 2 55

Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,

Mocking my powerless tyrant's horrible curse
With stubborn and unalterable will,
Even as a giant oak, which heaven's fierce flame
Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand 26°

A monument of fadeless ruin there;

Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves
The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,
As in the sun-light's calm it spreads
Its worn and withered arms on high 26 5

To meet the quiet of a summer's noon.

 — —
58 • Queen Mab
The Fairy waved her wand:
Ahasuerus fled
Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,
That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove, 2 7°

Flee from the morning beam:

The matter of which dreams are made
Not more endowed with actual life
Than this phantasmal portraiture
Of wandering human thought. 1* 2 75

VIII.
THE FAIRY.
The present and the past thou hast beheld:
It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn
The secrets of the future. Time! —
Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes, 5

And from the cradles of eternity,

Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,
Tear thou that gloomy shroud. — Spirit, behold
Thy glorious destiny! I0

Joy to the Spirit came.

Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil,
Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear:
Earth was no longer hell;
Love, freedom, health, had given I5

Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,

And all its pulses beat
Symphonious to the planetary spheres:
Then dulcet music swelled
Concordant 1 with the life-strings of the soul; 20

It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,

Catching new life from transitory death,
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,
That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea
And dies on the creation of its breath, 25

And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits:

Was the pure stream of feeling
That sprung from these sweet notes,
And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies
With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed. 3°

Joy to the Spirit came,

Such jov as when a lover sees
The chosen of his soul in happiness,
And witnesses her peace

9.That is, Ahasuerus has reality only as 1. Harmonious; dulcet means sweet,
an aberrant human idea.
 Queen Mab • 59
Whose woe to him were bitterer than death, 35

Sees her unfaded cheek

Glow mantling 2 in first luxury of health,
Thrills with her lovely eyes,
Which like two stars amid the heaving main
Sparkle through liquid bliss. 40

Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen:

"I will not call the ghost of ages gone
To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore;
The present now is past,
And those events that desolate the earth 45

Have faded from the memory of Time,

Who dares not give reality to that
Whose being I annul. To me is given
The wonders of the human world to keep,
Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity 50

Exposes now its treasure; let the sight

Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.
O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal
Where virtue fixes universal peace,
And midst the ebb and flow of human things, 55

Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,

A lighthouse o'er the wild of dreary waves.

"The habitable earth is full of bliss;

Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
By everlasting snow-storms round the poles, *°

Where matter dared not vegetate or live,

But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls 6s

Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,

Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves
And melodize with man's blest nature there.
"Those desarts of immeasurable sand, 7°

Whose age-collected fervors scarce allowed

A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,
Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's love
Broke on the sultry silentness alone,
Now teem with countless rills and shady woods, 75

Corn-fields and pastures and white cottages;

And where the startled wildnerness beheld
A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,
A tygress sating with the flesh of lambs
The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs, 8o

2. Suffused with color, blushes.

60 • Queen Mab
Whilst shouts and howlings through the desart rang,
Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sun-rise, smiles
To see a babe before his mother's door,
Sharing his morning's meal 85

With the green and golden basilisk-"*

That comes to lick his feet.

"Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail

Has seen above the illimitable plain,
Morning on night, and night on morning rise, 9°

Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread

Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,
Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves
So long have mingled with the gustv wind
In melancholv loneliness, and swept 95

The desart of those ocean solitudes,

But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,
The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm,
Now to the sweet and many mingling sounds
Of kindliest human impulses respond. IO°

Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,

With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,
And fertile vallies, resonant with bliss,
Whilst green woods overcanopv the wave,
Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore, I0 5

To meet the kisses of the flowrets there.

"All things are recreated, and the flame
Of consentaneous 4 love inspires all life:
The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck
II0
To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,
Rewarding her with their pure perfectness:
The balmy breathings of the wind inhale
Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:
Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,
JI 5
Glows in the fruits, and mantles 5 on the stream:
No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven.
Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride
The foliage of the ever verdant trees;
But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,
I2 °
And autumn proudlv bears her matron grace,
Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of spring,
Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit
Reflects its tint, and blushes into love.

"The lion now forgets to thirst for blood:

I2 5
There might you see him sporting in the sun
Beside the dreadlcss kid; his claws arc sheathed,

3. A mythical reptile, also called a 4. Simultaneous, mutual.

"cockatrice," whose breath and even its 5. Foams or bubbles (see also VIII. 132).
look were supposed to be fatal.
 Queen Mab • 61

His teeth are harmless, custom's force has made

His nature as the nature of a lamb. 6
Like passion's fruit, the nightshade's 7 tempting bane
Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows: l i°

All bitterness is past; the cup of joy

Unmingled mantles to the goblet's brim,
And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.

"But chief, ambiguous man, he that can know

More misery, and dream more joy than all; J 35

Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast

To mingle with a loftier instinct there,
Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,
Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;
Who stands amid the ever-varying world, l *°

The burthen or the glory of the earth;

He chief perceives the change, his being notes
The gradual renovation, and defines
Each movement of its progress on his mind.

"Man, where the gloom of the long polar night J 45

Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,

Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost
Basks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,
Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;
x 5°
His chilled and narrow energies, his heart,
Insensible to courage, truth, or love,
His stunted stature and imbecile frame,
Marked him for some abortion of the earth,
Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,
Whose habits and enjoyments were his own: f 55

His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,

Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,
Apprised him ever of the joyless length
Which his short being's wretchedness had reached;
His death a pang which famine, cold and toil, l6°

Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark

Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought:
All was inflicted here that earth's revenge
Could wreak on the infringers of her law;
—
One curse alone was spared the name of God. l6 5

"Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day

With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,
Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere
Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed

6. Shelley's two chief precedents for this (which has white flowers and black
peaceable vision of the future are Isaiah berries) or woody nightshade(purple
11 and Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. flowersand red berries), or else of the
7. A poisonous plant, either of the genus genus Atropa, deadly nightshade (bella-
Solanum, including black nightshade donna).
62 • Queen Mab
Unnatural vegetation, where the land x 7°

Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,

Was man a nobler being; slavery
Had crushed him to his country's bloodstained dust;
Or he was bartered for the fame of power,
Which all internal impulses destroying, x 75

Makes human will an article of trade;

Or he was changed with Christians for their gold,
And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound
Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work
Of all-polluting luxury and wealth, l8 °

Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads

The long-protracted fulness of their woe;
Or he was led to legal butchery,
To turn to worms beneath that burning sun,
Where kings first leagued against the rights of men, l8 5

And priests first traded with the name of God.

"Even where the milder zone afforded man
A seeming shelter, yet contagion there,
Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,
Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late I9°

Availed to arrest its progress, or create

That peace which first in bloodless victory waved
Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime:
There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,
The mimic of surrounding misery, I95

The jackal of ambition's lion-rage,

The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.

"Here now the human being stands adorning

This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;
Blest from his birth with all bland impulses, 20°

Which gently in his noble bosom wake

All kindly passions and all pure desires.
Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing
Which from the cxhaustless lore of human weal
2° 5
Dawns on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness, gift
With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks
The unprevailing hoariness of age,
And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene
2I °
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon earth: 8 no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
8. "Time is our consciousness of the of a man will ever be prolonged; but
succession of ideas in our mind. Vivid that his sensibility is perfectible.. . .

sensation, of either pain or pleasure, the life of a man of virtue and talent,
makes the time seem long. ... If, there- who should die in his thirtieth year, is,
fore, the human mind . . should be-
. with regard to his own feelings, longer
come conscious of an infinite number of than that of a miserable priest-ridden
ideas in a minute, that minute would be slave, who dreams out a century of dul-
eternity. I do not hence infer that the ness" (from Shelley's note; Shelley ac-
actual space between the birth and death tually died in his thirtieth year).
 Queen Mob • 63

And horribly devours his mangled flesh,

Which still avenging nature's broken law,
2I 5
Kindled allhumours in his frame,
putrid
and all vain belief,
All evil passions,
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime. 9
No longer now the winged habitants,
22 °
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,
Flee from the form of man; but gather round,
And prune their sunny feathers on the hands
Which children stretch in friendly sport
little
Towards these dreadless partners of their play.
All things are void of terror: man has lost 225

His terrible prerogative, and stands

An equal amidst equals: happiness
And science dawn though late upon the earth;
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
23 °
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reason and passion cease to combat there;
Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extend
Their all-subduing energies, and wield
The sceptre of a vast dominion there;
Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends 235

Its force to the omnipotence of mind,

Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth
To decorate its paradise of peace."

IX.

[the fairy continues:]

"O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!

To which those restless souls that ceaselessly
Throng through the human universe, aspire;
Thou consummation of all mortal hope!
Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will! 5

Whose throughout all space and time,

rays, diffused
Verge to one point and blend for ever there:
Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place!
9. In Shelley's day comparative anat- everything, and carnivorous in nothing;
omists studying man and apes, none of he has neither claws wherewith to seize
which has meat as a staple of its diet, his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth
concluded that man was naturally an to tear the living fibre. . . .

eater of fruits and nuts —

a vegetarian. "The intestines are also identical with
Shelley was a vegetarian on both medical those of herbivorous animals. On a
. . .

and moral grounds and remained one natural system of diet, we should require
most of his life. Shelley's note states: no spices from India; no wines from
"I hold that the depravity of the physical Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira;
and moral nature of man originated in none of those multitudinous articles of
his unnatural habits of life. All . . . luxury, for which every corner of the
vice arose from the ruin of healthful globe is rifled, and which are the causes
innocence. Tyranny, superstition, com- of so much individual rivalship, such
merce, and inequality, were then first calamitous and sanguinary national dis-
known, when reason vainly attempted to putes. . . .

guide the wanderings of exacerbated "The advantage of a reform in diet is

passion. . . . obviously greater than that of any other.
"Comparative anatomy teaches us that It strikes at the root of the evil."
man resembles frugivorous animals in
64 • Queen Mab
Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,
Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come: I0

O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!

"Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,
And dim forebodings of thy loveliness
Haunting the human heart, have there entwined
Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss I5

Where friends and lovers meet to part no'more.

Thou art the end of all desire and will,
The product of all action; and the souls
That by the paths of an aspiring change
2°
Have reached thy haven of perpetual peace,
There rest from the etemitv of toil
That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.
"Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear;
That hoary giant, who, in lonely pride,
*5
So long had ruled the world, that nations fell
Beneath his silent footstep. Pyramids,
That for millenniums had withstood the tide
Of human things, his storm-breath drove in sand
Across that desart where their stones survived
The name of him whose pride had heaped them there. 3°

Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp,

Was but the mushroom of a summer day,
That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust:
Time was the king of earth: all things gave way
Before him, but the fixed and virtuous will, 35

The sacred sympathies of soul and sense,

That mocked his fury and prepared his fall.
"Yet slow and gradual dawned the mom of love;
Long lay the clouds of darkness o'er the scene,
Till from
its native heaven they rolled away: 40

crime triumphant o'er all hope careered

First,
Unblushing, undisguising, bold and strong;
Whilst falshood, tricked in virtue's attributes,
Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe,
Till done by her own venomous sting to death, 45

She the moral world without a law,

left
No longer fettering passion's fearless wing,
Nor searing reason with the brand of God.
Then steadily the liappv ferment worked;
Reason was free; and wild though passion went
Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads, 1
Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers.
Yet like the bee returning to her queen.
She bound the sweetest on her sister's brow.
Who meek and sober kissed the sportive child, 55

No longer trembling at the broken rod.

1. Meadows enclosed by woods.
 Queen Mab • 65
"Mild was the slow necessity of death:
The tranquil Spirit failed beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Calm as a voyager to some distant land, 6°

And full hope as he.

of wonder, full of
The deadly germs of languor and disease
Died in the human frame, and purity
Blest with all gifts her earthly worshippers.
How vigorous then the athletic form of age! 65

How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!

Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, or care,
Had stamped the seal of grey deformity
On all the mingling lineaments of time.
How lovely the intrepid front of youth! 7°

Which meek-eyedcourage decked with freshest grace;

Courage of soul, that dreaded not a name,
And elevated will, that journeyed on
Through life's phantasmal scene in fearlessness,
With virtue, love, and pleasure, hand in hand. 75

"Then, that sweet bondage which is freedom's self,

And rivetswith sensation's softest tie
The kindred sympathies of human souls,
Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:
Those delicate and timid impulses 8o

In nature's primal modesty arose,

And with undoubted confidence disclosed
The growing longings of its dawning love,
Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,
That virtue of the cheaply virtuous, 8s

Who pride themselves in senselessness 2 and frost.

No longer prostitution's venomed bane
Poisoned the springs of happiness and life;
Woman and man, in confidence and love,
Equal and free and pure together trod *>

The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more

Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim's feet.

'Then, where, through distant ages, long in pride

The palace of the monarch-slave had mocked
Famine's faint groan, and penury's silent tear, 95

A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threw

Year after year their stones upon the field,
Wakening a lonely echo; and the leaves
Of the old thorn, that on the topmost tower
Usurped the roval ensign's grandeur, shook I0°

In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower

And whispered strange tales in the whirlwind's ear.

2. An absence of sensuous feelings.

66 • Queen Mab
"Low through the lone cathedral's roofless aisles
The melancholy winds a death-dirge sung:
It were a sight of awfulness to see I05

The works of faith and slavery, so vast,

So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal! 8
Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall.
A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death
To-day, the breathing marble glows above. II0

To decorate its memory, and tongues

Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms
In silence and in darkness seize their prey.

"Within the massy prison's mouldering courts,

and free the ruddy children played,
Fearless II5

Weaving gay chaplcts 4 for their innocent brows

With the green ivy and the red wall-flower,
That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;
The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,
There rusted amid heaps of broken stone I2 °

That mingled slowlv with their native earth:

There the broad beam of day, which feeblv once
Lighted the cheek of lean captivity
With a pale and sickly glare, then freelv shone
On the pure smiles of infant playfulness: I25

No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair

Pealed through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes
Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds
And merriment were resonant around.
"These ruins soon left not a wreck 5 behind: x 3°

Their elements, wide scattered o'er the globe,

To happier shapes were moulded, and became
Ministrant to all blissful impulses:
Thus human things were perfected, and earth,
I35
Even as a child beneath its mother's love,
Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew
Fairer and nobler with each passing year.

"Now Time his duskv pennons o'er the scene

Closes in stedfast darkness, and the past
Fades from our charmed sight. My task is done: I4 °

Thv lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own.

With all the fear and all the hope they bring.
My spells are past: the present now recurs.
Ah me! remains
a pathless wilderness
Yet unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand. ^5

3. Nonetheless, in spite of everything. 5. The Oxford English Dictionary gives

Lines 107-108 form an accidentally this use (with one from Wordsworth's
rhymed couplet; in revising the poem as Evening Walk) as an example of the
Queen of the Universe, Shelley eliminated mistaken use of "wreck" for "wrack"
this imperfection by inserting withal be- (sb.^.B), meaning vestige or trace left
tween yet and so. after a destructive process.
4. Garlands or wreaths worn on the head.
 :

Queen Mab • 67
"Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,
Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue
The gradual paths of an aspiring change:
For birth and life and death, and that strange state
Before the naked soul has found its home, J 5<>

All tend to perfect happiness, and urge

The restless wheels of being on their way,
Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,
Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal
For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense J 55

Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape

New modes of passion to its frame may lend;
Life is its and the store
state of action,
Of all events
aggregated there
is

That variegate the eternal universe; l6°

Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,

That leads to azure isles and beaming skies
And happy regions of eternal hope.
Therefore, O
Spirit! fearlessly bear on:
l6 5
Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,
Though frosts mav blight the freshness of its bloom,
Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth
To feed with kindliest dews its favorite flower,
That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens,
Lighting the green wood with its sunny smile. '7°

"Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand,

So welcome when the tyrant is awake,
So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch burns;
'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,
The transient gulph-dream of a startling sleep. J 75

Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen

Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,
Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there,
And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.
Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene l8 °

Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?

Whose stingings bade thy heart look further still,
When to the moonlight walk by Henry 7 led,
Sweetlv and sadlv thou didst talk of death?
And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast, l8 5

Listening supinelv to a bigot's creed,

Or tamely crouching to the tyrant's rod,
Whose iron thongs are red with human gore?
Never: but bravely bearing on, thy will
Is destined an eternal war to wage I9 °

With tyranny and falshood, and uproot

The germs of miserv from the human heart.
6. Flash, gleam, quiver (see Paradise the note to 1.134).
Lost, VI.766, in the description of the 7. Ianthe's lover, i.e., Shelley himself.
Chariot of Paternal Deitie alluded to in
68 • Queen Mab
Thine isthe hand whose piety would soothe
The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,
Whose impotence an easy pardon gains, f 95

Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease:

Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy
and brave its sternest will,
Its fiercest rage,
When fenced by power and master of the world.
Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mjnd, 2 °°

Free from heart-withering custom's cold control,

Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued.
Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee,
And therefore art thou worthy of the boon
Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep 2 °5

Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod,

And many days of beaming hope shall bless
Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love.
Go, happy one, and give that bosom jov
Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch 2I °

Light, life and rapture from thy smile."

The Fairy waves her wand of charm.
Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car,
That rolled beside the battlement,
Bending her beamy exes in thankfulness. 2I 5

Again the enchanted steeds were yoked,

Again the burning wheels inflame
The steep descent of heaven's untrodden way.
Fast and far the chariot flew:
22 °
The vast and fiery globes that rolled
Around the Fairy's palace-gate
Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared
Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs
That there attendant on the solar power
With borrowed light pursued their narrower way. 225

Earth floated then below:

The chariot paused a moment there;
The Spirit then descended:
The restless coursers pawed the ungenial soil,
23 °
Snuffed the gross air, and then, their errand done,
Unfurled their pinions to the winds of heaven.
The Body and the Soul united then,
A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's frame:
Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;
Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained: 2 "
She looked around in wonder and beheld
Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch.
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love.
And the bright beaming stars
2 -»°
That through the easement shone.
 Alastor • 69

Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Preface

The poem entitled "Alastor," may be considered as allegorical

of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind. It
represents a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius
led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through famil-
iarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of
the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is
still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world

sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to

their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is
possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and
unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the
period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at
length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an in-
He images to himself the Being whom he
telligence similar to itself.
loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most per-
fect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations
unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the
philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties,
the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requis-
itions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human
beings. Trie Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and
attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype
of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an
untimely grave.
The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The
Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged bv the furies of an irre-
sistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which

strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinc-
tion, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influ-
ences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits
that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and
inglorious as their delinquencv is more contemptible and pernicious.
They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred
thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition,
loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet
keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in
human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they,
have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with
them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are nei-
ther friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor
 —

70 • Alastor

benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist

without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish
through the intensity and passion of their search after its communi-
ties, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All
else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes
who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and
loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live
unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

"The good die first,

And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust,

Burn to the socket!"
December 14, 1815.

1
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans

amare. Confess. St. August.

Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!

If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety 2 to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; 3
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 5

With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, 4

1. For a detailed explication of Alastor of the visionary young Poet,

and its Preface see Evan K. Gibson's Shelley wrote Alastor in the fall and
essay (pp. 545-569, below). At the end early winter of 1815 while he and Mary
of the Preface, Shelley slightly misquotes Godwin were living quietly in a cottage
Wordsworth's The Excursion, 1.500-502; at Bishopsgate, one of the eastern en-
the epigraph from St. Augustine's Con- trances to the Great Park of Windsor, in
fessions, Ill.i, has been translated: "Not the Thames Valley west of London. It was
yet did I love, yet I was in love with published, together with eleven shorter
loving; ... I sought what I might love, poems, in February 1816 by Baldwin,
loving to love." Alastor explores the Cradock and Joy, an important London
interrelations between the universal hu- bookselling-publishing firm of the period,
man need for love and social ties and Though the volume was no best seller,
the idealist's solitary search for ultimate by the time of Shelley's death in 1822
truths and ideal love. Earl R. Wasserman all copies had been sold, and Mary
has recently suggested that the poem Shelley, who had difficulty obtaining a
contains two chief characters, neither of copy for her own use, reprinted Alastor
whom is named: (1) the Narrator, who with Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824).
invokes the elements of nature and tells No manuscript of the poem survives,
of his own early search for knowledge though there is a copy of the Alastor
of the Ultimate (lines 1-49), and (2) the volume containing Shelley's corrections
idealistic "Poet," whose story the Nar- for one of the poems published with it
rator tells in the main body of the poem (see Shelley and his Circle, IV, 592-
and whose fate he regrets in the closing 594). The only significant textual au-
49 lines. The numerous echoes of Words- thorities are, therefore, the first edition
worth's poems are concentrated in the and Mary's reprint in Posthumous Poems.
opening and closing addresses by the 2. From Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps
Narrator, leading Wasserman to consider Up": "And I could wish my days to be/
the Narrator not Shelley's personal voice, Bound each to each by natural piety."
b it a Wordsworthian poet who compro- 3. I.e.. "repay your gift [of love] with
mises with mortal limitations and who, my love."
tl erefore, contrasts with the absolutism 4. Colors accompanying the sunset.
 Alastor • 71

And solemn midnight's tingling silentness;

If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood,
And winter robing with pure snow and crowns
Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; I0

If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes

Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me;
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved

And cherished these my kindred; then forgive x5

This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw

No portion of your wonted favour now!
Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favour mv
solemn song, for I have loved
Thee and thee only; I have watched
ever, 20

Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,

And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee. 25

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings 5

Of 6 thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, 30

Like an inspired and desperate alchymist

Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made 35

Such magic as compels the charmed night

To render up thy charge: and, though ne'er yet
. . .

Thou hast unveil'd thy inmost sanctuary, 7

Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, 4°

Has shone within me, that serenely now

And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane, 8
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain 45

May modulate with murmurs of the air,

And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and dav, and the deep heart of man.
"-7
5.
of
From Wordsworth, Ode:
Immortality, 142:
Intimations
"those obstinate
r
J
/
7. Shelley in his youth actually hunted
ghosts and tried to raise the Devil and /
/

questionings/Of sense and outward/ spirits of the dead in churchyards and f

things." J, burial vaults. )

6. I.e., r^bout, concerning. £> A sanctuary or temple. /
 —
72 • Alastor

There was a Poet whose untimely tomb so

No human hands with pious reverence reared,

But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:
—
A lovely youth, no mourning maiden decked 55

With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, 5'

The lone couch of his everlasting sleep :—

Gentle, and brave, and generous, no lorn 1 bard —
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:
He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. ^
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he past, have pined
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, 65

Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

By solemn vision, and bright silver dream,

His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient 2 air,
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. 7°

The fountains of divine philosophy

Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had past, he left ?5

His cold fireside and alienated home

To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.
Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness
Has lured and he has bought
his fearless steps;
With his sweet voice from savage men,
and eves, 8o

His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps

He like her shadow has pursued, where'er
The red volcano overcanopies
Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice
With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes 4 85

On black bare pointed islets ever beat

With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves
Rugged and dark, winding among the springs
Of fire and poison, inaccessible
To avarice or pride, their starry domes 9°

Of diamond and of gold expand above

Numberless and immeasurable halls,

9. The cypress
tree was sacred to mourn- "How charming is divine Philosophy!"
ers Metamorphoses, Book X),
(Ovid, 4. Molten lava flows; the exact phrase
who offered wreaths of cypress boughs appears in Southey's Thalaba, VI. 15, but
to the gods on behalf of the dead. the significance possibly derives from
1. Forsaken, abandoned. Milton's Paradise Lost, X.562 and XII.
2. Surrounding. 41, where bituminous lakes are associated
3. An echo of Milton's Comus, 476: with Hell.
 Alastor • 73

Frequent with 5 crystal column, and clear shrines

Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite. 6
Nor had that scene of ampler majesty 95

Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven

And the green earth lost in his heart its claims
To love and wonder; he would linger long
In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,
Until the doves and squirrels would partake I0°

From his innocuous hand his bloodless food, 7

Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,
And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er
The dry leaf rustles in the brake, 8 suspend
Her timid steps to gaze upon a form I0 5

More graceful than her own.

His wandering step

Obedient to high thoughts, has visited
The awful ruins of the days of old:
Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste
Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers II0

Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids,

Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange 9
Sculptured on alabaster obelisk,
Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx,
Dark /Ethiopia in her desert hills II5

Conceals. Among the ruined temples there,

Stupendous columns, and wild images
Of more than man, where marble daemons 1 watch
The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men
Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, I2 °

He lingered, poring on memorials

Of the world's youth, through the long burning day
Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades
Suspended he that task, but ever gazed I2 5

And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind

Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw
The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. 2

Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,

x 3°
Her daily portion, from her father's tent,
And spread her matting for his couch, and stole

5. Crowded with (see Paradise Lost, tions of the past in search of knowledge;
1.797). he moves backward in time from the
6. Olivine, a greenish semi-precious stone. Greeks to the Phoenicians (Tyre and
7. Shelley was a vegetarian. Balbec or Heliopolis), the Jews, the
8. A thicket of bushes, brushwood, or Babylonians, the Egyptians (Memphis
briers. and Thebes), and finally to Ethiopia,
9. The unusual or the mysterious; a noun. which the French writer Volney in his
1. Intermediate spirits with ability to Ruins of Empire (1791) described as the
communicate between the gods and men "cradle of the sciences." In the temple
(from Plato and Greek mythology). of Dendera in Upper Egypt, the gods
2. The Poet's journey in lines 106-128 were arranged within the pattern of the
carries him to the sites of great civiliza- Zodiac.
 —
74 • Alastor

From duties and repose to tend his steps:

Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe
To speak her love: —and watched his nightly sleep,
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips J 35

Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath

Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home
Wildered, 3 and wan, and panting, she returned.

The Poet wandering on, through Arabie ! 4°

And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,

And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way; 4
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within *45

where odorous plants entwine

Its loneliest dell,
Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs. A vision 5 on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet ! 5°

Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid

Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held J 55

His inmost sense suspended in its web

Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine libertv,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, l6°

Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood

Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame
A permeating fire: wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands l6 5

Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp

Strange svmphonv, and in their branching veins
The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
I7 °
The pauses of her music, and her breath
Tumultuouslv accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned.
And saw bv the warm light of their own life I7 5

3. Lost or perplexed. of the Rivers Indus and Oxus, to the

4. The Poet journeys eastward through fabled Vale of Kashmir in northwest
Arabia, Persia, the Desert of Karmin India (see Prometheus Unbound, Il.i).
(southeast Iran), across the Hindu Kush 5. On the nature and significance of the
Mountains (the Indian Caucasus of dream-vision in lines 148-191, see Gib-
Prometheus Unbound) and the source son, pp. 551-554, below.
 —
Alastor • 75
Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil
Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,
Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,
Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips
Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. l8 °

His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess

Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom: she drew back a while,
. . .

Then, yielding to the irresistible joy, l8 5

With frantic gesture and short breathless cry

Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved 6 and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
J 9o
Like a dark flood suspended in its course,
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

Roused by the shock he started from his trance

The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods, J 95

Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled

The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and the majesty of Earth,
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes 20 °

Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly

As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues 2 °5

Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;

He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!
Were limbs, and breath,and being intertwined
Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost,
In the wide pathless desart of dim sleep, 2I °

That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death

Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds,
And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake,
2I 5
Lead only to a black and watery depth,
While death's blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung,
Where every shade which the foul grave exhales
Hides its dead eve from the detested day,
Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?
This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart, 22 °

The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung

His brain even like despair.

6. Wrapped up, obscured.

76 • Alastor

While day-light held

The sky, the Poet kept mute conference
With his still soul. At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream, 22 5

And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness. —
As an eagle grasped
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast
Burn with the poison, and precipitates 7
Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud, 2 *°

Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight

O'er the wide aery wilderness: thus driven
By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,
Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,
Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells, 2 *5

Startling with careless step the moon-light snake,

He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight,
Shedding the mockery of its vital hues
Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on
Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep 2 *°

Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud;

Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs
Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind
Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on, 8
Dav after day, a weary waste of hours, 2 *5

Bearing within his the brooding care

life

That ever fed on decaying flame.

its

And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair

Sered by the autumn of strange suffering
Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand 25 °

Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;

Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone

7. Hastens. between the Caspian and the Aral Sea. hut

.

8. The Poet flees from Kasmir to the north-

hcrc hc latlcr body o| ua(cr sccms inlcndcd:
,

west into what is now Afghanistan and then jn dassica timcs lhe ()xus pj ver Bowed into
i

into the central Asian areas that in classical

me Ara <j ea |

times (whose geographical terms Shelley em- „ wc undcrstand lhc p lHn tu cm bark on the
ploys) were Persian provinces; some of these Ara] Sca his sna lop a sma i| opcn boat, | .

areas are now parts of Russia. Aornos (240) wou d ^

camcd bs „ supcrnalura mp luse up
, | ,

was a mountain fortress on the upper Indus (hc ()xus (() j(s hcadv>alcrs in the Hindu Kush
River captured by Alexander the Great; its Mountains (see note to 144). In Shelley*! da\
name means "without birds." Petra (240), the
,hc sucntlst Bulton and omc rs believed that
Sogdian Rock, is part of the Pamir Range m lhc Hjndu Kush ndian Caucasus) region was
( |

the Tad/.hik SSR. Balk (242), the ancient Per- ,hc cradlc o| lhc human racc Because of the
sian province of Bactna. was south of the ambiguity of several geographical terms ies-
River Oxus (now Amu Darya). Though at pcc a |i v Chorasmum. 272. and Catcwnu, J53,
j

some periods Bactna and Parthia (which was ^ 7?) j, s possiblc hat shellc\ mas have in-
, ,

to the southwest, in the heartland of modern

,cndcd (hc Pocl to cinh ark on the Caspian Sea
Iran) were distinct provinces, alter the decline
and cn(J up m hc wcslcrn Caucasus Moun- ,

oi the post-Alexandrian Seleucid empire, a

lams bctwccn the Caspian and the Black Sea
strong independent Parthian kingdom spread , n (hc la „ cr cas0 hls |0urrK N uou d cnd somc
.
|
.

over the region; its kings were buried at the whcrc ncar thc traditional sue of the Garden
city ol Nysa (modern Nisa) in Bactna proper. () Edcn (Scc i uthcr ScaU s Jr KSJ 2 |
.
\
,

The Chorasmia was the swampy region ->-,.

^7 j
^u 1972-7^1) 1 1
 Alastor • 77
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,
Who ministered with human charity 2 55

His human wants, beheld with wondering awe

Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer,
Encountering on some dizzy precipice
That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind
With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet 26°

Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused

In its career: the infant would conceal
His troubled visage in his mother's robe
In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,
To remember their strange light in many a dream 26 5

Of after-times; but youthful maidens, taught

By nature, would interpret half the woe
That wasted him, would call him with false names
Brother, and friend, would press his pallid hand
At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path 2 7<>

Of his departure from their father's door.

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore

He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, 2 ?5

Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.

It rose as he approached, and with strong wings
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.
—
His eyes pursued its flight. 'Thou hast a home, 28 °

Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home,

Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck
With thine, and welcome thv return with eyes
Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy.
And what am I that I should linger here, 2g 5

With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,

Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beautv, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not mv thoughts?" A gloomy smile 2 9°

Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.

For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly
Its precious charge, and silent death exposed,
Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure,
With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. 2 95

Startled by his own thoughts he looked around.

There was no fair fiend 9 near him, not a sight
Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind.
9. The Poet fears he has been tempted to suicide (285-295) by a seductive "fiend"
external to his mind.
78 • Alastor

A little shallop floating near the shore

Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze. 3 °°

It had been long abandoned, for its sides

Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints
Swayed with the undulations of the tide.
A restless impulse urged him to embark
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste; 305

For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves

The slimy caverns of the populous deep.

The day was fair and sunny; sea and sky

Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind
Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. 3 10

Following his eager soul, the wanderer

Leaped in the boat, he spread his cloak aloft
On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat,
And felt the boat speed o'er the tranquil sea
Like a torn cloud before the hurricane. 315

As one that in a silver vision floats

Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds
Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly
Along the dark and ruffled waters fled
—
The straining boat. A whirlwind swept it on, 320

With fierce gusts and precipitating force,

Through the white ridges of the chafed sea.
The waves arose.Higher and higher still
Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest's scourge
Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp. 325

Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war

Of wave running on wave, and blast on blast
Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven
With dark obliterating course, he sate:
As if their genii were the ministers 330

Appointed to conduct him to the light

Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate
Holding the steady helm. Evening came on,
The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues
High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray 335

That canopied his path o'er the waste deep;

Twilight, ascending slowly from the east,
Entwin'd in duskier wreaths her braided locks
O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day;
Night followed, clad with stars. On every side 340

More horriblv the multitudinous streams

Of ocean's mountainous waste to mutual war
Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock
The calm and spangled skv. The little boat
345
Still fled before the stonm still fled, like foam
Down the steep cataract of a wintry river;
 — ——
Alastor • 79
Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave;
Now leaving far behind the bursting mass
That fell, convulsing ocean. Safely fled
As if that frail and wasted human form, 350
Had been an elemental god.
At midnight
The moon arose: and lo! the etherial 1 cliffs
Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone
Among the stars like sunlight, and around
Whose cavern'd base the whirlpools and the waves 355
Bursting and eddying irresistibly
—
Rage and resound for ever. Who shall save?
—
The boat fled on, the boiling torrent drove,
The crags closed round with black and jagged arms,
The shattered mountain overhung the sea, 360

And faster still, beyond all human speed,

Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave,
The little boat was driven. A cavern there

Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths

Ingulphed the rushing sea. The boat fled on 365
—
With unrelaxing speed. "Vision and Love!"
The Poet cried aloud, "I have beheld
The path of thy departure. Sleep and death
Shall not divide us long!"

The boat pursued

The winding of the cavern. Day-light shone 370

At length upon that gloomy river's flow;

Now, where the fiercest war among the waves
Is calm, on the unfathomable stream
The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven,
Exposed those black depths to the azure sky, 375

Ere yet the flood's enormous volume fell

Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound
That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass
Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm;
Stairabove stair the eddying waters rose, 380

Circling immeasurably fast, and laved

With alternating dash the knarled roots
Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms
In darkness over it. I' the midst was left,
Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud, 385

A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm.

Seized by the sway of the ascending stream,
With dizzv swiftness, round, and round, and round,
Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose,
Till on the verge of the extremest curve, 390

Where, through an opening of the rocky bank,

Rising high in the air.

80 • Alastor

The waters overflow, and a smooth spot

Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides
Is left, the boat paused shuddering. Shall — it sink
Down the abyss? Shall the reverting stress 395
Of that resistless gulph embosom it?

—
Now shall it fall? A wandering stream of wind,
Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail,
And lo! with gentle motion, between banJcs
Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream, 400

Beneath a woven grove it sails, and, hark!

The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar,
With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods.
Where the embowering trees recede, and leave
A little space of green expanse, the cove 405

Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers 2

For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes,
Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave
Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task,
Which nought but vagrant bird, or wanton wind, 410

Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay

Had e'er disturbed before. The Poet longed
To deck with their bright hues his withered hair,
But on his heart its solitude returned,
And he forbore. Not the strong impulse hid 415

In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame,

Had yet performed its ministry: it hung
Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud
Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods
Of night close over it.

The noonday sun 420

Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass

Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence
A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves,
Scooped in the dark base of their aery rocks
Mocking 3 its 4 moans, respond and roar for ever. 425

The meeting boughs and implicated 5 leaves

Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as led
By dream, or god, or mightier Death,
love, or
He sought Nature's dearest haunt, some bank,
in
Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark 430

And dark the shades accumulate. The oak,

Expanding its immense and knotty arms,
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
Of the tall cedar overarching, frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below, 435

Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,

2.The narcissi recall the legend of the 3. Imitating or mimicking.

Greek youth who pined away for self- 4. The forest of 421.
love. 5. Intertwined.
 —
Alastor • 81

The ash and the acacia floating hang

Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around 44<>

The grey trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes,

With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs
Uniting their close union; the woven leaves 445
Make net-work of the dark blue light of day,
And the night's noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns
Beneath these canopies extend their swells,
Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms 450
Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine,
A soul-dissolving odour, to invite
To some more Through the dell,
lovely mystery.
Silenceand Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep 455
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades,
Like vaporous shapes half seen; beyond, a well,
Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave,
Images all the woven boughs above,
And each depending leaf, and every speck 46o

Of azure sky, darting between their chasms;

Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves
Its portraiture, but some inconstant star
Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,
Or, painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, 465
Or gorgeous insect floating motionless,
Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings
Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon.
Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld
Their own wan light through the reflected lines 470
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth
Of that still fountain; as the human heart,
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard
The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprung 475
Startledand glanced and trembled even to feel
An unaccustomed presence, and the sound
Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs
Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed
—
To stand beside him clothed in no bright robes 480

Of shadowy silver or enshrining light,

Borrowed from aught the visible world affords
Of grace, or majesty, or mystery;
But, undulating woods, and silent well,
And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom 485
82 • Alastor

Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming

Held commune with him, as if he and it
Were all that was, —only . . . when his regard
Was raised by intense pensiveness, two eyes, . . .

Two starry eyes, hung in thegloom of thought, 490

And seemed with their serene and azure smiles

To beckon him.
Obedient to the light
That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing
—
The windings of the dell. The rivulet
Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine 49 *

Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell

Among the moss with hollow harmony
Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones
It danced; like childhood laughing as it went:
Then, through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept, soo

Reflecting every herb and drooping bud

That overhung its quietness. "O stream!
—
Wliose source is inaccessibly profound,
Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?
Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, 5 °5

Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulphs,

Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course
Have each their type in me: and the wide sky,
And measureless ocean may declare as soon
5I °
What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud
Contains thy waters, as the universe
Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched
Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste
I' the passing wind!"

Beside the grassy shore

5I5
Of the small stream he went; he did impress
On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught
Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one
Roused bv some joyous madness from the couch
Of fever, he did move; yet, not like him,
52 °
Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame
Of his frail exultation shall be spent,
He must descend. With rapid steps he went
Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flow
Of the wild babbling rivulet; and now
525
The forest's solemn canopies were changed
For the uniform and lightsome 7 evening skv.
Grey rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed
s
The struggling brook: tall spires of windlestrae
Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope,

6. Undiscoverable. 8. Dry stalks left from flowering plants

7. Luminous, evidently from light re- after blossoms have died,
fracted by the atmosphere after sunset.
 Alastor • 83

And nought 9
but knarled roots of antient pines 530

Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots

The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here,
Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away,
The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin
And white, and where irradiate dewy eyes 535
—
Had shone, gleam stony orbs: so from his steps
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade
Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds
And musical motions. Calm, he still pursued
The stream, that with a larger volume now 540

Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there

Fretted a path through its descending curves
With its wintry speed. On every side now rose
Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms,
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles 545

In the light of evening, and its precipice 1

Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above,
Mid toppling stones, black gulphs and yawning caves,
Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues
To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands 550

Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,

And seems, with its accumulated crags,
To overhang the world: for wide expand
Beneath the wan stars and descending moon
Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, 555
Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom
Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills
Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge
Of the remote horizon. The near scene,
In naked and severe simplicity, 560

Made contrast with the universe. A pine, 2

Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancv
Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast
Yielding one only response, at each pause
In most familiar cadence, with the howl 565
The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams
Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river,
Foaming and hurrying o'er its rugged path,
Fell into that immeasurable void
Scattering its waters to the passing winds. 570

Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine

And torrent, were not all; —
one silent nook
Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain,
Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks,

9. Shelley must have meant knarled 1. 541.

(gnarled) trunks, since these are said to 2. In Shelley's poetry pine trees recur as
clench the soil with grasping roots (531- emblems of human hopes and symbolize
532). the persistence of life in the face of
1. Headlong descent— fte refers to dell, adversity.
84 • Alastor

It overlooked in its serenity 575

The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars.
It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile
Even in the lap of horror. Ivv clasped
The fissured stones with its entwining arms,
And did embower with leaves for ever green, 580

And berries dark, the smooth and even space

Of its inviolated floor, and here
The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore,
In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay,
Red, yellow, or etherially pale, 585

Rivals the pride of summer. 'Tis the haunt

Of every gentle wind, whose breath can teach
The wilds to love tranquillity. One step,
One human step alone, has ever broken
—
The stillness of its solitude: one voice 590

Alone inspired its echoes, —even that voice

Which hither came, floating among the winds,
And led the loveliest among human forms
To make their wild haunts the depository
Of all the grace and beauty that endued 595

motions, render up its majesty,

Its
Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm,
And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould,
Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss,
Commit the colours of that varying cheek, 6o°

That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.

The dim and horned moon 3 hung low, and poured

A sea on the horizon's verge
of lustre
That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist
Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank ^5
Wan moonlight even to fulness: not a star
Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds,
Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice
Slept, clasped in his embrace. —
(), storm of death!
6l °
Whose sightless 4 speed divides this sullen night:
And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still
Guiding its irresistible career
In thv devastating omnipotence,
Art king of this frail world, from the red field
6l 5
Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital,
The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed
Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne,
A mightv voice invokes thee. Ruin calls

3. The moon crescent-shaped with the

is "invisible," but "blind" or "unseeing"
points rising; the image is that in Cole- seems to be the more likely meaning;
ridge's Dejection: An Ode of "the new like the charioteers in Hellas (71 Iff.) and
Moon/With the old Moon in her arms" "The Triumph of Life" (86-105), Death
(see also "The Triumph of Life," 79-85). is blind in not apprehending moral dis-
4. Some critics have glossed this word as tinctions.
 Alastor • 85
His brother Death. A rare and regal prey
He hath prepared, prowling around the world; 62 °

Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men

Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms,
Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine
The unheeded tribute of a broken heart.
When on the threshold of the green recess 62 5

The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death

Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,
Did he resign his high and holy soul
To images of the majestic past,
Tli at paused within his passive being now, 6 3°

Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe

Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place
His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk
Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone
Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, 6 35

Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink

—
Of that obscurest chasm; and thus he lay,
Surrendering to their final impulses
The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear 64°

Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,

And his own being unalloved bv pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmlv fed
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
At peace, and faintlv smiling: —
his last sight ^s
Was the great moon, which o'er the western line
Of the wide world her mightv horn suspended,
With whose dun 5 beams inwoven darkness seemed
To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills
and still as the divided frame
It rests, 6 5°

Of the vast meteor 6 sunk, the Poet's blood,

That ever beat in mystic sympathy
With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still:
And when two lessening points of light alone
Gleamed through the darkness, 7 the alternate gasp 6 55

Of his faint respiration scarce did stir

The stagnate night: —
till the minutest rav

Was quenched, the pulse vet lingered in his heart.

It paused — it fluttered. But when heaven remained
660
Utterly black, the murky shades involved
An image, silent, cold, and motionless,
As their own voiceless earth and vacant air.
Even as a vapour 8 fed with golden beams
5. Brownish; as the moon sinks lower, earth's atmosphere, whose outer limits
its light is more refracted and turns from were thought to be marked by the moon,
a whitish to a dark yellow or orange 7. As the moon sets, its center sinks first
color. below the horizon, leaving eventually
6.The term originally meant any phe- two lessening points of light (654).
nomenon (including weather) within the 8. Cloud.
 — ——
86 - Alastor

That ministered 9 on sunlight, ere the west

Eclipses was now that wonderous frame
it, w5
No sense, no motion, no divinity
A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings
The breath of heaven did wander a bright stream —
Once fed with many-voiced waves a dream —
Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever, 6 7°

Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.

O, for Medea's 1 wondrous alchemy,

Which wheresoe'er it fell made the earth gleam
With bright flowers, and the wintrv boughs exhale
From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God, 675

Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice

Which but one living man 2 has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
He bears, over the world wanders for ever, 68 °

Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream

Of dark magician 3 in his visioned cave,
Raking the cinders of a crucible
For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law 68s

Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled

Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn
—
Robes in its golden beams, ah! thou hast fled!
The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The and genius. Heartless things
child of grace ^
Are done and said the world, and many worms
i'

And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth

From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,
In vesper low or joyous orison,
Lifts still its solemn voice: —
but thou art fled ^5
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee
Been purest ministers, who are, alas!
Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips
So sweet even in their silence, on those eves
That image sleep in death, upon that form
Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear
—
Be shed not even in thought. Nor, when those hues
Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,
7°5
Worn by the senseless 4 wind, shall live alone
9. Attended, as a servant. in Queen Mab (VII.66ff.) and Hellas
1. While Medea, the sorceress of Greek (137-185, 638-640, 738ff), among other
legend and tragedy, brewed a magic works by Shelley.
potion to revive Aeson, she spilled some 3. An alchemist searching for the elixir

on the ground, whereupon flowers and of life and the power to change base
grass sprang up (Ovid, Metamorphoses, metals into gold within a cave in which
VII.275ff.). he sees visions.
2. Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, 4. Lacking sensation, insensate,
doomed to eternal life, who appears also
 Stanzas • 87
In the frail pauses of this simple strain,
Let not high verse, mourning the memory
Of that which is no more, or painting's woe
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence, 710

And all the shews o' the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.
It is a woe too "deep for tears," 5 when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves 715

Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,

The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. 720

Stanzas— April, 1814. 1

Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon,
Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.
Pause not! The time is past! Every voice cries, Away! 5

Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood:
Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay:
Duty and dereliction 2 guide thee back to solitude.
Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth; I0

Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,

And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth. 3
The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thine head:
The blooms of dewy spring shall gleam beneath thy feet:
But thy soul or this world must fade 4 in the frost that binds the
l$
dead,
Ere midnight's frown and morning's smile, ere thou and peace
may meet.
The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose,
For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in the deep:
Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows;
Whatever moves, or toils, or grieves, hath its appointed sleep. 20

5. Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Im- lished with Alastor in 1816.

mortality, 203. 2. The condition of being forsaken or
1. Composed at Bracknell, a village west abandoned.
of London, in April 1814, this potm re- 3. Lines 9-12 signal the deterioration oi
fers to Shelley's infatuation with Cornelia Shelley's first marriage to Harriet West-
Boinville Turner, daughter of Shelley's brook Shelley. Complicate: form in an
friend Harriet Collins de Boinville and intricate way.
wife of Thomas Turner, a lawyer and 4. If the soul is immortal, then the world
protege of Godwin. The poem was pub- will fade first.
 —
88 • To Wordsworth
—
Thou in the grave shalt rest yet till the phantoms flee
Which that house and heath and garden made dear to thee
erewhile, 5
Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings are not free
From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.
6
Mutability.
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
I low restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

Streaking the darkness radiantly! —

yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, 7 whose dissonant strings 5

Give various response to each varying blast,

To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest. —A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.— One wandering thought pollutes the day; I0

We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;

Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! — For, be

it joy or sorrow,

The path departure still is free:

of its

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; x 5

Nought may endure but Mutabilitv.

1816

To Wordsworth. 8
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine 5

Which thou too feel'st, vet I alone deplore.

Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:

Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood

IO
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
1816
5. A while before, formerly. Wordsworth's friend Robert Southey
6. "Mutability," like "To Wordsworth," (whom had known well during
Shelley
was published with Alastor (1816). his stay Keswick, Cumberland, from
at
7. Aeolian harps or wind lyres (cf. November 1812 through January 1813).
Alastor, 41^9, 663-668). On September 14, 1814, Mary Shelley
8. Shelley's comment on the growing recorded in her journal: "Shelley . . .

and religious conservatism of

political brings home Wordsworth's Excursion, of
both William Wordsworth (whom he which we read a part, much disappointed,
"
knew only through his writings) and He is a slave
 — —
Mont Blanc 89

Mont Blanc
1 ' ^J+ur^t^
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI '

[The everlasting universe of things

v lows through the mind, and rolls its rapid wavesTj
Now dark— now glittering—now reflecting gloom
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs 3
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, —with
a sound but half its own.
i
Such brook will oft assume
as a feeble
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, e
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river e
Over its rocks ceaselesslv bursts and raves.
h
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve — dark, deep Ravine-
Thou many-coloured, m any-voice d vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail J ~P
Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams: awful 2 scene,^ ^ <ry~ ls
.
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down c /^ ^s/cp
From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne, c "^
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flamed
Of lightning through the tempest; thou dost lie, *^— ^ ^,
r
1. According to the interpretation ad- and the Arve Valley; he hears the falling
vanced by Earl R. Wasserman in The of the streams melting off the glacier,
Subtler Language (1959), Shelley dis- Mer de Glace, above; but he images to
tinguishes between the Universal Mind himself and in the poem snows and the
(represented in Part II by the Ravine) lightning storms, unseen and unheard,
and the individual human mind (com- at the upper reaches of the mountain
pared in line 7 with the channel of a which feed the glacier and start the
"feeble brook"). (See also Alastor, 668- chain of Necessity that first destroys life
669.) The streams passing through these as the glacier moves down the mountain
respective channels (the River Arve and and then supports life as the River Arve
the brook itself) would represent
the and, later, the River Rhone carry water
stream of sensations or impressions that and life to peoples far away (lines
pass through the mind, universal or indi- 100-126).
vidual. Under this reading (which gains Power and the cycle of Necessity
support from lines 34ff.) the poet ex- generated by Power are unconcerned with
plores (1) the relationship of his own human values; what the scene teaches
seeming individual identity ("my own the attentive ("adverting") mind, that
separate phantasy") to the Universal or mind which can learn from observing the
One Mind, of which all minds are parts, cycle of destruction and rebirth found in
and (2) the relationship of Mind to the natural Necessity, is that "Power" (the
unknown first cause or motive force that First Cause) is not a personal God, but
sends the impressions of "things" (line an Unmoved Mover quite alien in nature
1) to the Mind. This unknown actuating to mutable mortal creatures. This knowl-
—
force referred to as "Power" in the edge can "repeal/Large codes of fraud
—
poem (lines 16, 96) is represented by and woe" (80-81), because it destroys
the top of Mont Blanc, the highest moun- old dogmatic ideas (the Divine Right of
tain in Europe, hidden high above the kings, for example) and the hierarchies
clouds. The actual scene of the roem and tyrannies that spring from them. For
the place where Shelley stood when he a reading of "Mont Blanc" that laid the
—
was inspired to write it is on a bridge foundation for modern understanding of
over the Arve River in the Valley of the poem, see Charles H. Vivian's "The
Chamonix in Savoy, now southeastern One 'Mont Blanc,' " reprinted pp. 569-
France, not far from Geneva, Switzer- 579, below.
land. Shelley sees only the rushing river 2. Filled with awe, reverence.
90 • Mont Blanc
r>
Thy giant brood of pines 3 around thee clinging, 20

Children of elder time, in whose devotion j *

The chainless winds still come and ever earned
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
f
To —
hear an old and solemn harmony; ^
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep ( 25

Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil £>

Robes some unsculptured image; 4 the strange sleep c

Which when the voices of the desart fail o
Wraps all in its own deep eternity; ly —
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, 9 30

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; o\

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that un resting soun<
Dizzy Ravinel and when I gaze on thee 5 h
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange 1{ 35

To muse on my own separate phantasy, 6 h

My own, my human mind, whichfpas siyely A
Now renders and receives fast influencings, /
Holding an unremitting i nterchang e A,
With the clear universe of thmgsaroundj 40
j

([One legion of wild thoughts^ whose wandering wings /

f^ow float above thy darkness, and now rest r ^

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, /7X
In the still cave of the witch Poesy, 7 r\
Seeking among the shadows 8 that pass bv o ,
4$

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, n

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast yv^
From which they fled 9 recalls them/ thou art there! .

*
in
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,— that death is slumber, 50

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

—
Of those who wake and live. I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled

3. Shelley uses the pine tree in several 7. The witch Poesy personifies the imag-
poems to symbolize the persistence of ination; only in the stillness of her cave
human values in the face of obstacles. —within the mind —
can the individual
(But see lines 109-111.) communicate with "that" (43), "the clear
4. The image that appears in the rocks universe of things" (40), or "thou" (43),
behind the veil of the waterfall has not the Universal Mind; note that the syntax
been sculptured by man. is ambiguous, leaving the possibility that
5. The poet addresses the Ravine of Arve these may be either two separate entities
in personal terms (thee, thy, thou) be- or only one.
cause, as the analogies of the opening 8. In apposition to Ghosts (46).
twenty lines have established, the Ravine 9. breast fled: The Ghosts of all
. . .

has become the emblem of the Universal things that are found in the imaginative
Mind. mind must come from a source, here an-
6. The phrase my own separate phantasy thropomorphized as a breast; the poet
is apposition to My own, my human
in explores the nature of this source in lines
mind (37) and One legion of wild 49-57.
thoughts (41). These identifications dis- 1. they . them refers to shadows
. . . . .

tinguish the individual human mind from Ghosts (45—46).

the Universal Mind.
 : —
Mont Blanc 91

The veil of life and death? 2 or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep 55

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, 60

Mont —
Blanc appears, still, snowy, and serene
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread 65

And wind among the accumulated steeps;

A desart peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks 3 her there how hideously — 70
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. Is this the scene —
Where the old Earthquake-daemon 4 taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire, envelope once this silent snow?
—
_None can reply all seems eternal now
he wiftfemess has a mysterious tongue
Which teachesjto£FuJ?doubt, 5 or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be '

But for such fait h£3JJJLJia-tei^»i£Conciled,

Thnn^flsFa vnirp great -Mountain) to repeal
V? >

jecodes of fraud aiTd wOti; rrert understood

»y all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeplv feel.
IV
The the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
fields,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
Within the daedal 7 earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
2. As E. B. Murray has argued (KSJ, may be
18:39-48 [1969]), Shelley here records To such high thoughts of With such
the anticlimactic moment at the end of a faith
the poet's vision in the cave of Poesy, In such wise faith with Nature recon-
when the veil is lowered again between ciled!— /~
the realms of life and death. On the basis df this evidence both Was-
3. Pursues, traces. serman and/Judith Chernaik have con-
4. A daemon, in Greek mythology, is a cluded thdt But is used here not as a
spirit intermediate between the gods and preposition meaning "except," but rather
men, usually personifying natural forces. as sdn adverb meaning "only" or
5. Reverent open-mindedness. "merely."
6. But for such faith probably means 7. Intricately, cleverly fashioned; this
"only through such faith"; in the manu- favorite adjective of Shelley comes ulti-
script draft this passage reads (canceled mately from Daedalus, the craftsman of
words in italics) Greek mythology who built the Cretan
Which teaches awful, —or a belief faith labyrinth and, later, wings to escape
so mild from it.

So solemn, so serene, that man again

 92 Mont Blanc 4^^^/A,
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower; — the bound 90

With which from that detested trance they leap;

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
And that of him and all that his may be;
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside and swell. 95

A*W^ Power dwells apart in its tranquillity

Remote, serene, and inaccessible: 8

ss
u And
On
this," the naked countenance of earth,
which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with manv a tower 105

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

i destined path, or in the mangled soil

d Its

"M Branchless and shattered stand: the rocks, drawn

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
down

Ar* ^Jever to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place

^
J

M P'tJjv
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Thefr food and their retreat for ever gone,
"5

f So much of life and jov is lost. The race

Of man, flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
And their place is not known. 10 Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, 1 for ever
125
,Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves,
(Breathes its swift vapours to the circling airj
v
Mont Blanc vet gleams on high: the power is — there,
h
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And manv sounds, and much of life and death. c
130
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, b
8. The bald statement of the aloof nature it is gone; and the place thereof shall
of Power contrasts with the endless cycli- know it no more" (Psalms 103:15—16).
cal activities of mortal creatures de- 1. The River Arve. which originates in
scribed in lines 84-95. the Valley of Chamonix at the foot of
9. I.e., the contrast drawn in lines 84—97, Mont Blanc, flows into Lake Geneva
but especially the nature of Power stated near the city of Geneva; nearby, the
in 96-97. River Rhone flows out of Lake Geneva
10. "As for man, his days are as grass. to begin its course through France to
. . For the wind passeth over it, and
. the Mediterranean Sea.
 —— — —
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 93
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
C*
(L
(Mb
I (Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, £ >

\ Or the star-beams dart through them: —Winds contend ci j

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

j c *
on-j
jn, Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home -f
iH:

kJ The voiceless lightning in these solitudes c

v
S>
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow.YThe secret strength of things
'«

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome / 1

*?
A
, i
7 , //
rOOf heaven is as a law, 2 inhabits theePJ ; / / r* \
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea/ / ^M5 t-j/#-
^ l

^
-7/
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silenre and solitude
Silenceand
-A
wprp vopa-nrv?
snliriirle were^yaegncy
Ihfafryciyy
/ .\s>,.^
^
'
. l
, 1
'

>N-
Hymn to Intellecttral Beauty
1

The awful shadow of some unseenq?ower J

c
Floats though unseen amongst us, visiting —
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance; ^p , ,

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
^
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
^ y
?;?/>

Spirit of Beauty, that dost 2 consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
—
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? 15

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

2. The clause, The secret strength . . . 1. Composed in the summer of 1816 dur-
law, states that the Power that generates ing his stay with Byron on the shores of
things and is the law of nature also Lake Geneva, Shelley's "Hymn" was first
—
governs thought that mind is ultimately published in Leigh Hunt's weekly news-
subordinate to the remote, serene, and paper the Examiner on January 19, 1817;
inaccessible (97) force that originates a revised version was printed, along with
the amoral cycles of Necessity. "Lines written among the Euganean
3. Mont Blanc; this personification of the Hills" and "Ozymandias," in Rosalind
symbol of the nonanthropomorphic, and Helen (1819). "Intellectual," as used
amoral Power prepares for the final in the title, means nonmaterial.
rhetorical question (142-144). The very 2. Though some editors follow the Ex-
power of imagination to realize the na- aminer text, which reads that doth, the
ture of Power, so remote and foreign to second person familiar form is correct in
all mortal experience, illustrates the su- this situation; see parallel usages in the
premacy of that imagination over the Collects of the Book of Common Prayer
silence and solitude that threaten it. (e.g., "Almighty God, who hast given
The poet is equal to Mont Blanc, for thine only Son . ..") and in Milton's
though the amoral Power can destroy sonnets, many of which are modeled on
him, only he can comprehend its meaning. the Collects of the prayer book.
 ——
94 • Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not forever
Weaves rainbowsyon mountain river,
o'er
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shewn, 20

Why fear and dream and death and birth

Cast on the daylight of this earth
—
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?.

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever 25

To sage or poet these responses given

name of God and ghosts and Heaven,
Therefore the
Remain the records of their 3 vain endeavour,
Frail spells —
whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From
all we hear and all we see, 30

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

—
Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument, 4
Or moonlight on
midnight stream,
a 35

/ Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

u*«r>
4
Jdl^ cw J Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
\A\L
fy^^y Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 5 40

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. 6
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes
Thou — that to human thought art nourishment,
Like_daj kness to a dying flame! 7 45

'Departnot as thy shadow came^

—
Depart not lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

5
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, 50

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

3. Sage and poet (line 26). therefore, the possibility of virtual (not
~4. Th^e Aeolian harp or wind lyre. literal) immortality.
5. I.e., "Man would be ... If thou 7. The Spirit Shelley invokes is said to
didst. . .
." nourish human thought as darkness nour-
6. Shelley's hyperbole in lines 39-41 de- ishes a dying flame; i.e., the Spirit does
rives from his belief in the primary not really feed human thought at all,
importance of psychological, rather than but sets off and calls attention to it be-
chronological. time. In his note to Queen cause of its opposite, antithetical nature.
Mab, VIII. 203-207, he asserts the per- This contrast is also found in "Mont
fectibility of the human sensibility and, Blanc."
 —— — ^

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty • 95

8
on poisonous names with which our youth
I called is fed;
I —
was not heard I saw them not
When musing deeply on the lot 55

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

wake to bring
All vital things that
News of budsand blossoming,
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in extacy! 6°

6
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers J>£<- u SJJ^2*^
—
To thee and thine have I not kept the vow? —
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave they have in visioned bowers

:
6$

Of studious zeal or love's delight

Outwatched with me the envious night
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free »

This world from its dark slavery, *y 7°

—
That thou O awful Loveliness, A^
^
Wouldst give whatever these words cannot express. ,

The day becomes more solemn and serene

When —
noon is past there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 75

Which through the summer not heard or seen,

is

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply 8o

Its calm — to one who worships thee,

And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear9 himself, and love all human kind.

8. Religious terms such as "God," 9. Revere, have respect,

"ghosts," and "Heaven" (line 27).
 96 Laon and Cythna

From Laon and Cythna; or

f- The Revolution of the Golden City
1

DEDICATION
TO
MARY
i.
So now my summer task is ended, Mary,
And I return to thee, mine own heart's home;
As to his Queen some Knight of Faery, 2
victor
Earning bright spoils for her inchanted dome;
Nor thou disdain, that ere my fame become
A star among the stars of mortal night,
indeed may cleave its natal gloom,
If it
Its doubtful promise thus I would unite
With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light.

2.
The which stole from thee so many an hour
toil
—
ended, and the fruit is at thy feet!
Is
No longer where the woods to frame a bower
With interlaced branches mix and meet,
9 Or where with sound like many voices sweet
Water-falls leap among wild islands green, 15

Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat

Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen
But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been.

Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first

The
clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. 20

I do remember well the hour which burst

My
spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near school-room, voices, that, alas! 25

Were but one echo from a world of woes

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

And then I clasped my hands and looked around

—But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground 30

1. Laon and Cythna (later retitled The an idealizedportrayal of the French

Revolt of Islam), Shelley's longest poem, Revolution. Shelley composed the poem
is a symbolic epic of twelve cantos in between March or April and September
Spenserian stanzas. Uniting Shelley's 1817; the Dedication "To Mary" (i.e.,
philosophical, social, and personal con- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) was written
cerns, it tells the story of two lovers after this "summer's task" had been
(also brother and sister in the original completed.
version) who inspire and lead a bloodless 2.The poem owes much to Spenser's
revolution against the sultan of Turkey The Faerie Queen.
 ——
V'ft^V^M) Laon and Cythna 97
So without shame, I spake :-f-"I will be wise,
just, and free, and mildjLifc-rn me lies
And ^r
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the stron^still tyrannise
Without reproach or check/] I then controuled 35

My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold^

And from that hour did I with earnest thought

Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store 4°
Wrought li nked armour f or my so ul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.3

6.
Alas, that love should be a blight and snare
To those who sympathies in one!
seek all
Such once I sought in vain; then b lack despair,
The shado w of a star le ss night was thrown ,

OveflHeworld which I moved alone:

in so

Yet never found I one not false to me,

Hard hearts, and cold, like weights of icy stone
Which crushed and withered mine, that could not be
Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee.

7-
Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart 55

Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain;

How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of Custom thou didst burst and rend in twain, 4
And walked as free as light the clouds among, 6°

Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain

From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung
To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long.

8.
No more alone through the world's wilderness,
Although I trod the paths of high intent, 65

I journeyed now: no more companionless,

Where solitude is like despair, I went.

3. Lines 21-45 give Shelley's most specific school), where Shelley studied from 1804
and detailed account of his conversion to 1810.
to revolutionary principles; the circum- 4. Mary Godwin was sixteen years old
stances of the scene seem to fit aristo- when she declared her love to Shelley,
cratic Eton College (a leading "public who was then twenty-one and married to
school" or endowed private preparatory Harriet Westbrook Shelley.
 98 • Laon and Cythna
There is the wisdom of a stern content
When Poverty can blight the just and good,
When Infamy dares mock the innocent,
And cherished friends turn with the multitude
To trample: this was ours, and we unshaken stood! V*
9- uJ*l
Now has descended a serener hour, ^ ^t*\<^
And
with inconstant fortuneTfriends return * C
Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power
—
ry v X/ Which says: Let scorn be not repaid with scom.
rsT </£ And from thy side two gentle babes are born y- (jv^°\
|
sf o %y ^° our ^
nome with smiles, 5 and thus are we fr4 *

CT/U Most
fortunate beneath life's beaming morn; \"r
And these delights, and thou, have been to me
The parents of the Song I consecrate to thee.
j ^ 8o

10.
Is it, that now my
inexperienced fingers
But strike the prelude of a loftier strain?
Or, must the lyre on which my spirit lingers
Soon pause in silence, ne'er to sound again, 6 85

Though it might shake the Anarch Custom's reign,

And charm the minds of men to Truth's own sway
Holier than was Amph ion's? 7 I would fain
—
Reply in hope but I am worn away,
And Death and Love are yet contending for their prey. 9°

i i.

And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak:

Time may interpret to his silent years.
Yet in the paleness of thy thoughtful cheek,
And ample forehead wears,
in the light thine
And inthy sweetest smiles, and in thy tears, 95

And in thy gentle speech, a prophecy

Is whispered, to subdue my fondest fears:
And through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see
A lamp of vestal fire 8 burning internally.
12.
They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth, IO°

Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child. ^

V> I wonder not — for One then Earth"
left this XJ
sy Whose life was like a setting planet mild iy
William (born Jan. 24, 1816) and to death her husband and that man's
Clara Everina (born Sept. 2, 1817). second wife.)
6. Shelley, who thought he might be 8. Sacred fire tended by vestal virgins in
dying at this time. the temple of Vesta, Roman goddess of
7. In Greek myth Amphion, a son of the hearth and household.
Zeus, was so creative with his lyre that 9. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, mother
stones formed themselves into the walls of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley,
of Thebes in response to his music. (His had died in 1797 from complications
unholy acts were to avenge his human connected with the birth of her name-
mother by conquering Thebes and putting sake.
 — ——

Whichclothed thee in the radiance undefiled

Of departing glory; still her fame
its I0 5

Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild

Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim
The shelter, from thy Sire, 1 of an immortal name.

One voice 2 came forth from many a mighty spirit,

Which was the echo of three thousand years; II0

And the tumultuous world stood mute to hear it,

As some lone man who in a desart hears
—
The music of his home: unwonted fears
Fell on the pale oppressors of our race,
And Faith, and Custom, and low-thoughted cares, "5
Like thunder-stricken dragons, for a space
Left the torn human heart, their food and dwelling-place.

M-
Truth's deathless voice pauses among mankind!
If there must be no response to my cry
If men must rise and stamp with fury blind I2 °

On his
pure name who loves them, thou and I, —
Sweet Friend! can look from our tranquillity
Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,
Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by
Which wrap them from the foundering 3 seaman's sight, I2 5

That burn from year to year with unextinguished light.

From CANTO IX 4

20.
"We know —
not what will come yet Laon, dearest,
Cythna shall be the prophetess of love,
3640

Her lips shall rob thee of the grace thou wearest,

To hide thy heart, and clothe the shapes which rove
Within the homeless future's wintry grove;
For I now, sitting thus beside thee, seem 3645

Even with thy breath and blood to live and move,

And violence and wrong are as a dream
Which rolls from stedfast truth, an unreturning stream.

1. William Godwin was regarded by caping the counter-revolutionary armies

young liberals as England's greatest po- sent by reactionary powers, have told
litical theorist and novelist of the decade each other how, after their separation
following 1792. years before, each had come to partici-
2. Godwin's An Enquiry
concerning Po- pate in the bloodless Revolution of the
litical Justice
(1793). Golden City. In this speech Cythna as-
3. Stumbling; sinking because the ship is sures Laon that they have not struggled
filled with water. in vain. Shelley later reused the imagery
4. Laon and his sister Cythna, after es- in "Ode to the West Wind."
 —
J 00 • Laon and Cythna
21.
"The blasts of autumn winged seeds
drive the
—
Over the Earth, next come the snows, and rain, 3650

And frosts, and storms, which dreary winter leads

Out of his Scythian 5 cave, a savage train;
Behold! Spring sweeps over the world again,
Shedding soft dews from her acthereal wings;
Flowers on the mountains, fruits over.the plain, 3655

And music on the waves and woods she flings,

And love on all that lives, and calm on lifeless things.
22.
"O Spring, of hope, and love, and youth, and gladness
Wind-winged emblem! brightest, best and fairest!
Whence comest thou, when, with dark Winter's sadness 3660

The tears that fade in sunny smiles thou sharest?

Sister of joy, thou art the child who wearest
Thy mother's dying smile, tender and sweet;
Thy mother Aujurjin^for whose grave thou bearest
Fresh flowersTlind beams like flowers, with gentle feet, 3665
Disturbing not the leaves which are her winding-sheet.
2 3-
"Virtue, and Hope, and Love, like light and Heaven,
Surround the world. —We
are their chosen slaves.
Has not the whirlwind of our spirit driven
Truth's deathless germs to thought's remotest caves? 3670

Lo, Winter comes! —

the grief of manv graves,
The frost of death, the tempest of the sword,
The flood of tyrannv, whose sanguine waves
Stagnate like ice at Faith, the inchantcr's word,
And bind all human hearts in its repose abhorred. 3675

24.
"The seeds are sleeping in the soil: meanwhile
Thy tyrant peoples dungeons with his prey,
Pale victims on the guarded scaffold smile
Because they cannot speak; and, day bv day,
The moon of wasting Science wanes away 3680

Among her stars, and in that darkness vast

The sons of Earth to their foul idols pray.
And grey priests triumph, and like blight or blast
A shade of selfish care o'er human looks is cast.
" 2 5-
"This the winter of the world;
is and here — 3685

We
die, even as the winds of Autumn fade,
Expiring in the frorc 7 and foggv air.
Behold! Spring comes, though we must pass, who made
5. Classical Scythia included regions of (Scythia extra Imaum).
central Asia east of the Aral Sea (Scythia 6. Knowledge and reasoned discourse.
intra Imaum) and what are now Tibet 7. Intensely cold, frosty.
and Sinkiang province of western China
 — 1

To Const antia • 10

—
The promise of its birth, even as the shade
Which from our death, as from a mountain, flings 3690

The future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed

As with the plumes of overshadowing wings,
From its dark gulphs of chains, Earth like an eagle springs.!

26.
"O we shall be dead and cold
dearest love!
Before this morn may on the world arise; 3695
Wouldst thou the glory of its dawn behold?
Alas! gaze not on me, but turn thine eyes
On thine own
heart —
it is a Paradise

Which everlasting Spring has made its own,

And while drear Winter fills the naked skies, 3700
Sweet streams of sunny thought, and flowers fresh-blown,
Are there, and weave their sounds and odours into one.
2 7-
own hearts the earnest of the hope
"In their
Which made them great, the good will ever find;
And though some envious shades may interlope 3705

Between the effect and it, One comes behind,

Whoaye the future to the past will bind
Necessity, 8
whose sightless strength forever
Evil with evil, good with good must wind
In bands of union, which no power may sever: 3710

They must bring forth their kind, and be divided never!

28.
"The good and mighty of departed ages
Are in their graves, the innocent and free
Heroes, and Poets, and prevailing Sages,
Who leave the vesture 9 of their majesty 3715

To adorn and clothe this naked world; and we —

—
Are like to them such perish, but they leave
All hope, or love, or truth, or liberty.
Whose forms their mighty spirits could conceive,
To be a rule and law to ages that survive." 10 3720

1
To Constantia
Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers
O'ershadowing me
with soft and lulling wings;
The blood and within thy snowy fingers
life
Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings.
8. See note to Queen Mab, VI. 198. in Ormond, by the American novelist
9. Clothing, raiment. Charles Brockden Brown). It was first
10. Cf. the end of A Defence of Poetry: published in the Oxford University and
"Poets are the unacknowledged legisla- City Herald on January 31, 1818, over
tors of the world." the name "Pleyel," the name not only of
1. Written at Marlow between mid-1817 a famous piano maker of the day but
and January 19, 1818, "To Constantia" also of a character in Wieland, Brown's
celebrates Claire Clairmont, one of whose best-known novel.
nicknames was "Constantia" (a character
102 To Constantia
My brain is wild, my breath comes quick,
The blood is listening in my frame,
And thronging shadows fast and thick
Fall on my
overflowing eyes,
My heart
quivering like a flame;
is

As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies, IO

I am dissolved in these consuming extacies.

I have no life, Constantia, but in thee;

Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song

Flows on, and fills all Jbi ngs with melody,:
Nowis-thy voice a tempest, swift and strong, '5

On which, as one in trance upborne,

Secure o'er woods and waves I sweep
Rejoicing, like a cloud of morn:
Now 'tis the breath of summer's night 2
Which, where the starry waters sleep
Round western isles with incense blossoms bright,
Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.

A deep an d breathless awe, like the swift change

OJLd reams unseen b ut felt in youth ful slumbers;
,

Wild, sweet, yet incommunicably strange,

Thou breathest now, in fast ascending numbers:
The cope of Heaven seems rent and cloven 3
By the inchantment of thy strain,
And o'er my shoulders wings are woven
To follow its sublime career, 30

Beyond the mighty moons that wane

Upon the verge of Nature's utmost sphere,
Till the world's shadowy walls are past, and disappear.

<5^Cease, cease — for such wild lessons madmen learn:

Long thus to sink, —thus be and to lost die 35

Perhaps is death indeed — Constantia turn!

Yes! in thine eyes a power like light doiliJie^
Even though the sounds, its voice, that were
Between thy lips are laid to sleep
Within thy breath and on thy hair
T.jVp ndour ir is IjngprinfT yet
And from fire doth leap:
thy touch like
Ey en while I write my
burning cheeks are wet — ,
.

f Such things the heart can feel and learn, but not forget! 4 \

2. A metaphor for the quality of her music, the heavens are opened by the
voice (not a reference to the season of power of her singing while accompanied
the poem's composition, as has some- by the organ.
times been assumed). 4. In the Bodleian manuscript of Shelley's
3. I.e., "The vault of Heaven seems tom firstdraft this line reads: "Alas, that the
and split." In traditional artistic repre- torn heart can bleed but not forget."
sentations of St. Cecilia, patron saint of
 — — "

Lines written among the Euganean Hills • J 03

Ozymandias 5 / 1 ?

I met from an antique land,

a traveller «^
Who said— "Two
vast and trunkless legs of stone ^^^V^fS
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
. . . <=)
ufo^Jtr
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, "^-
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that Jis sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive- ^stamped on these lifeless things, 7
The hand thar^mocksd them, and the heart that fed; 8
on the pedestal, these words appear: 'r7>^
CAnd
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings , *"^J S y .

Look on mv (Worlds, ye Mighty, anc^despajj^J ^^^^h^^i^y

Nothing ^esi^p remains. Round the decay '
^ &L*^S;
^

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare 0)/ >

The lone and level sands stretch far away." rt /?

1
Lines written among the Euganean Hills ,

S/
October, 1818. ^ y:

Many a green isle needs must be ^t _x ' ^X.

In the deep wide sea of Misery, °,7
^~ ^c^f/a^
Or the mariner, worn and wan, ""^'ir
Never thus could voyage on
Day and night, and night and day, 5

Drifting on his dreary way,

With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel's track;

5.Ozymandias (the Greek name for Countries (London, 1743). Our substan-
Ramses II, 1304-1237 B.C.) was the tive text derives from the two printings
pharaoh of Egypt with whom Moses con- during Shelley's lifetime, punctuation and
tended during the Exodus. Shelley's son- orthography from Shelley's holograph,
net was written —
probably late in 1817 6. Outlive.
in a contest with his friend Horace 7. The phrase, stamped . . . things, is
(Horatio) Smith. Shelley's sonnet was almost parenthetical, identifying the me-
published in Leigh Hunt's Examiner for dium through which the passions survive.
January 11, 1818, and Smith's sonnet, 8. The sculptor's hand mocked (imitated
also titled "Ozymandias" at first, but and derided) the passions that Ozyman-
later reprinted as "On a Stupendous Leg dias' heart fed.
of Granite, Discovered Standing by It- 1. Shelley began writing this poem while
self in the Deserts of Egypt, with the living at Este, amid the Euganean Hills
Inscription Inserted Below," appeared in near Padua, in October 1818. In De-
the Examiner for February 1, 1818. Dis- cember 1818 or January 1819 he mailed
crepancies between Shelley's and Smith's it to his publisher Charles Oilier, who
poems make it clear that they were re- published it with Rosalind and Helen
sponding independently to a conversa- (May 1819). Fragments of the press copy
tion about the scene and not relying on manuscript survive at the Huntington
a single written description. H. M. Rich- Library and in the Tinker Collection at
mond argues cogently (KSJ, 11:65-71 Yale University Library. For a detailed
[1962]) that Shelley's poem may reflect reading of the poem, see Donald H. Rei-
recollection of a description and an man, "Structure, Symbol, and Theme in
illustration in Richard Pococke's A De- 'Lines written among the Euganean
scription of the East and Some Other Hills,' " pages 579-596.
104 • Lines written among the Euganean Hills

Whilst above the sunless sky,

Big with clouds, hangs heavily, »o

And behind the tempest fleet

Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving 2 sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o'er-brimming deep; '5

And down, down, like that

sinks sleep
When the dreamer seems to be*
Weltering3 through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore 20

Still recedes, as ever still

Longing with divided will,

But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever drifted on
O'er the un reposing wave 25

To the haven of the grave.

What, if there no friends will greet;

What, if there no heart will meet
His with love's impatient beat;
Wander wheresoe'er he may, 3°

Can he dream before that day

To find refuge from distress
In- friendship's smile, in love's caress?
Then 'twill wreak 4 him little woe
Whether such there be or no: 35

Senseless 5 the breast, and cold,

is

Which relenting love would fold;

Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve 40

That from bitter words did swerve

Round the tortured lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December's bough.
On the beach of a northern sea 45
Which tempests shake eternally,
As once the wretch' there lay to sleep,
5

Lies a solitarv heap,

One white skull and seven dry bones, 7
On the margin of the stones 50
8
Where a few grey rushes stand,
Boundaries of the sea and land:

2. Tearing or pulling apart, rending. 7.See Reiman, page 583.

3. Tossing and tumbling; floundering. 8. Plants having naked stalks growing in
4. Cause harm or damage. marshy ground; used as a type of some-
5. Incapable of perception or emotion. thing with no value.
6. A poor and hapless being.
 —
Lines written among the Euganean Hills • J OS

Nor is heard one voice of wail

But the sea-mews, 9 as they sail
O'er the billows of the gale; 55
Or the whirlwind up and down
Howling, like a slaughtered town,
When a King in glory rides
Through the pomp of fratricides:
Those unburied bones around 6°

There is many
mournful sound;
a
There is no lament for him

Like a sunless vapour dim

Who once clothed with life and thought
What now moves nor murmurs not. 65

Aye, many flowering islands lie

In the waters of wide Agony.
To such a one this morn was led
My bark by soft winds piloted
'Mid the mountains Euganean 1 7°

Istood listening to the paean

With which the legioned rooks did hail
The sun's uprise majestical;
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar 75
Like grey shades, till th 'eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even
Flecked with and azure lie
fire

In the unfathomable sky,

So their plumes of purple grain, 8o

Starred with drops of golden rain,

Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning's fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail, 85

And the vapours cloven and gleaming

Follow down the dark steep streaming,
Till all is bright, and clear, and still,
Round the solitary hill.

Beneath spread like a green sea

is 9o

The waveless plain of Lombardy,

Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath day's azure eyes
Ocean's nursling Venice lies, 95

A peopled labyrinth of walls,

Amphitrite's 2 destined halls

9. See Reiman, page 586. 2. In Greek mythology Amphitrite was

1. This line shows how Shelley pro- the daughter of Oceanus (sire, 98) and
nounced Euganean (yoo-ga-ne'-un); the wife of Poseidon (Neptune), the
paean: song of thanksgiving. god of the sea.
 —
106 - Lines written among the Euganean Hills

Which her hoary sire now paves

With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind, I0°

Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined

On the level quivering line
Of the waters chrystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright, .
I0 5

Column, tower, and dome, and spire,

Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From ^fhe-altar_oi dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies; no
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old. 3

Sun-girt City, thou hast been n5

Ocean's child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier. I2 °

A less drear ruin then than now,

With thy conquest-branded brow4
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thv throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew I2 5

Flies, as once before it flew,

O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its antient state,
Save where many a palace gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown r 3°

Like a rock of ocean's own,

Topples o'er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
I35
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlight deep,
I4 °
Lead a rapid masque 5 of death
O'er the waters of his path.

3. dome . . . old: the oracle of Apollo by having been conquered by Napoleonic

at Delphi. France and Austria.
4. Venice is disfigured both by having in 5. An elaborately staged dramatic per-
the past been a conqueror and recently formance.
 —— —
Lines written among the Euganean Hills • 107
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aerial gold,
As I now behold them here,

Would imagine not they were J 45

Sepulchres, where human forms,

Like pollution-nourished worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake J 5o

In her omnipotence, and shake

From the Celtic Anarch's 6 hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously, J 55

Thou and all thy sister band

Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they! l6 °

Clouds which stain truth's rising day

By her sun consumed away
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring l6 5

With more kindly blossoming.

Perish —
let there only be
Floating o'er thy hearthless sea,
As the garment of thy sky
l i°
Clothes the world immortally,
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tattered pall 7 of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;
That a tempest-cleaving Swan 8
Of the songs of Albion, 9 ns
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his,and sprung l8 °

From his lips like music flung

O'er a mighty thunder-fit,
—
Chastening terror: what though yet
Poesy's unfailing River,
Which through Albion winds forever l8 5

6. Austrian tyrant; in Shelley's day Celtic acterizechaos (Paradise Lost, 11.988,

(pronounced in the Greek manner and Dunciad, IV.655).
"Keltic") referred to all northern, non- 7. Robe or cloak.
Mediterranean barbarian tribes, and 8. Lord Byron.
Anarch had gained associations from 9. England.
Milton's and Pope's use of it to char-
J 08 • Lines written among the Euganean Hills
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred Poet's grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled?
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay '90

Aught thine own? oh, rather say

Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's 1 wasting springs; J 95

As divinest Shakespeare's might

Fills Avon 2 and the world with light
Like Omniscient power which he
Imaged 'mid mortality;
^As'the love from Petrarch's urn 3 20°

Yet amid yon hills doth burn,

A quenchless lamp by which the heart
Sees things unearthly; —
so thou art,
Mighty Spirit — so shall be
The City that did refuge thee. 2 °5

Lo, the sun floats up the sky

Like thought-winged Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread, 2I °

And the beams ofdeadmorn lie

On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that grey cloud
Many-domed Padua proud 2I 5

Stands, a peopled solitude,

'Mid the harvest-shining plain,
Where the peasant heaps his grain
In the gamer 4
of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow 22 °

With the purple vintage strain,

Heaped upon the creaking wain, 5
That the brutal Celt" may swill
Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword 225

Lies unchanged, though many a lord,

Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region's foizon, 7

1. Scamander was a river near Troy in village of Arqua in the Euganean Hills.
Homer's Iliad. 4. Storehouse, granary.
2. The river near Shakespeare's birth- 5. Alarge open wagon for carrying heavy
place, Stratford-on-Avon. loads, especially of agricultural produce.
3. The last home and the burial place 6. See note to line 152.
of the great Italian poet and humanist 7. A plentiful crop or harvest.
Francis Petrarch (1304-1374) were at the
 — —
Lines written among the Euganean Hills • 1 09
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction's harvest home: 2 3°

Men must reap the things they sow,

Force from force must ever flow
Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. 2 35

Padua, thou within whose walls

Those mute guests at festivals,
Son and Mother, Death and Sin, 8
Played at dice for Ezzelin,
Till cried, "I win, I win!" 9
Death 240

And Sin cursed to lose the wager,

But Death promised, to assuage her,
That he would petition for
Her to be made Vice-Emperor,
When the destined years were o'er, 2 45

Over between the Po

all
And the eastern Alpine snow,
Under the mighty Austrian.
Sin smiled so as Sin only can,
And since that time, aye, long before, 2 5°

Both have ruled from shore to shore,

That incestuous pair, who follow
Tyrants as the sun the swallow,
As Repentance follows Crime,
And as changes follow Time. 2 55

In thine halls the lamp of learning,

Padua, now no more is burning; 1
Like a meteor, whose wild way
Is lost over the grave of day,
Itgleams betrayed and to betray: 26 °

Once remotest nations came

To adore that sacred flame.
When it lit not many a hearth
On and gloomy earth:
this cold
Now new from antique light
fires 26 5

Spring beneath the wide world's might;

But their spark lies dead in thee,
Trampled out by tyranny.
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depth of piny dells, 2 7°

8. Cf. Milton's allegory of Sin and Death lino da Romano, tyrannical ruler of
in Paradise Lost, Book II. Padua in the thirteenth century.
9. Cf. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient 1. Padua's university was one of the
Mariner," lines 196-197, where Death oldest and most famous in medieval
and Life-in-Death cast dice for the soul Europe.
of the Ancient Mariner. Ezzelin: Ezze-
 —
110 • Lines written among the Euganean Hills
One light flame among the brakes, 2
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn
By the fire thus lowly born:
The spark beneath his feet is dead, 2 ?5

He starts to see the flames it fed

Howling through the darkened sky
With a myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear: so thou,
O tyranny, beholdest n(j>w 280

Light around thee, and thou nearest

The loud flames ascend, and fearest:
Grovel on the eartbfaye, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!

Noon descends around me now: 2g 5

'Tis the noon of autumn's glow,

When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolved star
2 9°
Mingling light and fragrance, far
From the curved horizon's bound
To the point of heaven's profound, 3
the overflowing sky;
Fills
And the plains that silent lie
Underneath, the leaves unsodden 2 95

Where the infant frost has trodden

With his morning-winged feet,
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
And the red and golden vines,
Piercing with their trellised lines 3°°

The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;

The dun and bladed grass no less,
Pointing from this hoary tower
In the windless air; the flower
Glimmering at mv feet; the line 3°5

Of the olive-sandalled Apennine

In the south dimly islanded;
And the Alps, whose snows are spread
High between the clouds and sun;
3I °
And of living things each one;
And mv spirit which so long
Darkened this swift stream of song,
Interpenetrated lie
By the glory of the sky:
3I5
Be it love, light, harmony,

Odour, or the soul of all

Which from heaven like dew doth fall,

2. Thickets, clumps of bushes. 3. A vast depth or abyss.

 Lines written among the Euganean Hills • 111

Or the mind which feeds this verse

Peopling the lone universe.

Noon descends, and after noon 320

Autumn's evening meets me soon,

Leading the infantine moon,
And that one star, 4 which to her
Almost seems to minister
Half the crimson light she brings 325

From the sunset's radiant springs:

And the soft dreams of the morn
(Which like winged winds had borne
To that silent isle, which lies
'Mid remembered agonies, 330

The bark 5 of this lone being)

frail
Pass, to other sufferers fleeing,
And its antient pilot, Pain,
Sits beside the helm again.

Other flowering isles must be 335

In the sea of Life and Agony:

Other spirits float and flee
O'er that gulph: even now, perhaps,
On some rock the wild wave wraps,
With folded wings they waiting sit 340

For my bark, to pilot it

To some calm and blooming cove,
Where for me, and those I love,
May a windless bower be built,
Far from passion, pain, and guilt, 345

In a dell 'mid lawny hills,

Which the wild sea-murmur fills,
And soft sunshine, and the sound
Of old forests echoing round,
And the light and smell divine 350

Of all flowers that breathe and shine:

We may live so happy there,
That the Spirits of the Air,
Envying us, may even entice
To our healing Paradise 355

The polluting multitude;

But their rage would be subdued
By that clime divine and calm,
And the winds whose wings rain balm
On the uplifted soul, and leaves 360

Under which the bright sea heaves;

While each breathless interval
In their whisperings musical

4. Venus as the evening star (Vesper, 5. A small ship or rowing boat.

Hesperus).
112 •
Julian and Maddalo
The inspired soul supplies
With its own deep melodies, 365

And the love which heals all strife

Circling, like the breath of life,

All things in that sweet abode

With its own mild brotherhood:
They, not it, would change; 6 and soon 370

Every sprite" beneath the moon.

Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again.
T

Julian and Maddalo;

A Conversation 1

The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme,

The goats with the green leaves of budding spring,
—
Are saturated not nor Love with tears.
Virgil's Gallus.

Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of antient family and of

great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his

countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city.
He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he
would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming t he redeemer
o f his degraded country (j3ut it is his weakness to be proud: he
.

derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the

6. The analogues underlying Shel-

literary personal origin of parts of the madman's
ley's thought 352-370 are Shake-
in lines speech. The poem remained unpublished,
speare's The Tempest and Dante's sonnet however, during Shelley's lifetime, and
to Guido Cavalcanti beginning, "Guido, first appeared in his Posthumous Poems
I would that Lappo, thou, and I,/ Led by (1824). This version is from the author's
some strong enchantment, might ascend/ manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Li-
A magic ship ." of which Shelley
. . brary.
published a translation with Alastor. In his letter to Hunt of August 15.
7. Spirit. 1819, Shelley included some sentences on
1. Late 1818, Shelley commenced a
in the poetic style of the poem that he had
drama on the love and madness of the originally drafted in a notebook, perhaps
Italian epic poet Torquato Tasso. Then intending to include them in the preface:
abandoning that drama, he began to "I have employed a certain familiar style
write, early in 1819, a dialogue between of language to express the actual way in
himself (Julian) and Byron (Maddalo), which people talk with each other whom
reflecting their conversations in Venice of education and a certain refinement of
August 1818 (possibly stimulated by his sentiment have placed above the use of
reading of Childe Harold, Canto IV). vulgar idioms. I use the word vulgar in
Finally, while writing The Cenci near its most extensive sense; the vulgarity of
Leghorn during the summer of 1819, he rank and fashion is as gross in its way
took the materials thus far composed, as that of Poverty, and its cant terms
incorporated within the Maniac's speeches equally expressive of base conceptions,
some emotional lines that probably re- and therefore equally unfit for Poetry.
flect his own estrangement from Mary Not that the familiar style is to be
Shelley following the death of their son admitted in the treatment of a subject
William Shelley at Rome, June 7, 1819, wholly ideal, or in that part of any
and shaped them into a philosophical subject which relates to common life,
dialogue in the conversational or where the passion exceeding a certain
"familiar" style. Shelley sent the poem limit touches the boundaries of that
to Leigh Hunt to have it published which is ideal. Strong passion expresses
anonymously and — while affirming the im- itself in metaphor borrowed from ob-
personal nature of his portrait of the jects alike remote or near, and casts over
—
Maniac told Hunt that the poem
had all the shadow of its own greatness"
been "composed last year at Este," a (Shelley, Letters, II, 108).
remark probably designed to screen the
 Julian and Maddalo • 113
dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of
the nothingness of human lifeTjHis passions and his powers are
incomparably greater than those of other men; and, instead of the
latterhaving been employed in curbing the former, they have
mutually lent each other strength. ^His ambition preys upon itself,
for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say
that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express
the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it
is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to tramplejfor

in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient^ and un-
assuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty .[His more
serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as
by a spelyHe has travelled much; and there is an inexpressible
charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries.
Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately attached to
those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his
own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the ex-
tinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet
susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world, he is for
ever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete
infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy; and Maddalo takes

a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What

Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in
spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to
possess some good qualities. How far this is possible the pious
reader will determine. Julian is rath er seriou s.
Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems by his own
account to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very
cultivatedand amiable person when in his right senses. His story,
might be like many other stories of the same kind:
told at length,
the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a
sufficient comment for the text of every heart.

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo 2

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
—
Of Adria towards Venice: 3 a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, 5

Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,

Is this; —an uninhabitable sea-side
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes I0

Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

2. At least some details of the scene in (described by Shelley, Letters, II, 36).
lines 1-140 are based on Shelley's con- 3. The bank of land is the Lido of
versation with Byron of August 23, 1818 Venice; Adria: the Adriatic Sea.
 114 • Julian and Maddalo
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where 'twas our wont 4 to ride while day went down.
This ride was my delight. -fTlove all waste
And solitary places; where we taste *5

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to beTj
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more —
Than with a remembered friend I love
all, 20

To ride as then I rode; for the winds drove —

The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening North;
;
And, from the waves, sound like_dehght broke forth 25

Harmonizing with solitude, and sent

Into our hearts aerial merriment . . .

So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought,

Winging itself with laughter, lingered not,
But flew from brain to brain, such glee was ours — 30

Charged with light memories of remembered hours,

None slow enough for sadness: till we came
Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame.
This day had been cheerful but cold, and now
The sun was sinking, and the wind also. 35

Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be

Talk interrupted with such raillery
As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn
f~The thoughts it would extinguish: 'twas forlorn ,
—
^ Yet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell,"] n 4°
/ J^\
S*W««5 The devils held within the dales of Hell / Vytjr
Xi^Jf<- Concerning God, freewill and destiny:^]
Of that earth has been or yet may be,
all

All that vain men imagine or believe,

Or hope can paint or suffering may atchieve, 45

We descanted, 6 and I (for ever still

Is it not wise to make the best of ill?

Argued against despondency, but pride

Made my companion take the darker side.
The sense that he was greater than his kind so

Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirif blind

By gazing on its own exceeding light."
— Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight, 8

4. Custom, habit. could renew itsvision by flying directly

5. The allusion in lines 40-42 is to Para- into the sun, which burned the scales
dise Lost, 11.555-561, where the fallen from its eyes.
angels in Hell "reason'd high/ Of Provi- 8. light alight:
. . . The exact repetition
dence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, of the phonetic syllable in two rhyme
. And found no end, in wandring
. . words, called rime riche, though con-
mazes lost." sidered a virtue in French and Italian
6. Discussed at length, discoursed about. poetry, is avoided by most English poets;
7. eagle spirit light: According to
. . . Shelley, however, employs it with some
tradition, the eagle not only possessed frequency.
the keenest vision of all creatures, but it
 —
Julian and Maddalo • US
Over the horizon of the mountains; Oh, —
How beautiful is sunset, when the glow 55

Of Heaven descends upon ^Jand like thee,

(Tho u Paradise of exiles, ItalyJ^
Thy mountains, seas and vineyards and the towers
—
Of cities they encircle! it was ours
To stand on thee, beholding it; and then 6°

Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men

Were waiting for us with the gondola. 9 —
As those who pause on some delightful way
Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood
Looking upon the evening and the flood 65

Which lay between the city and the shore

Paved with the image of the sky the hoar . . .

And aery Alps towards the North appeared

Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared
Between the East and West; and half the sky ?o

Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry

Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep West into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent 75

Among the many folded hills: they were

Those famous Euganean hills, which bear
As seen from Lido through the harbour piles
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles
—
And then as if the Earth and Sea had been 8o

Dissolved into o ne lake of fire^ were seen

Those mountains towering as from waves of flame
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade," 85

Said my Companion, "I will shew you soon

A better station" — so, o'er the lagune
We glided, and from that funereal bark 1
I leaned, and saw the City, and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening's gleam, 9©

Its temples and its palaces did seem

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to Heaven.
I was about to speak, when "We are even
—
Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo,
And bade the gondolieri cease to row. 95

"Look, Julian, on the West, and listen well

If you hear not a deep and heavy bell."
I looked, and saw between us and the sun

A building on an island; such a one

9. That Shelley, here and at lines 139- peted & furnished with black & painted
140, rhymes "gondola" with "way" sug- black" (Shelley to Mary Shelley, Aug.
gests the contemporary British pronuncia- 23, 1818). "It glides along the water
tion of the word. looking blackly,/ Just like a coffin clapt
1. "These gondolas are . . . finely car- in a canoe" (Byron, Beppo, 150-151).
 — :

116 - Julian and Maddalo

As age to age might add, for uses vile,
A windowless, deformed and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung;
We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sunk behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief.
—
"What we behold
Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,"
Said Maddalo, "and ever at this hour
Those who may cross the water, hear that bell
Which calls the maniacs each one from his cell no
—
To vespers." "As much skill as need to pray
In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they
To their stern maker," 2 I replied. "O ho!
You talk as in years past," said Maddalo.
" 'Tis strange men change not. You were ever still "5
Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel,
Awolf for the meek lambs if you can't swim —
Beware of Providence." I looked on him,
But the gay smile had faded in his eye.
—
"And such," he cried, "is our mortality I2 °

And this must be the emblem and the sign

Of what should be eternal and divine!
And like that black and drearv bell, the soul,
Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll
Our thoughts and our desires to meet below I25

Round the rent heart and pray as madmen do —

—
For what? they know not, till the night of death
As sunset that strange vision, severeth
Our memory from itself, and us from all
_^We sought and yet were baffled!" I recall x 3°

The sense of what he said, although I mar

The force of his expressions. The broad star
Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill
And the black bell became invisible
And the red tower looked grey, and all between J 35

The churches, ships and palaces were seen

Huddled in gloom; — into the purple sea
The orange hues of heaven sunk silently.
We hardlv spoke, and soon the gondola
I4 °
Conveyed me to mv lodging by the way.

The following morn was rainy, cold and dim

Ere Maddalo arose, I called on him,
And whilst I waited with his child 3 I played;
A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made,
2. The tone in lines 111-113 is ironic. under Shelley's care from her birth on
3. Allegra Byron (or Biron), natural January 12, 1817. until she was sent to
child of Byron and Mary Jane Clara Byron in Venice on April 28, 1818. (Thus,
"Claire" Clairmont, Mary Shelley's step- line 155 refers to the six months or so of
sister. Allegra had been raised by Claire separation from the child.)
 — —
Julian and Maddalo • 117
A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being, us
Graceful without design and unforeseeing,
—
With eyes oh speak not of her eyes! which seem —
Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam
With such deep meaning, as we never see
But in the human countenance: with me 150

She was a special favourite: I had nursed

Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first
To this bleak world; and she yet seemed to know
On second sight her antient playfellow,
Less changed than she was by six months or so; 155

For after her first shyness was worn out

We sate there, rolling billiard balls about.
—
When the Count entered salutations past 4 —
'The word you spoke last night might well have cast
A darkness on my spirit if man be — 160

The passive thing you say, I should not see

Much harm in the religions and old saws
(Though I may never own 5 such leaden laws)
Which break a teachless 6 nature to the yoke:
Mine is another faith" —
thus much I spoke 165

And noting he replied not, added: "See

This lovely child, blithe, innocent and free;
She spends a happy time with little care
While we to such sick thoughts subjected are
2&
—
As came on you last night it is our will 7-\ 170

That thus enchains us to permitted ill

We —
might be otherwise we might be all
We dream of happy, high, majestical.
Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek
But in our mind? and if we were not weak 175

Should we be less in deed than in desire?"

—
"Ay, if we were not weak and we aspire
How vainly to be strong!" said Maddalo;
"You talk Utopia." "It remains to know," 7
I then rejoined, "and those who try may find 180

How strong the chains are which our spirit bind;

Brittle perchance as straw are assured
. . . We
Much may be conquered, much may be endured
Of what degrades and crushes us. We know
That we have power over ourselves to do 185

And suffer —what, we know not till we try;

But something nobler than to live and die
So taught those kings of old philosophy
Who reigned, before Religion made men blind;
And those who suffer with their suffering kind 190

4. In Shelley's draft this word replaced 7. In Shelley's fair copy manuscript the
"o'er" to rhyme with cast. word is "see"; but know completes the
5. Acknowledge. rhyme, and all printed texts include it.
6. Unteachable.
 ——
118 • Julian and Maddalo
Yet feel their faith, religion." "My dear friend,"
Said Maddalo, "my judgement will not bend
To your opinion, though I think you might
Make such a system refutation-tight
As words go. I knew one like you
far as J 95

Who to this city came some months ago

With whom I argued in this sort, and he
Is now gone mad, —
and so he answered me,
Poor fellow! but if you would like to go
We'll visit him, and his wild talk will show 20°

How vain are such aspiring theories."

"I hope to prove the induction otherwise,
And that a want of that true theory, still,
Which seeks a 'soul of goodness' 8 in things ill

Or in himself or others has thus bowed 2 °5

His being — there are some by nature proud,

Who patient in all else demand but this:
To love and be beloved with gentleness;
And being scorned, what wonder if they die
2I °
Some living death? this is not destiny
But man's own wilful ill." As thus I spoke 9
Servants announced the gondola, and we
Through the fast- falling rain and high-wrought sea
Sailed to the island where the madhouse stands.
We disembarkedTThe clap of tortured hands, 2I *

1 Fierce yells and nowlings and lamentings keen,

I And laughter where complaint had merrier been,
Moans, shrieks and curses and blaspheming prayers
'
Accosted us. We
climbed the oozv stairs
22 °
Into an old courtyard. I heard on high,
Then, fragments of most touching melody,
But looking up saw not the singer there
Through the black bars in the tempestuous air
I saw, like weeds on a wrecked palace growing,
22 5
Long tangled locks flung wildlv forth, and flowing,
Of those who on a sudden were beguiled
Into strange silence, and looked forth and smiled
—
Hearing sweet sounds. Then I: "Methinks there were
A cure of these with patience and kind care,
If music can thus move but what is he 23 °
. . .

Whom we seek here?" "Of his sad history

I know but this," said Maddalo: "he came
To Venice a dejected man, and fame
Said he was wealthy, or he had been so;
Some thought the loss of fortune wrought him woe; 2 *5

But he was ever talking in such sort

8. Shakespeare, King Henry V, IV.i.4. in the poem when Shelley elected to

9. G. M. Matthews has explained how drop three and a half lines from the
this came to be the only unrhymed line draft.
 — —— —
Julian and Maddalo • 119

—
As you do far more sadly he seemed hurt, —
Even as a man with his peculiar wrong,
To hear but of the oppression of the strong,
Or those absurd deceits (I think with you 2 4<>

In some you know) which carry through

respects,
The excellent impostors of this Earth
When they outface detection he had worth, —
Poor fellow! but a humourist 1 in his way"
"Alas, what drove him mad?" "I cannot say; 2 45

A Lady came with him from France, and when

She left him and returned, he wandered then
About yon lonelv isles of desart sand
Till he grew wild —
he had no cash or land
—
Remaining, the police had brought him here 25 °

Some fancy took him and he would not bear

Removal; so I fitted up for him
Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim,
And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers,
Which had adorned his life in happier hours, 2 55

—
And instruments of music you may guess
A stranger could do little more or less
For one so gentle and unfortunate;
And those are his sweet strains which charm the weight
From madmen's chains, and make this Hell appear 26°

A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear."

—
"Nay, this was kind of you he had no claim,
— —
As the world says" "None but the very same
Which I on all mankind were I as he
Fallen to such deep reverse; his melody — 26 s

Is interrupted now —we hear the din

Of madmen, shriek on shriek again begin;
Let usnow visit him; after this strain
He ever communes with himself again,
And sees nor hears not any." Having said 2 7°

These words we called the keeper, and he led

To an apartment opening on the sea
There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully
Near a piano, his pale fingers twined
One with the other, and the ooze and wind 2 ?5

Rushed through an open casement, and did sway

His hair, and starred it with the brackish 2 spray;
His head was leaning on a music book,
And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook;
His lips were pressed against a folded leaf 28 °

In hue too beautiful for health, and grief

1. One who exhibits strong peculiarities classical medieval —

physiology blood,
in a particular direction, supposedly phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melan-
caused by the predominance of one of choly (black bile),
the four "humours" or vital fluids of 2. Somewhat salty.
 120 Julian and Maddalo
Smiled in their motions as they lay apart
As one who wrought from his own fervid heart
The eloquence of passion, soon he raised
His sad meek face and eyes lustrous and glazed 285

—
And spoke sometimes as one who wrote and thought
His words might move some heart that heeded not
If sent to distant lands; and then as one
Reproaching deeds never to be undone
With wondering self-compassion; then his speech 290

Was lost in grief, and then his words came each

Unmodulated, cold, expressionless;
But that from one jarred accent you might guess
It was despair made them so uniform:
And all the while the loud and gusty storm 295

Hissed through the window, and we stood behind

Stealing his accents from the envious wind
Unseen. I yet remember what he said

ys/\
y^ { Distinctly: such impression his words made.

"Month after month," he cried, "to bear this load 300

And as a jade 3 urged by the whip and goad

To drag life on, which like a heavy chain
Lengthens behind with many a link of pain!
—
And not to speak my grief o not to dare
To give a human voice to my despair, 305

But live and move, and wretched thing! smile on

As if I never went aside to groan
And wear this mask of falshood even to those
—
Who are most dear not for my own repose
Alas, no scorn or pain or hate could be 310

So heavy as that falshood is to me

But that I cannot bear more altered faces
Than needs must be, more changed and cold embraces,
More misery, disappointment and mistrust
To own me for their father Would the dust
. . .
315

Were covered in upon my body now!

That the life ceased to toil within mv brow!
And then these thoughts would at the least be fled;
Let us not fear such pain can vex the dead.

"What Power delights to torture us? I know 320

That to myself do not whollv owe

I

What now I suffer, though in part I may.

Alas, none strewed sweet flowers upon the way
Where wandering heedlessly, I met pale Pain
My shadow, which will leave me not again 325

If I have erred, there was no joy in error,

But pain and insult and unrest and terror;

3. A cart horse or a worn-out, inferior horse.

 — ——
vw <=*c s s&etjc,^ c\±x^\&
Julian and Maddalo • 121

I have not as some do, bought penitence

With pleasure, and a dark yet sweet offence,
—
For then, if love and tenderness and truth 330

Had overlived hope's momentary youth,

My creed should have redeemed me from repenting;
But loathed scorn and outrage unrelenting
Met love excited by far other seeming
Until the end was gained ... as one from dreaming 335

Of sweetest peace, I woke, and found my state

Such as it is.
"O Thou, my spirit's mate
Who, for thou art compassionate and wise,
Wouldst pity me from thy most gentle eyes
If this sad writing thou shouldst ever see 340

My secret groansmust be unheard by thee,

Thou wouldst weep tears bitter as blood to know
Thy lost friend's incommunicable woe.
"Ye few by whom my nature has been weighed
In friendship, let me not that name degrade 345

By placing on your hearts the secret load

Which crushes mine to dust. There is one road
To peace and that is truth, which follow ye!
Love sometimes leads astray to misery.
—
Yet think not though subdued and I may well 35o

—
Say that I am subdued that the full Hell
Within me would infect the untainted breast
Of sacred nature with its own unrest;
As some perverted beings think to find
In scorn or hate a medicine for the mind 355

Which scorn or hate have wounded o how vain! —

The dagger heals not but may rend again ....
Believe that I am ever still the same
In creed as in resolve, and what may tame
My heart, must leave the understanding free 36o

Or all would sink in this keen agony

Nor dream that I will join the vulgar cry,
Or with my silence sanction tyranny,
Or seek a moment's shelter from my pain
In any madness which the world calls gain, 365

Ambition or revenge or thoughts as stern

As those which make me what I am, or turn
To avarice or misanthropy or lust ....
Heap on me soon, o grave, thy welcome dust!
Till then the dungeon may demand its prey, 370

And poverty and shame may meet and say

Halting beside me on the public way
—
'That love-devoted 4 youth is ours let's sit

4. Sacrificed to love.
 — —— —
122 • Julian and Maddalo
Beside him —
he may live some six months yet.'
Or the red scaffold, as our country bends, 375

May ask some willing victim, or ye friends

May under some sorrow which this heart
fall

Or hand may share or vanquish or avert;

I am prepared: in truth with no proud joy

To do or suffer aught, as when a boy 380

I did devote to justice and to love

My nature, worthless now! 5 . . .

"I must remove

A veil my
pent 6 mind. Tis torn aside!
from
O, pallid as death's dedicated bride,
Thou mockery which art sitting by my side, 385

Am I not wan like thee? at the grave's call

I haste, invited to thy wedding ball
To greet the ghastly paramour, for whom
Thou hast deserted me and made the tomb . . .

Thy bridal bed But I beside your feet

. . .
390

Will and watch ye from mv winding sheet

lie
Thus wide awake, though dead ... yet stay, o stay!
. . .

—
Go not so soon I know not what I say
Hear but my reasons ... I am mad, I fear,
My fancy is o'ervvrought thou art not here ... . . .
395

******
Pale art thou, 'tis most true

"Nay, was
Which,
but thou art gone,
Thy work is finished ... I am left alone!

it I who wooed
like a serpent, thou envenomest
. . .

thee to this breast

*7

As repayment of the warmth it lent?

in 400

Didst thou not seek me for thine own content?

Did not thy love awaken mine? I thought
That thou wert she who said, 'You kiss me not
Ever, I fear you do not love me now'
In truth I loved even to mv overthrow 4 °5

My
"You
lip
*******
Her, who would fain forget these words: but they
Cling to her mind, and cannot pass away.

I am proud
say that that when I speak
tortured with the wrongs which break
is
—
4I °
The spirit it expresses Never one . . .

Humbled have done!

himself before, as I

Even the instinctive worm on which we tread

Turns, though it wound not then with prostrate head —
Sinks in the dust and writhes like me —and dies?
4I5
No: wears a living death of agonies!
5. Cf. lines 380-382 with "Hymn to In- 7. The lines of asterisks indicate breaks
tellectual Beauty" and the Dedication to in the intermittent outcries of the Maniac;
Laon and Cythna. none of Shelley's poem is here omitted.
6. Locked up, imprisoned.
 ———
Julian and Maddalo 123

As the slow shadows of the pointed grass

Mark the eternal periods, his pangs pass
Slow, ever-moving, —
making moments be
—
As mine seem each an immortality!

"That you had never seen me —never heard 420

My voice, and more than all had ne'er endured

The deep pollution of my loathed embrace
That your eyes ne'er had lied love in my face
That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out
The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root 425

With mine own quivering fingers, so that ne'er

Our hearts had for a moment mingled there
To disunite in horror these were not —
With thee, like some suppressed and hideous thought
Which flits athwart our musings, but can find 430

No rest within a pure and gentle mind . . .

Thou sealedst them with many a bare broad word,

And cearedst 8 my memory o'er them, for I heard —
And can forget not they were ministered
. . .

One after one, those curses. Mix them up 435

Like self-destroying poisons in one cup,

And they will make one blessing which thou ne'er
Didst imprecate for, on me, death. —
"It were
A cruel punishment for one most cruel,
Ifsuch can love, to make that love the fuel 440

Of the mind's hell; hate, scorn, remorse, despair:

—
But me whose heart a stranger's tear might wear
As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone,
Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan
For woes which others hear not, and could see 445

The absent with the glance of phantasy,

And with the poor and trampled sit and weep,
Following the captive to his dungeon deep;
—
Me who am as a nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth 450

And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth

When all beside was cold that thou on me —
Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony
Such curses are from lips once eloquent
With love's too partial praise let none relent — 455
Who intend deeds too dreadful for a name
Henceforth, if an example for the same

:. Wrapped in waxed cloth, embalmed; previous editors have changed the word to
'searedst."
 — —
124 • Julian and Maddalo
They seek ... for thou on me lookedst so, and so
And didst speak thus . . . and thus ... I live to shew
How much men bear and die not!

"Thou wilt tell 46o

With the grimace of hate how horrible

It was to meet my love when thine grew less;
Thou wilt admire how I could e'er address
Such features to love's work this taunt, though . . . true,
(For indeed nature nor in form nor hue 465
Bestowed on me her choicest workmanship)
Shall not be thy defence ... for since thy lip
Met mine first, years long past, since thine eye kindled
With soft fire under mine, I have not dwindled
Nor changed in mind or bodv, or in aught 470

But as love changes what it loveth not

After long years and many trials.

"How vain
Are words! I thought never to speak again,
Not even in secret, —
not to my own heart
But from my lips the unwilling accents start 475
And from my pen the words flow as I write,
Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears . . . my sight
Is dim to see that charactered in vain
On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain
And eats into it all things fair
. . . blotting 480

And wise and good which time had written there.

"Those who inflict must suffer, for they see

The work of their own hearts and this must be
Our chastisement or recompense —O child!
485
Iwould that thine were like to be more mild
For both our wretched sakes ... for thine the most
Who feclest already all that thou hast lost
Without the power to wish it thine again;
And as slow vears pass, a funereal train
Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend 490

Fear
*******
Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend
No thought on my dead memory?

me not . . . against thee I

"Alas, love,
would not move
A finger in despite. Do I not live
That thou mayst have less bitter cause to grieve? 495

I give thee tears for scorn and love for hate,

And that thy lot may be less desolate
Than his on whom thou tramplest, I refrain
From that sweet sleep 9 which medicines all pain.
9. I.e., death.
 Julian and Maddalo • 125
Then, when thou speakest of me, never say, 500

'He could forgive not.' Here I cast away

All human passions, all revenge, all pride;
I think, speak, act no ill; I do but hide
Under these words like embers, every spark
Of that which has consumed me quick and dark
The grave is yawning ... as its roof shall cover
— 505

My limbs with dust and worms under and over

So let Oblivion hide this grief the air . . . / /
/J
Closes upon my accents, as despair / &^^ s$T
—
Upon my heart let death upon despair!" /Xl^c-p^i '
/
5I °

He ceased, and overcome leant back awhile, ' "^

Then rising, with a melancholy smile
Went to a sofa, and lav down, and slept
A heavy sleep, and in his dreams he wept
And muttered some familiar name, and we 515

Wept without shame in his society.

I think I never was impressed so much;

The man who were not, must have lacked a touch

Of human nature then we lingered not,
. . .

Although our argument was quite forgot, 520

But calling the attendants, went to dine

At Maddalo's; yet neither cheer nor wine
Could give us spirits, for we talked of him
And nothing else, till daylight made stars dim;
And we agreed his was some dreadful ill 525

Wrought on him boldly, yet unspeakable

By a dear friend; some deadly change in love
Of one vowed deeply which he dreamed not of;
For whose sake he, it seemed, had fixed a blot
Of falshood on his mind which flourished not 530

But in the light of all-beholding truth;

And having stamped this canker 1 on his youth
She had abandoned him and how much more —
Might be his woe, we guessed not he had store —
Of friends and fortune once, as we could guess 535

From his nice 2 habits and his gentleness;

These were now lost ... it were a grief indeed
If he had changed one unsustaining reed
For all that such a man might else adorn.
The colours of his mind seemed yet unworn; 54o

For the wild language of his grief was high,

Such as in measure were called poetry;
And I remember one remark which then
Maddalo made. He said: "Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong, 545
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
1. A consuming, spreading sore or ulcer 2. Refined, cultured,
(cf. cancer).
 —
126 - Julian and Maddalo
If I had been an unconnected man 3
I, from this moment, should have formed some plan
Never to leave sweet Venice, for to me —
It was delight to ride by the lone sea; 550

And then, the town is silent one may write —

Or read in gondolas by day or night,
Having the little brazen 4 lamp alight,
Unseen, uninterrupted; books are there, .
Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair 555

Which were twin-born with poetry, and all

We seek in towns, with little to recall
Regrets for the green country. I might sit
In Maddalo's great palace, and his wit
And subtle talk would cheer the winter night 56°

And make me know myself, and the firelight

Would flash upon our faces, till the day
Might dawn and make me wonder at my stay:
But I had friends in London too: the chief
Attraction here, was that I sought relief 565

From the deep tenderness that maniac wrought

—
Within me 'twas perhaps an idle thought,
But I imagined that if day by day
I watched him, and but seldom went away,

And studied all the beatings of his heart 570

With zeal, as men study some stubborn art

For their own good, and could by patience find
An entrance to the caverns of his mind,
I might reclaim him from his dark estate:

In friendships I had been most fortunate 575

Yet never saw I one whom I would call

More willinglv my friend; and this was all
Accomplished not; such dreams of baseless 5 good
Oft come and go in crowds or solitude
—
And leave no trace but what I now designed 58 °

Made for long years impression on my mind.

The following morning, urged by my affairs,
I left bright Venice.

After many years

And many changes I returned; the name
Of Venice, and its aspect, was the same; 585

But Maddalo was travelling far away

Among the mountains of Armenia. 6
His dog was dead. His child had now become
A woman; such as it has been my doom 7
To meet with few, a wonder of this earth, 590

Where there is little of transcendent worth,

3. A man without family or other re- speare. The Tempest, IV. 151.
sponsibilities. 6. Byron was in 1817-1818 studying the
4. Made of brass. Armenian language in Venice.
5. Having no foundation; see Shake- 7. Fate.
 —
Stanzas written in Dejection • 127
Like one of Shakespeare's women: kindly she
And with a manner beyond courtesy
Received her father's friend; and when I asked
Of the lorn 8 maniac, she her memory tasked 595
And told as she had heard the mournful tale:
"That the poor sufferer's health began to fail
Two years from my departure, but that then
The Lady who had left him, came again.
Her mien had been imperious, but she now 6o°

—
Looked meek perhaps remorse had brought her low.
Her coming made him better, and they stayed
—
Together at my father's for I played
As I remember with the lady's shawl
I might be six years old —
but after all 6°5

She left him" "Why, her heart must have been tough:
. . .

How did it end?" "And was not this enough?

— —
They met they parted" "Child, is there no more?"
"Something within that interval which bore
The stamp of why they parted, how they met: 6l °

Yet if thine aged eyes disdain to wet

Those wrinkled cheeks with youth's remembered tears,
Ask me no more, but let the silent years
Be closed and ceared 9 over their memory
As yon mute marble where their corpses lie." 6l 5

I urged and questioned still, she told me how

All happened —
but the cold world shall not know.

Stanzas written in Dejection-

1
December 1818, Near Naples
The Sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light 5

Around its unexpanded buds;

Like many a voice of one delight
The winds, the birds, the Ocean-floods;
The City's voice itself is soft, like Solitude's.

I see the Deep's untrampled floor I0

With green and purple seaweeds strown;

I see the waves upon the shore

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown;

8. Abandoned, desolate. other poems in his letter to Charles
9. Sealed up, embalmed (cf. line 433). Oilier of November 10, 1820, urging him
1. In the title Shelley gives us a place to publish most of them ("my saddest
and date of one of his most despairing verses raked up into one heap") with
lyrics, the personal nature of which Julian and Maddalo, but all remained
might give him reason to disguise the unpublished until Posthumous Poems
circumstances of its composition from (1824). This version is from the author's
Mary or other intimates. It is fairly manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Li-
certain that Shelley enclosed this and brary.
 —— —
128 • The Two Spirits —An Allegory
I sit upon the sands alone;
The lightning of the noontide Ocean x 5

Is flashing round me, and a tone

Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas, I have nor hope nor health
Nor peace within nor calm around, 20

Nor that content surpassing wealth

The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned; 2
Nor fame nor power nor love nor leisure
Others I see whom these surround, 25

Smiling they live and call life pleasure: 3

To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child 3°

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear
Death like Sleep might steal on me,
Till
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the Sea 35

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

Some might lament that I were cold,
As I, when this sweet day is gone,
4

Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,

Insults with this untimclv moan 40

They might lament, for I am one—

Whom men love not, and yet regret;
Unlike this day, which, when the Sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger though enjoyed, like joy in Memory yet. 5 45

6
The Two Spirits— An Allegory
FIRST SPIRIT
O Thou who plumed with strong desire
Would float above the Earth beware! —
A shadow tracks thy flight of fire
Night is coming!
2. content crowned: M. H. Abrams
. . . I will lament the passing of this sweet
has plausibly suggested that the allusion day.
in lines 21-23 is to the Roman emperor 5. Lines 43-45: the stainless day, unlike
and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius the poet, will leave a joyful memory that
(a.d. 121-180), whose Meditations Shel- will reproduce its original enjoyment,
ley admired. 6. At the time of Shelley's death this
3. If lines 25-26 were indeed written on poetic dialogue between optimistic and
the date and at the place Shelley gives, pessimistic views of human destiny ex-
the chief reference is surely to Lord isted only in Shelley's original draft
Byron and his circle at Venice. (Bodleian MS. Shelley adds, e.12, pp.
4. I.e., Some might lament my death as 13-17). Mary Shelley then transcribed
 — — — ——
The Two Spirits—An Allegory * 129
Bright are the regions of the air 5
And when winds and beams [

It were delight to wander there

Night is coming!
SECOND SPIRIT
The deathless stars are bright above;
If I should cross the shade of night I0

Within my heart is the torch of love

And that is day
And the moon will smile with gentle light
On my golden plumes where'er they move;
The meteors 7 will linger around my flight x5

And make night day.

FIRST spirit
But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken
Hail and Lightning and stormy rain
See, the bounds of the air are shaken,
Night is coming. 20

The red swift clouds of the hurricane

Yon declining sun have overtaken,
The clash of the hail sweeps o'er the plain
Night is coming.
SECOND SPIRIT
I see the glare and I hear the sound 25

on the flood of the tempest dark

I'll sail

With the calm within and light around

Which make night day;
And thou when the gloom is deep and stark,
Look from thy dull earth slumberbound 30

My moonlike flight thou then mayst mark

On high, far away.

Some say there is a precipice

Where one vast pine hangs frozen to ruin
O'er piles of snow and chasms of ice 35

Mid Alpine mountains;

And that the languid storm pursuing
That winged shape forever flies
Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
Its aery 8 fountains. 40

it (with some errors) and published it as early as 1818. We agree that the
in Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824), position in the Bodleian notebook sug-
later placing it among his poems of gests a date earlier than 1820 and date
1820. Judith Chernaik reedited it, along it tentatively between October 1818 and
with most of Shelley's other major lyrical February 1819. Our text, based on the
poems, in The Lyrics of Shelley (1972); Bodleian draft, differs verbally from
she and Earl R. Wasserman (Shelley: A Chernaik's redaction in lines 11 and 21.
Critical Reading, pp. 42-44) are both 7. Probably shooting stars.
convinced the poem is earlier possibly — 8. Ethereal.
 — —

130 - Prometheus Unbound

Some say when the nights are dry [and] clear
And the death dews sleep on the morass,
Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller
Which make night day
And a shape like his early love doth pass 45
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass
He finds night day.

Prometheus Unbound began drafting Prometheus Un-

Shelley
bound at Este in September 1818 and,
an apparent hiatus at Naples,
after
resumed work on it at Rome in March and April of 1819, completing most
of the first three acts before he undertook work on The Cenci in mid-May.
Late in 1819 Shelley again took up work on his drama, writing Act IV
and a few "lyrical insertions" for Acts I — III, among them the song at
1 1. hi. 54-9 8.
Though he had first sent Prometheus Unbound to be published in
England in its three-act original version, Shelley's late additions broadened
the scope of his most ambitious work from a myth of the renovation of
the human psyche to a renewing of the whole cosmos. Given Shelley's
ethics and knowledge (epistemology), it seems likely that he
his theory of
believed that when human
beings saw the universe correctly, it would
appear to be beneficent rather than hostile. Queen Mab, VIII-IX, provides
a clearer, more literal representation of such universal amelioration and can
be used to gloss and gauge the significance of the vision embodied in
Act IV.
In its Prometheus Unbound exhibits Shelley's preferred
final form
symmetrical structure. Act I and Act IV each consists of a single scene

that has three clear-cut divisions (Act I, 1-305, 306-634, and 635-833;
Act IV, 1-184, 185-502, 503-578); these acts flank two acts divided into
nine scenes, of which the central one —
Act II, scene v depicts the —
journey and transformation of Asia as she moves backwards through time,
reversing the gyres of history to make "the world grow young again."
Another obvious structural parallel comprises the dialogues of mytho-
logical characters in II. ii and III.ii. And whereas Acts I and III deal
primarily with conditions in the human —with the psychology
world of
tyranny (Act I) and of freedom (Act —the other two
III) acts explore
the metaphysical implications of human bondage— how psychology
a slave
distorts the human view of the universe.
Woven into these abstract structures is the action of the drama itself,

—
which Shelley drew with modifications, as he explains in his Preface
from Aeschylus' drama Prometheus Bound and what is known of his lost
sequel entitled Prometheus Unbound. In Shelley's version Act I sees
Prometheus' curse of Jupiter repeated to him, Prometheus repents it, he
resists the psychological torments sent by the tyrant, and he is comforted

by human hopes and ideals.

In Act II Panthea communicates to Asia two dreams she has had which
presage the release of Prometheus and the renewal of the world; Asia and
 —
Prometheus Unbound • 131

Panthea are called away and drawn down to the realm of Demogorgon, the
ultimate motive source of the chain of events known as Necessity. Asia
questions him on the nature of things. Demogorgon ascends the chariot of
the Hour in which Jupiter is destined to be overthrown and directs the
Oceanides to the car of the following Hour that will redeem Prometheus.
In Act III Jupiter, having married and raped Thetis, awaits the offspring
of their union; this proves to be Demogorgon, who drags Jupiter down into
the abyss of chaos. Hercules releases Prometheus, and — after directing the
Spirit of the Hour of redemption to spread the good news around the
world and after hearing that Spirit's report of the effects of the proclama-
tion —Prometheus and Asia an oracular cave to cultivate the arts.
retire to
The action itself having come to an end, Act IV is a hymn of rejoicing
first by a chorus of Spirits of the Hours and another chorus of Spirits of

the Human Mind; then by the Spirit of the Earth (male) and the Spirit
of the Moon (female). Finally, as in his opening speech Prometheus had
described his situation in relation to past events, so Demogorgon, addressing
the spirits of all creatures in the Universe, summarizes the present joy and
tells how to recapture freedom, should it be lost again.
There have been books and dozens of scholarly articles devoted
several
solely or chiefly to explaining Prometheus Unbound or parts of it. For a
summary and liberal sampling of interpretations up through the mid-1950s,
students can consult Lawrence John Zillman's Shelley's "Prometheus Un-
bound": A Variorum Edition (University of Washington Press, 1959), and
for supplementary references, page 367 of Donald H. Reiman's chapter
"Shelley" in The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and
Criticism, ed. Frank Jordan, Jr. (3rd ed., Modern Language Association,
1972). In this volume, see the critical selections from Earl R. Wasserman,
M. H. Abrams, and D. J. Hughes (pp. 524-530, 596-603, 603-620).
The textual difficulty of Prometheus Unbound is an anvil that has
already broken many hammers. We must admit that considerable baffle-
ment and frustration accompanied our attempts to edit a text that would
mediate between the three imperfect authorities Shelley's intermediate —
fair copy manuscript in the Bodleian Library (MSS. Shelley e.i, e.2, and
e.3), the first edition of 1820, and Mary Shelley's edition of 1839, which
incorporates some (though how many remains the problem) authoritative
corrections of the imperfect first edition. The present text, which we cannot
claim approaches definitiveness, has been edited on the following principles:
(1) Because the (now lost) manuscript copied by Shelley and/or Mary
that served as press copy for the first edition certainly contained his final
choices of which neither the compositors nor Shelley's friend
words,
Thomas Love Peacock (who corrected the proofs) would have felt free to
alter, we have retained the verbal text of 1820, unless either 1839 returns

to the reading of MS, or the MS reading makes much better sense than
1820. (2) Because the punctuation — especially in the lyric passages — is

much heavier than that in either Shelley's surviving press copy manuscripts
or those poems that he personally saw through the press (but resembles the
punctuation of Peacock's own poetry), we have made Shelley's MS the
chief authority for punctuation, capitalization, numerous
and spelling; in
cases, where the MS was manifestly underpunctuated, we have added
132 • Prometheus Unbound
pointing cither from 1820 or on analogy with punctuation in parallel lines
and passages in MS itself. (3) We have regularized spellings and, to a
lesser extent, capitalization in those instances where the Prometheus Un-
bound MS and his other MSS and authorized printed texts show that
Shelley maintained a reasonably consistent practice.
The punctuation, especially in the lyrics, is primarily rhetorical, not
grammatical (see Textual Introduction, p. xiv).For example, Shelley's
manuscript invariably contains a comma after internal rhyme words in
lyric passages (e.g., "To stay steps proud, o'er the slow cloud [1. 236]);

and in other passages Shelley inserted commas, semicolons, and full stops,

to indicate pauses at the beginnings and ends of phrases to be read as

units, as well as suspension points (...) mark sentences interrupted

to
by another speaker or longer pauses. Thus, if the meaning is not im-
mediately clear to the silent reader, he should read the passage aloud, with
pauses whose length is governed by the heaviness of the punctuation.
The capitalization in the Bodleian holograph manuscript does not seem
as erratic to us now as it first appeared. Since Peacock or the compositors
at Marchant, the printer, obviously lower-cased many capitals in Shelley's
manuscript (of the type that appear in print in those volumes that he saw
through the press), we have preferred Shelley's manuscript except that we
have included capitals found in the first edition (and not in the MS) where
they are congruent with the pattern of capitalization found in the Bodleian
—
MS and hence may have been added to the lost press copy.

Prometheus Unbound
A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts
AUDISNE H>EC AMPHIARAE, SUB TERRAM ABDITE?

PREFACE.
The Greek tragic writers, in selecting as their subject any portion of
their national history or mythology, employed in their treatment of
it a certain arbitrary discretion. They by no means conceived them-
selves bound to adhere to the common interpretation or to imitate
in story as in title their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would
have amounted to a resignation of those claims to preference over
their competitors which incited the composition. The Agamem-
nonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many
variations as dramas.
I have presumed to employ a similar licence. —The Prometheus
Unbound of /Eschylus, supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with
his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to
his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis. Thetis,
according to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to
Peleus, and Prometheus by the permission of Jupiter delivered from
his captivitv by Hercules. — Had I framed my storv on this model I
 Prometheus Unbound • 133

should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost
drama of /Eschylus; an ambition, which, if my preference to this
mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recol-
lection of the high comparison such an attempt would challenge,
might w ell abateJBut in truth I was averse from a catastrophe so
(Teeble as thatof reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of
mankind. The moral interest of the fable which is so powerfully
sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be
annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high
language, and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.
The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is

Satan j and lRr©me±h£uj is, in my

judgement, a more poetical char- f
acter than Satan because, in addition to courage and majesty and /
firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible
of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy,
revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which in the Hero
of Paradise Lost, interfere with the int<
engenders in the mind a pernicious
weigh his faults with his wrongs and to excuse the former because
the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider
that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling, it engenders some-
thing worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest
perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest
and the and noblest ends.
truest motives to the best
This Poem was upon the mountainous ruins of the
chiefly written
Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and thickets of odorif-
erous blossoming trees which are extended in ever winding laby-
rinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in
the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous
awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with
which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspira-
tion of this drama.
The which I have employed will be found in many in-
imager}'
stances to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind,
or from those external actions by which they are expressed. This is
unusual in modern Poetry; although Dante and Shakespeare are full
of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other
poet and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to
whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contem-
poraries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power, and it
is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be

denied me) to which I am willing that my readers should impute

this singularity.
One word is due in candour to the degree in which the study of
contemporary writings may have tinged my composition, for such
134 - Prometheus Unbound
has been ;i topic of censure with regard to poems far more popular,
and indeed more deservedly popular than mine. It is impossible
thai any one who inhabits the same age with such writers as those
who stand in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientiously
assure himself, that his language and tone of thought may not have
been modified by the study of the productions of those extraordinary
intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit of their genius, but the
forms in which it has manifested itself, are due, less to the peculiari-
ties of their own minds, than to the peculiarity of the moral and
intellectual condition of the minds among which they have been
produced. Thus a number of writers possess the form, whilst they
want the spirit of those whom, it is alleged, they imitate; because
the former is the endowment of the age in which they live, and the
latter must be the uncommunicated lightning of their own mind.
Thepeculiar style of intense and comprehensive imagery which
distinguishes the modern literature of England, has not been, as a
general power, the product of the imitation of any particular writer.
The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same;
the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change. If
England were divided into forty republics, each equal in population
and extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose but that, under
institutions not more perfect than those of Athens, each would
produce philosophers and poets equal to those who (if we except
Shakespeare) have never been surpassed. We owe the great writers
of the golden age of our literature to that fervidawakening of the
public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive
foi in of the Christian Religion. We owe Milton to the progress and

developement of the same spirit; the sacred Milton was, let it ever
be remembered, a Republican, and a bold enquirer into morals and
religion. The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to
suppose, companions and forerunners of some unimagined
the
change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it.
The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the
equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or
is about to be restored.
As to imitation; Poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates
by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions arc beauti-
ful and new, not because the portions of which the \ are composed
had no previous existence in the mind of man or in nature, but
because the whole produced by their combination has some in-
1

telligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and

thought, and with the contemporary condition of them: one great
poet is a masterpiece of nature, which another not only ought to
study but must study. He might as wisely and .1^ easily determine
that his mind should no longer be the minor of all that is lovely
 Prometheus Unbound • 135
in the visible universe, as exclude from his contemplation the
beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The
pretence of doing would be a presumption in any but the greatest;
it

the effect, even in him, would be strained, unnatural and ineffectual.

A Poet, is the combined product of such internal powers as modify
the nature of others, and of such external influences as excite and
sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man's mind
is in this respect modified by all the objects of nature and art, by

every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon
his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected,
and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than
philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are in one sense the
creators and in another the creations of their age. From this sub-
jection the loftiest do not escape. There is a similarity between
Homer and Hesiod, between ^schylus and Euripides, between
Virgil and Horace, between Dante and Petrarch, between Shake-
speare and Fletcher, between Dryden and Pope; each has a generic
resemblance under which their specific distinctions are arranged. If
this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willing to confess that
I have imitated.
Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I
have, what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms, 'a passion
for reforming the world:' what passion incited him to write and
publish his book, he omits to explain. Formy part I had rather be
damned with and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley.
Plato
and Malthus. But j f fa n mistnb* tr> supp ose that I dedicate myl
poetical compositions sole ly to the direct enforcement_oj^reform,l
or that I consider themlrTaTiy dcgiee ay -roTvtaming a reasoned
system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhor-
rence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not
tedious and supererogatory in verse. My p
iT,
p^P has hither to,
s imply to familiarize the highly refined imagin ation of the mo re
select cla sses of poetical readers

trust,
with beautiful idealisms of moral
excellence; awafe that T3TrrirTKe~mind can love, and admire, and
ancfhope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct
are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious
" <

k
>assenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest
of his happiness. Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that
is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the

genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of in-

justice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take
/Eschylus rather than Plato as my model.
The having spoken of myself with unaffected freedom will need
little apology with the candid; and let the uncandid consider that
they injure me less than their own hearts and minds by misrepre-
 136 • Prometheus Unbound
sentation. Whatever talents a person may possess to amuse and
be they ever so inconsiderable, he is yet bound to
instruct others,
exert them: if his attempt be ineffectual, let the punishment of an
unaccomplished purpose have been sufficient; let none trouble them-
selves to heap the dust of oblivion upon his efforts; the pile they
raise will betray his grave which might otherwise have been
unknown.

Prometheus Unbound
ACT I

Scene: A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus

is discovered bound to the Precipice. Panthea and lone are seated

-.at his feet. Time, Night. During the Scene, Morning slowly breaks.

14a
rlh-fflV
/ ' /
/
Monarch of
PROMETHEUS
Gods and Daemons, 1 and all Spirits

But One, who throng those bright and rolling Worlds

Which Thou and I alone of living things
[cL. Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou 5

Requitest for knee-worship, prayer and praise,

And toil, and hecatombs 2 of broken hearts,
With fear and self contempt and barren hope;
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless 8 in hate,
I0
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years 4 of sleep-unsheltered hours
—
And moments aye 5 divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
—
Scorn and despair, these are mine empire: I5

More glorious far than that which thou surveyest

From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
20
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever!
No change, no pause, no hope! —
Yet I endure.
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt? *5

I ask yon Heaven —

the all-beholding Sun,

1. Supernatural beings of secondary rank 4. The time span nineteenth-century

who could communicate with both gods scientists believed separated the develop-
and men. ment of early civilizations (Egypt, etc.)
2. Sacrifices of many victims presented from their own time,
as offerings. 5. Continually.
3. Blind.
 Prometheus Unbound I • 137

Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,

Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever! 30

The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears

Of their moon-freezing chrystals; the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
Heaven's winged hound, 6 polluting from thy lips
His beak in poison not his own, tears up 35

My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,

The ghastly people of the realm of dream,
Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind; 40

While from their loud abysses howling throng

The genii of the storm, urging the rage
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.
And yet to me welcome is Day and Night,
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, 45
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs
The leaden-coloured East; for then they lead
Their wingless, crawling Hours, 7 one among whom
— As some dark Priest hales 8 the reluctant victim
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood
From these pale feet, which then might trample thee
_If they disdained not such a prostrate sla ve.

Ah no! I pityjhee,— What Ruin

Mlicc ui rdeTended through wide Heaven! /
t hy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, / /^^/ ' 55
j/
^7 9
4^
^
fa Hell within!) ! speak in grief, I '^> 5

ration, tor I hate no more, ^ 'x^ ^^r^

emisery mademe wise. The Curse —
breathed on thee 1 would recall. 9 Ye Mountains,
rvv Whose many voiced Echoes, through the mist
:
^
\\Of cataracts, 1 flung the thunder of that spell!
vTe icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost,

J) Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept

^Shuddering through India! 2 Thou serenest Air,
6s
^j Through which the Sun walks burning without beams!
rs And ve swift Whirlwinds, who on poised wings

-v-
6. The eagle or vulture of Jupiter that from the European Caucasus (between
daily tortured Prometheus. the Black and Caspian seas) to the
7. In classical art and myth the Horae, Hindu Kush, or Indian Caucasus, which
representations of the hours and seasons, some writers identified with the Hima-
are winged human figures. layas. Shelley's reasons for the shift
8. Hauls or drags by force. have been much speculated on, but he
9. Remember; the word also foreshadows was certainly reflecting current ideas that
his revoking the curse. human life originated in central Asia;
1. Large waterfalls. he was attempting to universalize the
2. As the stage direction indicates, Shel- Greek myth to a generally human myth,
ley has relocated the scene of the play
 : —
J 38 •
Prometheus Unbound I

Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss,

As thunder louder than your own made rock 3
The orbed world! If then my words had power
—
/ Though I am changed so that aught evil wish 70
'Is dead within, although no memory be
—
Of what is hate let them not lose it now!
^What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.

first voice: from the Mountains

Thrice three hundred thousand years
O'er the Earthquake's couch we stood: 75

Oft as men convulsed with fears

Wetrembled in our multitude.

second voice: from the Springs

Thunderbolts had parched our water,
We
had been stained with bitter blood,
And had run mute 'mid shrieks of slaughter 8o

Through a city and a solitude!

third voice: from the Air
Ihad clothed since Earth uprose
Its wastes in colours not their own,
And oft had my serene repose
Been cloven by many a rending groan. 85

fourth voice: from the Whirlwinds

We had soared beneath these mountains
Unresting ages; nor had thunder
Nor yon volcano's flaming fountains
Nor any power above or under
Ever made us mute with wonder! 9°

first voice
But never bowed our snowy crest
As at the voice of thine unrest.

SECOND VOICE
Never such a sound before
To the Indian waves we bore.
A on the howling sea
pilot asleep 95

Leaped up from the deck in agony

And heard, and cried, "Ah, woe is me!"
And died as mad as the wild waves be.

THIRD VOICE
By such dread words from Earth to Heaven
My still realm was never riven IO°

When wound was closed, there

its stood
Darkness o'er the Day like blood.

3. Though rock functions as a verb, it can also be a pun on the meaning of the word
as a noun.
 ——
Prometheus Unbound I • 139

FOURTH VOICE
And we shrank back for dreams of ruin —
To frozen caves our flight pursuing4
Made us keep silence thus and thus — — I0 5

Though silence is as hell to us.

THE EARTH
The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hills
Cried "Misery!" then; the hollow Heaven replied,
"Misery!" And the Ocean's purple waves,
Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds. II0

And the pale nations heard it, "Misery!" —

PROMETHEUS
I hear a sound of voices not the voice —
—
Which I gave forth. Mother, 5 thy sons and thou
Scorn him, without whose all-enduring will
Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove "5
Both they and thou had vanished like thin mist
Unrolled on the morning wind! Know ye not me, —
The Titan, he who made his agony
The barrier to your else all-conquering foe?
rock-embosomed lawns and snow-fed streams I2 °

Now seen athwart fro re 6 vapours deep below,

Through whose o'er-shadowing woods I wandered once
With Asia, drinking life from her loved eyes;
Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now
To commune with me? me alone, who checked, I2 5

As one who checks a fiend-drawn charioteer,

The falshood and the force of Him who reigns
Supreme, and with the groans of pining slaves
Fills your dim glens and liquid wildernesses?
Why answer ve not, still? brethren!
THE EARTH
J 3°
They dare not.

PROMETHEUS
Who I would hear that curse again.
dares? for . . .

Ha, what an awful whisper rises up!

Tis scarce like sound, it tingles through the frame
As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike.
Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice I3 $

1 onlv know that thou art moving near

And love. How cursed I him?

4. In Shelley's day, ruin and pursuing learning" (p. 11).

were an exact rhyme ("pursuin"). Ac- 5. The Earth; in Hesiod's Theogony,
cording to William Scott's Elements of Earth (Gaea or Tithea) was the mother
Elocution (1808), apart from a few ex- and Sky (Uranus) the father of the
ceptions (which he lists), "G is silent Titans.
before and after n in the same syllable, 6. Frosty.
as gnat, gnarl, resign, . . . thinking,
 •
Prometheus Unbound I

THE EARTH
How canst thou hear
Who knovvest not the language of the dead?

PROMETHEUS
Thou art a living spirit —speak as they.

THE EARTH
I life, lest Heaven's fell King
dare not speak like l *°

Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain

More torturing than the one whereon I roll.
Subtle thou art and good, and though the Gods
——
Hear not this voice yet thou art more than God,
Being wise and kind earnestly hearken now. I4 *

PROMETHEUS
Obscurely through my brain like shadows dim
Sweep awful 7 thoughts, rapid and thick. I feel —
Faint, like one mingled in entwining love,
Yet 'tis not pleasure.

THE EARTH
No, thou canst not hear:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known '5©

Only to those who die . . .

PROMETHEUS
And what art thou,
O melancholy Voice?

THE EARTH
I am the Earth,

Thy mother, she within whose stony veins

To the last fibre of the loftiest tree
]V ;Whosc thin leaves trembled in the frozen air r 55
iv*;
J I
f]oy ran, as blood within a living frame,
-When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud
Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy!
And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted
I /^-Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust 160
l\MJ\ * And our almightv Tyrant with fierce dread
Grew thunder chained thee here.
pale, until his
Then — which burn and roll
see those million worlds
Around us: their inhabitants beheld
My sphered light wane in wide Heaven; the sea l6 5

Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire

From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow
Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven's frown;
Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains;
Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodlcss toads no
Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled;

7. Awe-inspiring.
 Prometheus Unbound I • 141

When plague had fallen on man and beast and worm,

And Famine, and black blight on herb and tree,
And in the corn and vines and meadow grass
Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds J 75

Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry

With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained
With the contagion of a mother's hate
Breathed on her child's destroyer aye, I heard — l8 °
Thy curse, the which if thou rememberest not
Yet my innumerable seas and streams,
Mountains and caves and winds, and yon wide Air
And the inarticulate people of the dead
Preserve, a treasured spell. meditate We
In secret joy and hope those dreadful words l85

But dare not speak them.

PROMETHEUS
Venerable mother!
All else who live and from thee
suffer take
Some comfort; flowers and fruits and happy sounds
And love, though fleeting; these may not be mine.
But mine own words, I pray, deny me not. I9°

THE EARTH
—
They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, 8 my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know, there are two worlds of life and death: J 9S

One that which thou beholdest, but the other

Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

The shadows of all forms that think and live

Till death unite them, and thev part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men 20 °

And all that faith creates, or love desires,

Terrible, strange, sublimeand beauteous shapes.
There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade
'Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains; all the Gods
2 °5
Are there, and all the Powers of nameless worlds,
Vast, sceptred phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts;
And Demogorgon, 9 a tremendous Gloom;

8. Zoroaster (sixth or seventh century error in transcribing the word "Demiour-

b.c), a king of Bactria in what became gos" (Demiurge) from Plato's myth of
part of Persia, founded a dualistic re- the creation in Timaeus (28-40). In a
Jigion that worshiped fire and light in note to the name in a poem written and
opposition to the evil principle of dark- published in 1817 while he and Shelley
ness. Priests of the religion were called both livedat Marlow and conversed
Magi (singular: Magus). The exact daily, Thomas Love Peacock alludes to
source of Shelley's reference has not yet Milton's mention of Demogorgon (Para-
been discovered, but there had been a dise Lost, 11.965), and outlines the
revival of interest in Zoroaster in France available information, from which we
in the eighteenth century, and Peacock abstract: "Pronapides .makes Pan
. .

was much interested in the subject. and the three sister Fates the offspring
9. The name originated from a medieval of Dsemogorgon. Boccaccio gives. . .
^"2, M2 • Prometheus Unbound I

And he, the Supreme Tyrant, 1 on

yg Of burning Gold. Son, one of these shall utter
his throne
*5-J
^^ The curse which all remember. Call at will
<^^T Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter,
210

=^- ^Q^ Hades or Typhon, 2 or what mightier Gods

?| From all-prolific Evil, since thy ruin
S?^ g^> Have sprung, and trampled on my prostrate sons.
\P ^ —
Ask and they must reply so the revenge *
2I 5

rOf '-
the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades
^As rainy wind through the abandoned gate
c4yir Of a fallen palace.

PROMETHEUS
Mother, let not aught
Of that which may be evil, pass again
My lips, or those of aught resembling me. 22 °

Phantasm of Jupiter, arise, appear! 3

ione
My
wings are folded o'er mine ears,
My
wings arc crossed over mine eyes,
Yet through their silver shade appears
And through their lulling plumes arise "5
A Shape, a throng of sounds:
May it be, no ill to thee 4
O thou of many wounds!
Near whom for our sweet sister's sake
Ever thus we watch and wake. 2 3°

PANTHEA
The sound of whirlwind underground,
is

Earthquake and fire, and mountains cloven;

Trie Shape is awful like the sound,
Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven.
A sceptre of pale gold 2 35

To stay steps proud, o'er the slow cloud

His veined hand doth hold.
Cruel he looks but calm and strong
Like one who does, not suffers wrong.

some account of him. ... He was the 2. Hades (Pluto), brother of Zeus (Jupi-
Genius of the Earth, and the Sovereign ter) and king of the underworld. Typhon,
Power of the Terrestrial Daemons. He a hundred-headed giant, warred with
dwelt originally with Eternity and Chaos, Jupiter and was finally imprisoned be-
till, becoming weary of inaction, he or- neath volcanic Mt. Aetna,
ganised the chaotic elements, and sur- 3. Critics have suggested that Prome-
rounded the earth with the heavens. In theus, when he cursed Jupiter, resembled
addition to Pan and the Fates, his chil- the tyrant —
that, in fact. Jupiter may be
dren were Uranus, Titsea, Pytho, Eris, merely a distortion of Prometheus him-
and Erebus" (Rhododaphne [London, self — and that it is therefore appropriate
1818], pp. 179-180). Thus, in Peacock's to have the Phantasm of Jupiter repeat
account, Demogorgon is the father of the the curse.
Sky, the Earth, and the Underworld, as 4. Shelley uses the comma in the middle
well as the Fates. of lines like these to emphasize the in-
1. The shadow of Jupiter ternal rhyme.
 — /
-

Prometheus Unbound I •
143

PHANTASM OF JUPITER
Why have the secret powers of this strange world
Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither
On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds
Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice
With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk
In darkness? And, proud Sufferer, who art thou?

PROMETHEUS
Tremendous Image! as thou art must be
He whom thou shadowest forth. I am his foe
The Titan. Speak the words which I would hear,
Although no thought inform thine empty voice.
THE EARTH
Listen! and though your echoes must be mute, 2 5°

Grey mountains and old woods and haunted springs,

Prophetic caves and isle-surrounding streams
Rejoice to hear what yet ye cannot speak.

PHANTASM
A spirit seizes me, and speaks within:
It tears me as fire tears a thunder-cloud! 255

PANTHEA
See how he lifts his mighty looks, the Heaven
Darkens above.
IONE
He speaks! O shelter me
PROMETHEUS
I see the curse on gestures proud and cold,
And looks of firm defiance, and calm hate,
And such despair as mocks itself with smiles, 26°

Written as on a scroll ... yet speak —O speak!

' ^ PHANTASM n t .

Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind,

-^"^vi si ^
All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do; /f&^IWAJ<
Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Humankind,
^^ M ^//L
'
/2f .

One only being shalt thou not subdue. 1

26 5

Rain then thy plagues upon me here, s _

Ghastly disease and frenzying fear;
^yt^f <y<L —
And let alternate frost and fire
Eat into me, and be thine ire
Lightning and cutting hail and legioned 5 forms *7°

Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms.

Aye, do thy worst. Thou art Omnipotent.
O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power,
And my own will. Be thy swift mischiefs sent
To blast mankind, from yon etherial tower. *75

5. Arrayed in legions, as armies.

J 44 • Prometheus Unbound I

Let thy malignant spirit move

Its darkness over those I love:
On me and mine I imprecate 6
The utmost torture of thy hate
And thus devote to sleepless agony 28 °

This undeclining head while thou must reign on high.

But thou who art the God and Lord thou —O

Who with thy soul this world of woe,
fillest

To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow

—
In fear and worship all-prevailing foe! 2g 5

I curse thee! let a sufferer's curse

Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse,
Till thine Infinity shall be
A
robe of envenomed agony;
And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain 29°

To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain. 7

Heap on thy soul by virtue of this Curse
deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good,
111

Both infinite as is the Universe,

And thou, and thy self-torturing solitude. 29 *

An awful Image of calm power

Though now thou sittest, let the hour
Come, when thou must appear to be
That which thou art internally. ^*
And after many a false and crime
fruitless *\ 3 °°

Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and time.
[The Phantasm vanishes.]

PROMETHEUS I l^/^^W^
THE EARTH 1 W
They were thine.

PROMETHEUS . /

doth repent me: words are quick and vain;

It -J yy^
Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. <
/^C {
/
^ J
/ 305
I wish noji yingjhin^ to su ffer pain.
/ /j^yv\plpi€^ k

Misery, O
misery to me,
THE EARTH
^^^l 9^H ^ W
< '

That Jove at length should vanquish thee.

Wail, howl aloud, Land and Sen,
The Earth's rent heart shall answer ye.
Howl, Spirits of the living and the dead, 3 10

Your refuge, vour defence lies fallen and vanquished.

6. Invoke or down
evil or calamity.
call caused the death of Hercules) and the
7. In lines 286-291
Shelley combines mocking of Jesus with a "gorgeous robe"
tortures from Greek myths (a poisoned and a crown of thorns (Matthew 27:28—
shirt or tunic from, the centaur Nessus / 29; M^ark 15:17; Luke 23:11).
 —
Prometheus Unbound I • J 45
FIRST ECHO
Lies fallen and vanquished?
SECOND ECHO
Fallen and vanquished!

—ione
Fear not 'tis but some passing spasm,
The Titan is unvanquished still. 3I5

But see, where through the azure chasm

Of yon forked and snowy hill,
Trampling the slant winds on high
With golden-sandalled feet, that glow
Under plumes of purple dye 32 °

Like rose-ensanguined 8 ivory,

A Shape comes now,
Stretching on high from his right hand
A serpent-cinctured 9 wand.
PANTHEA
'Tis Jove's world-wandering Herald, Mercury. 3 *s

IONE
And who are those with hydra tresses 1
And iron wings that climb the wind,
Whom the frowning God represses,
Like vapours streaming up behind,
Clanging loud, an endless crowd 33 °

PANTHEA
These are Jove's tempest-walking hounds, 2
Whom he gluts with groans and blood
When, charioted on sulphurous cloud,
He bursts Heaven's bounds.

IONE
Are they now
led from the thin dead, 33 *

On new pangs to be fed?

PANTHEA
The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud.

FIRST FURY
Ha! I scent life!

SECOND FURY
Let me but look into his eyes!

THIRD FURY
The hope of torturing him smells like a heap
Of corpses, to a death-bird after battle. 3 *°

8. Stained blood color. note to 346).

9. Encircled or girdled. 2. I.e., the Furies.
1. Hair of snakes like a Gorgon's (see
 —
J 46 • Prometheus Unbound I

FIRST FURY
Darest thou delay, O Herald? take cheer, Hounds
—
Of Hell what if the Son of Maia 8 soon
Should make us food and sport? Who can please long
The Omnipotent?
mercury
Back to your towers of iron .
And gnash, beside the streams of fire, and wail 8- 345
Your foodlcss teeth! . . . Geryon, arise! and Gorgon,
Chimaera, 4 and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends,
Who ministered to Thebes Heaven's poisoned wine,
Unnatural love and more unnatural hate: 5
These shall perform your task.

FIRST FURY
O mercy! mercy! 350
We die with our desire — drive us not back!

MFRCURY
Crouch then in silence.
Awful 6 Sufferer!
To thee unwilling, most unwillingly
I come, by the great Father's will driven down
To execute a doom of new revenge. 355
Alas! and hate myself
I pity thee,
That can do no more. Aye from thy sight
I —
Returning, for a season, Heaven seems Hell,
So thy worn form pursues me night and day,
Smiling reproach. Wise art thou, firm and good, 360

But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife

Against the Omnipotent, as yon clear lamps
Th.it measure and divide the weary years
From which there is no refuge, long have taught
And long must tench. Even now thv Torturer arms 365

With the strange might of unimagined pains

The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell,

3. Mercury, whose father was Jupiter. fire-breathing monster of Greek mythol-

Maia, the most luminous of the seven ogy with three heads (lion, goat, and
sisters in the constellation Pleiades, w;is dragon), the body of a lion and Bjoet,
1
daughter Of Atlas and
In Pleione. and a dragon's tail, was killed by Ik lie-
la. We
have repunctuated this line ac- rophon.
cording to the argument of F .. B. Murray. :
5. The Sphinx, a monster with the body
KSJ, 24:17-20 (1975). of a lion, wings, and the face and
Gtryon, a monster with three heads
1 breasts of a woman, besieged hebes by
I

and three bodies, lived with his man- devouring those who could not answer
eating Hocks and his three-headed dog her riddle. Oedipus solved the riddle
^n an island beyond the Strait! of (causing the Sphinx to kill herself), only
Gibraltar, where he was destroyed by to marry his mother Utnn<itural love),
Hercules, The three GortOM were mythi- leading to the tragi* event! deputed in
cal personage!, with snakes for hair, who the Oraek Theban plays, m winch first
turned beholders into stone. he onlv I the ro\.il l.imilv and then all Thebes are
mortal one. Medusa, was slain by Perseus destroyed h\ muiiu.i1 hatreds.
end hei head fixed on Athena's (Min- 6. Inspiring reverei
erva'e) shield The Chimera, i fabled
 Prometheus Unbound I •
147

And my commission is, to lead them here,

Or what more subtle, foul or savage fiends
People the abyss, and leave them to their task. 370

Be it not so! There is a secret known

. . .

To thee and to none else of living things

Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven,
The fear of which perplexes the Supreme . . .

Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne 375

In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer

And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane 7 ~
Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart; / /Os^
For benefits and meek submission tame / / s ^ t0^yOjn
r f*D
The fiercest and the mightiest. /; **// .

PROMETHEUS JZ>, '

Evil minds />^7^_ 380

Change good to their own nature. I gave all

He has, and he chains me here
in return
Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun
Split my parched skin, or in the moony night
The chrystal-winged snow cling round my hair 385

Whilst my beloved race is trampled down

Bv thought-executing ministers.
his
Such the tyrant's recompense: 'tis just:
is

He who is evil can receive no good;

And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost, 390

He can feel hate, fear, shame not gratitude: —

He but requites me for his own misdeed.
Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks
With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge.
Submission, thou dost know, I cannot try: 395

For what submission but that fatal word,

The death-seal of mankind's captivity
Like the Sicilian's hair-suspended sword 8
Which trembles o'er his crown would he accept / —
O r could I yield?-—whidij^^4--vn^H»oMaeid. 7 4°°

LeT others flatter Crime where it sitsthron'd

fn brief Omnipotence; secure are they:
For when triumphant will weep down
Justice
Pity not punishment on her own wrongs,
Too much avenged bv those who err. I wait, 405

Enduring thus the retributive hour

Which since we spake is even nearer now.
But hark, the hell-hounds clamour. Fear delay!
Behold! Heaven lowers 9 under thv Father's frown.

7. Temple. Amidst the splendor, Damocles perceived

8. Dionysius the Elder, pronounced by a sword hanging by one horsehair above
Damocles to be the happiest man on his head and begged Dionysius to re>-
earth because of his wealth, persuaded move him from the terrifying situation,
the flatterer to take his place as sovereign. 9. Cowers.
 —
148 • Prometheus Unbound I

MERCURY
we might be spared I to inflict
that — 4I °

And thou to suffer! Once more answer me:

Thou knowest not the period of Jove's power? 1

PROMETHEUS
1 know but this, that it must come.

MERCURY
Alas!
Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain?

PROMETHEUS
4I 5
They last while Jove must reign: nor more nor less
Do I desire or fear.

MERCURY
Yet pause, and plunge
Into Eternity, where recorded time,
Even all that we imagine, age on age,
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight 42 °

Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;

Perchance it has not numbered the slow years
Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved.
PROMETHEUS
Perchance no thought can count them — yet they pass.

MERCURY
Ifthou might'st dwell among the Gods the while, 425

Lapped in voluptuous joy?

PROMETHEUS
I would not quit

This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains.

MERCURY
Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee.

PROMETHEUS
Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven,
Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene 43 °

As light in the sun, throned. . . . How vain is talk!

Call up the fiends.

IONE
O sister, look! White fire

Has cloven to the rootsyon huge snow-loaded Cedar;

How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!

1. The end or conclusion.

 Prometheus Unbound I J 49
MERCURY
I must obey his words and thine — alas! 435
Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart!

PANTHEA
See where the child of Heaven, with winged feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
IONE
Dear thy plumes over thine eyes
sister, close
Lest thou behold and die they come —
they come — 44<>

Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,

And hollow underneath, like death.

FIRST FURY
Prometheus!

SECOND FURY
Immortal Titan!

THIRD FURY
Champion of Heaven's slaves!

PROMETHEUS
He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here.
Prometheus, the chained Titan. —
Horrible forms, 445

What and who are ye? Never yet there came

Phantasms 2 so foul through monster-teeming Hell
From the all-miscreative brain of Jove;
Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
Methinks I grow like what I contemplate 45°
And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy.
FIRST FURY
We are the ministers of pain and fear
And disappointment and mistrust and hate
And clinging 3 crime; and as lean dogs pursue
Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, 455
We track all things that weep and bleed and live
When the great King betrays them to our will. 4

PROMETHEUS
many fearful natures in one name!
1 know ye, and these lakes and echoes know

The darkness and the clangour of your wings. 460

But why more hideous than your loathed selves

Gather ye up in legions from the deep?

2. Spirits or incorporeal beings; appari- turned into a deer and devoured by his
tions. own hounds for seeing Diana naked)
3. Clasping. and an image deriving from it in Shake-
4. The comparison of human fears, speare's Twelfth Night: "That instant
hatreds, and evil thoughts with hunting was I turn'd into a hart;/ And my de-
dogs that pursue a deer embodies both sires, like fell and cruel hounds,/ E'er
the myth of Actaeon (a hunter who was since pursue me." (I.i.21-23).
 — —
J SO - Prometheus Unbound I

SECOND FURY
We knew not that — Sisters, rejoice, rejoice!

PROMETHEUS
Can aught exult in its deformity?

SECOND FURY
The beauty of delightmakes lovers glad, • 465

Gazing on one another so are we. —

As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers
The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek
So from our victim's destined agony 470

The shade which is our form invests us round,

Else are we shapeless as our Mother Night. 5

PROMETHEUS
Ilaugh your power and his who sent you here
—
To lowest scorn. Pour forth the cup of pain.

FIRST FURY
Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone? 47 5

And nerve from nerve, working like fire within?

PROMETHEUS
Pain is my element as hate is thine;
Ye rend me now: I care not.

SECOND FURY
Dost imagine
We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes?

PROMETHEUS
Iweigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer 48°

Being evil. Cruel was the Power which called

You, or aught else so wretched, into light.

THIRD FURY
Thou think'st we will live through thee, one by one,
Like animal life; and though we can obscure not
The soul which burns within, that we will dwell 48s

Beside it, like a vain loud multitude

Vexing the self-content of wisest men
That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain
And foul desire round thine astonished heart
And blood within thy labyrinthine veins 49°

Crawling like agony.

5. The children of Night (according to Vengeance, Retribution, Deceit, Old Age.

Hesiod's Theogony) included Destruction, and Strife.
Death, Blame, Grief, the Specters of
 ———
Prometheus Unbound I • J 51

PROMETHEUS
Why, ye are thus now;
Yet amking over myself, and rule
I

The torturing and conflicting throngs within

As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous.

CHORUS OF FURIES
From the ends of the Earth, from the ends of the Earth, 495
Where the night has its grave and the morning its birth,
Come, come, come!
O ye who shake hills with the scream of your mirth
When cities sink howling in ruin, and ye
Who with wingless footsteps 6 trample the Sea, 5<x>

And close upon Shipwreck and Famine's track

Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wreck;
Come, come, come!
Leave the bed, low, cold and red,
Strewed beneath a nation dead; 5°5

Leave the hatred as in ashes —

Fire is left for future burning,
It will burst in bloodier flashes
When ye stir it, soon returning;
Leave the self-contempt implanted s 10

In young spirits sense-enchanted,

Misery's yet unkindled fuel;
Leave Hell's secrets half-unchanted
To the maniac dreamer: cruel
More than ye can be with hate, 5I5

Is he with fear.
Come, come, come!
We are steaming up from Hell's wide gate
And we burthen the blasts of the atmosphere,
But vainly we toil till ye come here. 52 °

IONE
Sister, I hear the thunder of new wings.

PANTHEA
These solid mountains quiver with the sound
Even as the tremulous air: their shadows make
The space within my plumes more black than night.

FIRST FURY
Your was as a winged car
call 525

Driven on whirlwinds fast and far;

It rapt 7 us from red gulphs of war

SECOND FURY
From wide cities, famine-wasted
6. Hea\y, evil. 7. Carried from one place to another.
 — — —
152 * Prometheus Unbound I

THIRD FURY
Groans half heard, and blood untasted
FOURTH FURY
Kingly conclaves, stern and cold, 530

Where blood with gold is bought and sold

FIFTH FURY
From the furnace, white and hot,
In which

A FURY
—
Speak not whisper not!
I know all that ye would tell,

But to speak might break the spell 535

Which must bend the Invincible,

The stern of thought;
He yet defies the deepest power of Hell.

A FURY
Tear the veil!

ANOTHER FURY
It is torn!

CHORUS
The pale stars of the morn
Shine on a misery dire to be borne. 54 °

Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We

laugh thee to scorn.
Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man?
Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran
Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever,
Hope, love, doubt, desire —which consume him forever. 545

One 8 came forth, of gentle worth,

Smiling on the sanguine earth;
His words outlived him, like swift poison
Withering up truth, peace and pity.
Look! where round the wide horizon 550

Many a million-peopled city

Vomits smoke in the bright air.
Hark that outcry of despair!
'Tis his mild and gentle ghost
Wailing for the faith he kindled. 555

Look again, the flames almost

To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled:
The survivors round the embers
Gather in dread.
560
Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.

8. Jesus Christ.
 —— —
Prometheus Unbound I •
153

SEMICHORUS I
Drops of bloody agony flow
From his white and quivering brow. 565

Grant a little respite now

See! a disenchanted nation 9
Springs like day from desolation;
To truth its state, is dedicate,
And Freedom leads it forth, her mate; 570

A legioned band of linked brothers

Whom Love calls children

SEMICHORUS II

Tis another's
See how
kindred murder kin!
Tis the vintage-time for Death and Sin:
Blood, like new wine, bubbles within
Till Despair smothers
The struggling World, which slaves and tyrants win.
[All the Furies vanish, except one.]

IONE
Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan
Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart
Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep, 580

And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves.

Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him?

PANTHEA
Alas, I looked forth twice, but will no more.

IONE
What didst thou see?

PANTHEA
A woeful sight — a youth 1
With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. 585

IONE
What next?

PANTHEA
The Heaven around,
the Earth below
Was human death,
peopled with thick shapes of
All horrible, and wrought by human hands,
And some appeared the work of human hearts,
For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles: 590
And other sights too foul to speak and live
Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear
By looking forth —those groans are grief enough.
9. France, when it was freed of its into bloody civil strife and then wars of
enchantment by monarchy during the conquest.
French Revolution; subsequent lines re- 1. Jesus Christ,
count the perversion of the Revolution
 — ———
J 54 • Prometheus Unbound I

FURY
Behold, an emblem 2 —
those who do endure
Deep wrongs man, and scorn and chains, but heap
for 595

Thousand-fold torment on themselves and him.

PROMETHEUS
Remit the anguish of that lighted stare
—
Close those wan lips let that thorn-wounded. brow
Stream not with blood —
mingles with thy tears!
it
6o°
Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death
So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix,
So those pale fingers play not with thy gore.
O horrible! Thy name I will not speak,
lit hath become a curse. I see, I see

plie wise, the mild, the lofty and the just, ^s

hom thy slaves hate for being like to thee,
r

!ome hunted by foul lies from their heart's home,

ji early-chosen, late-lamented home,
3
ls hooded ounces cling to the driven hind,
6l °
Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells:
—
Some hear I not the multitude laugh loud?
Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms
Float by my feet like sea-uprooted isles
Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood
6l5
Bv the red light of their own burning homes.
FURY
Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans;
Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind.

PROMETHEUS
Worse?
FURY
In each hu man heart terror surviv es
The has gorged: the loftiest fear
ravin it

All that they would disdain to think were true: \

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of manv a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate
And yet they know not that thev do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears. 625

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things arc thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just, — 63 °
But live among their suffering fellow men
As if none felt: thev know not what thev do. 4

2. A symbol; a fable or allegory such as 4. Lines 625-631 show the moment of

might be expressed pictorially. Prometheus' ultimate temptation to de-
3. Cheetahs or hunting leopards; hind: spair. ending with the words of Christ
a female deer in and after its third year. on the cross (Luke 23:34).
 ——
Prometheus Unbound I J 55

PROMETHEUS
Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes
And yet, I pity those they torture not.

FURY
Thou pitiest them? I speak no more!
[Vanishes.]

PROMETHEUS
Ah woe!
Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, forever! 6 35

I close my tearless eves, but see more clear

Thy works within my woe-illumed mind,
Thou subtle Tyrant! . . Peace is in the grave
.

The grave hides all things beautiful and good

I am a God and cannot find it there,
64°

Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge,

This is defeat, fierce King, not victory.
The sights with which thou torturcst gird my soul
With new endurance, till the hour arrives
When they shall be no types of things which are. 645

PANTHEA
Alas! what sawest thou?

PROMETHEUS
There are two woes:
To speak and to behold; thou spare me one.
Names are there, Nature's sacred watchwords —they
Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry.
The nations thronged around, and cried aloud 6 5°

As with one voice, "Truth, liberty and love!"

Suddenlv fierce confusion fell from Heaven
—
Among them there was strife, deceit and fear;
Tvrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil.
This was the shadow of the truth I saw. 6 55

THE EARTH
I feltthy torture, Son, with such mixed joy
As pain and Virtue give. To cheer thy state —
I bid ascend those subtle and fair spirits

Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought

And who inhabit, as birds wing the wind, 66 °

Its world-surrounding ether; they behold

Beyond that twilight realm, as in a glass,
—
The future may they speak comfort to thee!

PANTHEA
Look, Sister, where a troop of spirits gather
Like flocks of clouds in spring's delightful weather, 66 5

Thronging in the blue air!

 — ———
156 - Prometheus Unbound I

IONE
And see! more come
Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb,
That climb up the ravine in scattered lines.
And hark! is it the music of the pines?
Is it the lake? is it the waterfall? 67o

PANTHEA
Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all.

CHORUS OF SPIRITS 5

From unremembered ages we

Gentle guides and guardians be
Of Heaven-oppressed mortality
And we breathe, and sicken not, 6 75

The atmosphere of human thought:

Be it dim and dank and grcv
Like a storm-extinguished dav
Travelled o'er by dying gleams;
Be it bright as all between 68 °

Cloudless skies and windless streams,

Silent, liquid and serene
As the birds within the wind,
As the fish within the wave,
As the thoughts of man's own mind 68 5

Float through all above the grave,

We make there, our liquid lair,
Voyaging cloudlike and unpent 6
Tli rough the boundless clement
Thence we bear the prophecv 69°

Which begins and ends in thee!

IONE
More come, one bv one: the air around them
yet
Looks radiant as the air around a star.
FIRST SPIRIT
On a battle-trumpet's blast
I fled hither, fast, fast, fast, 6 *5

Mid the darkness upward cast

From the dust of creeds outworn,
From the tvrant's banner torn,
Gathering round me, onward borne,
There was mingled main a cry 7 °°

Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory!

Till they faded through the sky
And one sound above, around.
One sound beneath, around, above,
Was moving; 'twas the soul of love; 7°5

'Twas the hope, the prophecv.

Which begins and ends in thee.
5. Identified by Earth at 658-663. 6. Unconfined.
 — ——
Prometheus Unbound I • J 57

SECOND SPIRIT
A rainbow's arch stood on the sea,
Which rocked beneath, immoveably;
And the triumphant storm did flee, ? 10

Like a conqueror swift and proud

Between, with many a captive cloud
A shapeless, dark and rapid crowd,
Each by lightning riven in half.
I heard the thunder hoarsely laugh. 715

Mighty fleets were strewn like chaff

And spread beneath, a hell of death
O'er the white waters, I alit
On a great ship lightning-split
And speeded hither on the sigh 720

Of one who gave an enemy

His plank —then plunged aside to die.

THIRD SPIRIT
I sate beside a sage's bed
And the lamp was burning red
Near the book where he had fed, 725

When a Dream
with plumes of flame
To his pillow hovering came,
And I knew it was the same
Which had kindled long ago
Pity, eloquence and woe; 730

And the world awhile below

Wore the shade its lustre made.
It has borne me here as fleet
As Desire's lightning feet:
I must ride it back ere morrow, 735

Or the sage will wake in sorrow.

FOURTH SPIRIT
On a Poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses 740

But feeds on the aerial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees the ivy-bloom
1 745

Nor heed nor see, what things they be;

But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!
One of these awakened me 750

And I sped to succour thee.

 — —
J 58 • Prometheus Unbound I

IONE
Behold'st thou not two shapes from the East and West
Come, as two doves to one beloved nest,
Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air,
On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere? 755

And hark! their sweet, sad voices! 'tis despair

Mingled with love, and then dissolved in sound.

PANTHEA
Canst thou speak, sister? all my words are drowned.
IONE
Their beautv gives me voice. See how they float
On their sustaining wings of skiey grain, 760

Orange and azure, deepening into gold:

Their soft smiles light the air like a star's fire.
CHORUS OF SPIRITS
Hast thou beheld the form of Love?
FIFTH SPIRIT
As over wide dominions
I sped, like some swift cloud that wings the wide air's wildernesses,
That planet-crested Shape swept by on lightning-braided
pinions, 7 765

Scattering the liquid joy of life from his ambrosial 8 tresses:

—
His footsteps paved the world with light but as I past 'twas fading
And hollow Ruin yawned behind. Great Sages bound in madness
And headless patriots and pale youths who perished unupbraiding,
Gleamed in the Night I wandered o'er — till thou, O King of
sadness, 770

Turned bv thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness.

SIXTH SPIRIT
Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing:
It walks not on the Earth, it floats not on the air,
But treads with silent footstep, and fans with silent wing
The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest
bear, 775

Who soothed to by the fanning plumes above

false repose
And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busv feet,
Dream visions of aerial joy, and call the monster, Love,
And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet.

CHORUS
Though Ruin now Love's 9 shadow be, 780

Following him destrovinglv

On Death's white and winged steed,
Which the fleetest cannot flee
Trampling down both flower and weed,
7. Wings. children of Night (along with those
8. Divine or worthy of the gods. mentioned in the note to line 472 above).
9. It may be relevant to the thought The Spirits here describe the effects of
here (and in 763 and 778) that in Love in the imperfect, unredeemed world.
Hesiod's Theogony, Love is among the
 — ——
Prometheus Unbound I • 159

Man and beast and foul and fair, 785

Like a tempest through the air;

Thou shalt quell this Horseman grim,

Woundless though in heart or limb.

PROMETHEUS
Spirits! how know ye this shall be?

CHORUS
In the atmosphere we breathe 790

As buds grow red when snow-storms flee

From spring gathering up beneath,
Whose mild winds shake, the elder brake 1
And the wandering herdsmen know
That the white-thorn soon will blow 795

Wisdom, Justice, Love and Peace,

When they struggle to increase,
Are to us as soft winds be
To shepherd-boys — the prophecy
8o°
Which begins and ends in thee.

IONE
Where are the Spirits fled?

PANTHEA
Only a sense
Remains Omnipotence
of them, like the
Of music when the inspired voice and lute
Languish, ere yet the responses are mute
Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul, 8 °5

Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll.

PROMETHEUS
How fairthese air-born shapes! and yet I feel
Most vain all hope but love, and thou art far,
Asia! who when mv being overflowed
Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine 8l °

Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust. 2

All things are still —
alas! how heavily
This quiet morning weighs upon my heart;
Though I should dream, I could even sleep with grief
If slumber were denied not ... I would fain 8l 5

Be what it is my destiny to be,

The saviour and the strength of suffering man,
Or sink into the original gulph of things. . . .

There no agony and no solace left;

is

Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more. 82 °

1. Thicket. that the human conception of the Ideal

2.The simile suggests that Asia retains or Intellectual Beauty comes from the
and transmits the values of Prometheus — overflow of man's spiritual imagination.
 i —
J 60 Prometheus Unbound II.

PANTHEA
Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee
The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when
The shadow of thy spirit falls on her?
PROMETHEUS
I said all hope was vain but love — thou lovest . . .

PANTHEA
Deeply —but the Eastern looks white,
in truth star 82 5

And Asia waits that Indian

in far vale,
The scene her sad of— rugged once
exile
And desolate and frozen like this ravine,
But now invested with fair flowers and herbs
83 °
And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow
Among the woods and waters, from the ether 3
Of her transforming presence which would fade —
If it were mingled not with thine. Farewell! —
END OF THE FIRST ACT.

4 / ACT II

^if^^O^Z SCENE J

f Morning. A lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia alone.

ASIA
From all the blasts of Heaven thou hast descended
Yes, like a thought which makes
spirit, like a
Unwonted 4 throng to the horny 5 eyes
tears
And beatings haunt the desolated heart
Which should have learnt repose, thou hast descended —
Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, Spring' O
O child of many winds! As sudden ly
Thou comest as the memory of a dream
Wh jgfTTTpwirsad becausTtt h alh be cn-swee t;
^"^
Like genius, or like joy which nseth up
As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds
The desart of our life. . . .

This is the season, this the day, the hour;

At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine,
I5
Too long desired, too long delaying, come!
How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl!
The point of one white star 6 is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening mom
Beyond the purple mountains; through a chasm
20
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it —
now it wanes it gleams again —
3. The air breathed by the gods. 5. Semi-opaque like horn.
4. Not usual. 6. I.e., Venus, the morning star.
 —
Prometheus Unbound II. i 161

As the waves and as the burning threads

fade,
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air. . . .

Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloudlike snow

The roseate sunlight quivers hear I not — 25

The yEolian music of her 7 sea-green plumes

Winnowing 8 the crimson dawn?
[Panthea enters.]
I feel, I see
Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears
Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.
Beloved and most beautiful, who wearest 30

The shadow of that soul by which I live,

How late thou art! the sphered sun had climbed
The sea, my heart was sick with hope, before
The printless air felt thy belated plumes.

PANTHEA
Pardon, great Sister! but my wings were faint Jj
35

With the delight of a remembered dream

As are the noontide plume s of summer wind!
Satiate with sweet flowersJ\l was wontTcTsleep
Peacefully,and awake refreshed and calm
Before the sacred Titan's fall and thy 4°

Unhappy love, had made through use and pity

Both love and woe familiar to my heart
As they had grown to thine erewhile 9 I slept
. . .

Under the glaucous 1 caverns of old Ocean,

Within dim bowers of green and purple moss; 45
Our young Ione's soft and milky arms
Locked then as now behind my dark moist hair
While my shut eyes and cheek were pressed within
The folded depth of her life-breathing bosom . . .

But not as now since I am made the wind 50

Which fails beneath the music that I bear

Of thy most \vordless converse; since dissolved
Into the sense with which love talks, my rest
Was troubled and yet sweet —my waking hours
Too full of care and pain.

ASIA
up thine eyes

2
Lift 55
J
And let me read thy dream.

PANTHEA
As I have said,
With our sea-sister at his feet I slept.
The mountain mists, condensing at our voice
Under the moon, had spread their snowy flakes

7. I.e., Panthea (sister, line 14). 1. Of a

dull or pale green color passing
8. Beating or flapping. into grayish blue.
9. Foimerly or some time ago.
 i

162 • Prometheus Unbound II.

From the keen ice shielding our linked sleep ... *°

Then two dreams came. 2 One I remember not.

But in the other, his pale, wound-worn limbs
Fell from Prometheus, and the azure night
Grew radiant with the glory of that form
65
Which lives unchanged within, and his voice fell
Like music which makes giddy the dim brain
Faint with intoxication of keen joy:
"Sister of her whose footsteps pave the world
—
With loveliness more fair than aught but her
—
Whose shadow thou art lift thine eyes on me!" ?°

I lifted them —
the overpowering light
Of that immortal shape was shadowed o'er
By love; which, from his soft and flowing limbs
And passion-parted lips, and keen faint eyes
Steam'd forth like vaporous fire; an atmosphere 7*

Which wrapt me in its all-dissolving power

As the warm ether of the morning sun
Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew.
I saw not — —
heard not moved not only felt —
His presence flow and mingle through my blood 8o

Till it became his life and his grew mine

And I was thus absorbed until it past —
And like the vapours when the sun sinks down,
Gathering again in drops upon the pines
And tremulous as they, in the deep night 8s

My being was condensed, and as the rays

Of thought were slowly gathered, I could hear
His voice, whose accents lingered ere they died
Like footsteps of far melody. Thy name,
Among the many sounds alone I heard 9°

Of what might be articulate; though still

I listened through the night when sound was none.

lone wakened/ then, and said to me:

"Canst thou divine what troubles me tonight?
I always knew what I desired before 95

Nor ever found delight to wish in vain.

But now I cannot tell thee what I seek;
I know not —
something sweet since it is sweet
—
Fven to desire it is thy sport, false sister!
IO°
Thou hast discovered some inchantment old
Whose spells have stolen mv spirit as I slept
And mingled it with thine; —
for when just now
We kissed, I felt within thv parted lips
The sweet air that sustained me; and the warmth
I0 5
Of the life-blood for loss of which I faint
Quivered between our intertwining arms."

2.The communication of these two action in this scene,

dreams of Panthea to Asia is the main
 — ——
Prometheus Unbound II. i • 163

I answered not, for the Eastern star grew pale,

But fled to thee.

ASIA
Thou speakest, but thy words
Are as the air. I feel them not. . oh, lift
. .

Thine eyes that I may read his written soul!

PANTHEA
them, though they droop beneath the load
I lift

Of that they would express what canst thou set —

But thine own fairest shadow imaged there?

ASIA
Thine eyes deep blue, boundless Heaven
are like the
Contracted to two circles underneath "5
—
Their long, fine lashes dark, far, measureless,
Orb within orb, and line through line inwoven.
PANTHEA
Why lookest thou as if a spirit past?

ASIA .

There change: beyond their inmost depth

is

I see a shade
a
—
a shape 'tis He, arrayed
— \

\
I2 °

In the soft light of his own smiles which spread

Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon.
Prometheus, it is thou depart not yet! —
Say not those smiles that we shall meet again
Within that bright pavilion which their beams 125

Shall build o'er the waste world? The dream is told

What shape 3 is that between us? Its rude hair
Roughens the wind that lifts it; its regard
Is wild and quick, yet 'tis a thing of air

For through itsgrey robe gleams the golden dew / I3 °

Whose stars the noon has quench 'd not.

DREAM
Follow, follow!

PANTHEA
It is mine other dream.

ASIA
It disappears.

PANTHEA
It passes now into my mind. Methought
As we sate here the flower-infolding buds

3. This
is the second dream, which re- the release of Prometheus, and to the
lates to the Spirits of the Hours that course of necessity,
are to usher in the fall of Jupiter and
 —— i

J 64 • Prometheus Unbound II.

Burst on yon lightning-blasted almond tree, 4 'M

When swift from the white Scythian wilderness
A wind swept forth wrinkling the Earth with frost . . .

I looked, and the blossoms were blown down;

all

—
But on each leaf was stamped as the blue bells
mo
Or Hyacinth tell Apollo's written grief"'
O follow, follow!

ASIA
As you speak, your words
Fill, pause by pause my own forgotten sleep
With Methought among these lawns together
shapes.
We wandered, underneath the young grey dawn,
And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds ms
Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains
Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind;
And the white dew on the new-bladed grass,
Just piercing the dark earth, hung silently
And there was more which I remember not; ! 5°

But, on the shadows of the morning clouds

Athwart the purple mountain slope was written
Follow, O
follow! as they vanished bv,
And on each herb from which Heaven's dew had fallen
The like was stamped as with a withering fire; I5 5

A wind arose among the pines it shook —

The clinging music from their boughs, and then
Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts,
Were heard —O
follow, follow, follow me!
l6°
And then I said: "Panthea, look on me."
But in the depth of those beloved eyes
Still I saw, follow, follow!

echo
Follow, follow!

PANTIIF.A
The crags, this clear spring morning, mock our voices,
As they were spirit-tongued.

ASIA
It is some being
Around the crags. — What fine clear sounds! O list!
l6 5

4. Earl R. Wasserman has pointed out which also means "hasten" (Jeremiah
that Pliny's Natural History (a book
in 1:11-12).
Shelley knew well) the almond tree is 5. After Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo,
mentioned as the first tree to bud in was killed by the jealous Zephyrus.
winter (January) and to bear fruit Apollo changed his blood into a flower
(March), and that the prophet Jeremiah and wrote his lament, "Ai" ("alas" or
puns on the Hebrew word for "almond," "woe!" in Greek) on the petals.
 —
Prometheus Unbound II. i • 165

echoes unseen
—
Echoes we listen!
Wecannot stay
As dew-stars glisten
Then fade away
Child of Ocean! 6 no

ASIA
Hark! Spirits speak! The liquid responses
Of their aerial tongues yet sound.
PANTHEA
I hear.

ECHOES
O follow, follow,
As our voice recedeth
Through the caverns hollow I7 *

Where the forest spreadeth;

[More distant.]
O follow, follow,
Through the caverns hollow,
As the song floats, thou pursue
Where the wild bee never flew, l8 °

Through the noontide darkness deep,

By
the odour breathing sleep
Of
faint night flowers, and the waves
At the fountain-lighted caves,
While our music, wild and sweet, l8 5

Mocks thy gently-falling feet,

Child of Ocean!

ASIA
Shall we pursue the sound? — It grows more faint
And distant.

PANTHEA
List! the strain floats nearer now.

ECHOES
In the world unknown *9<>

Sleeps a voice unspoken; 7

By thv step alone
Can its rest be broken,
Child of Ocean!

ASIA
How the notes sink upon the ebbing wind! *95

6. Asia, Panthea, and lone are Oceani- the echoes are leading Asia and Panthea
des, daughters of Oceanus, one of the from the realm of actuality into a world
firstgods in all classical theogonies. of potentiality (see D. J. Hughes' essay,
7. Such descriptions in negatives (see pp. 603-620).
world unknown, line 190) suggest that
 —
166 - Projnetheus Unbound ILii

ECHOES
O follow, follow!
Through the caverns hollow,
As the song floats thou pursue,
By the woodland noontide dew,
By the forests, lakes and fountains, 2 °°

Through the many-folded mountains,

To the rents and gulphs and chasms
Where the Earth reposed from spasms
On the day when He and thou
Parted — to commingle now, 2 °5

Child of Ocean!
ASIA
Come, sweet Panthea, link thy hand in mine,
And follow, ere the voices fade away.

SCENE II

A Forest, intermingled with Rocks and Caverns. Asia and Panthea

pass into it. Two young Fauns are sitting on a Rock, listening.

SEMICHORUS I OF SPIRITS
The path through which that lovely twain 8
Have by cedar, pine and yew, 9
past,
And each dark tree that ever grew
Is curtained out from Heaven's wide blue;

Nor sun nor moon nor wind nor rain 5

Can pierce its interwoven bowers;

Nor aught save when some cloud of dew,
Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze
Between the trunks of the hoar 1 trees,
Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers I0

Of the green laurel, 2 blown anew;

And bends and then fades silently
One frail and fair anemone; 3
Or when some star of many a one
That climbs and wanders through steep night, T 5

Has found the cleft through which alone

Beams fall from high those depths upon,
Ere it is borne awav, awav,

By the swift Heavens that cannot stay

It scatters drops of golden light 20

Like lines of rain that ne'er unite;

And the gloom divine is all around
And underneath is the mossy ground.
8. I.e., Asia and Panthea. leading down to Demogorgon's under-
9. Though the yew tree is commonly world.
associated with death, the cedar and 1. Old and venerable.
—
pine evergreens with more hopeful 2. Also called "bay," a symbol of suc-
—
symbolism suggest that Shelley's de- cess in poetry; blown: blooming,
scription aims at a neutral portrayal of 3. Windflower; it belongs to the butter-
the gloom divine (line 22) of the path cup family.
 ——
Prometheus Unbound II. ii •
167

SEMICHORUS II
There the voluptuous nightingales
Are awake through all the broad noonday. 25

When one with bliss or sadness fails

And through the windless ivy-boughs,
Sick with sweet love, droops dying away
On its mate's music-panting bosom
Another from the swinging blossom, 30

Watching to catch the languid close

Of the last strain, then lifts on high
The wings of the weak melody,
Till some new strain of feeling bear
The song, and all the woods are mute; 35

When there is heard through the dim air

The rush of wings, and rising there
Like many a lake-surrounded flute,
Sounds overflow the listener's brain
So sweet that joy is almost pain. 40

SEMICHORUS I
There those inchanted eddies play
Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw,
By Demogorgon's mighty law
With melting rapture or sweet awe,
All spirits on that secret way, 45
As inland boats are driven to Ocean
Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw;
And first there comes a gentle sound
To those in talk or slumber bound,
—
And wakes the destined soft emotion 5o

Attracts, impels them: those who saw

Say from the breathing Earth behind
There steams a plume-uplifting wind
Which drives them on their path, while they
Believe their own swift wings and feet 55

The sweet desires within obey:

And so they float upon their way,
Until still sweet but loud and strong
The storm of sound is driven along,
—
Sucked up and hurrying as they fleet 6o

Behind its gathering billows meet

And to the fatal mountain bear
Like clouds amid the yielding air. 4

FIRST FAUN
Canst thou imagine where those spirits live
WTiich make such delicate music in the woods? 65

We haunt within the least frequented caves

And closest coverts, 5 and we know these wilds,
4. —
Lines 24-63 deal with sounds follow- of sight in the scene's opening lines,
ing the closing out of light and the sense 5. Most secret shelters or thickets.
 —
168 - Prometheus Unbound II. Hi

Yet never meet them, though we hear them oft:

Where may they hide themselves?

SECOND FAUN
Tis hard to tell
I have heard those more skilled in spirits say, 70

The bubbles which the enchantment of the sun

Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere 75

Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves,

And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent 6 domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride on it, and rein their headlong speed, 8o

And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire

Under the waters of the Earth again. 7
FIRST FAUN
If such have others other lives
live thus,
Under pink blossoms or within the bells
Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep, 8s

Or on their dying odours, when they die,

Or in the sunlight of the sphered dew?
SECOND FAUN
Aye, many more, which we may well divine.
But should we stay to speak, noontide would come,
And thwart Silenus 8 find his goats undrawn 9°

And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs

Of fate and chance and God, and Chaos old,
And love and the chained Titan's woful doom
And how he shall be loosed, and make the Earth
—
One brotherhood delightful strains which cheer 9*

Our solitary twilights, and which charm

To silence the unenvying nightingales.

SCENE III

A Pinnacle of Rock among Mountains. Asia and Panthea.

PANTHEA
Hither the sound has bome us — to the realm
Of Demogorgon, and the mighty portal,
Like a volcano's meteor-breathing chasm,
Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up
6. Shining or luminous. 8. A demigod who became the nurse,
7. Lines 70-82 portray the hydrogen preceptor, and attendant of Bacchus,
cycle, as it was understood in Shelley's Silenus is generally represented as a fat
day, explaining the origin of the swamp and jolly old man riding an ass, crowned
gas that, when ignited, becomes the ignis with flowers, and always intoxicated;
fatuus or will-o'-the-wisp. undrawn: unmilked.
 —
Prometheus Unbound II. iii • 169

Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth 5

And call truth, virtue, love, genius or joy

That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain
To deep intoxication, and uplift
Like Maenads who cry loud, Evoe! Evoe! 9
The voice which I0
is contagion to the world.

ASIA
Fit throne for such a Power! Magnificent!
How glorious art thou, Earth! and if thou be
The shadow of some Spirit lovelier still,

Though evil stain its work and it should be

Like its creation, weak yet beautiful, js

I could fall down and worship that and thee.

1 —
Even now my heart adoreth. Wonderful! —
Look Sister, ere the vapour dim thy brain;
Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist,
2°
As a lake, paving in the morning sky,
With azure waves which burst in silver light,
Some Indian vale Behold it, rolling on
. . .

Under the curdling winds, and islanding

The peak whereon we stand midway, around —
Encinctured 2 by the dark and blooming forests, 25

Dim twilight lawns and stream-illumed caves

And wind-inchanted shapes of wandering mist;
And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains
From icy spires of sunlike radiance fling
The dawn, as lifted Ocean's dazzling spray, 30

From some Atlantic islet scattered up,

Spangles the wind with lamp-like water drops.
The vale is girdled with their walls — a howl
Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines
Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast, 35

—
Awful as silence. Hark! the rushing snow!
The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in Heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth 4°

Is loosened, and the nations echo round

Shaken to their roots: as do the mountains now. 8

9. Maenads were fanatic female wor- is thought" (V. 574— 576).

shipers of Dionysus, Greek god of wine 2. Belted.
(Roman Bacchus); when in an intoxicated 3. This simile is one of the best ex-
frenzy, they would surge through the amples of the reversal of imagery that
wilderness, crying "Evoe!" and killing Shelley mentions in the fourth paragraph
every living thing in their path. (See of the Preface, for here an external nat-
Euripides' late drama The Bacchae.) ural event (the avalanche, 36-38) is
1. The central imagery in lines 12-16 compared to a figure "drawn from the
echoes Paradise Lost, where Raphael operations of the human —
mind" in this
implies to Adam that Earth may be "but case, the slow growth of new concepts in
the shadow of Heav'n, and things therein/ Heaven-defying minds until there is an
Each to other like, more than on earth intellectual revolution.
 — —
170 Prometheus Unbound II. iU

PANTHEA
Look, how the gusty sea of mist is breaking
In crimson foam, even at our feet! it rises
As Ocean at the inchantment of the moon 45

Round foodless men wrecked on some oozy isle.

ASIA
Hie fragments of the cloud are scattered up
The wind that lifts them disentwines my hair-
Its billows now sweep o'er mine eyes my brain —
Grows dizzy — I see thin shapes within the mist. 50

PANTHEA
A countenance with beckoning smiles — there burns
An azure within its golden locks
fire

—
Another and another hark! they speak!
SONG OF SPIRITS
To the Deep, to the Deep,
Down, down! 55

Through the shade of Sleep,

Through the cloudv strife
Of Death and of Life;
Through the veil and the bar
Of things which seem and are, 6o

Even to the steps of the remotest Throne,

Down, down!
While the sound, 4 whirls around,
Down, down!
As the fawn draws the hound,
As the lightning the vapour,
As a weak moth the taper;
Death, Despair; Love, Sorrow;
Time both; to-day, to-morrow;
As steel obeys the Spirit of the stone, 5 70

Down, down!
Through the grey, void Abysm,
Down, down!
Where the air is no prism 6
And the moon and stars are not 75

And the cavern-crags wear not

The radiance of Heaven,
Nor the gloom to Earth given;
Where there is One pervading, One alone,
Down, down!

4. Again, the comma is metrical (mark- moth and taper (candle), Death and
ing a pause after the internal rhyme) Despair, etc.
rather than grammatical. 6. I.e., out of the earth's atmosphere,
5. The magnet draws the steel; the fawn which, acting as a prism, breaks the pure
attracts the hound (65); there is mutual white sunlight of eternity into the varie-
attraction between lightning and vapour, gated colors of mortal perception.
 — — —
Prometheus Unbound H.iv • 111

In the depth of the Deep,

Down, down!
Like veil'd Lightning asleep,
Like the spark nursed in embers,
The last look Love remembers, 85

Like a diamond which shines

On the dark wealth of mines, 7
A spell is treasured but for thee alone.

Down, down!

We have bound thee, we guide thee 9°

Down, down!
With the bright form beside thee
Resist not the weakness
Such strength is in meekness
That the Eternal, the Immortal, 95

Must unloose through life's portal

The snake-like Doom coiled underneath his throne
Bv that alone!

SCENE IV

The Cave of Demogorgon. Asia and Panthea.

PANTHEA
What veiled form sits on that ebon throne?

ASIA
The veil has fallen! . . .

PANTHEA
I see a mighty Darkness
Filling the seat of power; and gloom
rays of
Dart round,as light from the meridian Sun,
Ungazcd upon and shapeless neither limb — 5

Nor form — nor outline; 8 vet we feel it is

A living Spirit.

DEMOGORGON
Ask what thou wouldst know.

ASIA
What canst thou tell?

DEMOGORGON
All things thou dar'st demand.
7. Accordingto eighteenth-centu.y sci- 8. Shelley's description of Demogorgon
entists, thediamond was phosphorescent, echoes Milton's description of Death in
firstabsorbing light and then glowing in Paradise Lost (11.666-673), beginning,
the dark (see Robert A. Hartley, Notes "The other shape,/ If shape it might be
and Queries, n.s. 20:293-294 [August call'd that shape had none/ Distinguish-
1973]). able in member, joynt, or limb. ." . .
 172 - Prometheus Unbound II. iv

ASIA
Who made the living world?

DEMOGORGON
God.
ASIA
Who made all

That it contains — thought, passion, reason, will, IO

Imagination? 9

DEMOGORGON
God, Almighty God.

ASIA
Who made when the winds of Spring
that sense which,
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one beloved heard in youth alone,
I5
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears, which dim
The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,
And leaves this peopled earth a solitude
When it returns no more?

DEMOGORGON
Merciful God.

ASIA
And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,
Which from the links of the great chain of things 20

To every thought within the mind of man

Sway and drag heavily and each one reels—
Under the load towards the pit of death;
Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood; *5

Pain whose unheeded and familiar speech

Is howling and keen shrieks, day after day;
And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?

DEMOGORGON
He reigns.

^^~^~""^ ASIA

J
—
Utter his name a world pining in pain
\ Asks but his name; curses shall drag him down.

DEMOGORGON
He reigns.

ASIA
I feel, I know it — who?
9. The metaphysical implication of Asia's firmed nor denied by Demogorgon and
statement is that all the universe is made should be seen as a useful myth rather
up of mental activities, yet this like — than a declaration of Shelley's beliefs
—
Asia's other assertions is neither con- about reality.
 Prometheus Unbound II. iv • 173

DEMOGORGON
He reigns.

ASIA
Who There was the Heaven and Earth at first
reigns?
—
And Light and Love; then Saturn, from whose throne
Time fell, an envious shadow; 1 such the state
Of the earth's primal spirits beneath his sway 35

As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves

Before the wind or sun has withered them
And semivital worms; but he refused
The birthright of their being, knowledge, power,
The skill which wields the elements, the thought 4°

Which pierces this dim Universe like light,

Self-empire and the majesty of love,
For thirst of which they fainted. Then Prometheus
Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter
And with this law alone: "Let man be free," 45

Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven.

To know nor faith nor love nor law, to be
Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign;
And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man
First famine and then toil and then disease, 5°

Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before,

Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove,
With alternating shafts of frost and fire,

Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves;

And in their desart 2 hearts fierce wants he sent 55

And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle

Of unreal good, which levied mutual war,
So ruining the lair wherein they raged.
Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned 3 hopes
Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers, 6o

Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms; 4

That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings
The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind
The disunited tendrils of that vine
Which bears the wine of life, the human heart; 6*

And he tamed fire, which like some beast of prey

[ost terrible, but lovely, played beneath
The frown man, and tortured to his will
of
Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,

1. Shelley plays on the Greek names for (IV.220ff.) capable of banishing grief or
Saturn (Kronos), in whose reign was the trouble; Moly: a magical herb with a
mythical Golden Age, and Time (Chro- white flower and a black root, given to
nos). Odysseus by Hermes as a charm against
2. Forsaken or lonely. the sorceries of Circe (Odyssey, X.302ff.);
3. Arrayed in legions, as armies. Amaranth: from the Greek adjective
4. Elysian: conducive to complete hap- meaning "everlasting," "not fading," or
piness (from "Elysium," the abode of "incorruptible" (Cf. Paradise Lost, III.
the virtuous Greeks after death); Ne- 352-360).
penthe- a drug mentioned in the Odyssey
 — —
J 74 • Prometheus Unbound II. iv

And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms 70

Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves.

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the Universe;
"And Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven
Which shook but fell not; and the harmonious mind 75

Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song,

And music lifted up the listening spirit
Until it walked, exempt from mortal care,
Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound;
And human hands first mimicked 5 and then mocked 8o

With moulded limbs more lovely than its own

The human form, till marble grew divine,
And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see
Reflected in their race, behold, and perish. 6
He told the hidden power of herbs and springs, 85

—
And Disease drank and slept Death grew like sleep.
He taught the implicated 7 orbits woven
Of the wide-wandering stars, and how the Sun
Changes his lair, and bv what secret spell
The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eve *°

Gazes not on the interlunar 8 sea;

He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs,
The tempest-winged chariots of the Ocean, 9
And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then
1

Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed 95

The warm winds, and the azure aether shone,

And the blue sea and shadowv hills were seen . . .

Such the alleviations of his state

—
Prometheus gave to man for which he hangs
—
Withering in destined pain but who rains down I0°

Evil, the immedicable plague, which while

Man looks on his creation like a God
And sees that it is glorious, drives him on,
The wreck of his own will, the scorn of Earth,
The outcast, the abandoned, the alone? IQ 5

Not Jove: while yet his frown shook Heaven, aye when
His adversarv from adamantine 2 chains
Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare
Who is his master? Is he too a slave?

5. Copied or faithfully reproduced. 8. Dark; the time between the old and
6. Swinburne suggested that lines 83-84 the new moon.
describe the positive prenatal influence 9. tempest . . . Ocean: a periphrasis for
on children whose mothers had viewed "boats."
sculptures that achieved such idealized 1. From classical Greek times to Shel-
beauty that men fell desperately in love ley's day the term "Celts" meant any
with them. He compares Virgil's phrase of the barbarians to the north of the
on the sorcery of love: "Ut vidi, ut perii Graeco-Roman Mediterranean civiliza-
(Eclogues, VIII.41; "As I saw, how I tion.
was lost!"). 2. Incapable of being broken.
7. Intertwined or entangled.
 — —

Prometheus Unbound II. iv 175

DEMOGORGON
All spirits are enslaved who serve things evil: II0

Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no.

ASIA
Whom calledst thou God?

DEMOGORGON
I spoke but as ye speak

For Jove is the supreme of living things.

ASIA
Who is the master of the slave?

DEMORORGON
— If the Abys m
Coul d vomit forth its secrets :—but a voice / / /
Ts wanTihg, the deep truth is lmageTeJs;
or what would it avail to bid thee "gaze
'

On the revolving world? what to bid speak

Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change? To these
I2 °
All things are subject but eternal Love. 3

ASIA
So much I asked before, and my heart gave
The response thou hast given; and of such truths
Each to itself must be the oracle.
One more demand and do thou answer
. . . me
As my own soul would answer, did it know I25

—
That which I ask. Prometheus shall arise
Henceforth the Sun of this rejoicing world:
When shall the destined hour arrive?
DEMORORGON
Behold!

ASIA
The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night
I see Cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds I3 °

Which trample the dim winds in each there stands —

A wild-eyed charioteer, urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others with burning eyes lean forth, and drink x 35

With eager lips the wind of their own speed

As if the thing they loved fled on before,

3. Demogorgon makes sense only if we eternally outlasts all the evils of mor-
read Shelley's use of "Love" here as tality.
Eros or Desire; the desire for good
 — —
176 • Prometheus Unbound II. iv

And now —even now they clasped it; their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all

Sweep onward.
DEMOGORGON
These are the immortal Hours '4©

Of whom thou didst —

demand. One waits for thee.
ASIA
A Spirit with a dreadful countenance
Checks dark chariot by the craggy gulph.
its

Unlike thy brethren, ghastly charioteer,

What art thou? whither wouldst thou bear me? Speak! ms

SPIRIT
I am the shadow of a destiny
More dread than is mine aspect ere yon planet —
Has the Darkness which ascends with me
set,
Shall wrap in lasting night Heaven's kingless throne.

ASIA
What meanest thou?

PANTHEA
That terrible shadow 4 floats *5o

Up from its throne, as may

the lurid 5 smoke
Of earthquake-ruined cities o'er the sea.
Lo! it ascends the Car the coursers fly . . .

Terrified; watch its path among the stars

Blackening the night!

ASIA
Thus I am answered — strange! J 55

PANTHEA
See, near the verge" another chariot stavs;
An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire
Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim
Of delicate strange tracery —the voung Spirit
That guides it, has the dovelike eyes of hope. l6°

How its soft smiles attract the — soul! as light

Lures winged insects through the lampless air.

SPIRIT
My coursers are fed with the lightning,
They drink of the whirlwind's stream
And when the red morning is brightning l6 5

Thev bathe in the fresh sunbeam;

They have strength for their swiftness, I deem:
Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.

4. I.e., Demogorgon. darkness.

5. Shining with a red glow or glare amid 6. Outermost limits, horizon.
 Prometheus Unbound II. v • 177

I desire —and their speed makes night kindle;

I fear—they outstrip the Typhoon; J 7o

Ere the cloud piled on Atlas 7 can dwindle

We
encircle the earth and the moon:
We
shall rest from long labours at noon:
Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.

scene v

The Car pauses within a Cloud on the Top of a snowy Mountain.

Asia, Panthea and the Spirit of the Hour.

SPIRIT
On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire, 8
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire:
They shall drink the hot speed of desire! 5

ASIA
Thou breathest on their nostrils —but my breath
Would give them swifter speed.
SPIRIT
Alas, it could not.

PANTHEA
Spirit! pause and tell whence is the light
Which fills the cloud? the sun is yet unrisen.

SPIRIT
The sun not until noon. Apollo
will rise — IO

Isheld in Heaven by wonder and the light —

Which fills this vapour, as the aerial hue
Of fountain-gazing roses fills the water,
Flows from thy mighty sister.

PANTHEA
Yes, I feel . . .

ASIA
What is it with thee, sister? Thou art pale. xs

PANTHEA
How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee;
1 feel, but see thee not. I scarce endure
The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change
Is working in the elements which suffer

7. Atlas, a Titan and brother of Prome- lieved the heavens rested on its top and
theus, refused hospitality to Perseus, who Atlas supported the world on his
(by means of Medusa's head) changed shoulders.)
Atlas into a mountain. (The real moun- 8. I.e., usually rest or slow down,
tain was so high that the ancients be-
178 Prometheus Unbound I Lv
Thy presence thus unveiled. —The Nereids 9
tell 20

That on the day when the clear hyaline 1

Was cloven at thy uprise, and thou didst stand
Within a veined shell, which floated on
Over the calm floor of the chrystal sea,
Ainong the /Egean isles, and by the shores 25

Which bear thy name, 2 love, like the atmosphere

Of the sun's fire filling the living world,
Burst from thee, and illumined Earth and Heaven
And the deep ocean and the sunless caves,
And all that dwells within them; till grief cast 3°

Eclipse upon the soul from which it came:

Such thou now, nor is it I alone,
art
Thy thy companion, thine own chosen one,
sister,
But the whole world which seeks thy sympathy.
Hearest thou not sounds i' the air which speak the love 35

Of all articulate beings? Feelest thou not

The inanimate winds enamoured of thee? List! —
[Music.]

ASIA
Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his
Whose echoes they are —
yet all love is sweet,
Given or returned; common as light is love 40

And its familiar voice wearies not ever.

Like the wide Heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God . . .

They who inspire it most are fortunate

As I am now; but those who feel it most 45

Are happier still, after long sufferings

As I shall soon become.

PANTHEA
List! Spirits speak.

voice (in the air, singing)

Life of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them
And thy smiles before they dwindle 50

Make the cold air fire; then screen them

In those looks where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.

9. Water nymphs who were daughters of daughter of Celus (Sky) and Light, an-
Nereus (the Old Man of the Sea) and other saw her rising from the froth of
Doris (Hesiod's Theogony). the sea and standing "within a veined
1. The glassy, transparent surface of the shell," and still another located her birth
sea. near Tyre and identified her with Astarte
2. shores name: In his syncretic way
. . . of the Phoenicians and Syrians. But by
of treating myths, Shelley draws upon naming her Asia, Shelley frees his crea-
various traditions of Aphrodite/Venus tion from the specific limitations associ-
mentioned by Cicero. One saw her as the ated with the myths of Aphrodite/Venus.
 ———
Prometheus Unbound II. v • J 79

Child of Light! thy limbs are burning

Through the vest which seems to hide them 55

As the radiant lines of morning

Through the clouds ere they divide them,
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.

Fair are others; —

none beholds thee 6o

But thy voice sounds low and tender

Like the fairest —
for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never
As I feel now, lost forever! 65

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest

Its dim shapes are clad with brightness
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness
Till they fail, as I am failing, 7°

Dizzy, lost ... yet unbewailing!

ASIA
My an enchanted Boat
soul is

Which, swan, doth float

like a sleeping
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing,
And thine doth like an Angel sit 75

Beside the helm conducting it

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever forever —
Upon that many winding River
Between mountains, woods, abysses, 8o

A Paradise of wildernesses,
Till like oneslumber bound
in
Borne to theOcean, I float down, around,
Into a Sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.

Meanwhile thy Spirit lifts its pinions 3 85

In Music's most serene dominions,

Catching the winds that fan that happy Heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,
Without a course without a star — 9°
But by the instinct of sweet Music driven
Till, through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace 4 glided,
The boat of my desire is guided
Realms where the air we breathe is Love 9$

Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,

Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above.

3. Wings. 4. A small, light boat.

J 80 • Prometheus Unbound II Li

We have past Age's icy caves,

And Manhood's dark and tossing waves
And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray; IO°

Beyond the glassy gulphs we flee

Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth to a diviner day, 5
A Paradise of vaulted bowers
I0 5
Litby downward-gazing flowers •

And watery paths that wind between

Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld somewhat like thee, — "°
Which walk upon the sea, and chaunt melodiously!
END OF THE SECOND ACT.

ACT III

SCENE I

Heaven. Jupiter on his Throne; Thetis and the other Deities as-
sembled.

JUPITER
Ye congregated Powers of Heaven who share
The glory and the strength of him ye serve,
Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent.

All else has been subdued to me alone —

The soul of man,
unextinguished fire,
like 5

Yet burns towards Heaven with fierce reproach and doubt

And lamentation and reluctant praver,
Hurling up insurrection, which might make
Our antique empire insecure, though built
On eldest faith, and Hell's coeval, 6 fear. I0

And though my curses through the pendulous air

Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake bv flake 7
And cling to it — though under my wrath's night
It climb the crags of life, step after step,
Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet, I5

It yet remains supreme o'er misery,

Aspiring . . . unredressed; yet soon to fall:

Even now have I begotten a strange wonder,

That fatal Child, 8 the terror of the Earth,

5. The reversal of time and mortal aging defying minds" (II.iii.39), and thus pre-
described here parallels a myth in Plato's pares for Jupiter's overthrow; pendulous:
Statesman (270e and 271b). floating in space or undulatory.
6. Equal in antiquity or contemporary in 8. Jupiter describes at lines 37—48 more
origin. fully how he begot this child by raping
7. Jupiter's picture of his curses, falling Thetis. The present speech is an example
"flake by flake," echoes Asia's simile of of irony in the classical sense in which
the avalanche of change loosed after everything the speaker says is true in a
building up "flake after flake, in Heaven- way he does not comprehenH
 — — —— —
Prometheus Unbound HI. i •
181

Who waits but till the destined Hour arrive, 20

Bearing from Demogorgon's vacant throne

The dreadful might of ever living limbs
Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld
To redescend and trample out the spark . . .

Pour forth Heaven's wine, Idaean Ganymede, 9 25

And let it fill the daedal cups like fire

1

And from the flower-inwoven soil divine

Ye all triumphant harmonies arise
As dew from Earth under the twilight stars;
Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins 30

The soul of joy, ye everliving Gods,

Till exultation burst in one wide voice
Like music from Elysian winds.
And thou
Ascend beside me, veiled in the light
Of the desire which makes thee one with me, 35

Thetis, 2 bright Image of Eternity!

When thou didst cry, "Insufferable might!
God! spare me! I sustain not the quick flames,
The penetrating presence; 3 all my being,
Like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw 40
Into a dew with poison, 4 is dissolved,
Sinking through its foundations" —
even then
Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third
—
Mightier than either which unbodied now
Between us, floats, felt although unbeheld, 45
Waiting the incarnation, which ascends
Hear ye the thunder of the fiery wheels
Griding 5 the winds? —
from Demogorgon's throne.
Victory! victory! Feel'st thou not, World, O
The Earthquake of his chariot thundering up so

Olympus?
[The Car of the Hour arrives. Demogorgon descends
and moves towards the Throne of Jupiter.]
Awful Shape, what art thou? Speak!

DEMOGORGON
Eternity —demand no direr name.
Descend, and follow me down the abyss;
I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn's child,

9. While tending his father's flocks on —

when through a trick of Hera (Juno) —
Mt. Ida, Ganymede was carried away by Zeus (Jupiter) was bound by an oath to
an eagle to satisfy Jupiter's lust; he re- lie with her in his own undisguised form,
placed Hebe as cupbearer to the gods. (The child of the union was Dionysus
1. Displaying artistic cunning or fertile [Bacchus]).
invention; variously adorned (from Dae- 4. him .poison: In Lucan's Pharsalia
. .

dalus. the mythical craftsman). (IX. 762-788) Sabellus dissolves when

2. Asea nymph (nereid) who was also bitten by a seps, a legendary poisonous
the mother of Achilles by Peleus. snake, while crossing the Numidian
3. sustain . presence: Semele, daugh-
. . desert.
ter of Cadmus, was consumed by fire 5. Clashing or grating against.
 — ———
182 Prometheus Unbound IILii

Mightier than thee; 6 and we must dwell together 55

—
Henceforth in darkness. Lift thy lightnings not.
The tyranny of Heaven none may retain,
Or rcassume, or hold succeeding thee . . .

—
Yet if thou wilt as 'tis the destiny
60
Of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead
Put forth thy might.

JUPITER
Detested prodigy!
Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons 7
I trample thee! . . . Thou lingerest?
Mercy! mercy!
No pity —no release, .Oh, no respite! . .

That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge. 65

Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge

—
On Caucasus he would not doom me thus.
Gentle and just and dreadless, is he not
The monarch of the world? what then art thou? —
No refuge! no appeal — . . .

Sink with me then 70

We two will sink in the wide waves of ruin

Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,
Into a shoreless sea. — Let Hell unlock
Itsmounded Oceans of tempestuous fire, 75

And whelm on them into the bottomless void

Trie desolated world and thee and me,
The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck
Of that for which thev combate
Ai! /
80
The elements obey me not T"siTffcr . . .

Dizzilv down —
ever, forever, down
UB^ /
And, like a cloud, mine enemvi-akou; .

Darkens my fall with victory!—J-Ai! Ai!

J

SCENE II

The Mouth of a great River in the Island Atlantis. Ocean is dis-

covered reclining near the Shore; Apollo stands beside him.

OCEAN
He fell, thou sayest, beneath his conqueror's frown?

6. / am thy child .than thee: In

. . men.
Hesiod's Theogony (lines 886-900)— and, 7. The Titans, after their overthrow by
hence, at the very beginning of the liter- Jupiter and the Olympian gods, were im-
ary transmission of the Greek myths- prisoned in Tartarus, so far below the
there is the stated possibility that Zeus earth that it would take an anvil ten
(Jupiter) will be overthrown by his sec- days to fall there from the earth (the
ond child by Metis (Wisdom), an "un- same distance as from heaven to earth).
ruly son, the future king of gods and
 Prometheus Unbound III. ii • 183

APOLLO
Aye, when strife was ended which made dim
the
The orb I rule, and shook the solid stars. 8
The terrors of his eye illumined Heaven
With sanguine 9 light, through the thick ragged skirts 5

Of the victorious Darkness, as he fell;

Like the last glare of day's red agony
Which from among
the fiery clouds
a rent
Burns far along the tempest-wrinkled Deep.

OCEAN
I0
He sunk to the abyss? to the dark void?

APOLLO
An some bursting cloud
eagle so, caught in
On Caucasus, his thunder-baffled wings
Entangled in the whirlwind, and his eyes
Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded
I5
By the white lightning, while the ponderous hail
Beats on his struggling form which sinks at length
Prone, and the aerial ice clings over it.

OCEAN
Henceforth the fields of Heaven-reflecting sea
Which are my realm, will heave, unstain'd with blood
—
Beneath the uplifting winds like plains of corn 20

Swayed by the summer air; my streams will flow

Round many-peopled continents and round
Fortunate isles; and from their glassy thrones
Blue Proteus and his humid Nymphs shall mark
*5
The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see
The floating bark of the light-laden moon
With that white star, 10 its sightless pilot's crest,
Borne down the rapid sunset's ebbing sea;
Tracking their path no more by blood and groans;
And desolation, and the mingled voice 30

—
Of slavery and command but by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft, and mild, free, gentle voices,
That sweetest music, such as spirits love.

APOLLO
And I shall gaze not on the deeds which make 35

My mind obscure with sorrow, as Eclipse

Darkens the sphere I guide —but list, I hear
The small, clear, silver lute of the young spirit
That sits i' the Morning star.

8. The orb is the sun, and the solid stars 9. Blood-red.

are the fixed stars (those which were 10. Venus, the morning star of line 39.
thought not to move).
184 • Prometheus Unbound HI. Hi
OCEAN
Thou must away?
—
Thy steeds will pause at even till when, farewell. 40

The loud Deep calls me home even now, to feed it

With azure calm out of the emerald urns
Which stand forever full beside my throne.
Behold the Nereids under the green sea,
Their wavering limbs borne on the windlike stream, 45

Their white arms lifted o'er their streaming hair

With garlands pied 1 and starry sea-flower crowns,
Hastening to grace their mighty Sister's joy.
[A sound of waves is heard.]
It is the unpastured Sea hung'ring for Calm.
Peace, Monster — I come now! Farewell.

APOLLO
Farewell!— 50

SCENE III

Caucasus. Prometheus, Hercules, 2 lone, the Earth, Spirits. Asia and

Panthea borne in the Car with the Spirit of the Hour. Hercules
unbinds Prometheus, who descends.

HERCULES
Most glorious among Spirits, thus doth strength
To wisdom, courage, and long suffering love,
And thee, who art the form they animate,
Minister, like a slave.

PROMETHEUS
Thy gentle words
Are sweeter even than freedom long desired 5

And long delayed.

Asia, thou light of life,
Shadow of beauty unbeheld; and ye
Fair sister nymphs, who made long years of pain
Sweet to remember through your love and care:
Henceforth we will not part. There is a Cave I0

All overgrown with trailing odorous plants

Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers
And paved with veined emerald, and a fountain
Leaps in the midst with an awakening sound;
From its curved roof the mountain's frozen tears J 5

Like snow or silver or long diamond spires

Hang downward, raining forth a doubtful light;
1. With variegated colors. him after Prometheus had made his peace
2. In the Greek legend Herakles (Roman with Zeus (Jupiter). Shelley omits the
Hercules), the human hero who has been killing of the bird because, as IM.ii had
made immortal, kills the eagle (or vul- made clear, bloodshed was banished after
ture) that tortures Prometheus and frees Jupiter's fall.
 —— —
Prometheus Unbound III. Hi •
J 85

And there is heard the ever-moving air

Whispering without from tree to tree, and birds,
And bees; and all around are mossy seats 20

And the rough walls are clothed with long soft grass;
A simple dwelling, which shall be our own,
Where we will sit and talk of time and change
As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged
What can hide man from Mutability? 25

And if ye sigh, then I will smile, and thou

lone, shall chant fragments of sea-music,
Until I weep, when ye shall smile away
The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed;
We will entangle buds and flowers, and beams 3°

Which twinkle on the fountain's brim, and make

Strange combinations out of common things
Like human babes in their brief innocence;
And we will search, with looks and words of love
For hidden thoughts each lovelier than the last, 35

Our unexhausted spirits, and like lutes

Touched by the skill of the enamoured wind,
Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new,
From difference sweet where discord cannot be.
And hither come, sped on the charmed winds 4°
Which meet from all the points of Heaven, as bees
From every flower aerial Enna 3 feeds
At their known island-homes in Himera,
The echoes of the human world, which tell
Of the low voice of love, almost unheard, 45
And dove-eyed pity's murmured pain and music,
Itself the echo of the heart, and all
That tempers or improves man's life, now free.
And lovely apparitions dim at first
—
Then radiant as the mind, arising bright so

From the embrace of beauty (whence the forms

Of which these are the phantoms) casts on them
The gathered rays which are reality
Shall visit us, the progeny immortal
Of Painting, Sculpture and rapt Poesy 55

And arts, though unimagined, yet to be.

The wandering voices and-the shadows these
Of all that man becomes, the mediators
Of him and us
that best worship, love, by
Given and returned, swift shapes and sounds which grow *°

More fair and soft as man grows wise and kind,

And veil by veil evil and error fall . . .

Such virtue has the cave and place around.

3. The famous meadow in Sicily from (rather than in the underworld); not far
which Hades abducted Persephone was from it in Sicily are two rivers and a
aerial because it was in the air of earth town named Himera.
 — —
J 86 • Prometheus Unbound III. iii

[Turning to the Spirit of the Hour.]

For thee, fair Spirit, one toil remains. lone,
65
Give her that curved shell which Proteus old 4
Made Asia's nuptial boon, breathing within it
A voice to be accomplished, and which thou
Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock.

IONE
Thou most desired Hour, more loved and lovely
Than all thy sisters, this is the mystic shell; 7°

See the pale azure fading into silver,

Lining it with a soft yet glowing light.
Looks it not like lulled music sleeping there?

SPIRIT
It seems in truth the fairest shell of Ocean:
Its sound must be at once both sweet and strange. 75

PROMETHEUS
Go, borne over the cities of mankind
On whirlwind-footed coursers! once again
Outspeed the sun around the orbed world
And as thy chariot cleaves the kindling air,
Thou breathe into the many-folded Shell, 8o

Loosening its mighty music; it shall be

As thunder mingled with clear echoes. Then —
Return and thou shalt dwell beside our cave.
[Kissing the ground.]
And thou, O Mother Earth!

THE EARTH
I hear — I feel
Thy on me, and their touch runs down
lips are 85

Even to the adamantine central gloom

—
Along these marble nerves 'tis life, 'tis jov,
And through my withered, old and icv frame
Trie warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling. —
Henceforth the many children fair 9°

Folded in my sustaining arms all plants, —

4. Proteus was a sea deity who could not Hogg, writes: "Sir Guyon de Shelley, one
only change himself into various forms, of the most famous of the Paladins . . .

but could also predict future events. In carried about with him at all times three
Francis Bacon's explanation of classical conchs fastened to the inside of his
myths, Proteus represents physical na- shield. When he blew the first shell,
. . .

ture and natural law. That Proteus gives all giants, however huge, fled before him.
Asia the wedding gift of a conch shell When he put the second to his lips, all
to proclaim the fall of Jupiter and the spells were broken, all enchantments dis-
beginning of a new Golden Age may be solved; and when he made the third
explained by a legend surrounding three conch, the golden one, vocal, the law of
conch shells in the Shelleys' coat of arms God was immediately exalted, and the
(probably deriving from the magic bugle law of the Devil annulled and abrogated,
of Arthur's squire in Spenser's Fairie wherever the potent sound reached."
Queene, Book I, vm). Shelley's college (Hogg. Life of Shelley, ed. Edward
. . .

friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Dowden [1906], p. 18.)

 — —
Prometheus Unbound III. Hi •
187

And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged

And birds and beasts and fish and human shapes
Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom,
Draining the poison of despair shall take — 95

And interchange sweet nutriment; to me

Shall they become like sister-antelopes
By one fair dam, snowwhite and swift as wind
Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream;
The dewmists of my sunless sleep shall float I0 °

Under the stars like balm; night-folded flowers

Shall suck unwithering hues in their repose;
And men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather
Strength for the coming day and all its joy:
I0 5
And death shall be the last embrace of her
Who takes the life she gave, even as a mother
Folding her child, says, "Leave me not again!"

ASIA
O mother! wherefore speak the name of death?
Cease thev to love and move and breathe and speak
Who die?'

THE EARTH
would avail not to reply:
It II0

Thou art immortal and this tongue is known

But to the uncommunicating dead.
Death is the veil which those who live call life:
—
They sleep and it is lifted 5 and meanwhile . . .

In mild variety the seasons mild "5

With rainbow-skirted showers, and odorous winds
And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night,
And the life-kindling shafts of the keen Sun's
All-piercing bow, and the dew-mingled rain
Of the calm moonbeams, a soft influence mild; I2 °

Shall clothe the forests and the fields aye, even —

The crag-built desarts of the barren deep
With ever-living leaves and fruits and flowers.
And Thou! There is a Cavern 6 where my spirit
Was panted forth in anguish whilst thy pain I2 5

Made my heart mad, and those who did inhale it

Became mad too, and built a Temple there

And spoke and were oracular, and lured
The erring nations round to mutual war
And faithless faith, such as Jove kept with thee; no
Which breath now rises as among tall weeds
A violet's exhalation, and it fills

5. Death the veil

is lifted: Cf. Shel-
. . . 10, now redeemed from its former un-
ley's sonnet: "Lift not the painted happy role. At
lines 127-130, Shelley
veil .
." (p. 312).
. identifies thislocation with oracles, like
6. This cavern is, apparently, the "mighty that at Delphi,
portal" described by Panthea at II.iii.2-
 —
J 88 • Prometheus Unbound HI. Hi
With a serencr light and crimson air
Intense yet soft the rocks and woods around;
It feeds the quick growth of the serpent vine ! 35

And the dark linked ivy tangling wild

And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms
Which star the winds with points of coloured light
As they rain through them, and bright, golden globes
Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven; '4°

And, through their veined leaves and amber stems,

The flowers whose purple and translucid bowls
Stand ever mantling with aerial dew,
The drink of spirits; and it circles round
Like the soft waving wings of noondav dreams, f 45

Inspiring calm and happy thoughts, like mine

Now thou art thus restored . . . This Cave is thine.
Arise! Appear!
[A Spirit rises in the likeness of a winged child.]
This is my torch -bearer,
Who let his lamp out in old time, with gazing
On eyes from which he kindled it anew I5 °

With love which is as fire, sweet Daughter mine,

For such is that within thine own. Run, Wayward! —
And guide this company beyond the peak
Of Bacchic Nysa, 7 Maenad-haunted mountain,
And beyond Indus and its tribute rivers, I55

Trampling the torrent streams and glassy lakes

With feet unwet, unwearied, undelaying;
And up the green ravine, across the vale,
Beside the windless and chrystalline pool
Where ever lies, on unerasing waves, l6°

The image of a temple built above,

Distinct with column, arch and architrave 8
And palm-like capital, and overwrought,
And populous most with living imagery
Praxitelean shapes, 9 whose marble smiles l6s

Fill the hushed air with everlasting love.

It is deserted now, but once it bore

Thy name, Prometheus; there the emulous vouths

Bore to thine honour through the divine gloom
The lamp, which was thine emblem 1 I7 °
even as those . . .

Who bear the untransmitted torch of hope

7. In classical geography and legend of the fourth-century B.C. Greek sculptor

there were no less than ten places named Praxiteles.
Nysa, all associated with Dionysus (Bac- 1. At Athens there was a cult that an-
chus). One, a city in India, was the nually celebrated Prometheus' exploits as
reputed birthplace of Dionysus and his fire bringer in the Lampadephoria, a
capital during his legendary conquest of race by torch-bearing youths (who thus
the East. emulated the feat of Prometheus). The
8. The main beam that rests on the tops lost third play of Aeschylus' Promethean
of the capitals (column tops) in post trilogy was called Prometheus the Fire
and lintel architecture. Bringer.
9. Statues by or exhibiting the perfection
 ——
Prometheus Unbound HI. iv J 89

Into the grave across the night of life . . .

As thou hast borne it most triumphantly

To this far goal of Time . . . Depart, farewell.
Beside that Temple is the destined Cave ... I75

SCENE IV

A Forest. In the Background a Cave. Prometheus, Asia, Panthea,

lone, and the Spirit of the Earth.

IONE
Sister, it is not Earthly . . . how it glides
Under the leaves! how on
head there burns its

A light like a green star, whose emerald beams

Are twined with its fair hair! how, as it moves
The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass! 5

Knowest thou it?

PANTHEA
It is the delicate spirit
That guides the earth through Heaven. From afar
The populous constellations call that light
The loveliest of the planets, and sometimes
It floats along the spray of the salt sea I0

Or makes its chariot of a foggy cloud

Or walks through fields or cities while men sleep
Or o'er the mountain tops, or down the rivers,
Or through the green waste wilderness, as now,
Wondering at all it sees. Before Jove reigned I5

It loved our sister Asia, and it came

Each leisure hour to drink the liquid light
Out of her eyes, for which it said it thirsted
As one bit by a dipsas; 2
and with her
It made its childish confidence, and told her 20

All it had known or seen, for it saw much,

Yet idlv reasoned what it saw; and called her
For whence it sprung it knew not nor do I
"Mother, dear Mother."

of the earth [running to

spirit Asia]
Mother, dearest Mother;
May I then talk with thee as I was wont? 25

May I then hide mine eyes in thy soft arms

After thy looks have made them tired of joy?
May I then plav beside thee the long noons
When work is none in the bright silent air?

2.A poisonous snake of classical legend the bite of which caused an unquench-
(mentioned in Lucan's Pharsalia, IX.737- able thirst (cf. dipsomaniac).
760, and Milton's Paradise Lost, X.526),
 J 90 • Prometheus Unbound III. iv

ASIA
love thee, gentlest being, and henceforth 3°
I

Can cherish thee unenvied. —Speak, I pray:

Thy simple talk once solaced, now delights.

SPIRIT OF THE EARTH

Mother, I am grown though a child
wiser,
Cannot be wise day
like thee, within this
.^\nd happier too, happier and wiser both. 35

""Thou knowest that toads and snakes and loathly worms

And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs
That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever
An hindrance to my walks o'er the green world,
And that, among the haunts of humankind *°

Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks

Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles
Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance
Or other such foul masks with which ill thoughts
Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man; 45

And women too, ugliest of all things evil,

Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair

When good and kind, free and sincere like thee,

When false or frowning made me sick at heart
To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen. so

Well —my path lately lay through a great City

Into the woodv hills surrounding it.
A sentinel was sleeping at the gate:
When there was heard a sound, so loud, it shook
The towers amid the moonlight, yet more sweet 55

Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all,

A long long sound, as it would never end:
And all the inhabitants leapt suddenly

Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets,

Looking in wonder up to Heaven, while yet 6o

The music pealed along. I hid myself

Within a fountain in the public square
Where I lay like the reflex 3 of the moon
Seen in a wave under green leaves and soon —
Those ugly human shapes and visages 65

Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain,

Past floating through the air, and fading still
Into the winds that scattered them; 4 and those
From whom they past seemed mild and lovely forms
After some foul disguise had fallen and all — 70

Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise

3. Reflection. them derives (with a reversal of em-

4. Those ugly human shapes scat-. . . phasis) from the passage on the simula-
tered them: This image of the masks of era, or "images," in Lucretius' De rerum
ugly human nature floating away from natura, IV.46ff. See also "The Triumph
the creatures that produced and wore of Life," 480-516.
 —
Prometheus Unbound 1 1 1.iv • J9J

And greetings of delighted wonder, all

Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn
—
Came wouldst thou think that toads and snakes and efts 5
Could be beautiful? yet so they were
e'er
And that with little change of shape or hue:
— 75

All things had put their evil nature off.

I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake, -
7

Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined, / j ^v#ll/o.i&/^

I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward / £uy*y\&

j
And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries / ji /^
With quick, long beaks, and in the deep there lay / (/
v<% 7^r
Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky. 6 —
So with my thoughts full of these happy changes
We meet again, the happiest change of all. 8s

ASIA s& *
And never will we part, till thy chaste Sister7
^^^Z^^- ss
Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon ^_ ~, ^%^L
Will look on thy more warm and equal light / &£ -^^^
Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow
^^5 *^
And love thee.
;
SPIRITOF THE EARTH
What, as Asia loves Prometheus? 9°

ASIA
Peace, Wanton 8 —
thou art yet not old enough.
Think by gazing on each other's eyes
ye,
To multiply your lovely selves, and fill
With sphered fires the interlunar9 air?

SPIRIT OF THE EARTH

Nay, Mother, while my sister trims 1 her lamp 95

'Tis hard I should go darkling

ASIA
— Listen! look!
[The Spirit of the Hour enters.]

PROMETHEUS
We feel what thou hast heard and seen — yet speak.

THE HOUR
SPIRIT OF
Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the skv, and the wide earth,
There was I0°
a change . . . the impalpable thin air

5. Small lizards or lizardlike animals; mythology.

newts. 8. A spoiled child (with overtones of
6. cannot tell my joy
/ as in a sky:
. . . lasciviousness).
The double point of lines 78-8J is that 9. Dark; the time between the old and
the berries of the deadly nightshade are the new moon.
no longer poisonous (cf. Queen Mab, 1. Puts into proper order for lighting by
VIII. 129-130) and that the halcyons, or cleaning, cutting the wick, or adding
kingfishers, have turned vegetarian. fresh fuel.
7. Se»ene, the moon goddess of Greek
 — —
J 92 • Prometheus Unbound III. iv

And the all-circling sunlight were transformed

As the sense of love dissolved in them
if

Had folded itself round the sphered world.

My vision then grew clear and I could see
I05
Into the mysteries of the Universe. 2
Dizzy as with delight I floated down,
Winnowing 3 the lightsome air with languid plumes,
My coursers sought their birthplace in the sun-
Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil,
II0
Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire
And where my moonlike car will stand within
A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms, 4
Of thee, and Asia and the Earth, and me
And you fair nymphs, looking the love we feel,
In memory of the tidings it has borne, II5

Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers,

Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone
And open to the bright and liquid sky.
Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake
The likeness of those winged steeds will mock I2 °

The flight from which they find repose. 5 Alas, —

Whither has wandered now my partial 6 tongue
When all remains untold which ye would hear!
As I have said, I floated to the Earth:
It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss I25

To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went

Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind
And first was disappointed not to see
Such mighty change as I had felt within
I3 °
Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked, ,

And_behold thrones were kingless, and men walked

! /

One^with"TKe^trrireT-Fven as <;pink dp^ "

— ) /li^V^vK-
Nnne fawne d, none t rampled- hate r1isr]ain nt-fear, / j^'/j^/
Self-love o r self-contempt on hum an brows / J >

TNjnTrinrejT^rnTip^ ac nW
M <Lga te Ot hellT"
fr
)
*^H~>- 135

abandon, ye who enter here'V / /-*-*/} ,

[one frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear

Gazed on another's eye of cold command
Until the subject of a tvrant's will
Became, worse fate, the abject 8 of his own l *°

2. In the general regeneration the earth's two-horse chariot, was the emblem of the
atmosphere ceases to act as a prism, thus moon (my moonlike car), as opposed to
no longer distorting sunlight into varied the four-horse chariot of the sun-god; in
colors and a glare that hides realities. the museum the yoke of the two-horse
3. Flapping or beating. chariot is a snake with a head on each
4. Statues by or approaching the quality —
end the legendary amphisbaena.
of the great Athenian sculptor Phidias 6. Biased in favor of.
(fifth century b.c). 7. This line translates literally the last
5. The scene described in lines 111-121 words of the inscription written above
is based on the Pantheon and the Sala the gate leading into Dante's Inferno
della Biga in the Vatican Museum— both (III.9).
places Shelley visited in Rome. The biga, 8. Outcast or degraded person.
 —
Prometheus Unbound III. iv • J 93

Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death.

None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines
Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak;
None with firm sneer trod out in his own heart
The sparks of love and hope, till there remained r 45

Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed,

And the wretch crept, a vampire among men,
Infecting all with his own hideous ill.

None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk

Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes I 5<>

Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy

With such a self-mistrust as has no name.
And women too, frank, beautiful and kind
As the free Heaven which rains fresh light and dew
On the wide earth, past: gentle, radiant forms, J 55

From custom's evil taint exempt and pure;

Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel
And changed to all which once they dared not be,
Yet being now, made Earth like Heaven nor pride — l6°

Nor jealousy nor envy nor ill shame,

The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,
Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, 9 love.

Thrones, altars, judgement-seats and prisons; wherein

And beside which, by wretched men were borne l65

Sceptres, tiaras, swords and chains, and tomes

Of reasoned wrong glozed 1 on by ignorance,
Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes,
The ghosts of a no more remembered fame,
Which from their unworn obelisks look forth I7 °

In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs

Of those who were their conquerors, mouldering round. 2
Those imaged to the pride of Kings and Priests
A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide
As is the world it wasted, and are now I75

But an astonishment; even so the tools

And emblems of its last captivity
Amid the dwellings of the peopled Earth,
Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.
And those foul shapes, 3 abhorred by God and man l8 °

Which under many a name and many a form

/ Strange, savage, ghastlv, dark and execrable
9. A magic drink that banished grief querors (the ancient Romans) had fallen
and pain. into decay. The shapes on the obelisks
1. Glossed; commented on or explained. seemed monstrous and barbaric (168)
2. The Egyptian obelisks, brought to because, when Shelley wrote, hiero-
Rome by the conquering armies of the glyphics could not be deciphered,
empire, had in the Renaissance been 3. A generalized term for all gods of
erected in the principal piazzas of the vengeance who inspired fear.
city, while the palaces of their con-
 — — —
J 94 • Prometheus Unbound IV

Were [upiter, the tyrant oLthe^ world ;

And which the nations panic-stricken served

l8 5
With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love
Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless
And slain amid men's unreclaiming tears,
Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate
Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines.
The painted veil, by those who were, called life*, 1 9°

Which mimicked, 4 as with colours idly spread,

All men believed and hoped, is torn aside
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed but man: — '95
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the King —
Over himself; just, gentle, wise but man: —
Passionless? no —
yet free from guilt or pain
Which were, for his will made, or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, 20°

From chance and death and mutability,

The clogs 5 ~bf that which else imghTTJv*ersoar
The loftiest star of unascended Heaven
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. 6

END OF THE THIRD ACT.

ACT IV

Scene: A Part of the Forest near the Cave of Prometheus. Panthea

and lone are sleeping: they awaken gradually during the first Song.

VOICE OF UNSEEN SPIRITS

The pale Stars are gone,
For the Sun, their swift Shepherd,
To
their folds them compelling
In the depths of the Dawn
Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee 5

Beyond his blue dwelling,

As fawns flee the leopard . . .

But where are ye?

[A Train of dark Forms and Shadows passes by confusedly, singing.]

Here, oh here!
We
bear the bier IO

Of the Father of many a cancelled year!

Spectres we
Of the dead Hours be,
We bear Time to his tomb in eternitv.

4. Mocked (because the appearance is 5. Impediments or encumbrances,

copied ineffectively). 6. The formless void of infinite space.
 ——
Prometheus Unbound IV 195
I5
Strew, oh strew
Hair, not yew!
Wet the dusty pall with tears, not dew!
Be the faded flowers
Of Death's bare bowers
Spread on the corpse of the King of Hours! 20

Haste, oh haste!
As shades are chased
Trembling, by Day, from Heaven's blue waste,
We melt away
Like dissolving spray 25

From the children of a diviner day,

With the lullaby
Of winds that die
On the bosom of their own harmony!
IONE
What dark forms were they? 30

PANTHEA
The past Hours weak and grey
With the spoil, which their toil
Raked together
From the conquest but One could foil.

ione
Have they past?

PANTHEA
They have past; 35

They outspeeded the blast;

While 'tis said, they are fled
IONE
Whither, oh whither?

PANTHEA
To the dark, to the past, to the dead.

VOICE OF UNSEEN SPIRITS

Bright clouds float in Heaven, 4°

Dew-stars gleam on Earth,

Waves assemble on Ocean,
They are gathered and driven
By the Storm of delight, by the panic of glee!
They shake with emotion 45

They dance in their mirth

But where are ye?

The pine boughs are singing

Old songs with new gladness,
The billows and fountains so

Fresh music are flinging

 — —
Prometheus Unbound IV
—
196 •

Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;

The storms mock the mountains
With the thunder of gladness.
But where are ye?
IONE
What charioteers are these?

PANTHEA
Where are their chariots?

SEMICHORUS OF HOURS I

The voice of the Spirits of Air and of Earth

Has drawn back the figured curtain of sleep
Which covered our being and darkened our birth
In the deep

A VOICE
In the deep?

SEMICHORUS II

Oh, below the deep.

SEMICHORUS I
An hundred ages we had been kept
Cradled in visions of hate and care
And each one who waked as his brother slept
Found the truth
SEMICHORUS II

Worse than his visions were!

SEMICHORUS I

We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep,

We have known the voice of Love in dreams,
We have felt the wand of Power, and leap)

SEMICHORUS II

As the billows leap in the morning beams!

CHORUS
Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze,
Pierce with song Heaven's silent light,
Enchant the Dav that too swiftly flees,
To check its flight, ere the cave of Night.
Once the hungry Hours were hounds
Which chased the Day, like a bleeding deer
And it limped and stumbled with many wounds
Through the nightly dells of the desart year.

—
But now oh weave the mystic measure
Of music and dance and shapes of light.
Let the Hours, and the Spirits of might and pleasure
Like the clouds and sunbeams unite.
 —
Prometheus Unbound IV •
197
A VOICE
Unite! 8°

PANTHEA
See where the Spirits of the human mind
Wrapt in sweet sounds as in bright veils, approach.

CHORUS OF SPIRITS
We join the throng
Of the dance and the song
By the whirlwind of gladness borne along; 85

As the flying-fish leap

From the Indian deep,
And mix with the sea birds half asleep.

CHORUS OF HOURS
Whence come ye so wild and so fleet,
For sandals of lightning are on your feet 9°

And your wings are soft and swift as thought,

And your eyes are as Love which is veiled not?

CHORUS OF SPIRITS
We come from the mind
Of human kind
Which was late so dusk and obscene and blind; 95

Now an Ocean
'tis

Of clear emotion,
A Heaven of serene and mighty motion.

From that deep Abyss

Of wonder and bliss I0°

Whose caverns are chrystal palaces;

From those skiey towers
Where Thought's crowned Powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!

From the dim recesses I05

Of woven caresses
Where lovers catch ye by your loose tresses
From the azure isles
Where sweet Wisdom smiles,
Delaying your ships with her siren wiles; II0

From the temples high

Of man's ear and eye,
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy;
From the murmurings
Of the unsealed springs, "5
Where Science bedews his Daedal wings.
1 98 - Prometheus Unbound IV
Years after years
Through blood and tears,
And a thick hell of hatreds and hopes and fears,
We waded and flew I2 °

Andthe islets were few

Where the bud-blighted flowers of happiness grew.

Our feet now, every palm,

Are sandalled with calm,
And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm; I2 5

And beyond our eyes

The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on, Paradise.

CHORUS OF SPIRITS AND HOURS

Then weave the web of the mystic measure;
From the depths of the sky and the ends of the Earth l *°

Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure,

Fill the dance and the music of mirth,
As the waves of a thousand streams rush by
To an Ocean of splendour and harmony!

CHORUS OF SPIRITS
Our spoil is won, ! 35

Our task is done,

We are free to dive or soar or run . . .

Beyond and around

Or within the bound
I4 °
Which clips the world with darkness round.

We'll pass the Eyes

Of the starrv skies
Into the hoar Deep to colonize;
Death, Chaos and Night,
I45
From the sound of our flight
Shall flee, like mist from a Tempest's might.

And Earth, Air and Light

And the Spirit of Might
Which round the stars in their fiery flight;
drives
And Love, Thought, and Breath, "5°

The powers that quell Death,

Wherever we soar shall assemble beneath!

And our singing shall build,

In the Void's loose field,
A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield; *«
We
will take our plan
From the new world of man
And our work shall be called the Promethean.
 —— — —
Prometheus Unbound IV • J 99

CHORUS OF HOURS
Break the dance, and scatter the song;
Let some depart and some remain. l6°

semichorus I

We, beyond Heaven, are driven along

SEMICHORUS II

Us, the inchantments of Earth retain

SEMICHORUS I

Ceaseless and rapid and fierce and free

With the spirits which build a new earth and sea
And a Heaven where yet Heaven could never be l6 s

SEMICHORUS II
Solemn and slow and serene and bright
Leading the Day and outspeeding the Night
With the Powers of a world of perfect light

SEMICHORUS I

We whirl, singing loud, round the gathering sphere

x 7°
Till the trees and the beasts, and the clouds appear
From its chaos made calm by love, not fear
SEMICHORUS II
We encircle the Oceans and Mountains of Earth
And the happy forms of its death and birth
Change to the music of our sweet mirth.

CHORUS OF HOURS AND SPIRITS

Break the dance and scatter the song x ?5

Let some depart and some remain;

Wherever we fly we lead along
In leashes, like starbeams, soft yet strong,
The clouds that are heavy with Love's sweet rain.
PANTHEA
Ha, they are gone!

IONE
l8 °
Yet feel you no delight
From the past sweetness?

PANTHEA
As the bare green hill
When some soft cloud vanishes into rain
Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water
To the unpavilioned sky!

IONE
Even whilst we speak
New notes arise . . . What is that awful sound? l8 5
200 • Prometheus Unbound IV
PANTHEA
Tis the deep music of the rolling world,
Kindling within the strings of the waved air
/Eolian modulations.

IONE
Listen too,
How every pause is filled with under-notes,
Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones I9°

Which pierce the sense and

within the soul
live
As the sharp stars pierce Winter's chrystal air
And gaze upon themselves within the sea.
PANTHEA
But where through two openings in the forest
see,
Which hanging branches overcanopy, w
And where two runnels 7 of a rivulet
Between the close moss violet-inwoven
Have made their path of melody, like sisters
Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles,
Turning their dear disunion to an isle 20°

Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts;

Two visions of strange radiance float upon
The Ocean-like inchantment of strong sound
Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet
2 °5
Under the ground and through the windless air.

IONE
I see a chariot like that thinnest boat
In which the Mother of the Months 8 is borne
By ebbing light into her western cave
When she upsprings from interlunar dreams,
2I °
O'er which is curved an orblike canopy
Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods
Distinctly seen through that dusk aery veil
Regard 9 like shapes in an enchanter's glass;
Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold,
2I5
Such as the genii of the thunderstorm
Pile on the floor of the illumined sea
When the Sun rushes under it; they roll
And move and grow as with an inward wind.
Within it sits a winged Infant, white
22 °
Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow,
Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost,
Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds
Of itswhite robe, woof of aetherial pearl.
Its hair is white, —
the brightness of white light
1

7. Small streams. 1. The multiple references to the white-

8. The moon, seen as the thin crescent ness of the moon emphasize both its cold
of the new moon bearing the shadowy sterility and the beauty of its light un-
old moon. distorted by an atmosphere. It is po-
9. Appear or look. tentiality to the earth's actuality.
 — —
Prometheus Unbound IV • 201

Scattered in strings, yet its two eyes are Heavens "5

Of liquid darkness, which the Deity
Within, seems pouring, as a storm is poured
From jagged clouds, out of their arrowy lashes,
Tempering the cold and radiant air around
With fire that is not brightness; 2 in its hand 2 3<>

Itsways a quivering moonbeam, from whose point

A guiding power directs the chariot's prow
Over its wheeled clouds, which as they roll
Over the grass and flowers and waves, wake sounds
Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew. 2 35

PANTHEA
And from the other opening in the wood
Rushes with loud and whirlwind harmony
A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,
Solid as chrystal, yet through all its mass
Flow, as through empty space, music and light: 24 °

Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, 3

Purple and azure, white and green and golden,
Sphere within sphere, and every space between
Peopled with unimaginable shapes
Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep *45

Yet each intertranspicuous, 4 and they whirl

Over each other with a thousand motions
Upon a thousand sightless 5 axles spinning
And with the force of self-destroying swiftness,
Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on 2 5<>

Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones,

Intelligible words and music wild.
With mighty whirl the multidinous Orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist
Of elemental subtlety, like light, 2 55

And the wild odour of the forest flowers,

The music of the living grass and air,
The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams
Round its intense, yet self-conflicting6 speed,
Seem kneaded into one aerial mass 26°

Which drowns the sense. Within the Orb itself,

Pillowed upon its alabaster arms
Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil,
On its own folded wings and wavy hair
2. As Shelley knew from Sir Humphry 749ff.), which in turn echo visions in
Davy's account of the findings of Her- Ezekiel (chaps. 1 and 10) and Dante
schel (1800), there are "dark rays" (Purgatorio, Canto XXIX); involving and
infrared emanations that produce heat involved: entwining and enfolded or en-
—
without light which, Davy suggested, wrapped.
might be given off by the moon. 4. That can be seen through or between
3. This description of the earth and the each other,
spiritasleep within it draws heavily on 5. Invisible.
Milton's descriptions of angels (Paradise 6. Because its various component spheres
Lost, V. 620-624) and of the Chariot of are spinning in different directions.
Paternal Deitie (Paradise Lost, VI.
202 - Prometheus Unbound IV
The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep, 26 5

And you can see its little lips are moving

Amid the changing light of their own smiles
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream

IONE
Tis only mocking the Orb's harmony . . .

PANTHEA
And from a star upon its forehead, shoot, 2 7°

Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears

With tyrant-quelling myrtle 7 overtwined,
Embleming Heaven and Earth united now,
Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel
Which whirl as the Orb whirls, swifter than thought, 2 ?5

Filling the abyss with sunlike lightenings,

And perpendicular now, and now transverse,
Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass
Make bare the secrets of the Earth's deep heart,
28 °
Infinite mine of adamant 8 and gold,
Valueless 9 stones and unimagined gems,
And caverns on chrystalline columns poised
With vegetable silver 1 overspread,
Wells of unfathomed fire, and watersprings
Whence the great Sea, even as a child, is fed 2g 5

Whose vapours clothe Earth's monarch mountain-tops

With kingly, ermine snow; the beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; 2 anchors, beaks of ships,
2 9°
Planks turned to marble, quivers, helms and spears
And gorgon-headed targes, 3 and the wheels
Of scythed chariots, 4 and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards and armorial beasts
Round which Death laughed, sepulchred emblems
Of dead Destruction, ruin within ruin! 2 *5

The wrecks beside of many a city vast,

Whose population which the Earth grew over
Was mortal but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes, and fanes; 5 prodigious shapes 3°°

Huddled in grey annihilation, split,

Jammed in the hard black deep; and over these

7. The myrtle was associated with Venus tails come from a book Shelley read in
and love. 1812: James Parkinson's Organic Re-
8. Extremely hard rock. mains of a Former World (3 vols.,
9. Valuable beyond calculation. 1804-1811).
1. In Milton's Eden the Tree of Life bore 3. Light shields or bucklers carried by
"Ambrosial Fruit/ Of vegetable Gold" archers, embossed with gorgon's head;
(IV.218-220). helms: helmets.
2. On this passage and what follows, see 4. War chariots with scythes fastened to
D. J. Hughes, "Potentiality in Prome- the axles.
theus Unbound," pp. 605-612. Many de- 5. Temples.
 — ——
Prometheus Unbound IV • 203
The anatomies 6 of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around 305

The iron crags, or within heaps of dust

To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
—
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jagged alligator and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, 7 which once 310

Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores

And weed-overgrown continents of Earth
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe
Wrapt Deluge round it like a cloak, and they 315

and were abolished; or some God

Yelled, gaspt
Whose throne was in a Comet, past, and cried
—
"Be not!" and like my words they were no more.
THE EARTH
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,
The boundless, overflowing bursting gladness, 320

The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!

Ha! ha! the animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!
the moon
Brother mine, calm wanderer, 325

Happy globe of land and air,

Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee,
Which penetrates my frozen frame
And passes with the warmth of flame
With love and odour and deep melody 330

Through me, through me!

THE EARTH
Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains,
My cloven fire-crags, 8 sound-exulting fountains
Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter.
The Oceans and the Desarts and the Abysses 335
And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses
Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I
—
do "Sceptred Curse, 9
Who all our green and azure Universe
Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending 340
A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones,
And splinter and knead down my children's bones,
All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending,

6. Skeletons. 8. Volcanoes.
7. A general expression for one of the 9. —
Jupiter or, rather, the more general
largest r>nd strongest animals. principle of tyrannical rule.
 —
204 • Prometheus Unbound IV
"Until each craglike tower and storied column,
Palace and Obelisk and Temple solemn, 345

My imperial mountains crowned with cloud and snow and fire,

My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom

Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom,
Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire,
"How art thou sunk, withdrawn, cover'd —drunk up 350

By thirsty nothing, as the brackish 1 cup

Drained by a Desart-troop a little — drop for
all;

And from beneath, around, within, above,

Filling thy void annihilation, Love
Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunderball." 355

THE MOON
The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid Oceans flow and sing and shine
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth 360

My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine

On mine, on mine!
Gazing on thee I feel, I know,
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow
And living shapes upon my bosom move: 365

Music is in the sea and air,

Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark wij:h the rain new buds are dreaming of:
'Tis Love, all Love!

THE EARTH
It interpenetrates my granite mass, 370

Th rough tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass

Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;
Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread,
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,
Thev breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers 375

And like a storm, bursting its cloudy prison

With thunder and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being,
With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver
Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved forever, 380

Till Hate and Fear and Pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,

Leave Man, who was a manv-sided mirror

Whichcould distort to many a shape of error
This true fair world of things a Sen reflecting Lovc;^
,

Which over all his kind, as the Sun's Heaven 385

Gliding o'er Ocean, smooth, serene and even.

Darting from starry depths radiance and light, doth move,

1. Salty.
 —
Prometheus Unbound IV • 205

/ Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left

Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft
Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured; 39o

Then when wanders home with rosy smile

it

Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile

It is a Spirit- —
then weeps on her child restored. 2 /

.Man,
an oh ,
r
noi men ba chain or linked thougnt,
""TJFloveand mighTto be divided not, 395
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress
As the Sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet Republic of the maze
Of Planets, struggling fierce towards Heaven's free wilderness.

Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul 4<x>

Whose nature is its own divine controul

Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;

Familiar acts are beautiful through love;

Labour and Pain and Grief in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts —
none knew how gentle they could be! 405

His Will, with all mean passions, bad delights,

And trembling satellites,
selfish cares, its
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm
Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, 410

Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.

All things confess his strength .^Through the cold mass

Of marble and of colour his dreams pass;
Bright threads, whence mothers weave the robes their children wear.
Language is Orphic song, 4
a perpetual
f
1 *

Which rules wit h Dsda! ha rmony a throng

Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were

The Lightningis his slave; Heaven's utmost deep

Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep

They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! 420

The Tempest is his steed, he strides the air; —

And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
"Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me, I have none."

THE MOON
The shadow of white Death has past
From my path in Heaven at last, 425

2. The stanza alludes to the legend of artistic heritage.

King Bladud, mythical king of B~itain, 4. Orphic song . Deedal harmony:
. .

a banished leper who, while following a Orpheus, the mythical Greek bard, sang
lost swine, stumbled upon the healing so beautifully that he tamed wild beasts
hot springs of the English town of Bath and even stopped the tortures of Hades;
and returned home cured (Richard War- Daedalus was the mythical Athenian
ner's History of Bath [Bath, 1801]). artist; both represent the creative human
3. That is, the ideals that parents give spirit,
their children are influenced by their
 — —
206 • Prometheus Unbound IV
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep
And through my newly-woven bowers
Wander happy paramours
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep
Thy vales more deep. 43 °

THE EARTH
As the dissolving warmth of Dawn, may fol^
A half-unfrozen dewglobe, green and gold
And chrystalline, till it becomes a winged mist
And wanders up the vault of the blue Day,
Outlives the noon, and on the Sun's last ray 435

—
Hangs o'er the Sea a fleece of fire and amethyst
THE MOON
Thou art folded, thou art lying
In the light which is undying
Of thine own joy and Heaven's smile divine;
All suns and constellations shower 44o

On thee a light, a life, a power

Which doth array thy sphere thou pourest thine—
On mine, on mine!

THE EARTH
I spin beneath my pyramid of night 5
Which points into the Heavens, dreaming delight, 445

Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;

As a youth lulled in love-dreams, faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.

THE MOON
As and sweet eclipse
in the soft 450

When on lovers' lips,

soul meets soul
High hearts are calm and brightest eyes are dull;
So when thy shadow falls on me
Then am I mute and still, by thee — 455
Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,
Full, oh, too full!—

Thou art speeding round the Sun,

Brightest World of many a one,
Green and azure sphere, which shinest
46o
With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy chrystal paramour,

Borne beside thee by a power

Like the polar Paradise, 465

5. The cone-shaped shadow a planet casts out into space on the side away from the sun.
 —— —
Prometheus Unbound IV • 207
Magnet-like, of lovers' eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love
Maniac-like around thee move, 470
Gazing, an insatiate bride,
On thy form from every side 6
Like a Maenad round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
In the weird Cadmaean forest. 7 — 475
Brother, wheresoe'er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow

Through the Heavens wide and hollow,

Sheltered by the warm embrace
Of thy soul, from hungry space, 480
Drinking, from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty, and might,
As a lover or chameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
As a violet's gentle eye 485
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a grey and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
Athwart the western mountains it enfolds, 490
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow

THE EARTH
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.
O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight 495
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night
Through isles forever calm;
O gentle Moon, thy chrystal accents pierce
The caverns of my Pride's deep Universe, 500

Charming the tyger Joy, whose tramplings fierce

Made wounds, which need thy balm.

PANTHEA
I rise as from
bath of sparkling water,
a
A bath among dark rocks,
of azure light,
Out of the stream of sound

6. The moon, in circling the earth, al- a maenad (one of the female devotees
ways keeps the same side toward the of Dionysus); in a fit of blind intoxica-
earth because the period of its rotation tion, she killed her own son Pentheus.
exactly equals that of its revolution. See Euripides, The Bacchae.
7. Agave, daughter of Cadmus, became
 — —
208 • Prometheus Unbound IV
IONE
Ah me, sweet sister, 505

The stream of sound has ebbed away from us

And you pretend to rise out of its wave
Because your words fall like the clear soft dew
Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph's limbs and hair.

PANTHEA
Peace! peace! a mighty Power, which is as Darkness, 510

Is rising out o' Earth, and from the sky

Is showered like Night, and from within the air

Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up

Into the pores 8 of sunlight —
the bright Visions
Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone 5I 5

Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.

IONE
There is a sense of words upon mine ear

PANTHEA
A universal sound like words . . . O list!

DEMOGORGON
Thou Earth, calm empire of a happy Soul,
Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies, 520

Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll

The Love which paves thy path along the skies:

THE EARTH
I hear, — I am as a drop of dew that dies!

DEMOGORGON
Thou Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth
With wonder, as it gazes upon thee, 525

Whilst each to men and beasts and the swift birth

Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony:

THE MOON
I hear — I am a leaf shaken by thee!

DEMOGORGON
Ye Kings of suns and stars, Daemons and Gods,
/Etherial Dominations, who possess 53 °

Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes

Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness: 9
8. Minute spaces between the particles man ken; and Dominations, who exist
of light. at rest beyond the active universe. As
9. Shelley, creating a hierarchy of
in Carl Grabo notes, even Newton had
Heaven like those described in Dante's allowed for the possibility of "some
Paradiso fXXVIII. 121-126, for example) body absolutely at rest," though this
and Paradise Lost (11.310-311, V.772), region would be beyond human power to
uses just three classes Daemons and identify.
Gods, ruling heavenly bodies within hu-
 — ——
Prometheus Unbound IV • 209
a voice : from above
Our great Republic hears ... we are blest, and bless.

DEMOGORGON
Ye happy dead, whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray, 535
Whether your nature is that Universe
Which once ye saw and suffered

a voice: from beneath

Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.

DEMOGORGON
Ye elemental Genii, 1 who have homes
From man's high mind even to the central stone 540
Of sullen lead, from Heaven's star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens 2 on
a confused voice
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.

DEMOGORGON
Spirits —
whose homes are flesh ye beasts and birds-
—
Ye worms and fish ye living leaves and buds
—
Lightning and Wind and ye untameable herds,
545

Meteors and mists, which throng Air's solitudes:

A VOICE
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.

DEMOGORGON
Xlvlan, who wert once a despot and a slave,—
/ A dupe and a deceiver, a Decay, — \
550

/ A Traveller from the cradle to the grave

/ Through the dim night of this immortal Day:

ALL
Speak —thy strong words may never pass away.
DEMOGORGON
This-i&JJieDay whi ch down jhe void Abysm
At the Earth-bom's spell yawn sfor e aven's Despotism , H 555

Ana Conquest is dragged CapHvelTirough the Deepf

Love from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like Agony, springs 560

And folds over the world its healing wings.

1. The animating spirits of the elements. 2. Feeds gluttonously.

 ^ — —

210 The Sensii

gsyAZirtnp ^Vis dom and Endurance,-

-
ese are the seals' oftKal most hrm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, 565

Mother of many acts and hours, should free

e serpent that would clasp her with his length
TheseaTe^iej^jJenS^by which to reassume
An empire o^^ttievaisen tangled Doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; 570

To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;

To defy Power which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; 3 to hope, till Hope creates\
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change nor falter nor repent: 4 575

This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.

The Sensitive^

PART FIRST

A[Sensitive-plajrt/in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

And the Spring arose on the garden fair

Like the Spirit of love felt every where;
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss

In the garden, the field or the wilderness,

3. Appropriately, Demogorgon expresses to approximate Shelley's customary prac-

these timeless admonitions in timeless tice. The first edition remains authorita-
infinitives. tive for the words of the text.
4.Here Shelley has adapted Satan's senti- The sensitive-plant itself is a small
ment from Milton's Paradise Lost and variety of mimosa (Mimosa pudica), na-
reversed its moral implications: "yet not tive to Brazil, that closes up and recoils
for those/ Nor what the Potent Victor when touched; it is hermaphroditic
in his rage/ Can else inflict, do I repent needing only a single plant to reproduce
or change" (1.94-96). (hence, "companionless," line 12). Earl
1. Shelley composed "The Sensitive- Wasserman has noted that late-eighteenth-
Plant" in the spring of 1820. It was the century biologists were debating the
first of the "other poems" included in sensitive-plant's place as a bridge be-
the Prometheus Unbound volume, per- tween the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
haps because it is both the longest of Though interpretations of the poem's
these poems and a mythopoeic fable that fable have varied, it seems likely that the
harmonizes with Prometheus itself. There sensitive-plant represents, not Shelley or
is a fair copy in the hand of Mary any individual, but either mankind amid
Shelley in The Harvard Shelley Note- natural creation or else the type of the
book, which we have consulted in re- poet with creative sensibility amid general
vising the orthography and punctuation mankind.
 The Sensitive-Plant • 211

Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want

({(kflfte
As the companionless Sensitive-plant. 2
The ^now^dropj and then the .violet
AroseTromtne ground with warm rain wet
And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent l*

From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

Then the pied 3 ^ wind-flow ers, and they tulipj tall,
And mjarassi^, the fairest among them all /
\ jL *e <5^v-» ^uh
/ C^^/o^rt p^
»
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess
Till they die of their own dear loveliness; 4 '^qfV^ rejnJSt /Cs
And the Naiad-like 5 ji lyof the vale/ '

Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,

That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;

And thejhya^in_th^.purple, and white, and blue, 25

Which fimigTrom its bells a sweet peal anew

Of music so delicate, softand intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;
And the^rosejike a nymph to the bath addresst,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, 3°

Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air

The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:

And the wand-like lily^ which lifted up,

As a Maenad, 7 its moonlight-coloured cup
Till the fiery star, which is its eye, 35

Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;

And the nessamine j aint, and the sweet tuberos e,

^
The sweetest flower for scent that blows; 8
And all^rare blossojns .from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime. 40

And on the stream whose inconstant bosom

Was prankt 9/under boughs of embowering blossom!
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,

2. Whereas the sensitive-plant is an an- thus was a youth beloved by both Apollo
nual, all of the other flowers mentioned and Zephyrus, one of the winds; the
in Part First, 13-57, are perennials. latter, in a fit of jealousy, blew a quoit
3. Of varied colors. that Apollo had thrown out of its course,
4. narcissi loveliness:
. . . allusion to An killing the young man. Apollo changed
the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love hisblood into a flower.
with his own beautiful image in a pool 7. A
fanatical female devotee of Bacchus,
and killed himself in despair because he Note that all the mythical creatures
could not communicate with the image compared with the flowers are highly
he believed to be a nymph. He was passionate and sexual, whereas the sensi-
transformed into a flower. tive-plant, being unisexual, has no such
5. ANaiad was a nymph of a stream or relations with the other flowers,
fountain; naiads, according to Hesiod, 8. Blooms.
initiated youths into sexual experience. 9. Spangled or brightened with colors.
6. According to Greek legend, Hyacin-
 — —
—
212 - The Sensitive-Plant

Broad^w^terJiliesJ^y tremulously, 45

And ^tarrjijiygrjbud^ glimmered by,

And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.
And the sinuous paths of^Jawn^and ofmioss^
Which led through the garden along and across so

Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,

Some lost among bowers of blo ssoming trees\—
Were allpaved with (daisiesjgnd delicatebells
"* '

As fair as the fabulous /a spho dglsl^

And flowrets which drooping as day drooped too 55

Fell into pavilions, white, purple and blue,

To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers, as an infant's awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet *°

Can first lull, and at last must awaken it,

When Heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them,

As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven; and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun, 65

For each one was interpenetrated

With the light and the odour its neighbour shed
Like young lovers, whom youth and love makes dear
Wrapt and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive-plant which could give small fruit 70

Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,

—
Received more than all it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver.
For the Sensitive-Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower 75

It loves — —
even like Love its deep heart is full
It desires what it has not —
the beautiful! 2

The light winds which from unsustaining wings

Shed the music of many murmurings;
8o
The beams which dart from many a star
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
1. A common flower in Italy; in poetic the relevant passage (in which Socrates
usage from Homer through Milton and records his earlier conversation with Dio-
Pope it has been the name given to the tima) thus: "'It is conceded, then, that
Love loves that which he wants but
immortal flowers that bloom in the
Elysian fields. possesses not?'
— 'Yes,
—
certainly.' 'But
2. This stanza closely parallels a passage Love wants and does not possess beauty?*
in Plato's Symposium that Shelley cited —'Indeed it must necessarily follow"
with approval in his review of Peacock's (Notopoulos, Platonism of Shelley, p.
Rhododaphne (1817). Shelley translated 440).
The Symposium in July 1818, rendering
 .

The Sensitive-Plant • 213

The plumed 3 insects swift and free
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass; 85

The unseen clouds of the dew which lie

Like the flowers till the Sun rides high,
fire in
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
The quivering vapours of dim noontide, 9°

Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide

In which every sound, and odour, and beam
Move, as reeds in a single stream;

Each, and all, like ministering angels were

For the Sensitive-plant sweet joy to bear 95

Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by

Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky.
And when evening descended from Heaven above,
And the Earth was all rest, and the Air was all love;
I0 °
And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,
And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep,
And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound
Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress
—
The light sand which paves it' Consciousness. I05

(Only over head the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail
And snatches of its Elysian 4 chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive-plant)
IIQ
The Sensitive-plant was the earliest
Upgathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite,
Cradled within the embrace of night.

PART SECOND

There was a Power in this sweet place,

An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace
Which to the flowers did they waken or dream
Was as God 5 is to the starry scheme:

3.Delicately winged. two women with

tions Shelley compared
4.Glorious or perfect, like Elysium, the Lady in this poem—Margaret, Coun-
Greek mythological abode of the blessed tess of Mount Cashell ("Mrs. Mason")
dead. and Jane Williams. His references seem
5. In Shelley's conception God did not to imply that they gave emotional sup-
create matter but merely organized it port and harmony to those about them,
into a universe. In letters and conversa-
 —
214 • The Sensitive-Plant

A Lady —the wonder of her kind, 5

Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind

Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion,
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the Ocean

Tended the garden from morn to even:

And the meteors 6 of that sublunar Heaven IO

Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth,

Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth.
She had no companion of mortal race,
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes I5

That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:

As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake
As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her. 20

Her step seemed

to pity the grass it prest;
You might hear by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind,

And wherever her aery footstep trod, 25

Her from the grassy sod

trailing hair
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep
Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep.

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet

Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet; 3°

I doubt not they felt the spirit that came

From her glowing fingers through all their frame.

She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers 35

She emptied the rain of the thunder showers.

She heads with her tender hands

lifted their
And sustained them with rods and ozier bands; 7
If the flowers had been her own infants she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly. 40

And all killing insects and gnawing worms

And things of obscene and unlovely forms
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof, 8
Into the rough woods far aloof,

6. Any atmospheric phenomenon; in this of mutability.

context, healthful winds (cf. Part Third, 7. Slender willow branches.
line 78); sublunar: earthly; in the realm 8. A woven pattern.
 The Sensitive-Plant • 215
In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full, 45

The freshest her gentle hands could pull

For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.

But the bee and the beam-like ephemeris 9

Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that kiss 50

The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she
Make her attendant angels be.

And many an antenatal tomb

Where butterflies dream of the life to come
She left clinging round the smooth and dark 55

Edge of the odorous cedar bark.

This fairest creature from earliest spring

Thus moved through the garden ministering
All the sweet season of summertide,
And ere the first leaf looked brown —she died! 6o

PART THIRD

Three days the flowers of the garden fair,

Like stars when the moon is awakened, were;
Or the waves of Baiae, 1 ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.

And on the fourth, the Sensitive-plant 5

Felt the sound of the funeral chaunt

And the steps of the bearers heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners deep and low,

The weary sound and the heavy breath

And the silent motions of passing death I0

And the smell, cold, oppressive and dank,

Sent through the pores of the coffin plank.

The dark grass and the flowers among the grass

Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone, I5

And sate in the pines and gave groan for groan.

The garden once fair became cold and foul
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap 20

To make men tremble who never weep.

9. The ephemerid, dayfly or mayfly, has Adonais, 254.
a slender body and small, transparent 1. Baiae is a small bay of the Gulf of
wings. In its imago or winged stage, it Naples, west of the city itself; volcanic
lives only for a single day. Shelley men- Mt. Vesuvius is within sight of the bay,
tions the insect in his note to Queen Mab, though on the other side of Naples.
VIII.203-207, and alludes to it in
 —
216 • The Sensitive-Plant

Swift summer into the autumn flowed,

And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,
25
Mocking the spoil of the secret night.
The snow
rose leaves like flakes of crimson
Paved the and the moss below:
turf
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

And Indian plants, of scent and hue 3°

The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,

Leaf by leaf, day after day,
Were massed into the common clay.

And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red,

And white, with the whiteness of what is dead, 35

Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past

Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.

And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds

Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,
Till they clung round many a sweet flower's stem 4°

Which rotted into the earth with them.

The water blooms under the rivulet

Fell from theon which they were set;
stalks
And the eddies drove them here and there
As the winds did those of the upper air. 45

Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks

Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless network of parasite bowers
Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.

Between the time of the wind and the snow 5°

weeds began to grow,

All loathliest
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck
Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back.

And thistles, and nettles, and darnels 2 rank,

And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank, 3 55

Stretched out its long and hollow shank

And stifled the air, till the dead wind stank.
And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath.
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, 4 and blistering, and blue, ^
5 dew.
Livid, and starred with a lurid

2. Harmful grasses. 4. Soft or fleshy; flabby.

3. Dock the common name for several
is 5. Livid: bruised; lurid: pale and sickly
thick-rooted, coarse plants; both henbane in color.
and hemlock are poisonous.
 —
The Sensitive-Plant • 217
And agarics 6 and fungi with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, —
as if the decaying dead
65
With a spirit of growth had been animated!
Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake,
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer's stake,
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
Infecting the winds that wander by. 7

Spawn, 8 weeds and filth, a leprous scum, 70

Made the running rivulet thick and dumb

And at its outlet flags 9 huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water snakes.

And hour by hour when the air was still

The vapours arose which have strength to kill: 75

At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,

At night they were darkness no star could melt.
And unctuous 1 meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noonday
Unseen; every branch on which they alit 8o

By a venomous blight was burned and bit.

The Sensitive-plant like one forbid
Wept, and the tears, within each lid
Of its folded leaves which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue. 85

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon

By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.
—
For Winter came the wind was his whip 90

One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts 2 from the hills
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;

6. Gill mushrooms. Lines 64-69 describe retain this stanza also. The gibbet was
in (Helene Dworzan informs us)
detail a sort of gallows on which the body of
the maturing of the Amanita phalloides a criminal executed for a particularly
("Death Cap") and the Amanita virosa heinous crime was, by order of the
("Destroying Angel"), two of the deadli- sentencing judge, chained to an iron
est agarics. frame near the scene of the crime as a
7. Some editors have omitted this stanza warning to others. Its use was legal in
(which describes a body rotting on a England from 1752 to 1834. See another
gibbet) on the grounds that it is can- use of the gibbet at the end of "Zeinab
celed in Mary's transcript in The Harvard and Kathema."
Shelley Notebook and that Mary omits 8. The vegetative part (white filamentous
it from her collected editions. But the tubes) of mushrooms or other fungi.
first fact probably explains the second, 9. Reeds or rushes.
and since all editors follow the other 1. unctuous: oily; meteors: bad air or
substantive features of the first edition winds; spray: a slender twig or shoot.
rather than Mary's quite different safe- 2. Large waterfalls.
keeping transcript, it seems logical to
 —
218 • The Sensitive-Plant

His breath was a chain which without a sound

The earth and the air and the water bound; 95

He came, fiercely driven, in his Chariot-throne

By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.
Then the weeds which were forms of living death
Fled from the frost to the Earth beneath.
Their decay and sudden flight from frost . IO°

Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive-plant
The moles and the dormice died for want.
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air
And were caught in the branches naked and bare. I0 5

First there came down a thawing rain

And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw- rain grew;
And a northern whirlwind, wandering about II0

Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,

Shook the boughs thus laden and heavy and stiff

And snapped them off with his rigid griff. 3

When winter had gone and spring came back
The Sensitive-plant was a leafless wreck; "3
But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels
Rose like the dead from their ruined chamels.

CONCLUSION

Whether the Sensitive-plant, or that

Which within its boughs like a spirit sat
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say. —
Whether that Lady's gentle mind, 5

No longer with the form combined

Which scattered love — as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,

dare not guess; but in this life

I
I0
Of error, ignorance and strife
—
Where nothing is but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be, I5

Like all —
the rest, a mockery.

3. A claw.
 — —
Ode to Heaven • 219
That garden sweet, that lady fair
And sweet shapes and odours there
all
In truth have never past away
Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed not they. —
For love, and beauty, and delight
There is no death nor change: their might
—
Exceeds our organs which endure
No light —being themselves obscure. 4

Ode to Heaven 1
CHORUS OF SPIRITS

Palace-roof of cloudless nights,

Paradise of golden lights, .

Deep, Immeasurable, Vast, .

t/tfi^^
Which art now, and which wert then; I ^^ '

Of the present and the past, \ ffe

Of the eternal Where and When,
Presence chamber, Temple, Home, , /
Ever-canopying Dome CaiSOu^'r^j
Of acts and ages yet to come! 1 V
Glorious shapes have life in thee I0

Earth and all Earth's company,

Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses,
And green worlds that glide along,
And swift stars with flashing tresses, f5

And icy moons most cold and bright,

And mighty suns, beyond the Night,
Atoms 2 of intensest light!

4. their might . . . obscure: The state- in the collected editions, is based on a

merit of the conclusion is simply that, detailed comparison of the first edition
since we know our organs (of sensation, with the holograph manuscripts at the
reasoning, etc.) to be obscure (dark, Huntington and Bodleian libraries and
dim), the sequence of events related in with the transcript in The Harvard Shel-
Parts First, Second, and Third may not ley Notebook. The three parts of the
be the true picture. Because he knows poem represent three perspectives on
human perceptions to be fallible, the poet man's place in the universe. The first is
can still hold his modest creed (13), the viewpoint of eighteenth-century deists,
even after relating the apparent death of represented by Joseph Addison's famous
the Lady and the destruction of the hymn, "The Spacious Firmament on
beautiful garden. High." The second enunciates the Pla-
1. In The Harvard Shelley Notebook, tonic doctrine that the present world is
Mary Shelley concluded her transcript an imperfect and darkened delusion com-
of "Ode to Heaven," "Florence De- — pared to the spiritual reality. The third
cember. 1819." The poem, an jbvious deplores the presumption of thinking
outgrowth of the same mythopoeic im- that human existence is so important in
pulse that inspired Act IV of Prometheus the scheme of things. Cf. the opening
Unbound, was published in 1820 in the canto of Queen Mab.
Prometheus volume. Our text, which 2. The smallest conceivable portions or
differs considerably in form from those fragments of anything.
 — ———
220 • Ode to Heaven
Even thy name God, is as a
Heaven! for thou abode art the 20

Of that Power which is the glass

Wherein man his nature sees;
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees
Their unremaining Gods and they 25

Like a river roll away

Thou remainest such alway! —
A REMOTER VOICE
Thou art but the Mind's first chamber,
Round which its young fancies 3 clamber
Like weak insects in a cave 3°

Lighted up by stalactites;
But the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
But a dim and noonday gleam 35

From the shadow of a dream.

A LOUDER AND STILL REMOTER VOICE

Peace! the abyssis wreathed with scorn

At your presumption, Atom-born! 4

What is Heaven? and what are ye
Who its brief expanse inherit? 4°

What are suns and spheres which flee

With the instinct of that spirit
Of which ye are but a part?
Drops which Nature's mighty heart
Drives through thinnest veins. Depart! 45

What Heaven? a globe of dew

is

morning new
Filling in the
Some eyed flower 5 whose voung leaves waken
On an unimagined world.
Constellated suns unshaken, so

Orbits measureless, are furled

In that frail and fading sphere
With ten million gathered there
To tremble, gleam, and disappear! 6 —
3. Fantasies. 6. In lines 44-54 the entire visible uni-
4. born of one of the dust particles
I.e., verse is seen as a microcosm existing as
rendered visible by light, a mote in a a tiny part of a dewdrop in an infinitely
sunbeam. bigger universe.
5. Probably the flower called cosmos.
 . L
fW 3 A Ode to the West Wind 221

Ode to the West Wind ]

II
N-
w& O wild West Wind, thoubreath of Autumn's being, q
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead h
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, c

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic 2 red, h "

^^J^^f^ J
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: 3 Thou, C O
- _yh° chariotest to their dark wintry bed 6

The winded seed where they lie cold and low,

.s^

. Each like a corpse within its grave, until ,

r^P Thine azure sister of the Spring 4 shall blow c

Her clarion 5 o'er the dreaming earth, and fill H
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) f
* With living hues and odours plain and hill: </
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywherejjLS^C^c^*^,,
Destroyer and Preserver; 6 hear, O hearks/c c^^J^ ^/
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, 15

Loose clouds 7 like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 8
1. Though the basic imagery of this poem 3. the leaves dead . . . multitudes: Shel-
dates from at least 1817, when Shelley ley embodies in lines 2-5 the traditional
developed it in Canto IX of Laon and epic simile found in Homer, Virgil,
Cythna (see pp. 99-101), this best Dante, and Milton, in which souls of
known of all Shelley's shorter poems was the dead are compared to fallen leaves
begun October 20-25, 1819, under cir- driven by the wind (see also "The
cumstances described in the poet's own Triumph of Life," 49-51). G. M. Mat-
note: "This poem was conceived and thews notes that the four colors are not
chiefly written in a wood that skirts the only actually found in dead leaves, but
Arno, near Florence, and on a day are those traditionally representing the
when that tempestuous wind, whose —
four races of man Mongoloid, Negroid,
temperature is at once mild and ani- Caucasian, and American Indian.
mating, was collecting the vapours which 4. The traditional name of the autumnal
pour downthe autumnal rains. They west wind was Ausonius. (Italy was
began, as foresaw, at sunset with a
I poetically known as Ausonia.) Though
violent tempest of hail and rain, attended the spring west wind was masculine in
by that magnificent thunder and lightning both Greek (Zephyrus) and Latin (Fa-
peculiar to the Cisalpine regions." "Ode vonius) mythology, Shelley revises the
to the West Wind" was first published tradition by making the restorative force
in the Prometheus Unbound volume of of the spring mildly feminine.
1820. 5. Anarrow shrill-sounding war trumpet.
Structurally the poem consists of five 6. These titles come directly from the
terza-rima sonnets, the first three of titles of the Hindu gods Siva the De-
which describe the effect of autumn on stroyer and Vishnu the Preserver, known
the land, (figuratively) the sky, and the to Shelley from both the translations
sea. The fourth stanza contrasts the and writings of Sir William Jones and
poet's situation with these natural ele- Edward Moor's Hindu Pantheon (1810).
ments, and the final stanza is a prayer 7. High, wispy cirrus clouds (the word
or request to the West Wind, as mover means "curl" or "lock of hair" in
of the seasonal cycle, to assist the poet's Latin )
aims by spreading his message and, 8. Along the coasts of the Mediterranean
thereby, helping him to contribute to a from Genoa to Leghorn the autumn
moral or political revolution paralleling brought storms accompanied by water-
the seasonal change. spouts that rose like tree trunks on the
2. Wasting or consuming (referring to horizon. (Shelley and other travelers of
the "hectic flush" of tuberculosis). his time describe them.)
 222 • Ode to the West Wind
Angels 9of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 2°

Of some fierce Maenad, 1 even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge 2

(Mih\ Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 25

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, 3 from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain and fire and hail will burst: O hear!
in
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams q
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 4
30

Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams, <i

Beside a pumice 4
isle in Baiae's bay,
u*rtR And saw in sleep old palaces and towers c

Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 4

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers .

35

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou J

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers c

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below Cn

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear r
The sapless foliage of the ocean, 5 know J 40

Thy voice,and suddenly grow grey .with fear, %

And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear! e
If I were a dead leaf thou mightcst bear; / ^c^^i
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; /l
fa/f
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share vS 4*

9. Literally, "messengers." tempestuous dance" (Julian Edition, VI,

1. hair . Mcenad: The cirrus clouds
. . 323). See "The Triumph of Life," 137-
seem scattered ahead of the storm like 147.
locks thrown forward by the wild orgias- 2. A song of mourning,
tic dance of a maenad. Shelley had seen 3. Clouds.
four depicted in a relief sculpture at 4. From a boat beside an island of
Florence, which he described thus: "The pumice (porous lava) Shelley had the
tremendous spirit of superstition aided previous December seen the overgrown
by drunkenness seems to have caught
. . . ruins of villas from the days of imperial
them in its whirlwinds, and to bear Rome underneath the waters of the Bay
them over the earth as the rapid volu- of Baiae (Shelley, Letters, II, 61).
tions of a tempest bear the ever-changing 5. "The phenomenon alluded to at the
trunk of a water-spout. Their hair . . . conclusion of the third stanza is well
loose and floating seems caught in the known to naturalists. The vegetation at
tempest of their own tumultuous motion, the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of
their heads are thrown back leaning with lakes, sympathizes with that of the land
a strange inanity upon their necks, and in the change of seasons, and is conse-
looking up to Heaven, while they totter quently influenced by the winds which
and stumble even in the energy of their announce it" (Shelley's note).
 ^ nwivt ^ui^)
The Cloud 223
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
^^\M s> y
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, /
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 50

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave a leaf a_clou d!
fall upon the thorns
vcjh/- ,

of life
,

1M bleed! J
^ ^/j cUs

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
v
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

from an unextinguished hearth

Scatter, as
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! / /^
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth /) yx / /

The trumpet of a prophecy! 7 O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? f
J°
*?/f 7
' °
^
r TRe Cloud 1 \ c
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, ^ ^ Jf\[/ J/L *
1
j
From the seas and the streams; '^1 fc-,
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid y^ ^ ^ c^, » / j
In their noon-day dreams. ^y^tl[ H o , "^PyJ
6. Behind Shelley's image—besides other 1. "The Cloud," written in 1820 ana^\//
literary —
references lie Jesus' crown of published with Prometheus Unbound, ^
thorns and Dante's metaphor of life as was inspired, not so much by an event &£,
"a dark wood . . . rough and stubborn" or scene in Italy, as by the first-person />>
(Inferno, 1.1—5). plural song of the Nepheliads (cloud ^P, > tt
7. Be . prophecy!: "It is impossible
. . nymphs) in Part II of Leigh Hunt's ^^tf
to read the productions of our most poem "The Nymphs," which was ad-
celebrated writers without being
. . . mired by Shelley from its publi-
at least
startled with the electric life which there cation in Foliage (1818), and probably
is in their words. They are the . . . before. That song begins:
priests of an unapprehended inspiration,
the ipirrors of gigantic forms which fu- Ho! We are the Nepheliads, we,
turity casts upon the present, the words Who bring the clouds from the great sea,
which express what they conceive not, And have within our happy care
the trumpet which sings to battle and All the love 'twixt earth and air.
feels not what it inspires, the influence We it is with soft new showers
which is moved not but moves" (A Wash the eyes of the young flowers. . . .

Philosophical View of Reform; see also (Foliage, p. xxxi)

A Defence of Poetry, p. 508).
224 • The Cloud
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken s

The sweet buds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's 2 breast,
As she dances about the Sun.
I wield the flail 3 of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under, I0

And then again I dissolve it in rain,

And laugh as I pass in thunder.
the snow on the mountains below,
I sift

And their great pines groan aghast;

And all the night 'tis my pillow white, f 5

While I sleep in the arms of the blast.

Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning my pilot sits; 4
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits; 5 2°

Over Earth and Ocean, with gentle motion,

This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, 25

Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains. 30

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, 6

And his burning plumes 7 outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, 8
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag, 35

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

Throughout the song are lines like these 4. In his published lectures entitled A
that suggest ideas that Shelley develops System of Familiar Philosophy (2 vols.,
in "The Cloud." As Desmond King-Hele 1799), Adam Walker (who lectured at
points out (Shelley: His Thought and both Syon House Academy and Eton
Work, pp. 219-227), Luke Howard's during Shelley's school days there) ar-
Essay on Clouds, published in a journal gued that "water rises through the air,
in 1803, established the modern system flying on the wings of electricity" and
of classification and generated interest in that rains are caused when positively
describing clouds. Reiman has argued charged clouds react with the negatively
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 116-117) that, charged earth, either in a violent elec-
besides creating the mythopoeic auto- trical storm (lines 19-20) or in more
biography of a cloud, Shelley uses the gentle precipitation (line 30). The at-
cloud here, as in other poems, as "an traction of the two kinds of electrical
analogue of the human mind" and that charge Shelley personifies as love (23-
the poem portrays "the life-cycle of the 28).
human soul." 5. Spasmodically or at varying intervals.
2. the earth's.
I.e., 6. I.e., a fireball or shooting star;
like
3. A military weapon consisting of an sanguine: blood-red.
iron handle, at the end of which a 7. A poetic description of the sun's
stouter striking part armed with spikes corona.
swings freely; also a similarly con- 8. A mass of clouds driven before the
structed implement for threshing grain. wind inthe upper air.
 — —
The Cloud • 225
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit Sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love, 40
And the crimson pall 9 of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove. 1

That orbed maiden with white fire laden 45

Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear, 50

May have broken the woof, 2 of my tent's thin roof,

The stars peep behind her, and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,
When widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
I 55

Till thecalm rivers, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these. 3

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone

And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; 4 6o

The volcanos are dim and the stars reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof 65

The mountains its columns be!

The triumphal arch, through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the Air, are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured Bow; 7°

The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove

While the moist Earth was laughing below.

9. A canopy or coverlet of rich cloth. ley's universalized Cloud changes con-

1. With wings brooding dove:
. . . A stantly throughout the poem, assuming
significant echo of the invocation in roles played by different types of clouds;
Book I of Paradise Lost, in which the for example, the cloud described in lines
"Heav'nly Muse," whom Milton identi- 45—58 is probably the middle-altitude
fies with the Holy Spirit, is described at altocumulus radiatus, a sheet of cloud
the creationas sitting "Dove-like . . . that seems to be torn in strips, that Sun-
brooding on the vast Abyss" (1.21). beam-proof roof in 65 is the low
. . .

2. Fabric. gray stratocumulus opacus, and

sheet
3.That is, the earthly waters reject the that which
marches through the tri-
images of the moon and stars {these). umphal arch of the rainbow (67—70) is
4. I bind girdle of pearl: Cirrostratus
. . . probably a cumulonimbus capillatus, a
nebulosus clouds high, —
transparent, low rain-cloud, often featuring an anvil-
whitish cloud-veils covering the sky shaped "thunderhead." zone (59): girdle,
produce the halo phenomenon when the belt.
sun or moon shines behind them. Shel-
 —— ———
226 • To a Sky-Lark

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

And the nursling of the Sky; 5
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores; 75
I change, but I cannot die

For after the rain, when with never a stain

The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams, 6
Build up the blue dome of Air . 80

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, 7

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.

1
To a Sky-Lark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 5

Higher and higher

still

Fromthe earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. I0

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken Sun
O'er which clouds are brightning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied jov whose race is just begun. "3

Thepale purple even

Melts around thy flight,
Like a star of Heaven 2
In the broad day-light
—
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 20

5. As in the parentage of "The Witch 1. This poem was composed near Leg-
of Atlas," the emphasis is on the Cloud's horn (Livorno) in late June 1820 and
middle station on the metaphysical scale published with Prometheus Unbound.
of being, between earth and heaven. Thematically, it can be divided into three
6. The course of sunlight is refracted by parts: lines 1-30; 31-60; and 61-105.
the earth's atmosphere, bending around The first describes the flight of an actual
the earth in a convex arc, when viewed skylark (Alauda arvensis), a small Euro-
from above. Violet and blue, at the pean bird that sings only in flight, usu-
end of the visible color spectrum with ally when it is too high to be clearly
the shortest wave length, dominate in visible. The second part attempts but
the sky when the sunbeams are least fails to find a fitting analogue for the
distorted by clouds of dust or moisture. bird and its song; the third asks the bird
7. A sepulchral monument erected in to teach men its secret joy.
honor of a deceased person whose body 2. Venus as the evening star,
is elsewhere.
 To a Sky-Lark • 227
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere, 3
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see —
we feel that it is there. 25

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,
As when Night is bare
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams —and Heaven is overflowed. 3°

What thou art we know not; '

j /
/
What is most like thee? j
V\£M ^OTC f
c
?^T
From rainbow clouds there flow not _ La _ _ - ^>r-p
Drops so bright to see .
** /*-$/#* *t
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. "^ ^Jy^ 35

Like a Poet 4 hidden

In the light of thought,
^ ^^
^~^p^
r) ?
'

Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: 40

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour,
With music sweet as love —which overflows her bower: 45

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view: so

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves
By warm winds deflowered
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass. 6o

3. Venus as the morning star. the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms
4. The similes in stanzas 8-12 both de- and involve all five senses,
scend from human poet and lover through
 —— ——
228 • To a Sky-Lark

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What
sweet thoughts are thine;
have never heard
I

Praise of love or wine 5

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine: 6s

Chorus Hymeneal 6
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 7<>

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?
What fields or waves or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? 75

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee;
Thou lovest —but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. 8o

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal stream? 85

Welook before and after,

And
pine for what is not 7 —
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. *>

Yet if we could scorn

Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 95

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound
Better than all treasures
That in books are found
IO°
Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground!

5. Short poems in praise of love or wine, god of marriage.

called Anacreontics, were an established 7. Shelley echoes Hamlet, IV. iv. 33-39,
tradition descending from the Greek where Hamlet distinguishes between hu-
poet Anacreon (ca. 563-478 b.c. ). man beings* "god-like reason" and mere
6. Wedding song; Hymen was the Greek animal life.
 0* r W.
Y'^+V Ode to Liberty • 229
-legch me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then — as I am listening now. 8 I0 5

1
Ode to Liberty
Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner torn but flying,
Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind. 2
Byron

A glorious people vibrated again

The lightning of the nations: 3 Liberty
From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er Spain,
Scattering contagious fire into the sky,
Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay, 5

And plumes of song

in the rapid
Clothed itself, sublime and strong;
As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,
Hovering in verse o'er its accustomed prey;
Till from its station in the heaven of fame I0

The Spirit's whirlwind rapt it, and the ray

Of the remotest sphere of living flame
Which paves the void was from behind it flung,
As foam from a ship's swiftness, when there came
A voice out of the deep: I will record the same. x5

ii.

The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth:

The burning stars of the abyss were hurled
Into the depths of heaven. The daedal 4 earth,
That island in the ocean of the world,
Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air: 20

But this divinest universe

Was yet a chaos and a curse,
For thou wert not: but power from worst producing worse,
The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,
And of the birds, and of the watery forms, 25

And there was war among them, and despair

Within them, raging without truce or terms:
8. Shelley's estimate of the effects of goddess of Liberty directly as "thou" in
poetic joy in lines 101-105 contrasts with the form of a prayer,
the isolation that Coleridge sees as its 2. Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
result in "Kubla Khan," 42-54. See also IV.xcvni.1-2; the lines begin the last of
Julian and Maddalo, 544—546. twenty-one stanzas in which Byron traces
1. This ode was written between March the struggle between tyranny and liberty,
and July 1820 in celebration of the Span- 3. The spontaneous resistance to the
ish liberal revolution of that spring. French by the Spanish people in 1807-
Published later that year with Prome- 1808 had inspired the British to engage
theus Unbound, it traces the progress of in the Peninsular Campaign in Portugal
liberty as Thomas Gray had earlier traced and Spain, the prelude to the downfall
the "Profess of Poesy." Except for the of Napoleon's empire,
first and last stanzas, which frame the 4. Intricately wrought (from Daedalus,
poem, the poet addresses the personified the Greek craftsman).
 —
230 • Ode to Liberty

The bosom of their violated nurse

Groan'd, for beasts warr'd on beasts, and worms on worms,
And men on men; each heart was a hell of storms. 3°

in.
Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied
His generations under the pavilion
Of the Sun's throne: palace and pyramid,
Temple and prison, to many a swarming million
Were, as to mountain-wolves their ragged caves. 35

This human multitude

living
Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude,
For thou wert not; but o'er the populous solitude,
Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves
Hung tyranny; beneath, sate deified 4°

The sister-pest, 5 congregator of slaves;

Into the shadow of her pinions 6 wide
Anarchs 7 and priests, who feed on gold and blood
Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed,
Drove the astonished herds of men from every side. 45

IV.
The nodding promontories, and blue isles,
And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous 8 waves
Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles
Of favouring heaven: from their enchanted caves
Prophetic echoes flung dim melody so

On the unapprehensive wild.

The vine, the corn, the olive mild,
Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled;
And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,
Like the man's thought dark in the infant's brain, 55

Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,

Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein
Of Parian stone; 9 and, yet a speechless child,
Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain
Her lidless eyes for thee; when o'er the ^Egean main ^
v.
Athens arose: a city such as vision
Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision
Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it; 6s

inhabited
Its portals are
By thunder-zoned winds, each head
Within its cloudy wings with sunfire garlanded,

5. Fideistic religion exaggerating the im- 8. Separate, individual.

portance of blind faith. 9. Fine white marble from the island of
6. Wings. Paros, one of the Cyclades.
7. Tyrants.
 Ode to Liberty • 231
A divine work! Athens diviner yet
Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will 7°

Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;

For thou 1 wert, and thine all-creative skill
Peopled with forms that mock the eternal dead
In marble immortality that hill 2
Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle. 75

VI.
Within the surface of Time's fleeting river
Its 3 wrinkled image lies, as then it lay
Immovably unquiet, and for ever
It trembles, but
it cannot pass away!

The voices of bards and sages thunder

its 8o

With an earth-awakening blast

Through the caverns of the past;
Religion veils her eyes; Oppression shrinks aghast:
Awinged sound of joy, and love, and wonder,
Which soars where Expectation never flew, 85

Rending the veil of space and time asunder!

One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew;
One sun illumines heaven; one spirit vast
With life and love makes chaos ever new,
As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew. 9°

VII.
Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest,
Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmaean Maenad, 4
She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest
From that Elysian food was yet unweaned; 5
And many a deed of terrible uprightness 95
By thy sweet love was sanctified;
And in thy smile, and by thy side,
Saintly Camillus lived, and firm Atilius died. 6
But when tears stained thy robe of vestal whiteness,
And gold prophaned thy Capitolian throne, 7 I0 °

Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness,

The senate of the tyrants: they sunk prone
Slaves of one tyrant: Palatinus sighed
Faint echoes of Ionian song; that tone
Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown. I0 5

1. Athens, treated as a permanent idea of Camillus secure the surrender of Falerii

human civilization made possible by the —
by using the teacher's pupils the sons
spiritof Liberty. of that city's leading —
men as hostages
2. The Acropolis. (Livy, 5.27). According to Roman legend
3. Athens'. Atilius Regulus (third century B.C.) urged
4. In Euripides' play The Bacchae, the Rome to continue the war with Carthage
maenads, who are worshipers of Diony- even though failure of the peace mission
sus, are led by Cadmus' daughter Agave. meant his own cruel death. Cf. "A De-
(See Prometheus Unbound, IV.473-475.) fence of Poetry," p. 494.
5. thy dearest .yet unweaned: Athens
. . 7. The Capitoline and Palatine (103),
was still nourished by Liberty from two of Rome's seven hills, represent re-
which Rome now also drew inspiration. publican Rome and imperial Rome, re-
6. Camillus, the Roman general, rejected spectively.
the proposal by a traitorous teacher that
232 Ode to Liberty

VIII.
From what Hyrcanian 8 glen or frozen hill,
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
Or utmost islet inaccessible,
Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,
Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks, II0

And even Naiad's 9 ice-cold urn,

To talk in echoes sad and stern
Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?
For neither didst thou watch the wizard flocks
Of the Scald's dreams, nor haunt the Druid's sleep. 1 "5
What if the tears rained through thv scattered locks
Were quickly dried? for thou didst groan, not weep,
When from its sea of death, to kill and burn,
The Galilean serpent 2 forth did creep,
And made thy world an undistinguishable heap. I2 °

IX.
A thousand years the Earth cried, Where art thou?
And then the shadow of thy coming fell
On Saxon Alfred's olive-cinctured brow: 3
And many a warrior-peopled citadel,
Like rocks which fire lifts out of the flat deep, I2 5

Arose in sacred Italy,

Frowning o'er the tempestuous sea
Of kings, and priests, and slaves, in tower-crowned majesty;
That multitudinous anarchv did sweep
And burst around their walls, like idle foam, no
Whilst from the human spirit's deepest deep
Strange melodv with love and awe struck dumb
Dissonant arms; and Art, which cannot die,
With divine wand traced on our earthly home
Fit imager)- to pave heaven's everlasting dome. 4 '3S

x.
Thou huntress swifter than the Moon! 5 thou terror
Of the world's wolves! thou bearer of the quiver,
Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-winged Error,
As light mav pierce the clouds when they dissever
In the calm regions of the orient day! l *°

Luther6 caught thy wakening glance,

Like lightning, from his leaden lance

8. Hyrcania was a province of Persia lish people, and encouraged the intel-
near the Caspian (Hyrcanian) Sea. lectual growth of his nation. He is
9. Nymphs of fountains and streams. circled or crowned with olive leaves,
1. Scalds (skalds) were Norwegian and traditionally the highest tribute that could
Icelandic poets of the Viking period and be paid to the honorable and brave,
down to about 1250 a.d.; Druids: Celtic 4. The rise of the communes, independ-
priests. ent city-state republics in medieval Italy,
2. TheChristian religion. led to a revival of the arts.
3. Alfred the Great (870-901). the West 5. The moon as the goddess Diana, vir-
Saxon king and scholar who made peace gin huntress.
with the raiding Danes, united the Eng- 6. Cf. A Defence of Poetry, p. 499.
 Ode to Liberty • 233
Reflected,it dissolved the visions of the trance

In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay;

And England's prophets hailed thee as their queen, x 45

In songs whose music cannot pass away,

Though it must flow for ever: not unseen
Before the spirit-sighted countenance
Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene
Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien. x 5<>

XI.
The eager hours and unreluctant years
As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood,
Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,
Darkening each other with their multitude,
And cried aloud, Liberty! Indignation *55

Answered Pity from her cave;

Death grew pale within the grave,
And Desolation howled to the destroyer, 7 Save!
When like heaven's sun girt by the exhalation
Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise, l6°

Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation

Like shadows as if day had cloven the skies
:

At dreaming midnight o'er the western wave,

Men started, staggering with a glad surprise,
Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes. 8 l6 5

XII.
Thou heaven of earth! what spells could
pall thee then
In ominous eclipse? a thousand years
Bred from the slime of deep oppression's den,
Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears,
Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away; I7 °

How like Bacchanals of blood

Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood
Destruction's sceptred slaves, and Folly's mitred brood! 9
When one, like them, but mightier far than they,
The Anarch 1 of thine own bewildered powers, I7 5

Rose: armies mingled in obscure array,

Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred bowers
Of serene heaven. He, by the past pursued,
Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,
l8 °
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers.
XIII.
England yet was she not called of old?
sleeps:
Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder
Vesuvius wakens /Etna, 2 and the cold
Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder: 3
7. Death (157). 9. The French Revolution.
8. Lines 159-165 depict the Enlighten- 1. Napoleon.
ment and subsequent reform and revolu- 2. Volcanoes near Naples and in eastern
tionary movements of the eighteenth Sicily, respectively,
century. 3. Split apart.
234 • Ode to Liberty

O'er the lit waves every /Eolian isle l8 5

From Pithecusa to Pelorus 4

Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus:
They cry, Be dim; ye lamps of heaven suspended o'er us.
Her 5 chains are threads of gold, she need but smile
And they dissolve; but Spain's were links of steel, I9°

Till bit to dust by virtue's keenest file.

Twins of a single destiny! appeal
To the eternal years enthroned before us
In the dim West; impress as from a seal
All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal. I9 5

xiv.
Tomb of Arminius! 6 render up thy dead.
standard from a watch-tower's
Till, like a staff,
His soul may stream
over the tyrant's head;
Thy victory shall be his epitaph,
Wild Bacchanal 7 of truth's mysterious wine, 2 °°

King-deluded Germany,
His dead spirit lives in thee.
Why do we fear or hope? thou art already free!
And thou, 8 lost Paradise of this divine
And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness! 2 °5

Thou island of eternity! thou shrine

Where desolation, clothed with loveliness,
Worships the thing thou wert! O Italy,
Gather thy blood into thy heart; repress
2I °
The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces.

xv.
O, that the free would stamp the impious name
Of King into the dust! or write it there,
So that this blot upon the page of fame
Were which the light air
as a serpent's path,
2I5
Erases, and the sands close behind!
flat
Ye 9 the oracle have heard:
Lift the victory-flashing sword,
And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word, 1
Which weak itself as stubble, yet can bind
22 °
Into a mass, irrefragably 2 firm,
The axes and the rods which awe mankind;
The sound has poison in it, 'tis the sperm
Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred;
Disdain not thou, 3 at thine appointed term,
worm. 22 5
To set thine armed heel on this reluctant

4. Aeolianisles: islands north of eastern ad.) and freed Germany from foreign
Sicily, including Stromboli; Pithecusa: domination.
island of Ischia, west of Naples and 7. An occasion of drunken revelry.
Cumae; Pelorus: Cape Faro, the north- 8. Italy.
east point in Sicily. 9. The free (211).
5. England's. 1. "King" (212).
6. Germanic tribal leader (18 b.c-19 2. Indisputably.
a.d.), who annihilated a Roman army (9 3. Liberty.
 Ode to Liberty • 235
XVI.
O, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world,
That the pale name of Priest might shrink and dwindle
Into the hell from which it first was hurled,
A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure; 2 3<>

Till human thoughts might kneel alone,

Each before the judgement-throne
Of its own aweless soul, or of the power4 unknown!
O, that the words which make the thoughts obscure
From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew 2 35

From a white lake blot heaven's blue portraiture,

Were stript of their thin masks and various hue
And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own,
Till in the nakedness of false and true
They stand before their Lord, 5 each to receive its due! 2 *°

XVII.
He 6 who taught man to vanquish whatsoever
Can be between the cradle and the grave
Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavour!
If on his own high will, a willing slave,
Hehas enthroned the oppression and the oppressor. 2 45

What if earth can clothe and feed

Amplest millions at their need,
And power in thought be as the tree within the seed?
Or what if Art, an ardent intercessor,
Diving on fiery wings to Nature's throne, 2 5°

Checks the great mother stooping to caress her,

And cries: Give me, thy child, dominion
Over all height and depth? 7 if Life can breed
New wants, and wealth from those who toil and groan
Rend of thy gifts and hers 8 a thousandfold for one! 2 55

XVIII.
Come Thou, but lead out of the inmost cave
Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star
Beckons the Sun from the Eoan 9 wave,
Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car
Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame; 26 °

Comes she not, and come ye not,

Rulers of eternal thought,
To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned lot?
Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame
26 5
Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?

4. See general note to "Mont Blanc," p. 7. In lines 249-253, Art intercedes be-
89. tween Nature (the great mother) and
5. Either aweless soul or power unknown men.
(233); Shelley may be purposely (skepti- 8. thy: Liberty's; hers: Art's.
cally) ambiguous here. 9. Eastern; Eos was the Greek name of
6. Lord (240). Aurora, goddess of the dawn.
 —
236 • The Cenci
O, Liberty! if such could be thy name
Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:
If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought
By blood or tears, have not the wise and free
—
Wept tears, and blood like tears? The solemn harmony 2 ~i°

XIX.
Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing
To
abyss was suddenly withdrawn;
its

Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging

Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aerial golden light 2 ?5

On the heavy-sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;
As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain;
As a far taper fades with fading night, 1
As a brief insect dies with dying day, 28 °

My song, pinions disarrayed of might,

its

Drooped; o'er it closed the echoes far away

Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,
As waves which lately paved his watery way
Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous play. 2g 5

1 he C-eilCl Shelley began to compose this tragedy in May 1819,

probably inspired by viewing the supposed Guido Reni portrait of Beatrice
Cenci at the Palazzo Colonna in Rome. (The painting, which cannot be by
Guido, is now exhibited at the Corsini Palace.) This portrait and a visit to
the Palazzo Cenci stimulated Shelley to reread a manuscript version of the
Cenci family history that Mary had copied in May 1818 from a copy
owned by John Gisbome. Composition was interrupted by the death of
William Shelley (June 7, 1819), but continued through late June and
July after the Shelleys' move to the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn. By
July 25, Shelley could write to Peacock, "I have written a tragedy"
(Shelley, Letters, II, 102; for the date of the letter, see Shelley and his
Circle, VI, 897m). On August 11, Shelley was copying his drama for the
press, and on August 20, Mary notes, she was copying it; by September 21,

1819, the Leghorn printer Glauco Masi had produced 250 copies ready to
ship to England.
In the meantime, on September 10, Shelley had mailed to Thomas Love
Peacock a single printed copy (without the Dedication and Preface) with
which he was to submit the play anonymously to the Theatre Royal,
—
Covent Garden where Beatrice would be played, Shelley hoped, by Eliza
O'Neill (1791-1872), the leading female tragedian of the day. Miss
O'Neill, unknown to Shelley, had just married and retired from the stage,
and Thomas Harris —who had managed Covent Garden since 1774 ar»d
was not noted for his theatrical innovations — refused even to consider
producing the play because of its emphasis on incest. His opinion was

1. Compare this simile with "Hymn to —that to human thought art nourish-
Intellectual Beauty," lines 44-45: "Thou ment,/Like darkness to a dying flame!"
 The Cenci • 237
echoed by theatrical censors in Britain throughout the nineteenth century;
in 1886 The Cenci received its first staging in a private performance
sponsored by the Shelley Society and was not produced on the London
public stage until 1922, the centenary of Shelley's death. Prior to that
date the play had been produced professionally in Paris (1891), Coburg,
Germany (1919), Moscow (1919-1920), and Prague (1922); subsequent
professional productions in Europe and America have confirmed Shelley's
confidence that The Cenci is "fitted for the stage." (See Stuart Curran,
Shelley's "Cenci": Scorpions Ringed with Fire [Princeton, 1970].)
When it became would not be staged, he
clear to Shelley that the play
secured its publication in 1820. It alone of Shelley's books went into an
authorized second edition during his lifetime —
one for which he corrected
verbal errors in the first edition.
Our text is based on the first edition, as corrected from the errata leaf
in the hand of Mary Shelley. Because Shelley himself saw the play through
the press and inasmuch as the Italian compositors are unlikely to have taken
as many liberties with the forms of Shelley's words and punctuation as
British printers,The Cenci and Adonais (similarly produced) provide the
best evidence of how Shelley wished his poetry to appear in print. We
have, therefore, made only the most sparing changes in the first edition
where obvious errors appeared (M instead of (E at the beginning of
"CEdipus") or where the printed punctuation is not only inadequate but
also fails to conform with Shelley's own practice in his polished fair copy
manuscripts.

The Cenci
A Tragedy, in Five Acts

DEDICATION 1

TO LEIGH HUNT, Esq.

My —
dear friend I inscribe with your name, from a distant
country, and after an absence whose months have seemed years,
this the latest of my literary efforts.
Those writings which I have hitherto published, 2 have been little
else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the
beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary de-
fects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what
ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is
a sagLteahty_. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor,
and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart
furnishes, that which has been.

1. The rough draft of this Dedication to Reiman, Shelley and his Circle, VI,
Shelley's closest friend was written at 865-874.
Villa Valsovano sometime in the period 2. Shelley alludes especially to Queen
August 16-19, 1819; for the rough draft Mab, Alastor, and Laon and Cythna, the
version and Shelley's possible reasons for lastcomposed while Hunt was visiting
dating it May 29, 1819, see Donald H. him at Marlow.
238 • The Cenci
Had I known
a person more highly endowed than yourself with
all that becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work
it

the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent

and brave; one of more exaltedftoleration for all who do and think
evilTJand yet himself more freefrom evil; one who knows better
how to receive, and how to confer a benefit though he must ever
confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and, in the
a

highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew:
and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name
was added to the list.
In that patient and irreconcileable enmity with domestic and
political tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has
illustrated, and which, had I health and talents should illustrate
mine, let us, comforting each other in our task, live and die.
All happiness attend you! Your affectionate friend,
Percy B. Shelley.
rome, May 29, 1819.

PREFACE
A Manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy
which was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome,
and contains a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the
extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city
during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, 3 in the year 1599. The
story is, that an old man having spent his life in debauchery and
wickedness, conceived at length an implacable hatred towards his
children; which shewed itself towards one daughter under the form
of an incestuous passion, aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty
and violence. This daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape
from what she considered a perpetual contamination both of body
and mind, at length plotted with her mother-in-law 4 and brother to
murder their common tyrant. The young maiden who was urged to
this tremendous deed by an impulse which overpowered its horror,
was evidently a most gentle and amiable being, a creature formed
to adorn and be admired, and thus [violently thwarted from her
nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinionj The deed was
quickly discovered and in spite of the most earnest prayers made to
the Pope by the highest persons in Rome the criminals were put to
death. The old man had during his life repeatedly bought his
pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the most enormous and
unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand crowns; the

3. Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandino) could mean either "stepmother" or

was pope from 1592 to 1605. "spouse's mother."
4. Stepmother; in Shelley's day the word
 The Cenci • 239
death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted for by the
The Pope, among other motives for severity, probably
love of justice.
felt Count Cenci deprived his treasury of a
that whoever killed the
certain and copious source of revenue. 5 Such a story, if told so as to
present to the reader all the feelings of those who once acted it,
their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various
interests, passions and opinions acting upon and with each other,
yet all conspiring to one tremendous end, would be asCa light to
make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the
human heart?/
On my Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a
arrival at
subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a
deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company
never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a
passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her,
who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All
ranks of people knew the outlines of this history, and participated
in the overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of
exciting in the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's picture of
Beatrice which is preserved in the Colonna Palace, and mv servant
instantly recognizedit as the portrait of La Cenci.

This national and universal interest which the story produces and
has produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a
great City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake,
first suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic
purpose. In fact it is which has already received, from its
a tragedy
capacity of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, appro-
bation and success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe
it to the apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and

action as would bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the
sublimest tragic compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which
the tale of (Edipus is told, were stories which already existed in
tradition, as matters of popular belief and interest, before Shak-
speare and Sophocles made them familiar to the sympathy of all
succeeding generations of mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous:
any thing like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insup-
portable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase
the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the
pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestu-
ous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation

5. "The Papal government formerly took wickedness and weakness; so that the
the most extraordinary precautions communication of the MS. had become,
against the publicity of facts which offer until very lately, a matter of some diffi-
so tragical a demonstration of its own culty" (Shelley's note).
240 The Cenci
of the moral deformity from which they spring. There must also
be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is
vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose aimed
at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human
heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of
itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every
human being is and kind. If dogmas can
wise, just, sincere, tolerant
do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement
of them .(Undoubtedly, no person can_be truly dishonoured by_the
a ct of another; and the fit return to make to the most eno.mous
injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the
injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retalia-
tion, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in
this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would
never have been a tragic character?) the few whom such an exhibition
would have interested, could never have been sufficiently interested
for a dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their
interest among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and
anatomizing casuistry 6 with which men seek the justification of
Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in
the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her
wrongs and their revenge; that the dramatic character of what she
did and suffered, consists.
I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the char-

acters as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of
making them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong,
false or true, thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of
the sixteenth century into cold impersonations of my own mind.
They are represented as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged
with religion. To a Protestant apprehension there will appear some-
thing unnatural in the earnest and perpetual sentiment of the rela-
tions between God and man which pervade the tragedy of the
Cenci. It will especially be startled at the combination of an un-
doubting persuasion of the truth of the popular religion with a cool
and determined perseverance in enormous guilt. But religion jn Italy
is not, as in Protestant countries, a cloak to be worn on particular
days; or a passport which those who do not wish to be railed at
carry with them to exhibit; or a gloom y passion for penetrating the
impenetrable mysteries of our being, which terrifies its possessor at
the darkness of the abyss to the brink of which it has conducted him.
Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind of an Italian Catholic with

6. The analytic reasoning of the casuist; particular instances in which circum-

casuistry is that part of ethics which re- stances alter cases, or in which there
solves cases of conscience, applying the appears to be a conflict of duties,
general rules of religion and morality to
 The Cenci 241

a faith in that ofwhich all men have the most certain knowledge.
It isinterwoven with the whole fabric of life.\Tt is adoration, faith,
submission, penitence, blind admiration; not a rule for moral con-
duct. It has no necessary connexion with any one virtue. The most
atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and without any shock to
established faith, confess himself to be so. Religion pervades in-
tensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper
of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse,
a refuge; never a check. Cenci himself built a chapel in the court of
his Palace, and dedicated it to St. Thomas the Apostle, and estab-
lished masses for the peace of his soulJThus in the first scene of the
fourth act Lucretia's design in exposing herself to the consequences
of an expostulation withCenci after having administered the opiate,
was to induce him by a feigned tale to confess himself before death;
this being esteemed by Catholics as essential to salvation; and she
only relinquishes her purpose when she perceives that her perse-
verance would expose Beatrice to new outrages.
I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction
of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will
scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description,
unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's
murder should be judged be of that nature. 7
to
In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should in-
terpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the
full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the

immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of

mortal passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar
imagery may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in
the illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels
to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow
of its own greatness. In other respects I have written more carelessly;
that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of words. In
this respect I entirely agree with those modern critics who assert
that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the
familiar language ofmen. And that our great ancestors the antient
whom might incite us to
English poets are the writers, a study of
do that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it
must be the real language of men in general and not that of any

7. "An idea in this speech was suggested dramatists derive from the Italian manu-
by a most sublime passage in El Purga- script Relation of the Death of the
torio de San Patricio of Calderon: the Family of the Cenci that was Shelley's
only plagiarism which I have intention- chief source. (Curran also notes that
ally committed in the whole piece" (Shel- Shakespeare himself, by the time he
ley's note). As Stuart Curran points out, wrote Macbeth and Measure for Meas-
most of Shelley's supposed verbal and ure, could have known the story of the
situational "plagiarisms" from Shake- Cenci murder and trial of 1599 through
speare, Webster, and other Elizabethan accounts transmitted from Rome.)
242 • The Cenci
particular class to whose happens to belong. So
society the writer
much for what I need not be assured that success
have attempted; I

is a very different matter; particularly for one whose attention has

but newly been awakened to the study of dramatic literature.

I endeavoured whilst at Rome to observe such monuments of this

story as might be accessible to a stranger. The portrait of Beatrice at

the Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: it was taken by
Guido during her confinement in prison. But "it is most interesting
as a just representation of one of the loveliest specimens of the
workmanship of Nature. There is a fixed and pale composure upon
the features: she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the
despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentleness.
Her head is bound with from which the
folds of white drapery
yellow strings of her golden hair escape, and about her neck. fall

The moulding of her face is exquisitelv delicate; the eye brows are
distinct and arched: the lips have that permanent meaning of
imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed and
which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead
is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for

their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beauti-
fully tender and serene. In the whole mien there is a simplicity and
dignity which united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow
are inexpressibly pathetic.]Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one
of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together
without destroying one another: her nature was simple and pro-
found. The crimes and miseries in which she was an actor and a
sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances
clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the worljj
The Cenci Palace is of great extent; and though in part modern-
ized, there yet remains a vast and gloomv pile of feudal architecture
in the same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject
of this tragedy. The Palace is situated in an obscure comer of Rome,
near the quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see
the immense ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their pro-
fuse overgrowth of trees. There is a court in one part of the palace
(perhaps that in which Cenci built the Chapel to St. Thomas),
supported by granite columns and adorned with antique friezes of
fine workmanship and built up, according to the antient Italian
fashion, with balconv over balcony of open work. One of the gates
of the palace formed of immense stones and leading through a

passage, dark and lofty and opening into gloomy subterranean

chambers, struck me particularly.
Of the Castle of Petrella, I could obtain no further information
than that which is to be found in the manuscript.
 — — .

The Cenci Li • 243

DRAMATIS PERSONA
COUNT FRANCESCO CENCI savella, the Popes Legate.
GIACOMO olimpio.) ,
his sons. > Assassins.
BERNARDO.) ,

MARZIO. )
CARDINAL CAMILLO. andrea, servant to Cenci.
orsino, a Prelate. Nobles Judges Guards Servants— — —
lucretia, Wife of cenci, and step-mother of his children.
Beatrice, his daughter.

Trie Scene lies principally in Rome, but changes during the Fourth
Act to Petrella, a castle among the Apulia Apennines.
Time. During the Pontificate of Clement VIII.

ACT J

Scene
I. An apartment in the Cenci Palace.
Enter count cenci, and cardinal camillo.
Camillo. That matter of the murder is hushed up
If you consent to yield his Holiness
Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate. 8 —
It needed all my interest in the conclave
To bend him to this point: he said that you 5

Bought perilous impunity with your gold;

That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded
Enriched the Church, and respited from hell
An erring soul which might repent and live:
But that the glory and the interest 10

Of the high throne he fills, little consist

With making it a daily mart of guilt
As manifold and hideous as the deeds
Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes.
Cenci. The third of my possessions — let it go! J 5

Aye, I once heard the nephew of the Pope 9

Had sent his architect to view the ground,
Meaning to build a villa on my vines
The next time I compounded 1 with his uncle:
thought he should outwit me so!
I little 20

—
Henceforth no witness not the lamp shall see —
That which the vassal threatened to divulge
Whose throat is choked with dust for his reward.
The deed he saw could not have rated higher
Than his most worthless life: it angers me! — 25

Respited me from Hell! —

So may the Devil

8. The gate at the north end of the Via Catholic clergy were euphemistically
Veneto and now leading to the Borghese called "nephews" and "nieces."
Gardens; fief: an estate. 1. Accepted terms of settlement in lieu
9. The illegitimate children of Roman of prosecution.
 — ——
244 • The Cenci Li

Respite their souls from Heaven. No doubt Pope Clement,

And most charitable nephews, pray
his
That the apostle Peter and the saints
Will grant for their sake that I long enjoy 30

Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days

Wherein to act the deeds which arc the stewards
—
Of their revenue. But much yet remains
To which they shew no title.
Camillo. Oh, Count Cenci!
So much that thou migh'st honourably live 35

And reconcile thyself with thine own heart

And with thy God, and with the offended world.
How hideously look deeds of lust and blood
Through those snow white and venerable hairs!
Your children should be sitting round you now, 40

But that you fear to read upon their looks

The shame and misery you have written there.
Where is your wife? Where is your gentle daughter?
Methinks her sweet looks, which make all things else
Beauteous and glad, might kill the fiend within you. 45

Why is she barred from all societv

But her own strange and uncomplaining wrongs? 2

—
Talk with me, Count, you know I mean you well.
I stood beside your dark and fiery vouth

Watching its bold and bad career, as men so

Watch meteors, but it vanished not I marked —

Your desperate and remorseless manhood; now
Do I behold vou in dishonoured age
Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes.
Yet I have ever hoped you would amend, 55

And in that hope have saved your life three times.

Cenci. For which Aldobrandino 3 owes you now
My fief beyond the Pincian. Cardinal, —
One thing, I pray you, recollect henceforth,
And so we shall converse with less restraint. ^
A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter
He was accustomed to frequent my house;
So the next day his wife and daughter came
And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled:
I think they never saw him any more.
6s

Camillo. Thou execrable man, beware!

Cenci. Of thee?
Nay this is idle: —We should know each other.
As to my
character for what men call crime
Seeing I my senses as I list, 4
please
70
And vindicate that right with force or guile,
It is a public matter, and I care not

2. The evils done to Beatrice. 4. Wish or choose.

3. I.e., the Pope (his family name).
 — — ——
The Cenci Li • 245
If I discuss it with you. I may speak
Alike to you and my own conscious heart
For you give out that you have half reformed me,
Therefore strong vanity will keep you silent 75

If fear should not; both will, I do not doubt.

All men delight in sensual luxury,
All menenjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel
Flattering their secret peace with others' pain. 8o

But I delight in nothing else. I love

The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
When this shall be another's, and that mine.
And I have no remorse and little fear,
Which are, I think, the checks of other men. 8s

This mood has grown upon me, until now

Any design my captious 5 fancy makes
The picture of its wish, and it forms none
But such as men like you would start to know.
Is as my natural food and rest debarred 9°

Until it be accomplished.
Camillo. Art thou not
Most miserable?
Cenci. Why, miserable?
—
No. I am what your theologians call
—
Hardened; which they must be in impudence,
So to man's peculiar taste.
revile a 95

True, was happier than I am, while yet

I

Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;

While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now
Invention palls :
—Aye, we must all grow old
And but that there remains a deed to act I0 °

Whose horror might make sharp an appetite

Duller than mine I'd do, —
I know not what. —
When I was young
thought of nothing else
I

But pleasure; and I fed on honey sweets:

Men, by St. Thomas! cannot live like bees I0 5

—
And I grew tired: yet, till I killed a foe,
And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans,
Knew I not what delight was else on earth,
Which now delights me little. I the rather
Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals, II0

The dry fixed eye ball; the pale quivering lip,

Which tell me that the spirit weeps within
Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ.
I rarely kill the bodv which preserves,

Like a strong prison, the louI within my power, IJ 5

Wherein I feed it with the breath of fear

For hourly pain.

5. Designed to entrap or entangle by subtlety.

 —
246 • The Cenci I.ii

Camillo. Hell's most abandoned fiend

Did never, drunkenness of guilt,
in the
Speak to his heart as now you speak to me;
I thank my God that I believe you not.
I2 °

Enter andrea.
Andrea. My Lord, a gentleman from Salamanca 6
Would speak with you.
Cenci. Bid him attend me in
The grand saloon. 7 [Exit andrea
Camillo. Farewell; and I will pray
Almighty God that thy false, impious words
Tempt not his spirit to abandon thee. [Exit camillo.
Cenci. The third of my possessions! I must use I26

Close husbandry, 8 or gold, the old man's sword,

Falls from my withered hand. But yesterday
There came an order from the Pope to make
Fourfold provision for my cursed sons; I3 °

Whom I had sent from Rome to Salamanca,

Hoping some accident might cut them off;

And meaning if I could to starve them there.

I pray thee, God, send some quick death upon them!

Bernardo and my wife could not be worse I35

If dead and damned: —

then, as to Beatrice
[Looking around him suspiciously.
I think they cannot hear me at that door;
What if they should? And yet I need not speak

Though the heart triumphs with itself in words.

O, thou most silent air, that shalt not hear I *°

What now I think! Thou, pavement, which I tread

Towards her chamber, — your echoes
let talk
Of my imperious step scorning surprise,
But not of my intent! —Andrea!
Enter andrea.
Andrea. My lord?
Cenci. Bid Beatrice attend me in her chamber J 45

This evening: —
no, at midnight and alone. [Exeunt.

Scene II. —A garden of the Cenci Palace. Enter Beatrice and

orsino, as in conversation.
Beatrice. Pervert not truth,
Orsino. You remember where we held
—
That conversation; nay, we see the spot
—
Even from this cvpress; two long years are past
Since, on an April midnight, underneath 5

The moon-light ruins of mount Palatine,

I did confess to you my secret mind.

6. A city in Old Castile, Spain —not far or great house; salon.

from northern Portugal. 8. Secret or careful thrift, economy.
7. A principal reception room in a palace
 The Cenci Lii •
247
Orsino. You said you loved me then.
Beatrice. You are a Priest,
Speak to me not of love.
Orsino. I may obtain

The dispensation of the Pope to marry. IO

Because I am
do you believe
a Priest
Your image, as the hunter some struck deer,
Follows me not whether I wake or sleep?
Beatrice. As I have said, speak to me not of love;
Had you a dispensation I have not; J 5

Nor will I leave this home of misery

Whilst my poor Bernard, and that gentle lady
To whom I owe life, and these virtuous thoughts,
Must suffer what I still have strength to share.
Alas, Orsino! All the love that once 20

I felt turned to bitter pain.

for you, is

Ours was a youthful contract, which you first

Broke, by assuming vows no Pope will loose.
And thus I love you still, but holily,
Even as a sister or a spirit might; 25

And so I swear a cold fidelity.

And it is well perhaps we shall not marry.
You have a sly, equivocating vein
—
That suits me not. Ah, wretched that I am!
Where shall I turn? Even now you look on me 3°

As you 9 were not my friend, and as if you

Discovered that I thought so, with false smiles
Making my true suspicion seem your wrong.
Ah! No, forgive me; sorrow makes me seem
Sterner than else my nature might have been; 35

I have a weight of melancholy thoughts,

—
And they forbode, but what can they forbode
Worse than I now endure?
Orsino. All will be well.
Is the petition yet prepared? You know

My zeal for all you wish, sweet Beatrice; 4°

Doubt not but I will use my utmost skill

So that the Pope attend to your complaint.
Beatrice. Your zeal for all I wish; Ah me, you are — cold!
Your utmost skill speak but one word. .(aside)
. . . . Alas!
Weak and deserted creature that I am, 45

Here stand bickering with my only friend!

I [To orsino.
This night my father gives a sumptuous feast,
Orsino; he has heard some happy news
From Salamanca, from my brothers there,
And with this outward shew of love he mocks so

His inward hate. 'Tis bold hypocrisy

For he would gladlier celebrate their deaths,

9. I.e., As if you.
 ——
248 • TheCenciLiii
Which I have heard him pray for on his knees:

Great God! that such a father should be mine!

But there is mighty preparation made, 55

And all our kin, the Cenci, will be there,

And all the chief nobility of Rome.
And he has bidden me and my pale Mother
Attire ourselves in festival array.
Poor lady! She expects some happy change ' 6°

In his dark spirit from this act; I none.

At supper I will give you the petition:
Till when — farewell.
Orsino. Farewell. (Exit Beatrice.) I know the Pope
Will ne'er absolve me from my priestly vow
But by absolving me from the revenue 65

Of many wealthy see; 1 and, Beatrice,

a
I think to win thee at an easier rate.

Nor shall he read her eloquent petition:

He might bestow her on some poor relation
Of his sixth cousin, as he did her sister, 7°

And I should be debarred from all access.

Then as to what she suffers from her father,
In all this there is much exaggeration:
Old men are testy and will have their way;
A man may stab his enemy, or his vassal, 75

And wine or women,

live a free life as to
And with a peevish temper may return
To a dull home, and rate 2 his wife and children;
Daughters and wives call this, foul tyranny.
I shall be well content if on my conscience
8o

There rest no heavier sin than what they suffer

From the devices of my love — a net
From which she shall escape not. Yet I fear
Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze,
WTiose beams anatomize 3 me nerve by nerve 8s

And lay me bare, and make me blush to see

—
My hidden thoughts. Ah, no! A friendless girl
Who clings to me, as to her only hope:
I were a fool, not less than if a panther
Were 9°
panic-stricken by the Antelope's eye,
If she escape me. [Exit.

Scene III. —
A magnificent Hall in the Cenci Palace. A Banquet.
Enter cenci, lucretia, Beatrice, orsino, camillo, nobles.
Cenci. Welcome my friends and Kinsmen; welcome ye,
Princes and Cardinals, pillars of the church,
Whose presence honours our festivity.

1. revenue/ Of many a wealthy see: Or- a portion of the revenues while subor-
sino, a clergyman from an influential dinates perform the duties.
Roman family, has been given title to 2. Scold, reprove angrily or vehemently,
several bishoprics, from which he retains 3. Analyze minutely.
 —
The Cenci l.iii • 249
I have too long lived like an Anchorite, 4
And in my absence from your merry meetings 5

An evil word is gone abroad of me;

But do hope that you, my noble friends,
I

When you have shared the entertainment here,

And heard the pious cause for which 'tis given,
And we have pledged a health or two together, I0

Will think me flesh and blood as well as you;

Sinful indeed, for Adam made all so,
But tender-hearted, meek and pitiful.
First Guest. In truth, my Lord, you seem too light of heart,
Too sprightly and companionable a man, J5

To act the deeds that rumour pins on you.

(To his Companion.) I never saw such blithe and open cheer
In any eye!
Second Guest. Some most desired event,
In which we all demand a common joy,
2°
Has brought us hither; let us hear it, Count.
Cenci. indeed a most desired event.
It is
If, when a parent from a parent's heart
Lifts from this earth to the great father of all
A prayer, both when he lays him down to sleep,
And when he rises up from dreaming it;
2*

One supplication, one desire, one hope,

That he would grant a wish for his two sons
Even all that he demands in their regard
And suddenly beyond his dearest hope,
It is accomplished, he should then rejoice, 30

And call his friends and kinsmen to a feast,

And task their love to grace his merriment,
Then honour me thus far for I am he. —
Beatrice (to lucretia). Great God! How horrible! Some
dreadful ill

Must have befallen my brothers.

Lucretia. Fear not, Child, 35

He speaks too frankly.

Beatrice. Ah! My blood runs cold.
I wicked laughter round his eye
fear that
Which wrinkles up the skin even to the hair.
Cenci. Here are the letters brought from Salamanca;
Beatrice, read them to your mother. God! 40

I thank thee! In one night didst thou perform,

By ways inscrutable, the thing I sought.

My disobedient and rebellious sons
Are dead! —Why, dead! —What means this change of cheer?
You hear me not, I tell you they are dead; 45

And they will need no food or raiment more:

The tapers that did light them the dark way

4. One who has secluded himself from the world, usually for religious reasons.
 —— —
250 The Cenci Liii

Are their last cost. The Pope, I think, will not

Expect I should maintain them in their coffins.
Rejoice with me —
my heart is wondrous glad. so

[lucretia sinks, half fainting; Beatrice supports her.

is not true!
Beatrice. It —
Dear lady, pray look up.
Had been true, there is 5 a God in Heaven,
it

He would not live to boast of such a boon.

Unnatural man, thou knowest that it is false. *
Cenci. Aye, as the word of God; whom here I call 55

To witness that I speak the sober truth;

And whose most favouring Providence was shewn
Even in the manner of their deaths. For Rocco 6
Was kneeling at the mass, with sixteen others,
When the Church fell and crushed him to a mummy, 7 6°

The rest escaped unhurt. Cristofano 8

Was stabbed in error by a jealous man,
Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival;
All in the self-same hour of the same night;
Which shews that Heaven has special care of me. 65

I beg those friends who love me, that they mark

The day a feast upon their calendars.

It was the twenty-seventh of December: 9
Aye, read the letters if you doubt my oath.
[The assembly appears confused; several of the guests rise.
First Guest. Oh, horrible! I will depart
Second Guest. And I.
Third Guest. No, stay! ?o
I do believe it is some jest; though faith!

'Tis mocking us somewhat too solemnly.

I think his son has married the Infanta,
Or found a mine of gold in El Dorado; 1
'Tis but to season some such news; stay, stay! 75

I see 'tis only raillery bv his smile.

Cenci {filling a bowl of wine, and lifting it up).

Oh, thou bright wine whose purple splendor leaps
And bubbles gaily in this golden bowl
Under the lamp light, asmy spirits do,
8o
To hear the death of my accursed
sons!
Could I believe thou wert their mingled blood,
Then would I taste thee like a sacrament,
And pledge with thee the mighty Devil in Hell,
Who, if a father's curses, as men say,
85
Climb with swift wings after their children's souls,
And drag them from the very throne of Heaven,
Now triumphs in my triumph! —But thou art

5. I.e., because there is. 1. A country or city abounding

fictitious
6. One
of Cenci's sons. in gold, by the Spaniards and
believed
7. A
pulpy substance or mass. Sir Walter Ralegh to exist upon the
8. Another of Cenci's sons. Amazon; Infanta: the title given a daugh-
9. The feast day of John the Evangelist, ter of the king of Spain,
who wrote "God is love" (1 John 4:8).
 The Cenci Lin •
251

Superfluous; have drunken deep of joy

I

And I no other wine to-night.

will taste
Here, Andrea! Bear the bowl around.
A Guest (rising). Thou wretch! 90

Will none among this noble company

Check the abandoned villain?
Camillo. For God's sake
Let me dismiss the guests! You are insane,
Some ill will come of this.
Second Guest. Seize, silence him!
First Guest. I will!
Third Guest. And I!
Cenci (addressing those who rise with a threatening gesture).
Who moves? Who speaks?
(turning to the Company)
'tis nothing, 95

—
Enjoy yourselves. Beware! For my revenge
Is as the sealed commission of a king
That kills, and none dare name the murderer.
[The Banquet is broken up; several of the Guests are departing.
Beatrice. I do entreat you, go not, noble guests;
What although tyranny, and impious hate IO°

Stand sheltered by a father's hoary hair?

What, if 'tis he who clothed us in these limbs
Who tortures them, and triumphs? What, if we,
The desolate and the dead, were his own flesh,
His children and his wife, whom he is bound I05

To love and shelter? Shall we therefore find

No refuge in this merciless wide world?
Oh, think what deep wrongs must have blotted out
First love, then reverence in a child's prone mind
Till it thus vanquish shame and fear! O, think! no
I have borne much, and kissed the sacred hand

Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke

Was perhaps some paternal chastisement!
Have excused much, doubted; and when no doubt
Remained, have sought by patience, love and tears IJ s

To soften him, and when this could not be

I have knelt down through the long sleepless nights
And lifted up to God, the father of all,
Passionate prayers: and when these were not heard
I have still borne, —
until I meet you here, I2 °

Princes and kinsmen, at this hideous feast

Given at my brothers' deaths. Two yet remain,
His wife remains and I, whom if ye save not,
Ye may soon share such merriment again
As fathers make over their children's graves. I2 5

Oh! Prince Colonna, 2 thou art our near kinsman,

2. The Colonna family, great rivals of the Orsinis for centuries, were at this period at
the height of their power.
 — —
252 • The Cenci l.iii
Cardinal, thou art the Pope's chamberlain,
Camillo, thou art chief justiciary,
Take us away!
Cenci. (He has been conversing with camillo during the first
part of Beatrice's speech; he hears the conclusion, and now
advances.)
I hope my good friends here

Will think of their own daughters or perhaps — ^°

—
Of their own throats before they lend an ear
To this wild girl.
Beatrice (not noticing the words of Cenci). Dare no one look
on me
None answer? Can one tyrant overbear
The sense of many best and wisest men?
Or is it that I sue not in some form "33

Of scrupulous law, that ye deny my suit?

Oh, God! That I were buried with my brothers!
And that the flowers of this departed spring
Were fading on my grave! And that my father
Were celebrating now one feast for all! x 4°

Camillo. A bitter wish for one so voung and gentle;

Can we do nothing
Colonna. Nothing that I see.
Count Cenci were dangerous enemy:
a
Yet I would second any one.
A Cardinal. And I.

Cenci. Retire to your chamber, insolent girl! x 45

Beatrice. Retire thou, impious man! Aye hide thyself

Where never eye can look upon thee more!
Wouldst thou have honour and obedience
Who art a torturer? Father, never dream
I5 °
Though thou mayst overbear this company,
But ill must come of ill. Frown not on me! —
Haste, hide thyself, lest with avenging looks
My brothers' ghosts should hunt thee from thy seat!
Cover thv face from everv living eye,
And I55
start if thou but hear a human step:
Seek out some dark and silent corner, there,
Bow thy white head before offended God,
And we will kneel around, and fervently
Pray that he pity both ourselves and thee.
Cenci. My friends, I do lament this insane girl l6°

Has spoilt the mirth of our festivity.

Good night, farewell; I will not make you longer
Spectators of our dull domestic quarrels.
Another time. [Exeunt all but cenci and Beatrice.
My brain is swimming round;
Give me a bowl of wine! [To Beatrice.
 — .

The Cenci ILi 253

Thou painted viper! l6 5

Beast that thou art! Fair and yet terrible!

I know a charm shall make thee meek and tame,
Now get thee from my sight! [Exit Beatrice.
Here, Andrea,
Fill up this goblet with Greek wine. I said
I would not drink this evening; but I must;
J 7<>

For, strange to say, I feel my spirits fail

With thinking what I have decreed to do.

[Drinking the wine.
Be thou the resolution of quick youth
Within my veins, and manhood's purpose stern,
And age's firm, cold, subtle villainy; x 75

As if thou wert indeed my children's blood

Which I did thirst to drink! The charm works well;
It must be done; it shall be done, I swear! [Exit

END OF THE FIRST ACT.

ACT II

Scene I. —An apartment in the Cenci Palace. Enter lucretia and

BERNARDO.
Weep not, my gentle boy; he struck but me
Lucretia.
Who have borne deeper wrongs. In truth, if he
Had killed me, he had done a kinder deed.
O, God Almighty, do thou look upon us,
We have no other friend but only thee! 5

Yet weep not; though I love you as my own

I am not your true mother.

Bernardo. O more, more,

Than ever mother was to any child,
That have you been to me! Had he not been
My father, do you think that I should weep? I0

Lucretia. Alas! Poor boy, what else could'st thou have done?

Enter Beatrice.
Beatrice (in a hurried voice). Did he pass this way? Have you
seen him, brother?
Ah! No, that is his step upon the stairs;
'Tis nearer now; his hand is on the door;
Mother, if I to thee have ever been '3

A duteous child, now save me! Thou, great God,

Whose image upon earth a father is,
Dost thou indeed abandon me! He comes;
The door is opening now; I see his face;
He frowns on others, but he smiles on me, 20

Even as he did after the feast last night.

254 • The Cenci 11 i
Enter a Servant.
Almighty God, how merciful thou art!
—
Tis but Orsino's servant. Well, what news?
Servant. My master bids me say, the Holy Father
Has sent back your petition thus unopened. [Giving a paper.
And he demands at what hour 'twere secure 26

To visit you again?

Lucretia. At the Ave Mary. 3 [Exit Servant.
•

So, daughter, our last hope has failed; Ah me!

How pale you look; you tremble, and you stand
Wrapped in some fixed and fearful meditation, 30

As if one thought were over strong for you:

Your eyes have a chill glare; O, dearest child!
Are you gone mad? If not, pray speak to me.
Beatrice. You see I am not mad, I speak to you.
Lucretia. You talked of something that your father did 35

After that dreadful feast? Could it be worse

Than when he smiled, and cried, "My sons are dead!"
And every one looked in his neighbour's face
To see if others were as white as he?
At the first word he spoke I felt the blood 40

Rush to my heart, and fell into a trance;

And when it past I sat all weak and wild;
Whilst you alone stood up, and with strong words
Checked his unnatural pride; and I could see
The devil was rebuked that lives in him. 45

Until this hour thus you have ever stood

Between us and your father's moody wrath
Like a protecting presence: your firm mind
Has been our only refuge and defence:
What can have thus subdued it? What can now 50

Have given you that cold melancholy look,

Succeeding to your unaccustomed fear?
Beatrice. What is it that you say? I was just thinking
'Twere better not to struggle any more.
Men, like my father, have been dark and bloody, 55

—
Yet never O! Before worse comes of it
'Twere wise to die: it ends in that at last.
Lucretia. Oh, talk not so, dear child! Tell me at once
What did your father do or say to you?
He stayed not after that accursed feast ^
One moment in your chamber. Speak to me. —
Bernardo. Oh, sister, sister, prithee, speak to us!
Beatrice (speaking very slowly with a forced calmness).
It was one word, Mother, one little word;
One look, one smile. (Wi7d/y.) Oh! He has trampled me
6*
Under his feet, and made the blood stream down

3. I.e., at the hour when the bell is rung for the recitation of the salutation (Ave) to
the Virgin.
 The Cenci Hi •
255
My pallid cheeks. And he has given us all
Ditch water, and the fever-stricken flesh
Of buffaloes, and bade us eat or starve,
—
And we have eaten. He has made me look
On my beloved Bernado, when the rust 70

Of heavy chains has gangrened his sweet limbs,

And I have never yet despaired but now! —
What would I say? [Recovering herself.
Ah! No, 'tis nothing new.
The sufferings we all share have made me wild:
He only struck and cursed me as he passed; 75

—
He said, he looked, he did; nothing at all
Beyond his wont, yet it disordered me.
Alas! I am forgetful of my duty,
I should preserve my senses for your sake.
Lucretia. Nay, Beatrice; have courage, my sweet girl, 8o

If any one despairs it should be I

Who loved him once, and now must live with him
Till God in pity call for him or me.
For you may, like your sister, find some husband,
And smile, years hence, with children round your knees; 85

Whilst I, then dead, and all this hideous coil 4

Shall be remembered only as a dream.
Beatrice. Talk not to me, dear lady, of a husband.
Did you not nurse me when my mother died?
Did you not shield me and that dearest boy? 90

And had we any other friend but you

In infancy, with gentle words and looks,
To win our father not to murder us?
And shall I now desert you? May the ghost
Of my dead Mother plead against my soul 95

If I abandon her who the place

filled
She left, with more, even, than a mother's love!
Bernardo. And I am of my sister's mind. Indeed
I would not leave you in this wretchedness,

Even though the Pope should make me free to live I0°

In some blithe place, like others of my age,

With sports, and delicate food, and the fresh air.
Oh, never think that I will leave you, Mother!
Lucretia. My dear, dear children!

Enter cenci, suddenly.

Cenci. What, Beatrice here!
Come hither! [She shrinks back, and covers her face.
I0 5
Nay, hide not your face, 'tis fair;
Look up! WTiy, yesternight you dared to look
With disobedient insolence upon me,
Bending a stern and an inquiring brow

4. Turmoil, confusion; cf. "mortal coil" (Hamlet, III.i.67).

256 • The Cenci Hi
On what I meant; whilst I then sought to hide
—
That which I came to tell you but in vain. M0
Beatrice (wildly, staggering towards the door).
Oh, that the earth would gape! Hide me, God! O
Cenci. Then it was I whose inarticulate words
Fell from my lips, and who with tottering steps
Fled from your presence, as you now from mine.
Stay, I command you —from day and hour
this "3
Never again, I think, with fearless eye,
And brow superior, and unaltered cheek,
And that lip made for tenderness or scorn,
Shalt thou strike dumb the meanest of mankind;
Me least of all. Now get thee to thy chamber! I2°

Thou too, loathed image of thy cursed mother, [To bernardo.

Thy milky, meek face makes me
sick with hate!
[Exeunt Beatrice and bernardo.
(Aside.) So much has passed between us as must make
—
Me bold, her fearful. Tis an awful 5 thing
To touch such mischief as I now conceive: I2 5

So men sit shivering on the dewy bank,

And try the chill stream with their feet; once in . . .

How the delighted spirit pants for joy!

Lucretia (advancing timidly towards him).
Oh, husband! Pray forgive poor Beatrice.
She meant not any ill.

Cenci. Nor you perhaps? I3 °

Nor that young imp, whom you have taught by rote

Nor Giacomo?
Parricide with his alphabet?
Nor those two most unnatural sons, who stirred
Enmity up against me with the Pope?
Whom in one night merciful God cut off: '33

Innocent lambs! They thought not any ill.

You were not here conspiring? You said nothing
Of how I might be dungeoned as a madman;
Or be condemned to death for some offence,
And you would be the witnesses? This failing, — x 4°

How just it were to hire assassins, or

Put sudden poison in my evening drink?
Or smother me when overcome by wine?
Seeing we had no other judge but God,
And he had sentenced me, and there were none '45

But you to be the executioners

Of his decree enregistered in heaven?
Oh, no! You said not this?
Lucretia. So help me God,
I never thought the things you charge me with!

Cenci. If you dare speak that wicked lie again f 5

I'll kill you. What! It was not by your counsel

That Beatrice disturbed the feast last night?

5. Awe-inspiring.
 —
The Cenci II.fi 257

You did not hope to stir some enemies

Against me, and escape, and laugh to scorn
What every nerve of you now trembles at? J 55

You judged that men were bolder than they are;

Few dare to stand between their grave and me.
Lucretia. Look not so dreadfully! By my salvation
I knew not aught that Beatrice designed;

Nor do I think she designed any thing l6°

Until she heard you talk of her dead brothers.

Cenci. Blaspheming liar! You are damned for this!
But I will take you where you may persuade
The stones you tread on to deliver you:
For men shall there be none but those who dare l6 5

All things —
not question that which I command.
On Wednesday next I shall set out: you know
That savage rock, the Castle of Petrella,
Tis safely walled, and moated round about:
J 7°
Its dungeons underground, and its thick towers
Never told tales; though they have heard and seen
What might make dumb things speak. —Why do you linger?
Make speediest preparation for the journey! [Exit lucretia.
Trie all-beholding sun yet shines; I hear
A busy stir of men about the streets; J 75

I see the bright sky through the window panes:

It is a garish, broad, and peering day;

Loud, light, suspicious, full of eyes and ears,
And every little corner, nook, and hole
Is penetrated with the insolent light. l8°

Come darkness! Yet, what is the day to me?

And wherefore should I wish for night, who do
A deed which shall confound both night and day?
'Tis she shall grope through a bewildering mist
Of horror: if there be a sun in heaven l8 5

She shall not dare to look upon its beams;

Nor feel its warmth. Let her then wish for night;
The act I think shall soon extinguish all
For me: I bear a darker deadlier gloom
Than the earth's shade, 6 or interlunar air, x 9<>

Or constellations quenched in murkiest cloud,

In which I walk secure and unbeheld
—
Towards my purpose. Would that it were done! [Exit.

Scene II. —A chamber in the Vatican. Enter camillo and giacomo,

in conversation.

Camillo. There is an obsolete and doubtful law

By which you might obtain a bare provision
Of food and clothing
Giacomo. Nothing more? Alas!

6. The shadow that the earth casts away the dark period between the old and new
from the sun; interlunar: pertaining to moon.
 —
258 • The Cenci Il.ii

Bare must be the provision which strict law

Awards, and aged, sullen avarice pays. 5

Why did my father not apprentice me

To some mechanic trade? I should have then
Been trained in no highborn necessities
Which I could meet not by my daily toil.
The eldest son of a rich nobleman IO

Is heir to all his incapacities;

He has wide wants, and narrow powers. If you,
Cardinal Camillo, were reduced at once
From thrice-driven beds of down, 7 and delicate food,
An hundred servants, and six palaces, x 5

To that which nature doth indeed require?

Camillo. Nay, there is reason in your plea; 'twere hard.
Giacomo. 'Tis hard for a firm man to bear: but I
Have a dear wife, a lady of high birth,
Whose dowry in ill hour I lent my father 20

Without a bond or witness to the deed:

And children, who inherit her fine senses,
The breathing world;
fairest creatures in this
And she and they reproach me not. Cardinal,
Do vou not think the Pope would interpose 25

And stretch authority beyond the law?

Camillo. Though your peculiar case is hard, I know
The Pope will not divert the course of law.
After that impious feast the other night
I spoke with him, and urged him then to check 30

Your hand; he frowned and said,

father's cruel
"Children are disobedient, and they sting
Their fathers' hearts to madness and despair
Requiting years of care with contumely. 8
I pity the Count Cenci from my heart; 35

His outraged love perhaps awakened hate,

And thus he is exasperated to ill.
In the great war between the old and young
I, who have white hairs and a tottering body,

Will keep at least blameless neutrality." 40

Enter orsino.
You, my good Lord Orsino, heard those words.
Orsino. What words?
Giacomo. Alas, repeat them not again!
There then is no redress for me, at least
None but that which I may atchieve myself,
Since I am driven to the brink. But, say,— 45

My innocent sister and my only brother

7. Apparently down (the soft under- blown away from the others (see V.ii.
feathers of birds) that has been sepa- 169-170).
rated from larger, coarser feathers by 8. Insulting or offensively contemptuous
beating the feathers until the lightest are language or treatment.
 —
The Cenci ILii 259
Are dying underneath my father's eye.
The memorable torturers of this land,
Galeaz Visconti, Borgia, Ezzelin, 9
Never inflicted on their meanest slave 50

What these endure; shall they have no protection?

Camillo. Why, if they would petition to the Pope
I see not how he could refuse it yet
He holds it of most dangerous example
—
In aught to weaken the paternal power, 55

Being, as 'twere, the shadow of his own.

I pray you now excuse me. I have business

That will not bear delay. [Exit camillo.

Giacomo. But you, Orsino,
Have the petition: wherefore not present it?
Orsino. I have presented it, and backed it with 6o

My earnest prayers, and urgent interest;

It was returned unanswered. I doubt not

But that the strange and execrable deeds

—
Alledged in it in truth they might well baffle
—
Any belief have turned the Pope's displeasure 6s

Upon the accusers from the criminal:

So I should guess from what Camillo said.
Giacomo. My
friend, that palace- walking devil Gold
Has whispered silence to his Holiness:
And we are left, as scorpions ringed with fire, 70

What should we do but strike ourselves to death? 1

For he who is our murderous persecutor
Is shielded by a father's holy name,

Or I would [Stops abruptly.

Orsino. What? Fear not to speak your thought.
Words are but holy as the deeds they cover: 75
A priest who has forsworn the God he serves;
A judge who makes truth weep at his decree;
A friend who should weave counsel, as I now,
But as the mantle of some selfish guile;
A father who is all a tyrant seems, 8o

Were the prophaner for his sacred name.

Giacomo. Ask me not what I think; the unwilling brain
Feigns often what it would not; and we trust
Imagination with such phantasies
85
As the tongue dares not fashion into words,

9. Three noted Italian tyrants featured the warring petty rulers of the region;
as villains in Sismondi's History of the Ezzelino (Eccelino) da Romano (1194—
Italian Republics in the Middle Ages. 1259), vicar and son-in-law of Holy
Gian Galeazzo
Visconti (1351-1402), Roman Emperor Frederick II, led the
first Duke
of Milan, imprisoned or killed Ghibelline faction in Lombardy as ruler
his and then conquered much
relatives of Verona, Vicenza, and Padua,
of northern Italy; Cesare Borgia (1475- 1. According to bestiary tradition, when
1507), the son of Pope Alexander VI, a scorpions are surrounded by fire, they
Spaniard, tried to carve out a personal commit suicide by stinging themselves,
state in Romagna, the marches of An- (See Queen Mab, VI. 36-38 and note.)
cona, and Tuscany by cruelly suppressing
 —
260 - The Cenci ILii

Which have no words, their horror makes them dim

—
To the mind's eye. My heart denies itself
To think what you demand.
Orsino. But a friend's bosom
the inmost cave of our own mind
Is as
Where we sit shut from the wide gaze of day, 9°

And from the all-communicating air.

You look what I suspected
Giacomo. Spare me now!
I am as one lost in a midnight wood,
Who dares not ask some harmless passenger
The path across the wilderness, lest he, 95

As my thoughts are, should be a murderer. —

I know you are my friend, and all I dare

Speak to my soul that will I trust with thee.

But now my heart is heavy and would take
Lone counsel from a night of sleepless care. IO°

Pardon me, that I say farewell farewell! —

I would that to my own suspected self

I could address a word so full of peace.

Orsino. Farewell! —Be your thoughts better or more bold.

[Exit GIACOMO.
I had disposed the Cardinal Camillo I0 5

To feed his hope with cold encouragement:

It fortunately serves my close designs
That 'tis a trick of this same family
To analyse their own and other minds.
Such self-anatomy 2 shall teach the will no
Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers,
Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,
Into the depth of darkest purposes:
So Cenci fell into the pit; even I,
Since Beatrice unveiled me to myself, 1I5

And made me shrink from what I cannot shun,

Shew a poor figure to my own esteem,
To which I grow half reconciled. I'll do
As mischief as I can; that thought
little
Shall fee 3 the accuser conscience.
(After a pause.) Now what harm I2 °

If Cenci should be murdered? —

Yet, if murdered,
Wherefore by me? And what if I could take
The profit, yet omit the sin and peril
In such an action? Of all earthly things
I2 5
I fear a man whose blows outspecd his words;

And such is Cenci: and while Cenci lives

His daughter's dowry were a secret grave
If a priest wins her. —
Oh, fair Beatrice!
Would that I loved thee not, or loving thee
2. Self-dissection or analysis. 3. Pay, bribe.
 —
The Cenci IILi • 261

Could but despise danger and gold and all J 3<>

That frowns between my wish and its effect,

Or smiles beyond it! There is no escape . . .

Her bright form kneels beside me at the altar,

And follows me to the resort of men,
And fills my
slumber with tumultuous dreams, J 35

So when my blood seems liquid fire;

I wake
And if I strike my damp and dizzy head
My hot palm scorches it: her very name,
But spoken by a stranger, makes my heart
Sicken and pant; and thus unprofitably '4°

I clasp the phantom of unfelt delights

Till weak imagination half possesses
The self-created shadow. Yet much longer
Will not nurse this life of feverous hours:
I

From the unravelled hopes of Giacomo I45

I must work out my own dear purposes.

I see, as from a tower, the end of all:

Her father dead; her brother bound to me

By a dark secret, surer than the grave;
Her mother scared and unexpostulating x 5°

From the dread manner of her wish atchieved:

And she! — Once more take courage, my faint heart;
What dares a friendless maiden matched with thee?
I have such foresight as assures success:
Some unbeheld divinity doth ever, J 55

When dread events are near, stir up men's minds

To black suggestions; and he prospers best,
Not who becomes the instrument of ill,
But who can flatter the dark spirit, that makes
Its empire and its prey of other hearts l6 °

Till it become his slave ... as I will do. [Exit.

END OF THE SECOND ACT.

ACT III

Scene I. An apartment in the Cenci Palace, lucretia, to her

enter Beatrice.

Beatrice. (She enters staggering, and speaks wildly.)

Reach me that handkerchief! —My brain is hurt;
My eyes are full of blood; just wipe them for me . . .

I see but indistinctly . . .

Lucretia. My sweet child,

You have no wound; only a cold dew
'tis

That starts from your dear Drow Alas! Alas! . . .

What has befallen?

Beatrice. How comes this hair undone?
Its wandering strings must be what blind me so,
 .

262 • The Cenci lll.i

And yet I tied it fast. —O, horrible!

The pavement sinks under my feet! The walls
Spin round! I see a woman weeping there, I0

And standing calm and motionless, whilst I

Slide giddily as the world reels. My God! . . .

The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!

The sunshine on the floor is black! The air
Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe I5

In charnel pits! Pah! I am choked! There creeps

A clinging, black, contaminating mist
About me . . . 'tis substantial, heavy, thick,
I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues
My fingers and my limbs to one another, 20

And eats into my sinews, and dissolves

My flesh to a pollution, poisoning
The and inmost spirit of life!
subtle, pure,
My God! I never knew what the mad felt
Before; for I am mad beyond all doubt! 25

(More wildly.) No, I am dead! These putrefying limbs

Shut round and sepulchre the panting soul
Which would burst forth into the wandering air! (A pause.)
What hideous thought was that I had even now?
'Tis gone; and yet its burthen remains here 3°

O'er these dull eyes upon this weary heart! . . .

O, world! O, life! O, day! O, misery!

Lucretia. What ails thee, mv poor child? She answers not:
Her spirit apprehends the sense of pain,
But not its cause; suffering has dried away 35

The source from which it sprung . . .

Beatrice (franticly) Like Parricide . . .

Misery has killed its father: yet its father

Never like mine .0, God!
. . What thing am I?
Lucretia. My dearest child, what has your father done?
Beatrice (doubtfully). Who art thou, questioner? I have no
father. 4°

(Aside.) She ismadhouse nurse who tends on me,

the
It is a piteous office. [To lucretia, in a slow, subdued voice.
you know Do
I thought I was that wretched Beatrice

Men speak of, whom her father sometimes hales 4

From hall to hall by the entangled hair; 45

At others, pens up naked in damp cells

Where scaly reptiles crawl, and starves her there,
Till she will eat strange flesh. This woful story
So did I overact in my sick dreams,
That I imagined ... no, it cannot be! 5°

Horrible things have been in this wide world.

Prodigious mixtures, and confusions strange

4. Drags, especially by force or violence.

 The Cenci IILi • 263
Of good and ill; and worse have been conceived
Than ever there was found a heart to do.
But never fancy imaged such a deed 55

As . . . [Pauses, suddenly recollecting herself.

'Who art thou? Swear to me, ere I die
With fearful expectation, that indeed
Thou art not what thou seemest . . . Mother!
Lucretia. Oh!
My sweet child, know you . . .

Beatrice. Yet speak it not:

For then if this be truth, that other too 6°

Must be a truth, a firm enduring truth,

Linked with each lasting circumstance of life,
Never to change, never to pass away.
Why so it is. This is the Cenci palace;
Thou art Lucretia; I am Beatrice. 65

I have talked some wild words, but will no more.

Mother, come near me: from this point of time,
I am . . . [Her voice dies away faintly.
Lucretia. Alas! What has befallen thee, child?
What has thy father done?
Beatrice. What have I done?
Am not innocent? Is it my crime
I 70

That one with white hair, and imperious brow,

Who tortured me from my forgotten years,
As parents only dare, should call himself
My father, yet should be! Oh, what am I? —
What name, what place, what memory shall be mine? 75
What retrospects, outliving even despair?
Lucretia. He is a violent tyrant, surely, child:
We know that death alone can make us free;
His death or ours. But what can he have done
Of deadlier outrage or worse injury? 8o

Thou art unlike thyself; thine eyes shoot forth

A wandering and strange spirit. Speak to me,
Unlock those pallid hands whose fingers twine
With one another.
Beatrice. 'Tis the restless life
85
Tortured within them. If I try to speak
I shall go mad. Aye, something must be done;

What, yet I know not something which shall make

. . .

The thing that I have suffered but a shadow

In the dread lightning which avenges it;
Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying *>

The consequence of what it cannot cure.

Some such thing is to be endured or done:
When I know what, I shall be still and calm,
And never any thing will move me more.
But now! —O blood, which art my father's blood, 95
264 • The Cenci lll.i

Circling through these contaminated veins,

If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth,
Could wash away the crime, and punishment
By which I suffer ... no, that cannot be!

Many might doubt there were a God above IO°

Who sees and permits evil, and so die:

That faith no agony shall obscure in me.
Lucretia. It must indeed have been some bitter wrong;
Yet what, I dare not guess. Oh, my lost child,
Hide not in proud impenetrable grief I0 5

Thy sufferings from my fear.

Beatrice. I hide them not.
What which you would have me speak?
are the words
I, who can feign no image in my mind

Of that which has transformed me. I, whose thought

Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up "°
In its own formless horror. Of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse, 5
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My if another ever knew
misery:
Aught like to it, she died as I will die, n5
And left it, as I must, without a name.
Death! Death! Our law and our religion call thee
A punishment and a reward Oh, which . . .

Have I deserved?
Lucretia. The peace of innocence;
Till in your season you be called to heaven. I2 °

Whate'er you may have suffered, you have done

No evil. Death must be the punishment
Of crime, or the reward of trampling down
The thorns which God has strewed upon the path
Which leads to immortality.
I2 5
Beatrice. Aye, death ...
The punishment of crime. pray thee, God,
I

Let me not be bewildered while I judge.

If Imust live day after day, and keep
These limbs, the unworthy temple of thy spirit,
As a foul den from which what thou abhorrest f 3°

Mav mock thee, unavenged ... it shall not be!

Self-murder no, that might be no escape,
. . .

For thy decree vawns like a Hell between

—
Our will and it: O! In this mortal world
I35
There is no vindication and no law
Which can adjudge and execute the doom
Of that through which I suffer.
Enter orsino.
(She approaches him solemnly.) Welcome, Friend!
I have to tell you that, since last we met,

5. Conversation; social communication.

 —
The Cenci IILi • 265
I have endured a wrong so great and strange,
That neither life or death can give me rest. *4<>

Ask me not what it is, for there are deeds

Which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.
Orsino. And what is he who has thus injured you?
Beatrice. The man they call my father: a dread name.
Orsino. It cannot be . . .

Beatrice. What can be, or not,

it
x 45

Forbear to think. It is, and it has been;

Advise me how it shall not be again.
I thought to die; but a religious awe

Restrains me, and the dread lest death itself

l $°
Might be no refuge from the consciousness
Of what is yet unexpiated. Oh, speak!
Orsino. Accuse him of the deed, and let the law
Avenge thee.
Beatrice. Oh, ice-hearted counsellor!
If Icould find a word that might make known
The crime of my destroyer; and that done I55

My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret

Which cankers 6 my heart's core; aye, lay all bare
So that my unpolluted fame should be
With vilest gossips a stale mouthed story;
A mock, a bye-word, an astonishment: l6°

If this were done, which never shall be done,

Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate,
And the strange horror of the accuser's tale,
and overpowering speech;
Baffling belief,
Scarce whispered, unimaginable, wrapt l6 s

In hideous hints Oh, most assured redress!

. . .

Orsino. You will endure it then?

Beatrice. Endure? —Orsino,
It seems your counsel is small profit.
[Turns from him, and speaks half to herself.
Aye,
All must be suddenly resolved and done.
What is this undistinguishable mist x 7°

Of thoughts, which rise, like shadow after shadow,

Darkening each other?
Orsino. Should the offender live?
Triumph in his misdeed? and make, by use,
His crime, whate'er it is, dreadful no doubt,
Thine element; until thou mayst become *75

Utterly lost; subdued even to the hue

Of that which thou permittest?
Beatrice (to herself). Mighty death!
Thou double visaged shadow! 7 Only judge!
6. Corrupts; consumes slowly and se- god of beginnings and endings, who is
cretly. usually depicted with two faces, one to
7. Shelley here associates the image of view the past and one the future,
death with the myth of Janus, the Roman
266 • The Cenci IILi

Rightfullest arbiter! [She retires absorbed in thought.

Lucretia. If the lightning
Of God has e'er descended to avenge ... l8 °

Orsino. Blaspheme not! His high Providence commits

Its glory on this earth, and their own wrongs
Into the hands of men; if they neglect
To punish crime . . .

Lucretia. But if one, like this wretch,

Should mock, with gold, opinion, law and power? l8 5

If there be no appeal to that which makes

The guiltiest tremble? If because our wrongs,
For that they are, unnatural, strange and monstrous,
Exceed all measure of belief? O God!
If, for the very reasons which should make l *°

Redress most swift and sure, our injurer triumphs?

And we the victims, bear worse punishment
Than that appointed for their torturer?
Orsino. Think not
But that there is redress where there is wrong,
So we be bold enough to seize it.
Lucretia. How? ! w
If there were any way to make all sure,
I know not . . . but I think it might be good
To . . .

Orsino. Why, his late outrage to Beatrice;

For it is such, as I but faintly guess,
2 °°
As makes remorse dishonour, and leaves her
Only one duty, how she may avenge:
You, but one refuge from ills ill endured;
Me, but one counsel . . .

Lucretia. For we cannot hope

That aid, or retribution, or resource
2°5
Will arise thence, where ever}' other one
Might find them with less need. [Beatrice advances.
Orsino. Then . . .

Beatrice. Peace, Orsino!

And, honoured Lady, while I speak, I pray,
That you put off, as garments overworn,
Forbearance and respect, remorse and fear,
2I °
And all the fit restraints of daily life,
Which have been borne from childhood, but which now
Would be a mockery to mv holier plea.
As I have endured a wrong,
have said, I

Which, though be expressionless, is such it

2I 5
As asks atonement; both for what is past,
And lest I be reserved, day after day.
To load with crimes an overburthened soul.
And be what ye can dream not. I have prayed
. . .

To God, and I have talked with mv own heart,

 The Cenci III A • 267
And have unravelled my entangled will, 22 °

And have at length determined what is right.

Art thou my friend, Orsino? False or true?
Pledge thy salvation ere I speak.
Orsino. I swear

To dedicate my cunning, and my strength,

My silence,
and whatever else is mine, 22 5

To thy commands.
Lucretia. You think we should devise
His death?
And execute what is devised,
Beatrice.
And suddenly. We
must be brief and bold.
Orsino. And yet most cautious.
Lucretia. For the jealous laws
Would punish us with death and infamy 2 3°

For that which it became themselves to do.

Beatrice. Be cautious as ye may, but prompt. Orsino,
What are the means?
Orsino. I know two dull, fierce outlaws,

Who think man's spirit as a worm's, and they

Would trample out, for any slight caprice, 2 35

The meanest or the noblest life. This mood

Is marketable here in Rome. They sell
What we now want.
Lucretia. To-morrow before dawn,
Cenci will take us to that lonely rock,
Petrella, in the Apulian Apennines. 8 2 4°

If he arrive there . . .

Beatrice. He must not arrive.

Orsino. Will be dark before vou reach the tower?
it

Lucretia. The sun will scarce be set.

Beatrice. But I remember
Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine; 'tis rough and narrow, 2 45

And winds with short turns down the precipice;

And in its depth there is a mightv rock,
Which has, from unimaginable vears,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulph, and with the agony 2 5°

With which it seems slowlv coming down;

clings
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life; vet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag 2 55

Huge as despair, as if in weariness,

The melancholy mountain yawns below, . . .

You hear but see not an impetuous torrent

Raging among the caverns, and a bridge

8. Mountains in Apulia, a region of southeast Italy.

268 • The Cenci lll.i

Crosses the chasm; and high above there grow, 26°

With intersecting trunks, from crag to crag,

Cedars, and yews, and pines; whose tangled hair
Is matted in one solid roof of shade
By the dark twine. At noon day here ivy's
Tis twilight, and at sunset blackest night. 9 26 5

Orsino. Before you reach that bridge make some excuse

For spurring on vour mules, or loitering
Until . . .

Beatrice. What sound is that?

Lucretia. Hark! No, it cannot be a servant's step;
Itmust be Cenci, unexpectedly 2 7°

Returned Make some excuse for being here.

. . .

Beatrice. (To orsino, as she goes out.)

That step we hear approach must never pass
The bridge of which we spoke. [Exeunt lucretia and Beatrice.
Orsino. What shall I do?
Cenci must find me here, and I must bear
The imperious inquisition of his looks 2 ?5

As what brought me hither: let me mask

to
Mine own in some inane and vacant smile.
Enter giacomo, in a hurried manner.
How! Have you ventured hither? Know you then
That Cenci is from home?
Giacomo. I sought him here;

And now must wait till he returns.

28 °
Orsino. Great God!
Weigh you the danger of this rashness?
Giacomo. Ave!
Does my destroyer know his danger? We
Are now no more, as once, parent and child,
But man to man; the oppressor to the oppressed;
The slanderer to the slandered; foe to foe: 28s

He has cast Nature off, which was his shield.

And Nature casts him off, who is her shame;
And I spurn both. Is it a father's throat
Which I will shake, and say, ask not gold; I

29°
I ask not nor memories
happy vears;
Of tranquil childhood; nor home-sheltered love;
Though all these hast thou torn from me, and more;
But onlv mv fair fame; only one hoard
Of peace, which I thought hidden from thy hate.
Under the penurv heaped on me by thee, 295

Or I will God can understand and pardon,

. . .

Why should I speak with man?

9. Lines 243-265 contain the description Patricio by the Spanish dramatist Pedro
which, Shelley says in his Preface, he Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681); in
modeled on a passage near the end of Calderon's play the description is that of
the second act of El Pitrgatorio de San the entrance to Hell.
 The Cenci lll.i •
269

Orsino. Be calm, dear friend.

Giacomo. Well, calmly tell you what he did.
I will
This old Francesco Cenci, as you know,
Borrowed the dowry of my wife from me, 3 °°

And then denied the loan; and left me so

In poverty, the which I sought to mend
By holding a poor office in the state.
Ithad been promised to me, and already
Ibought new clothing for my ragged babes, 3 °5

And my wife smiled; and my heart knew repose.

When Cenci's intercession, as I found,
Conferred this office on a wretch, whom thus
He paid for vilest service. I returned
With this ill news, and we sate sad together 3I °

Solacing our despondency with tears

Of such affection and unbroken faith
As temper life's worst bitterness; when he,
As he is wont, came to upbraid and curse,
Mocking our povertv, and telling us 3I5

Such was God's scourge for disobedient sons.

And then, that I might strike him dumb with shame,
I spoke of my wife's dowry; but he coined

A brief yet specious tale, how I had wasted

The sum and he saw
in secret riot; 32 °

My wife was touched, and he went smiling forth.

And when I knew the impression he had made,
And felt my wife insult with silent scorn
Mv ardent truth, and look averse and cold,
I went forth too: but soon returned again; 325

Yet not so soon but that my wife had taught

My children her harsh thoughts, and they all cried,
"Give us clothes, father! Give us better food!
What you in one night squander were enough
For months!" I looked, and saw that home was hell. 33 °

And to that hell will I return no more

Until mine enemy has rendered up
Atonement, or, as he gave life to me
I will, reversing nature's law . . .

Orsino. Trust me,

The compensation which thou seekest here 33 $

Will be denied.
Giacomo. Then Are you not my friend?
. . .

Did you not hint at the alternative,

Upon the brink of which you see I stand,
The other day when we conversed together?
My wrongs were then less. That word parricide, 3 *<>

Although I am resolved, haunts me like fear.

Orsino. It must be fear itself, for the bare word
Is hollow mockery. Mark, how wisest God
270 • TheCenciULi
Draws to one point the threads of a just doom,
So sanctifying it: what you devise 345

Is, as it were, accomplished.

Giacomo. Is he dead?
Orsino. His grave is ready. Know that since we met
Cenci has done an outrage to his daughter.
Giacomo. What outrage?
Orsino. That she speaks* not, but you may
Conceive such half conjectures as I do, 350

From her fixed paleness, and the lofty grief

Of her stern brow bent on the idle air,
And her severe unmodulated voice,
Drowning both tenderness and dread; and last
From this; that whilst her step-mother and I, 355

Bewildered in our horror, talked together

With obscure hints; both self-misunderstood
And darkly guessing, stumbling, in our talk,
Over the truth, and yet to its revenge,
She interrupted us, and with a look 360

Which told before she spoke it, he must die . . .

Giacomo. It is enough. Mv
doubts are well appeased;
There is a higher reason for the act
Than mine; there is a holier judge than me,
A more unblamed avenger. Beatrice, 365

Who in the gentleness of thy sweet youth

Hast never trodden on a worm, or bruised
A living flower, but thou hast pitied it
With needless tears! Fair sister, thou in whom
Men wondered how such loveliness and wisdom 370

Did not destroy each other! Is there made

Ravage of thee? O, heart, I ask no more
Justification! Shall I wait, Orsino,
Till he return, and stab him at the door?
Orsino. Not so; some accident might interpose 375

To rescue him from what is now most sure;

And you are unprovided where to fly,

How to excuse or to conceal. Nay, listen:

All is contrived; success is so assured
That . . .

Enter Beatrice.
Tis my brother's voice! You know me not?
Beatrice. 380

Giacomo. My sister, my lost sister!

Beatrice. Lost indeed!
Isee Orsino has talked with you, and
That you conjecture things too horrible
To speak, yet far less than the truth. Now, stay not,
He might me; I
return: yet kiss shall know 385

That then thou hast consented to his death.

Farewell, Farewell! Let piety to God,
 The Cenci ffl.fi • 271
Brotherly love, justice and clemency,
And all things that make tender hardest hearts
Make thine hard, brother. Answer not . . . farewell. 390

[Exeunt severally.

Scene II. —A mean apartment in giacomo's house, giacomo, alone.

Giacomo. Tis midnight, and Orsino comes not yet.

[Thunder, and the sound of a storm.
What! can the everlasting elements
Feel with a worm like man? If so the shaft
Of mercy-winged lightning would not fall
On stones and trees. My
wife and children sleep: s

They are now living in unmeaning dreams:

But I must wake, still doubting if that deed
Be just which is most necessary. O,
Thou unreplenished lamp! whose narrow fire
Is shaken by the wind, and on whose edge I0

Devouring darkness hovers! Thou small flame,

Which, as a dying pulse rises and falls,
Still flickerest up and down, how very soon,
Did I not feed thee, wouldst thou fail and be
As thou hadst never been! So wastes and sinks I5

Even now, perhaps, the life that kindled mine:

But that no power can fill with vital oil
That broken lamp of flesh. Ha! 'tis the blood
Which fed these veins that ebbs till all is cold:
It is the form that moulded mine that sinks 20

Into the white and yellow spasms of death:

It is the soul by which mine was arrayed
In God's immortal likeness which now stands
Naked before Heaven's judgement seat! [A bell strikes.
One! Two!
The hours crawl on; and when my hairs are white, 25

My son will then perhaps be waiting thus,

Tortured between just hate and vain remorse;
Chiding the tardy messenger of news
Like those which I expect. I almost wish
He be not dead, although mv wrongs are great; 30

Yet 'tis Orsino's step

. . . . . .

Enter orsino.
Speak!
Orsino. I am come
To say he has escaped.
Giacomo. Escaped!
Orsino. And safe
Within Petrella. He by the spot
past
Appointed for the deed an hour too soon.
272 • The Cenci IILii

Giacomo. Are we the fools of such contingencies? 35

And do we waste in blind misgivings thus

The hours when we should act? Then wind and thunder,
Which seemed to howl his knell, is the loud laughter
With which Heaven mocks our weakness! I henceforth
Will ne'er repent of aught designed or done 4°

But my repentance.
Orsino. See, the lamp is out. *

Giacomo. If no remorse is ours when the dim air

Has drank this innocent flame, why should we quail
When Cenci 's life, that light bv which ill spirits
See the worst deeds they prompt, shall sink for ever? 45
No, I am hardened.

Orsino. Why, what need of this?

Who feared the pale intrusion of remorse
In a just deed? Although our first plan failed
Doubt not but he will soon be laid to rest.
But light the lamp; let us not talk i' the dark. 50

Giacomo (lighting the lamp). And vet once quenched I cannot

thus relume 1
My father's life: do you not think his ghost
Might plead that argument with God?
Orsino. Once gone
You cannot now recall your sister's peace;
Your own extinguished years of youth and hope; 55

Nor your wife's bitter words; nor all the taunts

Which, from the prosperous, weak misfortune takes;
Nor your dead mother; nor . . .

Giacomo. O, speak no more!

I am resolved, although this very hand

Must quench the life that animated it. ^

Orsino. There is no need of that. Listen: you know
Olimpio, the castellan 2 of Petrella
In old Colonna's time; him whom your father
Degraded from his post? And Marzio,
That desperate wretch, whom he deprived last year 65

Of a reward of blood, well earned and due?

Giacomo. I know Olimpio; and they say he hated
Old Cenci so, that in his silent rage
His lips grew white only to see him pass.
Of Marzio I know nothing.
Orsino. Marzio's hate 70

Matches Olimpio's. I have sent these men,

But in your name, and as at your request,
To talk with Beatrice and Lucretia.
Giacomo. Only to talk?
Orsino. The moments which even now
Pass onward to to-morrow's midnight hour 75

1. Relight, rekindle. 2. The governor or constable of a castle

 —
The Cenci IV. i •
273
May memorize 3
their flight with death: ere then
They must have talked, and may perhaps have done,
And made an end . . .

Giacomo. Listen! What sound is that?

Orsino. The house-dog moans, and the beams crack: nought
else.
Giacomo. It is my wife complaining in her sleep: 8o

I doubt not she is saying bitter things

Of me; and all my children round her dreaming

That I deny them sustenance.
Orsino. Whilst he
Who truly took it from them, and who fills
Their hungry rest with bitterness, now sleeps 85

Lapped in bad pleasures, and triumphantly

Mocks thee in visions of successful hate
Too like the truth of day.
Giacomo. If e'er he wakes
Again, I will not trust to hireling hands . . .

Orsino. Why, that were well. I must be gone; good-night! 9©

When next we meet may all be done
Giacomo. And all

Forgotten —Oh, that I had never been! [Exeunt.

END OF THE THIRD ACT.

ACT IV
Scene I. —An apartment in the Castle of Petrella.
Enter cenci.

Cenci. She comes not; yet I left her even now

Vanquished and faint. She knows the penalty
Of her delay: yet what if threats are vain?
Am I now not within Petrella's moat?
Or fear I still the eyes and ears of Rome? 5

Might I not drag her by the golden hair?

Stamp on her? Keep her sleepless till her brain
Be overworn? Tame her with chains and famine?
Less would suffice. Yet so to leave undone
What I most seek! No, 'tis her stubborn will I0

Which by its own consent shall stoop as low

As that which drags it down.

Enter lucretia.
Thou loathed wretch!
Hide thee from my abhorrence, Fly, begone!
Yet stay! Bid Beatrice come hither.
Lucretia. Oh,
Husband! I pray for thine own wretched sake I5

3. Memor'alize.
 i

274 • The Cenci IV.

Heed what thou dost. A man who walks like thee
Through crimes, and through the danger of his crimes,
Each hour may stumble o'er a sudden grave.
And thou art old; thy hairs are hoary grey;
As thou wouldst save from death and 20
thyself hell,
Pity thy daughter; give her to some friend
In marriage: so that she may tempt thee not
To hatred, or worse thoughts, if worse there be.

Cenci. her sister who has found a home

What! like
To mock my hate from with prosperity? 25

Strange ruin shall destroy both her and thee

And all that yet remain. My death may be
—
Rapid her destiny outspeeds it. Go,
Bid her come hither, and before mv mood
Be changed, lest I should drag her by the hair. 30

Lucretia. She sent me to thee, husband. At thy presence

She fell, as thou dost know, into a trance;
And in that trance she heard a voice which said,
"Cenci must die! Let him confess himself!
Even now the accusing Angel waits to hear 35

If God, to punish his enormous crimes,

Harden his dying heart!"
Cenci. Why—
such things are . . .

No doubt divine revealings mav be made.

Jtif'Tis plain I have been favoured from above,
For when I cursed my sons they died. Aye so —
40 . . . . . .

As to the right or wrong that's talk repentance . . . . . .

Repentance is an easy moment's work

And more depends on God than me. Well well . . . . . .

I must give up the greater point, which was

To poison and corrupt her soul.

[A pause; lucretia approaches anxiously, and
then shrinks back as he speaks.
One, two; 4*

jL Aye . Rocco and Cristofano my curse

. .

Strangled: and Giacomo, I think, will find

Life a worse Hell than that beyond the grave:
Vi Beatrice shall, if there be skill in hate
Die in despair, blaspheming: to Bernardo, 50

He is so innocent, I will bequeath

The memory of these deeds, and make his youth
The sepulchre of hope, where evil thoughts
Shall grow like weeds on a neglected tomb.
When all is done, out in the wide Campagna, 4 55

I will pile up my silver and my gold;

My costly robes, paintings and tapestries;

My parchments and all records of my wealth,
4. The Roman Campagna is the level of unhealthy climate malaria was
its —
valley of theRiver surrounding
Tiber rife there —
and because Italian warlords,
Rome; in Count Cenci's (and in Shel- like the Orsini and Colonna families, had
ley's) day it was almost deserted because ravaged it.
 The Cenci IV. i •
275
And make a bonfire in my joy, and leave
Of my possessions nothing but my name; 6o

Which shall be an inheritance to strip

Its wearer bare as infamy. That done,
My soul, which is a scourge, 5 will I resign
Into the hands of him who wielded it;

Be it for its own punishment or theirs, 65

He not ask it of me till the lash 6

will
Be broken in its last and deepest wound;
Until its hate be all inflicted. Yet,
Lest death outspeed my purpose, let me make
Short work and sure . . . [Going.
Lucretia (Stops him.) Oh, stay! It was a feint: 70

She had no vision, and she heard no voice.

I said it but to awe thee.

Cenci. That is well.

Vile palterer 7 with the sacred truth of God,
Be thy soul choked with that blaspheming lie!
For Beatrice worse terrors are in store 75

To bend her to my will.

Lucretia. Oh! to what will?
What cruel sufferings more than she has known
Canst thou inflict?
Cenci. Andrea! Go call my daughter, -£g
And if she comes not tell her that I come.
What sufferings? I will drag her, step by step, 8o

Through infamies unheard of among men:

She shall stand shelterless in the broad noon
Of public scorn, for acts blazoned 8 abroad,
One among which shall be . What? Canst thou guess?
. .

85
She shall become (for what she most abhors
Shall have a fascination to entrap
Her loathing will), to her own conscious self
All she appears to others;and when dead,
As she shall die unshrived 9 and unforgiven,
A rebel to her father and her God, 90

Her corpse shall be abandoned to the hounds; 1

Her name shall be the terror of the earth;
Her spirit shall approach the throne of God
Plague-spotted with my curses. I will make
Body and soul a monstrous lump of ruin. 95

Enter andrea.
Andrea. The lady Beatrice . . .

Cenci. Speak, pale slave! What

Said she?
Andrea. My Lord, 'twas what she looked; she said:
5. A personseen as an instrument of 8. Conspicuously displayed, proclaimed,
divine chastisement. 9. Unconfessed.
6. the soul of line 63.
I.e., 1. "And the dogs shall eat Jezebel . . .

7. An equivocator or trifler with serious and there shall be none to bury her" (2
matters. Kings 9:10).
276 • The Cenci IV. i

"Go tell my father that I see the gulph

Of Hell between us two, which he may pass,

I will not." [Exit andrea.
Cenci. Go thou quick, Lucretia, IO°

Tell her to come; yet let her understand

Her coming is consent: and say, moreover,
That if she come not I will curse her. [Exit lucretia.
Ha! .

With what but with a father's curse doth God

and make pale I05
Panic-strike armed victory,
Cities in their prosperity? The world's Father
Must grant a parent's prayer against his child
Be he who asks even what men call me.
Will not the deaths of her rebellious brothers
Awe her before I speak? For I on them II0

Did imprecate quick ruin, and it came.

Enter lucretia.
Well; what? Speak, wretch!
Lucretia. She said, "I cannot come;
Go tell my father that
I see a torrent

Of his own blood

raging between us."
Cenci (kneeling). God!
Hear me! If this most specious mass of flesh, n5
Which thou hast made my daughter; this my blood,
This particle of my divided being;
Or rather, this and my disease,
my bane
Whose sight infects and poisons me; this devil
Which sprung from me as from a hell, was meant I2 °

To aught good use; if her bright loveliness

Was kindled to illumine this dark world;
Ifnursed by thy selectcst dew of love
Such virtues blossom in her as should make
The peace of life, I prav thee for mv sake, I25

As thou the common God and Father art

Of her, and me, and all; reverse that doom!
Earth, in the name of God, let her food be
Poison, until she be encrusted round
With leprous stains! Heaven, rain upon her head l *°

The blistering drops of the Maremma's dew, 2

Till she be speckled like a toad; parch up
Those love-enkindled lips, warp those fine limbs
To loathed lameness! All-beholding sun,
Strike in thine envy those life-darting eves f 35

With thine own blinding beams!

Lucretia. Peace! Peace!
For thine own sake unsav those dreadful words.
When high God grants He punishes such prayers.
2. The Maremma, a coastal plain and tidewater swamp near Pisa, was noted for its

unhealthy climate.
 The Cenci IV. i •
277
Cenci (leaping up, and throwing his right hand towards Heaven).
He does his will, I mine! This in addition,
That if she have a child . . .

Lucretia. Horrible thought! x 4<>

Cenci. That she ever have a child; and thou,

if

Quick Nature! I adjure thee by thy God,

That thou be fruitful in her, and encrease

And multiply, fulfilling his command,
And my deep imprecation! May it be J 45

A hideous likeness of herself, that as

From a distorting mirror, she may see
Her image mixed with what she most abhors,
Smiling upon her from her nursing breast.
And that the child may from its infancy ^°
Grow, day by day, more wicked and deformed,
Turning her mother's love to misery:
And that both she and it may live until
It shall repay her care and pain with hate,
Or what may else be more unnatural. J 55

So he may hunt her through the clamorous scoffs

Of the loud world to a dishonoured grave.
Shall I revoke this curse? Go, bid her come,
Before my words are chronicled in heaven. [Exit lucretia.
I do not feel as if I were a man, l6 °

But like a fiend appointed to chastise

The offences of some unremembered world.
My blood is running up and down my veins;
A fearful pleasure makes it prick and tingle:
I feel a giddy sickness of strange awe; l6 5

My heart is beating with an expectation

Of horrid joy.

Enter lucretia.
What? Speak!
Lucretia. She bids thee curse;
And thy curses, as they cannot do,
if

Could kill her soul . . .

Cenci. She would not come. 'Tis well,

I can do both: first take what I demand, no
And then extort concession. To thy chamber!
Fly ere I spurn 3 thee: and beware this night
That thou cross not my footsteps. It were safer
To come between the tyger and his prey. [Exit lucretia.
It must be late;eyes grow weary dim
mine x 75

With unaccustomed heaviness of sleep.

Conscience! Oh, thou mo:t insolent of lies!
They say that sleep, that healing dew of heaven,
Steeps not in balm the foldings of the brain

3. Kick.
 —
278 • The Cenci IV. ii
Which I will go
thinks thee an impostor. l8 °

an hour of rest,
First to belie thee with
Which will be deep and calm, I feel: and then . . .

O, multitudinous Hell, the fiends will shake

Thine arches with the laughter of their joy!
There shall be lamentation heard in Heaven l8 5

As o'er an angel fallen; and upon Earth

All good shall droop and sicken, and ill things
Shall with a spirit of unnatural life
Stir and be quickened 4 . . . even as I am now. [Exit.

Scene II. Before the Castle of Petrella. Enter Beatrice and

lucretia above on the ramparts.
Beatrice. They come not yet.
Lucretia. Tis scarce midnight.
Beatrice. How slow
Behind the course of thought, even sick with speed,
Lags leaden-footed time!
Lucretia. The minutes pass . . .

Ifhe should wake before the deed is done?

Beatrice. O, Mother! He must never wake again. 5

What thou hast said persuades me that our act

Will but dislodge a spirit of deep hell
Out of a human form.
Lucretia. Tis true he spoke
Of death and judgement with strange confidence
For one so wicked; as a man believing I0

In God, yet recking 5 not of good or ill.

And yet to die without confession! . . .

Beatrice. Oh!
Believe that heaven is merciful and just,
And will not add our dread necessity 6
To the amount of his offences.
Enter olimpio and marzio, below.
Lucretia. I5
See,
They come.
must hasten thus
Beatrice. All mortal things
To down.
their dark end. Let us go
[Exeunt lucretia and Beatrice from above.
Olimpio. How feel you to this work?
Marzio As one who thinks
A thousand crowns excellent market price
20
For an old murderer's life. Your cheeks are pale.
Olimpio. It is the white reflexion of your own.
Which you call pale.

4. Brought to life. the ironic deeper meaning the word must

5. Heeding the consequences, caring. be read in the context of Shelley's belief
6. Though Beatrice's use of the word in Necessity as proclaimed in Queen
"necessity" is ordinary, to comprehend Mab, VI.198fT. and note.
 —
The Cenci IV. Hi • 279
Marzio. Is that their natural hue?
Olimpio. Or 'tis my hate and the deferred desire
To wreak 7 it, which extinguishes their blood.
Marzio. You are inclined then to this business?
2*
Olimpio. Aye.
If one should bribe me with a thousand crowns
To kill a serpent which had stung my child,
I could not be more willing.

Enter Beatrice and lucretia, below.

Noble ladies!
Beatrice. Are ye resolved?
Olimpio. Is he asleep?

Marzio. Is all
Quiet?
Lucretia. I mixed an opiate with his drink: 30

He sleeps so soundly . . .

Beatrice. That his death will be

But as a change of sin-chastising dreams,
A dark continuance of the Hell within him,
Which God extinguish! But ye are resolved?
Ye know it is a high and holy deed? 35

Olimpio. We
are resolved.
Marzio. As to the how this act
Be warranted, it rests with you.
Beatrice. Well, follow!
Olimpio. Hush! Hark! What noise is that?
Marzio. Ha! some one comes!
Beatrice. Ye conscience-stricken cravens, 8 rock to rest
Your baby hearts. It is the iron gate, 4°

Which ye left open, swinging to the wind,

That enters whistling as in scorn. Come, follow!
And be your steps like mine, light, quick and bold. [Exeunt.

Scene III. An apartment in the Castle. Enter Beatrice and

LUCRETIA.
Lucretia. They are about it now.
Beatrice. Nay, it is done.
Lucretia. I have not heard him groan.

Beatrice. He will not groan.

Lucretia. What sound is that?
Beatrice. List! 'tis the tread of feet
About his bed.
Lucretia. My God!
If he be now a cold stiff corpse . . .

Beatrice. O, fear not 5

What may be done, but what is left undone:

The act seals all.

7. Give vent or expression to. 8. Confessed or acknowledged cowards.

280 • The Cenci IV. Hi
Enter olimpio and marzio.
Is it accomplished?
Marzio. What?
Olimpio. Did you not call?
Beatrice. When?
Olimpio. Now.
Beatrice. I ask if all is over?
Olimpio. We
dare not kill an old and sleeping man;
His thin grey hair, his stern and reverent brow, I0

His veined hands crossed on his heaving breast,

And the calm innocent sleep in which he lay,
Quelled me. Indeed, indeed, I cannot do it.
Marzio. But I was bolder; for I chid Olimpio,
And bade him bear his wrongs to his own grave T 5

And leave me
the reward. And now my knife
Touched the loose wrinkled throat, when the old man
Stirred in his sleep, and said, "God! hear, O, hear,
A What, art thou not our father?"
father's curse!
And then he laughed. I knew it was the ghost 20

Of my dead father speaking through his lips,

And could not kill him.
Beatrice. Miserable slaves!
Where, if ye dare not kill a sleeping man,
Found ye the boldness to return to me
With such a deed undone? Base palterers! 25

Cowards and traitors! Why, the very conscience

Which ye would sell for gold and for revenge
Is an equivocation: 9 it sleeps over
A thousand daily acts disgracing men;
And when a deed where mercy insults heaven ... 3°

Why do I talk?
[Snatching a dagger from one of them and raising it.

Hadst thou a tongue to say,

"She murdered her own father," I must do it!

But never dream ye shall outlive him long!

Olimpio. Stop, for God's sake!
Marzio. I will go back and kill him.
Olimpio. Give me the weapon, we must do thy will. 35

Beatrice. Take it! Depart! Return!

[Exeunt olimpio and marzio.
How pale thou art!
We do but that which 'twere a deadly crime
To leave undone.
Lucretia. Would it were done!
Beatrice. Even whilst
That doubt passing through your mind, the world
is

Is conscious of a change. Darkness and Hell 40

Have swallowed up the vapour they sent forth

9. The expression of a falsehood in a form that is verbally true.
 —
The Cenci IV. iv •
281

To blacken the sweet light of life. My breath

Comes, methinks, lighter, and the jellied blood
Runs freely through my veins. Hark!

Enter olimpio and marzio.

He is . . .

Olimpio. Dead!
Marzio. We
strangled him that there might be no blood; 45
And then we threw his heavy corpse i' the garden
Under the balcony; 'twill seem it fell.

Beatrice {giving them a bag of coin). Here take this gold, and
hasten to your homes.
And, Marzio, because thou wast only awed
By that which made me tremble, wear thou this! so

[Clothes him in a rich mantle.

It was the mantle which my grandfather
Wore in his high prosperity, and men
Envied his state: so may th'ev envy thine.
Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God
To a just use. Live long and thrive! And, mark, 55

Ifthou hast crimes, repent: this deed is none. [A horn is sounded.

Lucretia. Hark, 'tis the castle horn; my God! it sounds
Like the last trump. 1
Beatrice. Some tedious guest is coming.
Lucretia. The drawbridge is let down; there is a tramp
Of horses in the court; flv, hide yourselves! ^
[Exeunt olimpio and marzio.
Beatrice. Let us retire to counterfeit deep rest;
I need to counterfeit it now:
scarcely
The which doth reign within these limbs
spirit
Seems strangely undisturbed. I could even sleep 64

Fearless and calm: all ill is surely past. [Exeunt.

Scene IV. Another apartment in the Castle. Enter on one side the
legate savella introduced by a servant, and on the other
LUCRETIA and BERNARDO.

Savella. Lady, my duty to his Holiness

Be my excuse that thus unseasonably
I break upon your rest. I must speak with

Count Cenci; doth he sleep?

Lucretia (in a hurried and confused manner). I think he sleeps;
Yet wake him not, I pray, spare me awhile, 5

He is a wicked and a wrathful man;

Should he be roused out of his sleep to-night,
Which is, I know, a hell ol angry dreams,

It were not well; indeed it were not well.

Wait till day break. (aside) O, I am deadly
. . . sick! I0

1. The end of the world when Gabriel's trumpet will announce the Last Judgment.
282 • The Cenci IV. iv
Savella. I grieve thus to distress you, but the Count
Must answer charges of the gravest import,
And suddenly; 2 such my commission is.
Lucretia (with increased agitation). I dare not rouse him: I know
none who dare . . .

Twere perilous; . . . vou might as safely waken '5

A serpent; or a corpse in which some fiend

Were laid to sleep.
Savella. Lady, my moments here
Are counted. I must rouse him from his sleep,
Since none else dare.
Lucretia (aside). O, terror! O, despair!
(To bernardo.) Bernardo, conduct you the Lord Legate to 20

Your father's chamber. [Exeunt savella and bernardo.

Enter Beatrice.
Beatrice. 'Tis amessenger
Come to arrest the culprit who now stands
Before the throne of unappealable God.
Both Earth and Heaven, consenting arbiters,
Acquit our deed.
Lucretia. Oh, agony of fear! 2s

Would that he yet might live! Even now I heard

The Legate's followers whisper as they passed
They had a warrant for his instant death.
Allwas prepared by unforbidden means
Which we must pay so dearly, having done. 30

Even now they search the tower, and find the body;
Now they suspect the truth; now thev consult
Before they come to tax us with the fact;
O, horrible, 'tis all discovered!
Beatrice. Mother,
What is done wisely, is done well. Be bold 35

As thou art just. 'Tis like a truant child

To fear that others know what thou hast done,
Even from thine own strong consciousness, and thus
Write on unsteadv eves and altered cheeks
All thou wouldst hide. Be faithful to thyself, 40

And fear no other witness but thv fear.

For if, as cannot be, some circumstance
Should rise in accusation, we can blind
Suspicion with such cheap 3 astonishment,
Or overbear4 it with such guiltless pride, 45

As murderers cannot feign. The deed is done,

And what may follow now regards not me.
I am as universal as the light;

Free as the earth-surrounding air; as firm

2. Immediately. 4. Overcome.
3. Easily accomplished.
 The Cenci IV. iv • 283

As the world's centre. Consequence, to me, 50

Is as the wind which strikes the solid rock

But shakes it not. [A cry within and tumult.
Voices. Murder! Murder! Murder!

Enter bernardo and savella.

Savella (to his followers). Go search the castle round; sound the
alarm;
Look to the gates that none escape!
Beatrice. What now?
Bernardo. Iknow not what to say my father's dead.
. . .
55

Beatrice. How; dead! he only sleeps; you mistake, brother.

His sleep is very calm, very like death;
Tis wonderful how well a tvrant sleeps.
He is not dead?
Bernardo. Dead; murdered.
Lucretia (with extreme agitation). Oh no, no,
He is not murdered though he may be dead; 6o

I have alone the kevs of those apartments.

Savella. Ha! Is it so?

Beatrice. My Lord, I pray excuse us;
We will retire; my
mother is not well:
She seems quite overcome with this strange horror.
[Exeunt lucretia and Beatrice.
Savella. Can you suspect who may have murdered him? 65

Bernardo. I know not what to think.

Savella. Can you name any
Who had an interest in his death?
Bernardo. Alas!
I can name none who had not, and those most
Who most lament that such a deed done; is

My mother, and my sister, and myself. 7°

Savella. 'Tis strange! There were clear marks of violence.

I found the old man's body in the moonlight

Hanging beneath the window of his chamber

Among the branches of a pine: he could not
Have fallen there, for all his limbs lay heaped 75

And effortless; 'tis true there was no blood . . .

Favour me, Sir; it much imports your house

That all should be made clear; to tell the ladies
That I request their presence. [Exit bernardo.

Enter guards bringing in marzio.

Guard. have one.We
Officer. My Lord, we found this ruffian and another 8o

Lurking among the rocks; there is no doubt

But that they are the murderers of Count Cenci:
Each had a bag of coin; this fellow wore
A gold-inwoven robe, which shining bright
Under the dark rocks to the glimmering moon 85
284 - The Cenci IV. iv
Betrayed them to our notice: the other fell
Desperately fighting.
Savella. What does he confess?
Officer. He keeps firm silence; but these lines found on him
May speak.
Savella. Their language is at least sincere. [Reads.
"To the Lady Beatrice. *>

That the atonement of what my nature

Sickens to conjecture may soon arrive,
I send thee, at thv brother's desire, those

Who will speak and do more than I dare

Write. . . .

Thy devoted servant, Orsino."

Enter lucretia, Beatrice, and bernardo.

Knowest thou this writing, Lady?
Beatrice. No.
Savella. Nor thou? 95

Lucretia. (Her conduct throughout the scene is marked by ex-

treme agitation.) Where was it found? What is it? It should
be
Orsino's hand! It speaks of that strange horror
Which never yet found utterance, but which made
Between that hapless child and her dead father
A gulph of obscure hatred.
Savella. I0 °
Is it so?
Is it true, Lady, that thy father did
Such outrages as to awaken in thee
Unfilial hate?
Beatrice. Not hate, 'twas more than hate:
This ismost true, yet wherefore question me?
Savella. There is a deed demanding question done; I0 5

Thou hast a secret which will answer not.

Beatrice. What savest? My Lord, vour words are bold and rash.
Savella. I do arrest all present in the name
Of the Pope's Holiness. You must to Rome.
Lucretia. O, not to Rome! Indeed we arc not guilty. II0

Beatrice. Guilty! Whodares talk of guilt? My Lord,

I am more innocent of parricide
Than is a child born fatherless . . . Dear Mother,
Your gentleness and patience are no shield
For this keen judging world, this two-edged lie, "5
Which seems, but is not. What! will human laws,
Rather will ye who are their ministers,
Bar all access to retribution first.
And then, when heaven doth interpose to do
What ye neglect, arming familiar things I2 °

To the redress of an unwonted 5 crime,

5. Unusual.
 :

The Cenci IV. iv •

285

Make ye the victims who demanded it

Culprits? Tis ye are culprits! That poor wretch
Who stands so pale, and trembling, and amazed,
If it be true he murdered Cenci, was I2 5

A sword in the right hand of justest God,

Wherefore should I have wielded it? Unless
The crimes which mortal tongue dare never name
God therefore scruples to avenge.
Savella. You own
That you desired his death?
Beatrice. It would have been r 3°

A crime no less than his, if for one moment

That had faded in my heart.
fierce desire
'Tis true did believe, and hope, and pray,
I

Aye, I even knew ... for God is wise and just,

That some strange sudden death hung over him. f 35

'Tis true that this did happen, and most true

There was no other rest for me on earth,
No other hope in Heaven now what of this?
. . .

Savella. Strange thoughts beget strange deeds; and here are

both:
I judge thee not.
Beatrice. And yet, if you arrest me, I4°

You are the judge and executioner

Of that which is the life of life: the breath
Of accusation kills an innocent name,
And leaves for lame acquittal the poor life
Which is a mask without it. 6 'Tis most false f 45

That I am guilty of foul parricide;

Although I must rejoice, for justest cause,
That other hands have sent my father's soul
To ask the mercy he denied to me.
Now leave us free; stain not a noble house I ^°

With vague surmises of rejected crime;

Add to our sufferings and your own neglect
No heavier sum let them have been enough
:

Leave us the wreck we have.

Savella. I dare not, Lady.

Ipray that you prepare yourselves for Rome: '55

There the Pope's further pleasure will be known.

Lucretia. O, not to Rome! O, take us not to Rome!
Beatrice. Why
not to Rome, dear mother? There as here
Our innocence is as an armed heel
To trample accusation. God is there l6°

As here, and with his shadow ever clothes

The innocent, the injured and the weak;
6. The sense of lines 140-145 is that good only acquittal to give insufficient sub-
reputation (an innocent name) is the stance to the life that would, without
life of life, which will be killed by the acquittal, be merely a mask.
accusation of so serious a crime, leaving
286 • The Cenci V.i

And such are we. Cheer up, dear I^idy, lean

On me; collect your wandering thoughts. My Lord,
As soon as you have taken some refreshment, ,6 5

And had all such examinations made

Upon the spot, as may be necessary
To the full understanding of this matter,
We shall be ready. Mother; will you come?
Lucretia. I la! they will bind us to the rack, and wrest '7°

Self-accusation from our agony!

Will Giacomo be there? Orsino? Marzio?
All present; all confronted; all demanding
Each from the other's countenance the thing
Which is in every heart! C), misery! *7J

[She faints, and is borne out.

Savella. She faints: an ill appearance this.
Beatrice. My Lord,
She knows not yet the uses of the world.
She fears that power is as a beast which grasps
And loosens not: a snake whose look transmutes
All things to guilt which is its nutriment. l8 °

She cannot know how well the supine slaves

Of blind authority read the truth of things
When written on a brow of guilelessness:
She sees not yet triumphant Innocence
l8 5
Stand at the judgement-seat of mortal man,
A judge and an accuser of the wrong
Which drags it there. Prepare vourself, my Lord;
Our suite 7 will join yours in the court below. [Exeunt.

END OF THE FOURTH ACT.

ACT V
Scene I. —An apartment in orsino's Palace. Enter orsino and
giacomo.
Giacomo. Do evil deeds thus quickly come to end?
O, that the vain remorse which must chastise
Crimes done, had but as loud a voice to warn
As its keen sting is mortal to avenge!
O, that the hour when present had cast off 5

The mantle of its mystery, and shewn

The ghastly form with which it now returns
When its scared game is roused, cheering the hounds
Of conscience to their prey! Alas! Alas!
It was wicked thought, a piteous deed, IO
a
To killan old and hoarv-headed father.
Orsino. It has turned out unluckily, in truth.
Giacomo. To violate the sacred doors of sleep;

7. Retinue; train of followers or servants.

 The Cenci V.i • 287
To cheat kind nature of the placid death
Which she prepares for overwearied age; J5

To drag from Heaven an unrepentant soul

Which might have quenched in reconciling prayers
A life of burning crimes . . .

Orsino. You cannot say

I urged you to the deed.
Giacomo. O, had I never
2°
Found in thy smooth and ready countenance
The mirror of my darkest thoughts; hadst thou
Never with hints and questions made me look
Upon the monster of my thought, until
Itgrew familiar to desire . . .

Orsino. Tis thus

Men cast the blame of their unprosperous acts *5

Upon the abettors of their own resolve;

Or anything but their weak, guilty selves.
And yet, confess the truth, it is the peril
In which you stand that gives you this pale sickness
Of penitence; confess 'tis fear disguised 30

From its own shame that takes the mantle now

Of thin remorse. What if we yet were safe?
Giacomo. How can that be? Already Beatrice,
Lucretia and the murderer are in prison.
I doubt not officers are, whilst we speak, 35

Sent to arrest us.

Orsino. I have all prepared

For instant flight. We

can escape even now,
So we take fleet occasion by the hair. 8
Giacomo. Rather expire in tortures, as I may.
What! will you cast bv self-accusing flight 4°

Assured conviction upon Beatrice?

She, who alone in this unnatural work,
Stands like God's angel ministered upon
By fiends; avenging such a nameless wrong
As turns black parricide to piety; 45

Whilst we for basest ends ... I fear, Orsino,

While I consider all your words and looks,
Comparing them with your proposal now,
That you must be a villain. For what end
Could you engage in such a perilous crime, so

Training me on with hints, and signs, and smiles,

Even to this gulph? Thou art no liar? No,
Thou art a lie! Traitor and murderer!
Coward and slave! But, no, defend thyself; [Drawing.
Let the sword speak what the indignant tongue 55

Disdains to brand thee with.

Orsino. Put up your weapon.
8. Gain power or leverage over, while the time is right.
288 • The Cenci V.i

Is it the desperation of your fear

Makes you thus rash and sudden with a friend,
Now ruined for your sake? If honest anger
Have moved you, know, that what I just proposed ^
Was but to try you. As for me, I think,
Thankless affection led me to this point,
From which, if my firm temper could repent,
"
I cannot now recede. Even whilst we speak

The ministers of justice wait below: 65

They grant me these brief moments. Now if you

Have any word of melancholy comfort
To speak to your pale wife, 'twere best to pass
Out at the postern, and avoid them so.
Giacomo. O, generous friend! How canst thou pardon me? 7°
Would that mv life could purchase thine!
Orsino. That wish
Now comes a day too late. Haste; fare thee well!
Hear'st thou not steps along the corridor? [Exit giacomo.
I'm sorry for it; but the guards are waiting
At his own gate, and such was mv contrivance 75

That I might rid me both of him and them.

I thought to act a solemn comedy

Upon the painted scene of this new world,

And to attain my own peculiar ends
By some such plot of mingled good and ill 8o

As others weave; but there arose a Power

Which graspt and snapped the threads of my device
And turned it to a net of ruin ... Ha! [A shout is heard.
Is that my name I hear proclaimed abroad?
85
But I will pass, wrapt in a vile disguise;
Rags on my back, and a false innocence
Upon my face, through the misdeeming crowd
Which judges by what seems. 'Tis easv then
For a new name and for a country new,
And a new life, fashioned on old desires, ^
To change the honours of abandoned Rome.
And these must be the masks of that within,
Which must remain unaltered Oh, I fear
. . .

That what is past will never let me rest!

Why, when none else is conscious, but myself, 9S

Of my misdeeds, should mv own heart's contempt

Trouble me? Have I not the power to fly
My own reproaches? Shall I be the slave
Of . what? A word? which those of this false world
. .

IO°
Employ against each other, not themselves;
As men wear daggers not for self-offence.
But if I am mistaken, where shall I
Find the disguise to hide me from myself,
As now I skulk from every other ej [Exit.

9. Back or side door.

 The Cenci V.ii 289

Scene II. —A Hall of Justice, camillo, judges, etc., are discovered

seated; marzio is led in.

First Judge. Accused, do you persist in your denial?

I ask you, are you innocent, or guilty?
I demand who were the participators
In your offence? Speak truth and the whole truth.
Marzio. My
God! I did not kill him; I know nothing; 5

Olimpio sold the robe to me from which

You would infer my guilt.
Second Judge. Away with him!
First Judge. Dare you, with lips yet white from the rack's kiss
Speak false? Is it so soft a questioner,
That you would bandy lover's talk with it I0

Till it wind out your life and soul? Away!

Marzio. Spare me! O, spare! I will confess.
First Judge. Then speak.
Marzio. I strangled him in his sleep.
First Judge. Who urged you to it?
Marzio. His own son Giacomo, and the young prelate
Orsino sent me to Petrella; there I5

The ladies Beatrice and Lucretia

Tempted me with a thousand crowns, and I

And my companion forthwith murdered him.

Now let me die.
First Judge. This sounds as bad as truth. Guards, there,
Lead forth the prisoners!

Enter lucretia, Beatrice, and giacomo, guarded.

Look upon this man; 20

When did you see him last?

Beatrice. We never saw him.
Marzio. You know me too well, Lady Beatrice.
Beatrice. I know thee! How? where? when?
Marzio. You know 'twas I

WTiom you did urge with menaces and bribes

To kill your father. When the thing was done *5

You clothed me in a robe of woven gold

And bade me thrive: how I have thriven, you see.
You, my Lord Giacomo, Lady Lucretia,
You know that what I speak is true.
[Beatrice advances towards him; he covers his face, and shrinks
back.
Oh, dart
The terrible resentment of those eyes 30

On the dead earth! Turn f hem away from me!

They wound: 'twas torture forced the truth. My Lords,
Having said this let me be led to death.
Beatrice. Poor wretch, I pity thee: yet stay awhile.
Camillo. Guards, lead him not away.
Beatrice. Cardinal Camillo, 35
290 • The Cenci V.ii

You have a good repute for gentleness

And wisdom: can it be that you sit here
To countenance a wicked farce like this?
When some obscure and trembling slave is dragged
From sufferings which might shake the sternest heart 4°

And bade to answer, not as he believes,

But as those may suspect or do desire
Whose questions thence suggest their own reply:
And that in peril of such hideous torments
As merciful God spares even the damned. Speak now 45

The thing you surely know, which is that you,

If your fine frame were stretched upon that wheel,
And you were told: "Confess that you did poison
Your little nephew; that fair blue-eyed child
Who —
was the lodestar 1 of your life:" and though 50

most swift and piteous death,

All see, since his
That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time,
And all the things hoped for or done therein
Are changed to you, through your exceeding grief,
Yet you would say, "I confess anv thing:" 55

And beg from your tormentors, like that slave,

The refuge of dishonourable death.
Ipray thee, Cardinal, that thou assert
My innocence.
Camillo (much moved). What shall we think, my lords?
Shame on these tears! I thought the heart was frozen 6°

Which is their fountain. I would pledge mv soul

That she is guiltless.
Judge. Yet she must be tortured.
Camillo. would as soon have tortured mine own nephew:
I

(If he now lived he would be just her age;

His hair, too, was her colour, and his eyes 65

Like hers in shape, but blue and not so deep)

As that most perfect image of God's love
That ever came sorrowing upon the earth.
She is as pure as speechless infancy!
Judge. Well, be her puritv on your head, my Lord, 7°

If you forbid the rack. His Holiness

Enjoined us to pursue this monstrous crime
By the severest forms of law; nay even
To stretch a point against the criminals.
The prisoners stand accused of parricide 75

Upon such evidence as justifies

Torture.
Beatrice. What evidence? This man's?
Judge. Even so.
Beatrice (to marzio). Come near. And who art thou thus chosen
forth

1. A "guiding star"; that on which one's attentions or hopes are fixed.

 The Cenci V.ii • 291

Out of the multitude of living men

To kill the innocent?
Marzio. I am Marzio, 8o

Thy father's vassal.

Beatrice. Fix thine eyes on mine;
Answer to what I ask. [Turning to the judges.
I prithee mark
His countenance: unlike bold calumny
Which sometimes dares not speak the thing it looks,
He dares not look the thing he speaks, but bends 85

His gaze on the blind earth.

(To marzio.) What! wilt thou say
That I did murder my own father?
Marzio. Oh!
Spare me! My brain swims round ... I cannot speak . . .

It was that horrid torture forced the truth.

Take me away! Let her not look on me! 9°

I am a guilty miserable wretch;

I have said all I know; now, let me die!

Beatrice. My Lords, if by my nature I had been

So stern, as to have planned the crime alledged,
Which your suspicions dictate to this slave, 95

And the rack makes him utter, do you think

I should have left this two edged instrument

Of my misdeed; this man, this bloody knife

With my own name engraven on the heft,
Lying unsheathed amid' a world of foes, I0 °

For my own death? That with such horrible need

For deepest silence, I should have neglected
So trivial a precaution, as the making
His tomb the keeper of a secret written
On a thief's memory? What is his poor life? I0 5

What thousand lives? A parricide

arc a
Had trampled them like dust; and, see, he lives!
(Turning to marzio.) And thou . . .

Marzio. Oh, spare me! Speak to me no more!

That stern yet piteous look, those solemn tones,
Wound worse than torture.
(To the judges.) I have told it all;
no
For pity's sake lead me away to death.
Camillo. Guards, lead him nearer the Lady Beatrice,
He shrinks from her regard like autumn's leaf
From the keen breath of the serenest north.
Beatrice. Oh, thou who tremblest on the giddy 2 verge us
Of life and death, pause ere thou answerest me;
So mayest thou answer God with less dismay:
What evil have we done thee? I, alas!
Have lived but on this earth a few sad years,
2. Apt to cause dizziness.
292 The Cenci V.ii

And my lot was ordered, that a father

so I2 °

First turned the moments of awakening life

To drops, each poisoning youth's sweet hope; and then
Stabbed with one blow my everlasting soul;
And my untainted fame; and even that peace
Which sleeps within the core of the heart's heart; I2 5

But the wound was not mortal; so my hate

Became the only worship I could lift
To our great father, who in pity and love,
Armed thee, as thou dost say, to cut him off;
And thus his wrong becomes my accusation; x 3°

And art thou the accuser? If thou hopest

Mercy in heaven, shew justice upon earth:
Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.
If thou hast done murders, made thy life's path
Over the trampled laws of God and man, *35

Rush not before thy Judge, and say: "My maker,

I have done this and more; for there was one

Who was most pure and innocent on earth;

And because she endured what never any
Guilty or innocent endured before: I4 °

Because her wrongs could not be told, not thought;

Because thy hand at length did rescue her;
I with my words killed her and all her kin."

Think, I adjure you, what it is to slay

The reverence living in the minds of men x<*5

Towards our antient house, and stainless fame!

Think what it is to strangle infant pity,
Cradled in the belief of guileless looks,
Till it crime to suffer. Think
become a
What 'tis infamy and blood
to blot with I5 °

All that which shows like innocence, and is,

Hear me, great God! I swear, most innocent,

So that the world lose all discrimination
Between the sly, fierce, wild regard of guilt,
I55
And that which now compels thee to reply
To what I ask: Am I, or am I not
A parricide?
Marzio. Thou art not!
Judge. What is this?
Marzio. I here declare those whom I did accuse
Are innocent. 'Tis I alone am guilt v.
l6°
Judge. Drag him away to torments; let them be
Subtle and long drawn out, to tear the folds
Of the heart's inmost cell. Unbind him not
Till he confess.
Marzio. Torture me as ye will:
A keener pain has wrung a higher truth
From my last breath. She is most innocent! l6 5
 —
The Cenci VMi • 293

Bloodhounds, not men, glut yourselves well with me;

I will not give you that fine piece of nature

To rend and ruin. [Exit marzio, guarded.

Camillo. What say ye now, my Lords?
Judge. Let tortures strain the truth till it be white
J 7°
As snow thrice sifted by the frozen wind.
Camillo. Yet stained with blood.
Judge (to Beatrice). Know you this paper, Lady?
Beatrice. Entrap me not with questions. Who stands here
As my accuser? Ha! wilt thou be he,
Who art my judge? Accuser, witness, judge,
What, one? Here is Orsino's name;
all in x 75

Where is Orsino? Let his eye meet mine.

What means this scrawl? Alas! ye know not what,
And therefore on the chance that it may be
Some evil, will ye kill us?
Enter an Officer.
Officer. Marzio's dead.
Judge. What did he say?
Nothing. As soon as we l8 °
Officer.
Had bound him on the wheel, he smiled on us,
As one who baffles a deep 3 adversary;
And holding his breath, died.
Judge. There remains nothing
But to apply the question to those prisoners,
Who yet remain stubborn.
Camillo. I overrule
l8 5

Further proceedings, and in the behalf

Of these most innocent and noble persons
Will use my interest with the Holy Father.
Judge. Let the Pope's pleasure then be done. Meanwhile
J 9°
Conduct these culprits each to separate cells;
And be the engines 4 ready: for this night
If the Pope's resolution be as grave,
Pious, 5 and just as once, I'll wring the truth
Out of those nerves and sinews, groan by groan. [Exeunt.

Scene III. The cell of a prison. Beatrice is discovered asleep

on a couch. Enter bernardo.

Bernardo. How gently slumber rests upon her face,

Like the last thoughts of some day sweetly spent
Closing in night and dreams, and so prolonged.
After such torments as she bore last night,
How light and soft her breathing comes. Ay, me! 5

3. Profoundly cunning. (1740-1823) ruled Rome and the Papal

4. Machines of torture, especially the States with a reactionary government
rack. employing spies, secret police and assas-
5. Pope's resolution . . . Pious: While sins, torture, execution, slavery in the
Shelley was in Italy, Pope Pius VII galleys, and exile.
294 • TheCenciV.m
Methinks that I shall never sleep again.
But I must shake the heavenly dew of rest
From this sweet folded flower, thus . . . wake! awake!
What, sister, canst thou sleep?
Beatrice (awaking). I was just dreaming
That we were all in Paradise. Thou knowest IO

This cell seems like a kind of Paradise

After our father's presence.
Bernardo. Dear, dear sister,
Would that thy dream were not a dream! O, God!
How shall I tell?

Beatrice. What would'st thou tell, sweet brother?

Bernardo. Look not so calm and happy, or even whilst ! 5

I stand considering what I have to say

My heart will break.
Beatrice. See now, thou mak'st me weep:
How very friendless thou wouldst be, dear child,
If I were dead. Say what thou hast to say.
Bernardo. They have confessed; they could endure no more 2°

The tortures . . .

Beatrice. Ha! What was there to confess?

They must have some weak and wicked
told lie

To flatter their tormentors. Have they said

That they were guilty? O white innocence,
That thou shouldst wear the mask of guilt to hide 25

Thine awful and serenest countenance

From those who know thee not!
Enter judge with lucretia and ciacomo, guarded.
Ignoble hearts!
For some brief spasms of pain, which are at least
As mortal as the limbs through which they pass,
Are centuries of high splendour laid in dust? 30

And that eternal honour which should live

Sunlike, above the reek of mortal fame,
Changed to a mockery and a bye- word? What!
Will you give up these bodies to be dragged
At horse's heels, so that our hair should sweep 35

The footsteps of the vain and senseless crowd,

Who, that they may make our calamity
Their worship and their spectacle, will leave
The churches and the theatres as void
As their own hearts? Shall the light multitude 40

Fling, at their choice, curses or faded pity,

Sad funeral flowers to deck a living corpse,
Upon us as we pass to pass away,
And leave what memory of our
. . . having been?
Infamv, blood, terror, despair? O thou, 45

WTio wert a mother to the parentless,

Kill not thy child! Let not her wrongs kill thee!
 The Cenci V.iii • 295
Brother, lie down with me upon the rack,
And let us each be silent as a corpse;
Itsoon will be as soft as any grave. so

Tis but the falsehood it can wring from fear

Makes the rack cruel.
Giacomo. They will tear the truth
Even from thee at last, those cruel pains:
For pity's sake say thou art guilty now.
Lucretia. O, speak the truth! Let us all quickly die; 55

And after death, God is our judge, not they;

He will have mercy on us.
Bernardo. If indeed
It can be true, say so, dear sister mine;
And then the Pope will surely pardon you,
And all be well.
Confess, or I will warp 6°
Judge.
Your limbs with such keen tortures . . .

Beatrice. Tortures! Turn

The rack henceforth into a spinning-wheel!
Torture your dog, that he may tell when last
He lapped the blood his master shed not me! . . .

My pangs are of the mind, and of the heart, 6s

And of the soul; aye, of the inmost soul,

Which weeps within tears as of burning gall
To see, in this ill world where none are true,
My kindred false to their deserted selves.
And with considering all the wretched life 7°

Which I have lived, and its now wretched end,

And the small justice shown by Heaven and Earth
To me or mine; and what a tyrant thou art,
And what slaves these; and what a world we make,
The oppressor and the oppressed such pangs compel
. . .
75

My answer. What is it thou wouldst with me?

Judge. Art thou not guilty of thy father's death?
Beatrice. Or wilt thou rather tax high judging God
That he permitted such an act as that
Which I have suffered, and which he beheld; 8o

Made it unutterable, and took from it

All refuge, all revenge, all consequence,
But that which thou hast called my father's death?
Which is or is not what men call a crime,
Which either I have done, or have not done; 8s

Say what ye will. I shall deny no more.

If ye desire it thus, thus let it be,
And so an end of all. Now do your will;
No other pains shall force another word.
Judge. She
is convicted, but has not confessed. 90

Be enough. Until their final sentence

it

Let none have converse with them. You, young Lord,

296 • The Cenci V.iii
Linger not here!
Beatrice. Oh, tear him not away!
Judge. Guards, do your duty.
Bernardo (embracing Beatrice). Oh! would ye divide
Body from soul?
Officer. That is the headsman's business. 9*

but lucretia, Beatrice, and ciacomo.

[Exeunt all
Giacomo. Have I confessed? Is it all ovef now?
No hope! No refuge! O
weak, wicked tongue
Which hast destroyed me, would that thou hadst been
Cut out and thrown to dogs first! To have killed
My father first, and then betrayed my sister; IO°

Aye, thee! the one thing innocent and pure

In this black guilty world, to that which I

So well deserve! My wife! my little ones!

Destitute, helpless, and I Father! God! . . .

Canst Thou forgive even the unforgiving, I0 5

When their full hearts break thus, thus! . . .

[Covers his face and weeps.

Lucretia. O my child!
To what dreadful end are we all come!
a
Why did I yield? Why
did I not sustain
Those torments? Oh, that I were all dissolved
Into these fast and unavailing tears, no
Which flow and feel not!
Beatrice. What 'twas weak to do,
'Tis weaker to lament, once being done;
Take cheer! The God who knew my wrong, and made
Our speedy act the angel of his wrath,
II5
Seems, and but seems to have abandoned us.
Let us not think that we shall die for this.
Brother, sit near me; give me your firm hand,
You had a manly heart. Bear up! Bear up!
O, dearest Lady, put your gentle head
Upon my lap, and try to sleep a while: I2 °

Your eyes look pale, hollow and overworn,

With heaviness of watching and slow grief.
Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune,
Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing,
I25
Some outworn and unused monotony,
Such as our country gossips sing and spin,
Till they almost forget they live: lie down!
So, that will do. Have I forgot the words?
Faith! They are sadder than I thought they were.
SONG
*°
False friend, wilt thou smile or weep
l

When mv life is laid asleep?

Little cares for a smile or a tear,
The clay-cold corpse upon the bier!
 The Cenci V.iv •
297
Farewell! Heigh o!
What is this whispers low? *35

There is a snake in thy smile, my dear;

And bitter poison within thy tear.

Sweet sleep, were death like to thee,

Or if thou couldst mortal be,
I would close these eyes of pain; I *°

When towake? Never again.

O, World! Farewell!
Listen to the passing bell!
It says, thou and I must part, J 44

With a light and a heavy heart. [The scene closes.

Scene IV. —A Hall of the Prison. Enter camillo and bernardo.

Camillo. The Pope is stern; not to be moved or bent.

He looked as calm and keen as is the engine
Which tortures and which kills, exempt itself
From aught it inflicts; a marble form,
that
A rite, custom: not a man.
a law, a 5

He frowned, as if to frown had been the trick

Of his machinery, on the advocates 6
Presenting the defences, which he tore
And threw behind, muttering with hoarse, harsh voice:
"Which among ye defended their old father I0

Killed in his sleep?" Then to another: "Thou

Dost this in virtue of thy place; 'tis well."
He turned to me then, looking deprecation,
And said these three words, coldly: "They must die."
Bernardo. And yet you left him not?
Camillo. I urged him
J s
still;

Pleading, as could guess, the devilish wrong

I

Which prompted your unnatural parent's death.

And he replied: "Paolo Santa Croce
Murdered his mother yester evening,
And he is fled. Parricide grows so rife 20

That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young

Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs.
Authority, and power, and hoary hair
Are grown crimes capital. You are my nephew,
You come to ask their pardon; stay a moment; 25

Here is their sentence; never see me more

Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled."
Bernardo. O
God, not so! I did believe indeed
That all you said was but sad preparation
For happy news. O, there are words and looks 30

To bend the sternest purpose! Once I knew them,

6. Those who plead a case in court.

 —
298 • The Cenci V.tv

Now forget them at my dearest need.

I

What think you if I seek him out, and bathe

His feet and robe with hot and bitter tears?
Importune him with prayers, vexing his brain 35

With my perpetual cries, until in rage

He strike me with his pastoral cross, and trample
Upon my prostrate head, so that my blood
May stain the senseless dust on which he treads,
And remorse waken mercy? I will do it! 40

O, wait till I return! [Rushes out.

Camillo. Alas! poor boy!
A wreck-devoted seaman thus might pray
To the deaf sea.
Enter lucretia, Beatrice, and ciacomo, guarded.
Beatrice. I hardly dare to fear
That thou news than a just pardon.
bring'st other
Camillo. May God in heaven be less inexorable 45

To the Pope's prayers, than he has been to mine.

Here is the sentence and the warrant.
Beatrice (wildly). Oh,
My God! Can be possible I have
it

To die so suddenly? So young to go

Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! 50

To be nailed down into a narrow place;

To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts, sad, vet thus lost
How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be . . .
55

What? O, where am I? Let me not go mad!

Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, grey, lamplcss, deep, unpeopled world!
6°
If all things then should be my father's spirit
. . .

His eve, his voice, his touch surrounding me;

The atmosphere and breath of mv dead life!
If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth.
Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come 65

And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix

His eves on mine, and drag me down, down, down!
For was he not alone omnipotent
On Earth, and ever present? Even though dead.
Does not his spirit live in all that breathe, 70

And work for me and mine the same ruin.

still

Scorn, pain, despair? Who ever vet returned

To teach the laws of death's untrodden realm?
Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now,
O, whither, whither?
Lucretia. Trust in God's sweet love, 75
 The Cenci V.tv 299
The tender promises of Christ: ere night
Think we shall be in Paradise.
Beatrice. 'Tis past!
Whatever comes my heart shall sink no more.
And yet, I know not why, your words strike chill:
How tedious, false and cold seem all things. I
8o

Have met with much injustice in this world;

No difference has been made by God or man,
Or any power moulding my wretched lot,
'Twixt good or evil, as regarded me.
Iam cut off from the only world I know, 85

From light, and life, and love, in youth's sweet prime.

You do well telling me to trust in God,
Ihope I do trust in him. In whom else
Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold.
[During the latter speeches giacomo has retired conversing
with camillo, who now goes out; giacomo advances.
Giacomo. Know you not, Mother Sister, know you not? 9<>
. . .

Bernardo even now is gone to implore

The Pope to grant our pardon.
Lucretia. Child, perhaps
It will be granted. We
may all then live
To make these woes a tale for distant years:
O, what a thought! It gushes to my heart 95

Like the warm blood.

Beatrice. Yet both will soon be cold.
O, trample out that thought! Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope:
the only ill which can find place
It is

Upon the giddy, sharp and narrow hour I0°

Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost

That it should spare the eldest flower of spring:

Plead with awakening Earthquake, o'er whose couch

Even now a city stands, strong, fair and free;
Now stench and blackness yawns, like death. O, plead I0 5

With famine, or wind-walking Pestilence,

Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man!
Cruel, cold, formal man; righteous in words,
In deeds a Cain. 7 No, Mother, we must die:
Since such is the reward of innocent lives; II0

Such the alleviation of worst wrongs.

And whilst our murderers live, and hard, cold men,
Smiling and slow, walk through a world of tears
To death as to life's sleep; 'twere just the grave
Were some strange joy for us. Come, obscure Death, "5
And wind me in thine all-embracing arms!
Like a fond mother hide me in thy bosom,

7. The first fratricide and murderer gave Dante's Inferno where those who mur-
his name to the area of Hell (Caina) in dered relatives were punished.
300 • The Cenci V.iv
And rock me to the sleep from which none wake.
Live ye, who live, subject to one another
As we were once, who now . . .

BERNARDO TUSllCS in.

Bernardo. Oh, horrible! I2 °

That tears, that looks, that hope poured forth in prayer,

Even till the heart is vacant and despairs, .

Should all be vain! The ministers of death

Are waiting round the doors. I thought I saw
Blood on the face of one what if 'twere fancy? .
I2 5
. .

Soon the heart's blood of all I love on earth

Will sprinkle him, and he will wipe it off
As if 'twere only rain. O, life! O, world!
Cover me! let me be no more! To see
That perfect mirror of pure innocence I3 °

Wherein I gazed, and grew happv and good,

Shivered 8 to dust! To sec thee, Beatrice,
Who made all lovely thou didst look upon . . .

Thee, light of lifedead, dark! while I say,

. . . sister,
To hear I have no sister; and thou, Mother, '33

Whose love was a bond to all our loves . . .

Dead! The sweet bond broken!

Enfer camillo and guards.
They come! Let me
Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves
Are blighted white. .cold. Say farewell, before
. . . .

Death chokes that gentle voice! O, let me hear 1 *°

You speak!
Beatrice. Farewell, my tender brother. Think
/ Of our sad fate with gentleness, as now:
And let mild, pitving thoughts lighten for thee
Thy sorrow's load. Err not in harsh despair,
But tears and patience. One thing more, my child, I4 5

For thine own sake be constant to the love

Thou bearest us; and to the faith that I,
Though wrapped in a strange cloud of crime and shame,
Lived ever holv and unstained. And though
111 tongues shall wound me, and our common name '5°

Be mark stamped on thine innocent brow

as a
For men to point at as they pass, do thou
Forbear, and never think a thought unkind
Of those, who perhaps love thee in their graves.
So mavest thou die as I do; fear and pain '55

Being subdued. Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!

Bernardo. I cannot say, farewell!
Camillo. O, Ladv Beatrice!
Beatrice. Give vourself no unnecessary pain.

Shattered.
 —
The Mask of Anarchy • 301

My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie

My girdle for me, and bind up this hair l6°

In any simple knot; aye, that does well.

And yours I see is coming down. How often
Have we done this for one another; now
We shall not do it any more. Lord, My
We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well. l6 5

THE END.

The Mask of Anarchy 1

Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester

As I lay asleep in Italy

There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

met Murder on the way

I 5

He had a mask like Castlereagh 2 —

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds 3 followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
I0
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
1. On August 16, 1819, in St. Peter's Field, had intended his poem as a rallying cry.
Manchester, a occurred when a group
riot The tetrameter couplets and triplets, set
of drunken mounted militiamen and cav- in stanzas of four and five lines, embody
alrymen misinterpreted their orders and Shelley's characteristic symbols and im-
charged into a peaceful crowd of men, agery, but this poem seems to produce
women, and children who were attending more immediate effects upon a less edu-
a rally in support of Parliamentary re- ca ted audience. It is a kind of rallying
form. At least six persons were killed hymn to nonviolent resistance.
and more than eighty wounded. (Some The two authoritative manuscripts,
authorities give figures as high as eleven Shelley's intermediate holograph and
killed and five-hundred injured.) Shelley, Mary's fair copy with Shelley's correc-
isolated in Italy, first learned of the so- tions, are in the Ashley Collection of the
called Peterloo Massacre (a name allud- British Library and in the Manuscript
ing to the Tories' great pride in the Division of the Library of Congress,
victory at Waterloo) in a letter from 2. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh,
Thomas Love Peacock that reached him at this time Foreign Secretary and leader
on September 5. Writing to Charles of the Tories in the House of Commons,
Oilier, his publisher, Shelley said that had earlier been infamous for his bloody
the "torrent of my indignation has not suppression of unrest in Ireland; now
yet done boiling in my veins." He drafted Shelley (and Byron) blamed him for his
"The Mask of Anarchy" and reworked support of Austria and the reactionary
it into an intermediate fair copy, and Holy Alliance in Europe.
Mary Shelley recopied it for the press 3. In 1815, Britain joined seven other
and mailed it to Leigh Hunt to publish nations (Austria, France, Russia, Prussia,
in the Examiner on September 23, 1819. Portugal, Spain, and Sweden) in agree-
—
Hunt fearful of prosecution because of ing to postpone final abolition of the
the volatile temper of the country and slave trade; the pro-war advocates in
the new repressive legislation passed late Pitt's administration had been popularly
in —
1819 and 1820 refrained from pub- known as the "bloodhounds" (cf.
lishing the poem until 1832, after the "hawks"),
battle had been won for which Shelley
 —
302 • The Mask of Anarchy
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, 4 an ermined gown; J 5

His big tears, for he wept well,

Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who

Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every gem,
tear a 20

Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light, 5
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile 7 rode by. 25

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: 8 he rode 3°

On white horse, splashed with blood;

a
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown,

And in his grasp a sceptre shone; 35

On his brow this mark I saw

"I am God, and King, and Law!"

With a pace stately and fast,

Over English land he past,
Trampling to a mire of blood *°

The adoring multitude.

And a mighty troop around,

With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord. 45

4.John Scott, Baron Eldon, was the help pacify the half-starved workers in
Lord Chancellor (hence the ermined the new industrial towns.
gown); his decision in court had deprived 7. The crocodile, which according to
Shelley of his children by Harriet. He legend wept in order to attract or while
was notorious for weeping in public. devouring its prey, was a symbol of
5. Shelley had marked an "x" in his hypocrisy.
manuscript, as if to indicate the reference 8. Shelley's personification of Anarchy,
to a footnote (which remained un- besides drawing on Revelation 6:8, al-
written). ludes to Benjamin West's celebrated
6. Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, painting of Death un the Pale Horse, in
was as Home Secretary responsible for which Death is portrayed as wearing a
internal security. He hired spies and crown and, with sword-bearing followers,
agents who first provoked discontented is trampling a crowd. In using the name

workingmen to illegal acts and then be- Anarchy for the supreme personification
trayed them to be hanged or deported. of evil. Shelley was following Milton and
In 1818 he persuaded Parliament to vote Pope, who termed ChMM Lost,
a million pounds for new churches to 11.988; Dunciad, IV.655) Anarch.
 —
The Mask of Anarchy . 303
And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.
O'er fields and towns, from sea to sea. 50

Passed the Pageant swift and free,

Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.

And each dweller, panic-stricken,

Felt his heart with terror sicken 55

Hearing the tempestuous cry

Of the triumph of Anarchy.
For with pomp to meet him came
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired Murderers, who did sing 6o

"Thou art God, and Law, and King.

"We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold." 6s

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,

To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering
— "Thou art Law and God."
Then all cried with one accord; 70

"Thou art King, and God, and Lord;

Anarchy, to Thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!"
And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one, 75

As well as if education
his
Had cost ten millions to the Nation.

For he knew the Palaces

Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown, and globe, 9 8o

And the gold-inwoven robe.

So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower, 1
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned 2 Parliament 85

9. The golden ball or orb borne along jewels are kept.

with the scepter as a sign of sovereignty. 2. Retired on a pension; the word implies
1. Bank: The Bank of England, which that Parliament was open to corruption,
manages the government's money; Tower: especially bribery.
the Tower of London, where the crown
 —
304 • The Mask of Anarchy
When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:
"My father Time is weak and grey VO

With waiting for a better day;

See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!

"He has had child after child

And the dust of death is piled 95

Over every one but me

Misery, oh, Misery!"

Then she lay down in the street,

Right before the horses' feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye, I0°

Murder, Fraud and Anarchy.

When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapour of a vale: I0 5

grow on the blast,

Till as clouds
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky,
It grew — a Shape arrayed in mail 1!0

Brighter than the Viper's scale,

And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.
On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning's, 3 lay; II5

And those plumes its light rained through

Like a shower of crimson dew.
With step as soft as wind it past
O'er the heads of men so fast — I2 °
That they knew the presence there,
—
And looked, but all was empty air.
As flowers beneath May's footstep waken
As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken
As waves arise when loud winds call
I2 5
Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.
And the prostrate multitude-
Looked —
and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope that maiden most serene
Was walking with a quiet mien:

3. Venus as the morning star.

 — ——
The Mask of Anarchy • 305
And Anarchy, the ghastly birth, J 3o

Lay dead earth upon the earth

The Horse of Death tameless as wind
Fled, and with his hoofs did grind
To dust, the murderers thronged behind.

A rushing light of clouds and splendour, J 35

A sense awakening and yet tender

Was heard and felt —and at its close
These words of joy and fear arose

As if their Own indignant Earth

Which gave the sons of England birth J 4o

Had felt their blood upon her brow,

And shuddering with a mother's throe
Had turned every drop of blood
By which her face had been bedewed
To an accent unwithstood, x 45

As if her heart had cried aloud:

"Men of England, heirs of Glory,

Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
J 5o
Hopes of her, and one another;
"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. I5 5

"What is Freedom? ye can tell

That which slavery is, too well
—
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
"Tis to work and have such pay l6°

As just keeps life from dav to day

In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell

"So that ye for them are made

Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade, l6 5

With or without your own will bent

To their defence and nourishment.
"'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak, 4
When the winter winds are bleak,
They are dying whilstI speak. *7i

4. Wasting away in health and spirits.

 ——— —
306 • The Mask of Anarchy
"Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
I75
Surfeiting beneath his eye;

"Tis to let the Ghost of Gold 5

Take from Toil a thousand fold
More than e'er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.

'Taper coin — that forgery l8 °

Of the title deeds, which ye

Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.
" Tis be a slave in soul
to
And no strong controul
to hold l8s

Over your own wills, but be

All that others make of ye.

"And at length when ye complain

With a murmur weak and vain
I9°
Tis to see the Tyrant's crew
Ride over your wives and you
Blood is on the grass like dew.
'Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
—
Blood for blood and wrong for wrong I95

Do not thus when ye are strong.

"Birds find rest, in narrow nest
When weary of their winged quest;
Beasts find fare, in woody lair
2 °°
When storm and snow are in the air.

"Asses, swine, have litter spread

And with fitting food are fed;
home but one
All things have a
Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none! 6
"This is Slavery —
savage men, 2°5

Or wild beasts within a den

Would endure not as ye do
But such ills they never knew.
"What art thou Freedom? O! could slaves
21 °
Answer from their living graves
—
This demand tyrants would flee

Like a dream's dim imagery:

5. Paper money, which Shelley con- of Jesus: "The foxes have holes, and
sidered a trick to inflate currency, there- the birds of the air have nests; but the
by depressing the relative cost of labor. Son of man hath not where to lay his
6. Shelley alludes ironically to a saying head" (Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58).
 — —

The Mask of Anarchy 307

"Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name 2I 5

Echoing from the cave of Fame. 7

"For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy 8 home. 22 °

"Thou art clothes, and fire, and food

For the trampled multitude
No — in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see. 22 5

"To the rich thou art a check,

When his foot is on the neck
Of his victim, thou dost make
That he treads upon a snake. 9

"Thou art Justice —

ne'er for gold 2 3°

May thy righteous laws be sold

As laws are in England thou —
Shield'st alike the high and low.

—
"Thou art Wisdom Freemen never
Dream that God will damn for ever 2 35

All who think those things untrue

Of which Priests make such ado.
"Thou —
Peace never by thee
art
Would blood and treasure wasted be
As tyrants wasted them, when all 2 4°

Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul. 1

"What if English toiland blood
Was poured forth, even as a flood?
It availed, Oh, Liberty!
To dim, but not extinguish thee. 245

—
"Thou art Love the rich 2 have kist
Thy feet, and like him following Christ,
Give their substance to the free
And through the rough world follow thee
"Or turn their wealth to arms, and make 2 5°

War for thy beloved sake

On wealth, and war, and fraud —whence they
Drew the power which is their prey.

7. Common talk or rumor. radicalswho used the image earlier

8. Free from want. may have adopted it from the Americans.
9. This image had been used by the 1. France, during the Revolution.
American Revolutionists in their "Don't 2. obviously includes himself in
Shelley
Tread on Me" flag picturing a coiled this group dedicated to Liberty through
rattlesnake. Shelley— and/or the English Love.
 —— —
?08 • /'//« M<s*A <»/ Anarchy
"Sciem e, Poctrj . and I nought
\k Hi\ lamps; thej make the lot
:
(
)| the dwellers In ol .1 *

So m " ne, the) curse it not.

"Spirit, Patieni e, G< ntli n<

Ail thai 1
in ndom and bl<

Ait thou lei dirds, not words, express

Thine exceeding loveliness

"I ,el .1 great Assembly be

( )i the tearless and the free
( hi some spol oi English ground
\\ here tin pi. mis stretch wide around

"I In* blue skj overhead,

,( 1 1

The green earth on which ye tread,

All ih. it must eternal be
\\ itness the solemnity

"From the corners uttermost

( >i the bounds oi English ( oast,
From and town
ever) hut, village
\\ here those who live and surTei moan

F01 others' miser) 01 theii own.

"From Hie workhouse and the prison

Where pale .is corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
('.10. in foi pain, and weep foi cold

"From the haunts i>i daih life

Where is waged the daih strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows tin' human heart with tares'

"l astly from tin- palaces

Where the murmui of distress
Echoes, like tin- dist.mt sound
t ^1 .1 w ind . 1 1 1 \ 1 around

"Those prison halls ol wealth .mil fashion,

\\ Ihh some tru feel such compassion
1 01 those who groan, and 'oil. and wail
\s must make theii brethren pale

"Vc who
woes untold, surTei
( h to behold feel, 01 to
Vein lost countn bought and sold
With price oi blood and gold
.1

>
Colt ! '
1
' <•'«• panbta ol <•><* «Mcat »nd
» Deletrrloui wetdi; ^rc Matthtw n thi ti
 —
The Mask of Anarchy • 309
"Let a vast assembly be, 2 95

And with great solemnity

Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free

"Be your strong and simple words

Keen to wound as sharpened swords, 300

And wide as targes 5 let them be

With their shade to cover ye.

"Let the tyrants pour around

With a quick and startling sound,
Like the loosening of a sea 305

Troops of armed emblazonry.

"Let the charged artillery drive

Till thedead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses' heels. 310

"Let the fixed bayonet

Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

"Let the horsemen's scimitars 315

Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars

Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.

"Stand ye calm and resolute,

Like a forest close and mute, 320

With folded arms and looks which are

Weapons of unvanquished war,

"And let Panic, who outspeeds

The career of armed steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade 325

Through your phalanx undismayed.

"Let the Laws of your own land,

Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute, 330

"The England they

old laws of —
Whose reverend heads with age are grey,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo — Liberty! 335

5. Large lightweight shields or bucklers.

 — —— —
310 • The Mask of Anarchx
"On those who first should violate
Such sacred heralds in their state
Rest the blood that must ensue.
And it will not rest on you.

"And if then the tyrants dare *4°

Let them ride among vou there.

Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew.
What they like, that let them do.

"With folded arms and steady c

And little fear, and less surprise 345

Look upon them as they slay

Till their rage has died away.

"Then they with shame

will return
To the place from which they came
And the blood thus shed will speak 350

In hot blushes on their cheek.

"Every woman in the land

Will point at them as they stand
Thev will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street. 355

"And the bold, true warriors

Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free.
Ashamed of such base company.

"And that slaughter to the Nation 360

Shall steam up like inspiration,

Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

"And these words shall then become

Like oppression's thundered doom 365

Ringing through each heart and brain,

—
Heard again again again —
"Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew 370

Which in sleep had fallen on you

—
Ye are manv thev are few."
THE END.
 — ~

To the Republic of Benevento • 311

1
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; 2
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, —mud from a muddy spring; 3
Rulers who neither see nor nor know, feel
But leechlike to their fainting country cling 5

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th'untilled field; 4
An army, whom liberticide 5 and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine 6 laws which tempt and slay; IO

Religion Christless, Godless a book sealed; —

A senate, Time's worst statute, unrepealed 7 —
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
-"* —
8
Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento

Nor 9 happiness nor majesty nor fame

Nor peace nor strength nor skill in arms or arts
Shepherd 1 those herds whom Tyranny makes tame;
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame 5

Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts

As to Oblivion their blind millions fleet, 2
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery

1. Shelley sent this sonnet to Leigh Hunt British people in his Philosophical View
from Florence on December 23, 1819 of Reform (see Shelley and his Circle,
(Letters, II, 167). Mary Shelley first pub- VI, 997ff.).
lished it in her edition of Shelley's 8. Better known as "Political Greatness,"
Poetical Works, 1839. the title that Mary Shelley gave it when
2. King George III, who had reigned she published it in Posthumous Poems
since 1760, had been acknowledged vio- (1824), this sonnet records Shelley's in-
he died on January
tently insane in 1811; terest in the revival of one of the me-
29, 1820. dieval Italian communes that Sismondi
3. The sons of George III had among celebrates in his History of the Italian
them sired numerous illegitimate chil- Republics Middle Ages. (See "Ode
in the
dren and only two legitimate ones. In to Liberty.") After a popular revolt in
addition, they had engaged in such di- July 1820 drove the reactionary Bourbon
verse activities as gluttony, gambling, Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies,
incest with a sister, and selling army from absolute rule in Naples, the town
commands to those who bribed a favor- of Benevento northeast of Naples estab-
ite mistress. lished a short-lived "republic," until the
4. An allusion to the Peterloo Massacre entire revolutionary movement was
(see "The Mask of Anarchy"). crushed by an Austrian army in the
5. The killing of liberty. spring of 1821.
6. Gold and blood are recurring emblems 9. The first nor in a series of this kind
of the twin roots and forms of tyranny. means "neither."
(See Queen Mab, IV.195; Cenci, I i.127; 1. Though each subject of this verb is
"Written on .the Death of Na-
. . technically discrete and singular, gram-
poleon," 35; Hellas, 1094; "The Mask marians of Shelley's day accepted the
of Anarchy," 65, 294; "The Triumph of practice of using plural verbs in such
Life," 287.) situations.
7. Shelley details his objections to Parlia- 2. Speed or hasten,
ment for being unrepresentative of the
 — —
312 - ["Ye hasten to the grave']
—
Of their own likeness.8 What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be, IO

Must rule the empire of himself; in it

Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished
Of hopes and
will,
fears,
—being
—
quelling the anarchy
himself alone.

4
Sonnet
Lift not the painted veil 5 which those who live
Call Life; though unreal shapes be pictured there
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread, behind, lurk Fear —
And Hope, twin Destinies, who ever weave 5

Their shadows o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.

I knew one who had lifted it .... he sought,

For his lost heart was tender, things to love

But found them not, alas; nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve. I0

Through the unheeding many he did move,

A splendour among shadows a bright blot —
Upon this —
gloomy scene a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher, 7 found it not.

8
Sonnet
Ye hasten to the grave! What seek ye there,
Ye restless thoughts, and busy purposes
Of the idle brain, which the world's liverv wear?
O thou quick Heart, which pantest to possess
All that pale Expectation feigneth fair! 5

Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess

Whence thou didst come, and whither thou must go,
And all that never yet was known, would know, 1'

3. Staining . likeness: See Queen

. . 6. Lacking anything to see.
Mab, VI. 88-107 and "The Triumph of 7. I.e., the skeptical speaker in Ecclesi-
Life," 288-292. astes, who begins by saying "Vanity of
4. The date Shelley composed this sonnet vanities ... all is vanity" (emptiness),
is uncertain, but probably before the end In Shelley's rough draft lines 13 and 14
of 1819. The Morgan manuscript on read: "I should be happier had I ne'er
which our text is based is written on the known/This mornful man —he was him-
back of a leaf containing the concluding self alone."
lines of "Stanzas Written in Dejection"; 8. Leigh Hunt first published this sonnet
both poems, torn from The Harvard in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1823
Shelley Notebook, were probably among (1822). Mary Shelley reprinted it in
what Shelley called "all my saddest Posthumous Poems (1824). In her col-
verses raked up into one heap" that he lected edition of Shelley's Poetical Works
sent to Oilier on November 10. 1820, to (1839) Mary placed this sonnet among
publish with Julian and Maddalo. Be- Shelley's poems of 1820. Our text fol-
cause Oilier failed to issue Julian and lows the holograph press copy manu-
Maddalo, this sonnet was first published, script in the Pierpont Morgan Library,
in a different text, in Shelley's Posthu- 9. The verb subjunctive (thou
is . . .

mous Poems of 1824. wouldst being the correct indicative

5. Compare and contrast the veil figure form),
in Prometheus Unbound, I II. iv. 190-192.
 — — —
Letter to Maria Gisborne • 313
O whither hasten ye, that thus ye press,
With such swift feet life's green and pleasant path, I0

Seeking alike from happiness and woe

A refuge in the cavern of grey death?
O Heart and Mind and Thoughts what thing do you
Hope to inherit in the grave below?

1
Letter to Maria Gisborne

Leghorn, July 1, 1820

The spider spreads her webs, whether she be

In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm, 2 5

Sit spinning still round this decaying form,

From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought
No net of words in garish colours wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day
But a soft cell, where when that fades away, I0

Memory may clothe in wings my living name

And feed it with the asphodels 3 of fame,
Which in those hearts which must remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist, 4 J5

Would think I were a mighty mechanist,

Bent with sublime Archimedean 5 art
To breathe a soul into the iron heart

1. Shelley's verse letter to Maria James ably attributable to Shelley.

—
Reveley Gisborne obviously meant to The poem has an air of easy, conversa-
be read also by her husband John and by tional informality, as Shelley describes
Henry Reveley, her son by an earlier the objects in Henry Reveley's study and
—
marriage was written at the Leghorn then imagines the Gisbornes and Henry
home of the Gisbornes, which the Shel- in London and those they would be see-
leys were occupying while the Gisbornes ing there. But running through it is a
were in London attempting to find a strong unifying theme in which Shelley
suitable professional position for Henry, contrasts mechanical and scientific knowl-
an aspiring engineer. The poem was edge with the magical powers of the
written late in June 1820 and probably imagination.
mailed on July 1, 1820. The original 2. Shelley alludes to personal attacks on
verse letter that Shelley mailed does not, his morals in reviews of his and Hunt's
apparently, survive, but both Shelley's poems in the Quarterly Review and to
draft and a transcript by Mary Shelley personal criticisms of him with which, as
do. The poem was first published in Shelley suspected, William Godwin was
Posthumous Poems (1824), with some of at the time filling the Gisbornes' ears,
the personal references omitted and (Godwin was bitter because Shelley re-
others disguised. It first reached its pres- —
fused to lend really give him more —
eht general shape in Harry Buxton For- money.)
man's edition of 1876. Our text is based 3. The immortal flowers of the Elysian
on Forman's, with punctuation generally fields.
lightened on the basis of Shelley's draft 4. "I know" or "certainly."
and with a few verbal emendations from 5. Here, mechanical or scientific, from
the draft and from Mary's transcription Archimedes (ca. 287-212 B.C.), the Greek
—
of it, which though it contains errors mathematician and inventor who lived at
seems to embody a few revisions prob- Syracuse in Sicily.
 — —
314 • Letter to Maria Gisborne

Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, 6

Which by the force of figured spells might win 20

Its way over the sea, 7 and sport therein;

For round the walls are hung dread engines, such
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch
Ixion or the Titan: 8 — or the quick
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic, 9 .
25

To convince Atheist, Turk or Heretic

Or those in philanthropic council met, 1

Who thought to pay some interest for the debt

They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation,
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation 3°

To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest

Who made our land an island of the blest,
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire:
With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag, 35
Which fishers found under the utmost crag
Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles, 2
Where to the sky the rude sea rarely smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn
When the exulting elements in scorn 40

Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay

Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
—
As Panthers sleep; and other strange and dread
Magical forms the brick floor overspread,
Proteus 3 transformed to metal did not make 45

More figures, or more strange; nor did he take

Such shapes of unintelligible brass,
Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood,
And forms of unimaginable wood, so

To puzzle Tubal Cain 4 and all his brood:

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks,
The elements of what will stand the shocks
6. Engine; the word gin is frequently menical councils of the Roman Catholic
used in Shakespeare and other Renais- Church —especially
the Council of Trent
sance writers to refer to traps or snares. (1545-1563), which initiated the Counter-
7. Henry Reveley had been building, with Reformation.
Shelley's financial help, a steamboat to 2. The Hebrides, of north
Scotland,
travel between Leghorn and Marseilles. where many ships from
the Spanish
8. Vulcan (Greek Hephaestus) made Armada, which sailed against England
both an ever-turning wheel on which in 1588, were wrecked. Some of these
Ixion was tied in Hades and the bands ships contained instruments of torture
that chained Prometheus to his moun- (line 35) that the Spanish Inquisition
tain of torture. intended to use against English Prot-
9. The Spanish founder of the Domini- estants.
can order (lived 1170-1221) took a lead- 3. A Greek mythological sea-god who
ing role in the bloody suppression of the could assume numerous different forms.
Albigensian heresy in southern France, 4. Tubal Cain, the first metalsmith of
an activity which eventually brought the biblical myth (Genesis 4:22), was the
Dominicans into virtual control of the third son of Lamech, who was the great-
Inquisition, great-great-grandson of Cain, the son of
1. Syntactically parallel to Vulcan and Adam.
St. Dominic, this allusion is to the ecu-
 — —
Letter to Maria Gisborne • 315
—
Of wave and wind and time. Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able 55

To catalogize in this verse of mine:

A pretty bowl of wood —
not full of wine,
But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink
When at their subterranean toil they swink, 5
Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who 6°

Reply to them in lava — cry halloo!

And call out to the head,
cities o'er their
Roofs, towers, and shrines, the dying and the dead,
—
Crash through the chinks of earth and then all quaff
65
Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh.
This quicksilver no gnome has drunk within —
The walnut bowl it lies, veined and thin,
In colour like the wake of light that stains
The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains
The inmost shower of its white fire the breeze — 7°

Is still—blue Heaven smiles over the pale seas.

And in this bowl of quicksilver — for I

Yield to the impulse of an infancy

Outlasting manhood —
I have made to float

A rude idealism of a paper boat 7 — 75

—
A hollow screw with cogs Henry will know
The thing I mean and laugh at me, if so —
He fears not I should do more mischief. Next —
Lie bills and calculations much perplext,
With steam-boats, frigates and machinery quaint 8o

Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.

Then comes a range of mathematical
Instruments, for plans nautical and statical; 8
A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass
—
With ink in it; a china cup that was 85

What it will never be again, I think,

A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink
The liquor doctors rail at —
and which I
—
Will quaff in spite of them and when we die
9°
We'll toss up 9 who died first of drinking tea,
And cry out, heads or tails? where'er we be.
Near that a dustv paint box, some odd hooks,
A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books,
Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms,
To great Laplace, from Sanderson and Sims, 1 95

5. Gnomes are diminutive spirits fabled 1. Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace

to inhabit the interior of the earth and (1749-1827), French mathematician and
to be the guardians of its treasures; astronomer, most famous in Shelley's
swink: labor. day for his theory of the universe (1796)
6. Afull draught of liquor. that introduced the nebular hypothesis;
7. Shelley was famous among his friends Nicholas Saunderson or Sanderson (1682-
for sailing paper boats on any body of 1739), an early teacher of Newtonian
water he happened to encounter. science at Cambridge and eventually pro-
8. Referring to the science of statics. fessor of mathematics who wrote impor-
9. I.e., toss a coin to settle the question. tant books on algebra and elementary
 — —
316 • Letter to Maria Gisbome
Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray
—
Of figures, disentangle them who may.
Baron de Tott's Memoirs- beside them lie,
And some odd volumes of old chemistry.
Near those a most inexplicable thing, IO°

With lead in the middle I'm conjecturing —

How to make Henry understand; but no^-
1*11 leave, as Spenser says, with many mo,

This secret in the pregnant womb of time, 3

Too vast a matter for so weak a rhvme. I0 5

And here like some weird Archimage 4 sit I,

Plotting dark spells, and devilish enginery,

The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind
Which pump up oaths from clergymen, and grind
The gentle spirit of our meek reviews II0

Into a powdery foam of salt abuse,

Ruffling the ocean of their self-content
I sit —
and smile or sigh as is my bent,
—
But not for them Libeccio 5 rushes round
With an inconstant and an idle sound, "5
I heed him more than them the thunder-smoke —
Is gathering on the mountains, like a cloak
Folded athwart their shoulders broad and bare;
The ripe corn under the undulating air
Undulates like an ocean and the vines — I2 °

Are trembling wide in all their trellised lines

The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill
The empty pauses of the blast — the hill
Looks hoarv through the white electric rain,
I2 5
And from the glens bevond, in sullen strain,
The interrupted thunder howls above —
One chasm of Heaven smiles, like the eye of Love
On the unquiet world —while such things are,
How could one worth your friendship heed the war
Of worms? — the
shriek of the world's carrion jays, 13 °

Their censure, or their wonder, or their praise?

You are not here the quaint witch

. . . Memory sees,
In vacant chairs, your absent images.

mathematical physics; Sims is either "many mo" (Faerie Queene, IV.i.8)

Thomas Simpson (1710-1761), who wrote with "many events in the womb of time,"
treatises on the laws of chance and the in Shakespeare's Othello, I.iii.377.
theory of fluctuations, as well as text- 4. Archimago is the evil wizard or ma-
books on algebra, geometry, and trigo- gician in The Faerie Queene. Shelley
nometry, or Robert Simson (1687-1768), sardonically describes his imagination as
who wrote books on geometry and conic evil because it ruffles the feelings of the
sections. clergymen (like his Eton and Oxford
2. Baron Francois de Tott's Memoires contemporary, the Rev. Henry Hart Mil-
sur lt>\ Tuns el les Tartares (1785; man) who wrote for the establishment
English trans., 1786). Quarterly Review.
3. Shelley coalesces Spenser's phrase 5. The southwest wind.
 —
Letter to Maria Gisborne • 317
And points where once you sat, and now should be
But are not. —
I demand if ever we J 35

Shall meet as then we met —

and she replies,
Veiling in awe her second-sighted eyes;
"I know —
the past alone but summon home
My —
Hope, she speaks of all to come."
sister
But I, an old diviner, who know well x 4o

Every false verse of that sweet oracle, 6

Turned to the sad enchantress once again,
And sought a respite from my gentle pain,
In citing every passage o'er and o'er
—
Of our communion how on the sea shore x 45

We watched the ocean and the sky together,

Under the roof of blue Italian weather;
How I ran home through last year's thunder-storm,
And felt the transverse lightning linger warm
—
Upon my cheek and how we often made r 5°

Feasts for each other, where good will outweighed

The frugal luxury of our country cheer,
As well it might, were it less firm and clear
—
Than ours must ever be and how we spun
A shroud of talk to hide us from the Sun x 55

Of which seems to be
this familiar life,
—
But is not or is but quaint mockery
Of all we would believe, and sadly blame
The jarring and inexplicable frame
—
Of this wrong world: and then anatomize 7 l6°

The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes

Were closed in distant years or widely guess—
The issue of the earth's great business,
When we shall be as we no longer are
Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war l6 s

Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not or how —

You listened to some interrupted flow
Of visionary rhyme, 8 in joy and pain
Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain,
With little skill perhaps —
or how we sought w°
Those deepest wells of passion or of thought
Wrought by wise poets 9 in the waste of years,
Staining their sacred waters with our tears;
Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed!
I7 5
Or how I, wisest lady! then indued
The language of a land which now is free, 1
And winged with thoughts of truth and majesty
6. That is, Hope; the sad enchantress several plays by Pedro Calderon de la
(142) is Memory. Barca.
7. Analyze minutely. 1. In January 1820 there had been an
8. Shelley had read Prometheus Un- almost bloodless revolution in Spain
bound to the Gisbornes the previous that had resulted in the abolition of the
autumn. Inquisition and the establishment of a
9. Maria Gisborne had taught Shelley constitutional monarchy,
to read Spanish; together they had read
 — — ——
318 • Letter to Maria Gisbome
Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a cloud,
And bursts the peopled prisons cries aloud, —
"My name —
Legion!" 2 that majestic tongue
is l8 °

Which Calderon over the desart flung

Of ages and of nations,
and which found
An echo in our hearts, and with the sound
Startled Oblivion —
thou wert then to me.
As is a nurse —when inarticulately l8 5

A child would talk as its grown parents do.

If living winds the rapid clouds pursue,
Ifhawks chase doves through the aetherial way,
Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey,
Why should not we
rouse with the spirit's blast x 9o

Out of the forest of the pathless past

These recollected pleasures? 3

You are now

In London, that great sea whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. x m
Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see
That which was Godwin, greater none than he
—
Though fallen and fallen on evil times 4 to stand
— —
Among the spirits of our age and land
Before the dread Tribunal of to come 2 °°

The foremost while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb.

. . .

You will see Coleridge he who sits obscure —

In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind, 2 °5

Flags wearily through darkness and despair

A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
You will see Hunt 5 —one
happy souls of those
Who and without whom
are the salt of the Farth, 2I °

This world would smell like what it is, a tomb

WTio is, what others seem his room no doubt
6
—
Is still adorned with many a cast from Shout,
With graceful flowers tastefully placed about,

2. I.e., "innumerable" (Mark 5:9; Mat- Reveley had in the 1790s been members
thew 26:53). of London intellectual circles that in-
3. Lines 132-192 treat the past and eluded Godwin and Samuel Taylor Cole-
Memory (traditionally the mother of the ridge (202-208), both, in 1820. at the
Muses). The next section (192-253) is a low ebb of their literary reputations,
flightof the imagination across space, 5.James Henry Leigh Hunt ( 1784-1859),
rather than time, to London in the Shelley's closest friend, was a poet and
present. journalist who at this period was best
4. Shelley describes his father-in-law known as editor of the Examiner, a
once his mentor but now his bitter ac- weekly political and literary newspaper,
cuser —
in a phrase that Milton used of 6. Robert Shout was a London maker of
himself (Paradise Lost, VII.25) and with plaster copies of great statues, like the
a generous appreciation of Godwin's Venus de Medici and the Apollo Belve-
place in intellectual history. Maria Gis- dere.
borne and her first husband Willey
 —
Letter to Maria Gisborne • 319
And coronals 7 of bay from ribbons hung, 215

And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,

The gifts of the most learn'd among some dozens
Of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins.
And there is he with his eternal puns,
Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns 8 22 °

Thundering for money at a poet's door.

Alas, it is no use to say "I'm poor!"
Or oft in graver mood, when he will look
Things wiser than were ever read in book,
Except in Shakespeare's wisest tenderness. 22 5

—
You will see Hogg 9 and I cannot express
His virtues, though I know that they are great,
Because he locks, then barricades the gate
Within which they inhabit of his wit —
And wisdom, vou'll cry out when you are bit. 2 3°

He is a pearl within an oyster shell,

One of the richest of the deep. And there
IsEnglish Peacock, 1 with his mountain fair,
Turned into a Flamingo, that shy bird
—
That gleams i' the Indian air have you not heard 2 35

When a man Hindoo,

marries, dies, or turns
His best friends hear no more of him? but you —
Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
With the milk-white Snowdonian antelope
Matched with this cameleopard 2 his fine wit — 24°

Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;

A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wise for selfish bigots — let his page
Which charms the chosen spirits of the time
Fold up for the serener clime
itself 245

Of vears to come, and find its recompense

In that just expectation. —
Wit and sense,
Virtue and human knowledge, all that might
Make this dull world a business of delight,
Are combined in Horace Smith. 3 And these,
all — 25 °

With some exceptions, which I need not tease

Your patience bv descanting on, are all —
You and I know in London. 4
I recall
My thoughts, and bid you look upon the night.
As water does a sponge, so the moonlight 255

7. Garlands worn on the head. Wales called Snowdonia (239).

8. Collection agents. 2. A giraffe.
9. Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792-1862), 3. Famous as one of the authors (with
Shelley's closest friendat Oxford, now his brother James) of Rejected Addresses
grown somewhat distant from him. (1812), which included parodies of many
1. Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), famous writers of the day, Horace Smith
Shelley's friend and a comic novelist, (1779-1849) was a poet, stockbroker, wit,
had recently taken a post at the East and later a novelist.
India Company and married Jane 4. That is, all their mutual friends who
Gryffydh from the area of northwest lived in London.
 ———— — —
320 - Letter to Maria Gisbome
the void, hollow, universal air
Fills
What
see you? —
unpavilioned heaven is fair
Whether the moon, into her chamber gone,
Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan
Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep, 26°

Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse deep

Piloted by the many-wandering blast,
And the rare stars rush through them dim and fast
All this is beautiful in every land
But what sec you beside? a shabbv stand — 26 s

Of Hackncv coaches, 5 a brick house or wall

Fencing some lonely court, white with the scrawl
Of our unhappy politics; or worse
A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse
Mixed with the watchman's, partner of her trade, 6 2 ~i°

You must accept in place of serenade

Or yellow-haired Pollonia murmuring
To Henry, some unutterable thing. 7 —
I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit
2 ?5
Built round dark caverns, even to the root
Of the living stems that feed them in whose bowers —
There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;
Bevond, the surface of the unsickled corn
Trembles not in the slumbering air, and bome
In circles quaint, and ever changing dance, 28 °

Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance

Pale in the open moonshine, but each one
Under the dark trees seems a little sun,
A meteor tamed, a fixed star gone astray
From the silver regions of the Milkv Way; 285

Afar the contadino's 8 song is heard,

Rude, but made sweet by distance and a bird —
Which cannot be the Nightingale, and vet
I know none else that sings so sweet as it

At this late hour—and then all is still

29°

Now Italy or London — which you will!

Next winter vou must pass with me; I'll have

My house by that time turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughtcd care
2 *5
And all the dreams which our tormentors are.
Oh, that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith were there,
With everything belonging to them fair!
We will have books, Spanish, Italian, Greek;
And ask one week to make another week

5. Horse-drawn carriages for hire. bornes' landlord in Leghorn, had a cru>h

6. I.e.. the watchman pimps for the on Henry Reveley. as Mary Shelley re-
prostitute, peatedly reminded him in teasing letters.
7. Apollonia Ricci, daughter of the Gis- 8. Italian peasant or farmhand.
 — —
Peter Bell the Third - 321
As like his father as I'm unlike mine, 9 300

Which is not his fault, as you may divine.

Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's have tea and toast;
be merry! we'll
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs 1
and jellies and mince-pies, 305
And other such lady-like luxuries
Feasting on which we will philosophize!
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood, 2
To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.
—
And then we'll talk what shall we talk about? 310

Oh, there are themes enough for many a bout

Of thought-entangled descant; as to nerves, —
With cones and parallelograms and curves
I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare
—
To bother me when you are with me there, 315

And they shall never more sip laudanum,

From Helicon or Himeros; 3 well, come, —
And in despite of God and of the devil
We'll make our friendly philosophic revel
Outlast the leafless time —
till buds and flowers 320

Warn the obscure inevitable hours

Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew
"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 4

Peter Bell the Third Wordsworth's Peter Bell, which appeared at

the end of April 1819, tells the story of an itinerant potter named Peter
Bell, who leads a completely immoral life until a series of natural events,
centering on an ass that is dumblydead master, so work
faithful to its

upon the ignorant man's superstitious imagination that he "Forsook his

crimes, renounced his folly,/ And, after ten months' melancholy,/ Became
a good and honest man." In a scathing review in the Examiner for May 2,

1819, Leigh Hunt charged that the moral of the poem (a "didactic little
horror") was "founded on the bewitching principles of fear, bigotry, and
diseased impulse," and after quoting the stanza Shelley takes as his epi-
graph, he asks whether "Mr. Wordsworth is earnest ... in thinking that
his fellow-creatures are to be damned?" (The Romantics Reviewed, ed.
D. H. Reiman [New York, 1972], Part A, II, 538-539-)
In June 1819, Shelley read Hunt's review, together with a review by
Keats that had appeared in the April 25 issue of the Examiner of John
Hamilton Reynolds' parody entitled Peter Bell; A Lyrical Ballad (which

9. Shelley alludes to his estrangement says (312-317) that he will strangle his
from his own father, Sir Timothy Shelley. nerves with mathematical studies rather
1. A sweetened drink or dish made from than use the opiates of writing poetry
milk (often freshly drawn from the cow) (the summit of Helicon contains the
and cider or wine. sanctuary of the Muses and the spring
2. Ferdinand III was the Grand Duke of of poetic inspiration) or falling in love.
Tuscany. Himeros: "A synonym of Love" (Shel-
3. Laudanum was a liquid form of ley's note).
opium, used figuratively here. Shelley 4. The final line of Milton's Lycidas.
 —
322 • Peter Bell the Third

Reynolds had contrived without seeing Wordsworth's poem and published

"the real Simon Pure"). Mary Shelley wrote in 1839, "A critique
just before
on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley
exceedingly and suggested this poem." She does not say but scholars have —
recently argued —
that Shelley read Wordsworth's poem itself before writing
his reply (see Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years, pp. 626-627). In any
case, Shelley takes up Peter's story at a point denying from the inferences

of Hunt's review rather than the end of Peter Bell itself.

Shelley creates a Methodist Peter Bell, predestined to damnation, whose
career resembles, in a wild way, Wordsworth's own career. By Sunday,
October 24, 1819, Shelley had completed his poem and read it to Man,
who transcribed it for the press by October 28. Shelley mailed it to Leigh
Hunt on November 2 with instructions to ask Charles Oilier "to print &
publish immediately not however with my name ... as I have only
. . .

expended a few days on this party squib ... & I am about to publish more
serious things this winter"(Letters, II, 135). On December 15, Shelley
asked Oilier what he had done with the poem, adding, "I think Peter not
bad in his way; but perhaps no one will believe in anything in the shape
of a joke from me" (Letters, II, 164).
Though Shelley later tried to stimulate Oilier to publish it, the poem
remained unknown to the public until Mary added it to the one-volume
second edition of Shelley's Poetical Works late in 1839. There Mary, who
had earlier omitted the poem because she found its humor at the expense
of Wordsworth and Coleridge somewhat embarrassing amid the proper
solemnity of Victorian high seriousness, added to her apologetic remarks:
"No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views, with regard to the
which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious
errors into
on society. Much of it is beautifully written
effects of certain opinions
and though ... it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit
—
and poetry so much of himself in it, that it cannot fail to interest
greatly. . .
."

Our textbased directly on the Bodleian manuscript (MS. Shelley

is

adds. C.5, 50-68), transcribed for the press by Man- Shelley in October
ff.

1819, with headings, some notes, and corrections in Shelley's hand. Part
of the Preface (suppressed by Mary in 1839 because it attacked the
powerful house of John Murray) is here printed for the first time, and
numerous readings have been corrected to conform to Shelley's manifest

intention.
 — 2 i

Peter Bell the Third 323

Peter Bell the Third

By Miching Mallecho, Esq.

Is it a party in a parlour Some sipping punch —some sip-
Crammed just as they on earth ping tea;
were crammed, But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damned!
Peter Bell, by w. wordsworth.
Ophelia: What means this, my lord?
Hamlet: Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.
SHAKESPEARE.

Dedication

To Thomas Brown, Esq., The Younger, H.F. 3

Dear Tom —Allow me to request you to introduce Mr. Peter Bell

to the respectable family of the Fudges; although he may fall short
of those very considerable personages in the more active properties
which characterize the Rat and the Apostate, 4 I suspect that even
you their historian will be forced to confess that he surpasses them
in the more peculiarly legitimate qualification of intolerable dulness.
You know Mr. Examiner Hunt. That murderous and smiling
villain at the mere sound of whose voice our susceptible friend the
Quarterly fell and foamed so
into a paroxysm of eleutherophobia
much acrid gall that it Mr. Murray's upper
burned the carpet in
room, 5 and eating a hole in the floor fell like rain upon our poor
friend's head, 6 who was scampering from room to room like a bear
with a swarm of bees on his nose: —
it caused an incurable ulcer and

our poor friend has worn a wig ever since. Well, this monkey 7
suckled with tyger's milk, this odious thief, liar, scoundrel, coxcomb
and monster presented me to two of the Mr. Bells. Seeing me in
his presence they of course uttered very few words and those with
much caution. I scarcely need observe that they onlv kept company

1. The stanza, later omitted by Words- Twopenny Post-Bag (1813) and The
worth on the remonstrance of friends, Fudge Family in Paris (1818) under the
appeared in the first edition on page 39, name "Thomas Brown, the Younger."
the fourth stanza from the end of Part I. "H.F." ("Historian of Fudges") plays
Shelley's text is punctuated as he found off Wordsworth's Dedication to "Robert
it in the Examiner. Southey, Esq., P.L." (Poet Laureate.).
2. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. ii. 148-149. 4. Presumably the "Rat" is Reynolds'
Ophelia's question follows the opening "antenatal Peter" and the "Apostate" is
scene of the dumb show that reenacts Wordsworth's legitimate one.
Claudius' murder of Hamlet's father. 5. William Gifford, who edited the Tory
Scholars have glossed "miching malle- Quarterly Review in an upper room at
cho" as "lying in wait for the evildoer." John Murray's Albemarle Street publish-
Shelley, like Hamlet, presumably hoped ing house, was Hunt's greatest enemy;
to "catch the conscience" of his political eleutherophobia: fear of freedom (eleu-
foes by drawing self-exposing reactions thero, Greek for "free").
to his poem. 6. I.e., John Murray's.
3. I.e., Thomas Moore, who had written 7. I.e., Leigh Hunt,
popular doggerel satires including The
324 • Peter Bell the Third

with him — I can certainly answer for one of them

at least in order —
to observe whether they could not borrow colours from any par-
ticulars of his private life for the denunciation they mean to make
of him, as the member and black conspiracy for
of an "infamous
diminishing the authority of that venerable canon, which forbids
any man to mar his grandmother"; the effect of which in this on
our moral and religious nation is likely to answer the purpose of the
controversy'. My intimacy with the younger Mr. Bell naturally sprung
from this introduction to his brothers. And in presenting him to
you, I have the satisfaction of being able to assure you that he is

considerably the dullest of the three.

There is this particular advantage in an acquaintance with any-
one of the Peter Bells; that if you know one Peter Bell, you know
three Peter Bells; they are not one but three, not three but one. An
awful mystery after having caused torrents of blood, and having been
hymned by groans enough to deafen the music of the spheres is at
length illustrated to the satisfaction of all parties in the theological
world, by the nature of Mr. Peter Bell.
Peter is a polvhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes
colours like a chameleon, and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus*
of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound;
then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull —o so dull! it is an
ultra-legitimate dulness.
You will perceive that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the
Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in
"this world which is" — so Peter informed us before his conversion
to White Obi»—

the world of all of us, and where

We find our happiness, or not at all.

Let me observe that I have spent six or seven days 1 in composing

this sublime piece; — the orb of my moonlike genius has made the
fourth part of its revolution round the dull earth which you inhabit,
driving you mad whilst it has retained its calmness and its splendour,
and I have been fitting this its last phase "to occupy a permanent
station in the literature of mv country."

8. Greek demigod of the sea who could Friend (1809). It was reprinted with the
change shape at will. collected poems of 1815. and was finally
9. Christianity. Among blacks in the incorporated into The Prelude (XI. 142-
West Indies, "Obi" was the name of a 144).
magical power that sorcerers used to 1. Wordsworth had taken pains with his

afflict their enemies; the "White Obi" Peter Bell since 1798 'to make the pro-
would be white magic, or religion. The duction less unworthy of a favourable
indented quotation is from Wordsworth's reception; or. rather, to tit it for filling
"The French Revolution as It Appeared permanently a station however humble,
in the Literature of my Country
"

to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement."

which first appeared in Coleridge's The
 — — —
Peter Bell the Third • 325
Your works, indeed, dear Tom, Sell better; but mine are far
superior. The public is no judge; posterity sets all to rights.
Allow me to observe that so much has been written of Peter Bell,
that the present history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a
continuation of that series of cyclic poems which have already been
candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that
they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of
view, have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition
I

with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued
by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey,
a full stop of a very qualified import.
Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges,
you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when
London shall be an habitation of bitterns, 2 when St. Paul's and
Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the
midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo bridge
shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers 3 and cast the
jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream,
some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of
some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective
merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and of their historians; I remain,
Dear Tom, Yours sincerely,
Miching Mallecho.

December 1, 1819.

P.S. Pray excuse the date of place; so soon as the profits of this
publication come in, I mean to hire lodgings in a more respectable
street. 4

Prologue

Peter Bells, one, two and three,

O'er the wide world wandering be.
First, the antenatal Peter,
Wrapt in weeds of the same metre,
The so long predestined raiment 5

Clothed in which to walk his way meant

The second Peter; whose ambition
Is to link the proposition
As the mean of two extremes
(This was learnt from Aldric's themes) 5 I0

2. Marsh-dwelling birds related to the able "245, Piccadilly").

heron. 5. Artis Logicae Compendium, written in
3. Willow trees. 1691 by Henry Aldrich (1647-1710), re-
4. I.e., Miching Mallecho does not in- mained the standard school logic text
elude his address, as did Tom Brown in until the late nineteenth century.
his Fudge Family in Paris (the fashion-
 ————— —

326 Peter Bell the Third

Shielding from the guilt of schism

The orthodoxal syllogism:
The First Peter —
he who was
Like the shadow in the glass
Of the second, yet unripe; x 5

His substantial antitype.

Then came Peter Bell the Second,
Who henceforward must be reckoned
The body of a double soul
And that portion of the whole 20

Without which the rest would seem

Ends of a disjointed dream.
And the third is he who has
O'er the grave been forced to pass
To the other side, which is, 25

Go and try else, — just like this.

Peter Bell the First was Peter

Smugger, milder, softer, neater,
Like the soul before it is
Born from that world into this. 6 3°

The next Peter Bell was he

Predevote 7 like you and me
To good or evil as may come;
His was the severer doom,
For he was an evil Cotter 8 35

And a polygamic 9 Potter. 1

And the last is Peter Bell,
Damned since our first Parents fell,

Damned eternally to Hell

Surelv he deserves it well! 40

Part First

DEATH

And Peter Bell, when he had been

With fresh-imported Hell-fire wanned,
—
Grew serious from his dress and mien
'Twas very plainlv to be seen
Peter was quite reformed.

6. The idea underlying this "antenatal 9. Having many v*i\cs

Peter" is the Platonic (or Pythagorean) 1. "The oldest scholiasts read
transmigration of souls, which are reborn A dodecanamic Potter,
in various bodies. This is at once descriptive and more
7. Predestined, foredoomed. —
megalophonous. but the alliteration of
8. A Scottish peasant renting a cottage the text had captivated the vulgar ears of
and small plot of ground; a potter (36) the herd of later commentators'* (Shel-
makes and sells ceramic pots. ley's note).
 —— —
Peter Bell the Third - 327
His eyes turned up, his mouth turned down;
His accent caught a nasal twang;
He oiled his hair; 2 there might be heard
The grace of God in every word
Which Peter said or sang. I0

But Peter now grew old, and had

An ill no doctor could unravel;
His torments almost drove him mad;
Some said it was a fever bad
Some swore it was the gravel. 3 xs

His holy friends then came about

And with long preaching and persuasion,
Convinced the patient, that without
The smallest shadow of a doubt
He was predestined to damnation. 20

They said
— "Thy name Peter is Bell;
Thy skin is brimstone hue;
of a
Alive or dead — or
ay, sick well
The one God made to rhyme with hell;
The other, I think, rhymes with you." 4 *5

Then Peter set up such a yell!

The nurse, who with some water gruel
Was climbing up the stairs, as well
As her old legs could climb them fell, —
—
And broke them both the fall was cruel. 30

The Parson from the casement leapt

Into the lake of Windermere 5 —
And many an eel— though no adept
In God's right reason —kept
for it

Gnawing his kidneys half a year. 35

And all the rest rushed through the door,

And tumbled over one another,
—
And broke their skulls. Upon the floor
Meanwhile and swore,
sate Peter Bell,
And cursed his father and his mother; 40

2. "To those who have not duly appre- whale oil, the common man's cheap
ciated the distinction between Whale substitute.
and Russia oil this attribute might rather 3. A disease involving aggregations of
seem to belong to the Dandy than the urinary crystals; popularly used to indi-
Evangelic. The effect, when
to the wind- cate pain or difficulty in passing urine.
ward, is indeed so similar, that it re- 4. one . other: I.e., "Peter Bell" and
. .

quires a subtle naturalist to discriminate "brimstone hue."

the animals. They belong, however, to 5. A large lake in Westmorland that
distinct genera" (Shelley's note). "Rus- appears frequently in Wordsworth's
sia oil" was oil of the birch tree imported poetry.
from Russia and sold to the upper classes;
 —
328 Peter Bell the Third

And raved of God, and sin, and death,

Blaspheming like an infidel;
And said, that with his clenched teeth
He'd seize the earth from underneath,
And drag it with him down to Hell. 45

As he was speaking came a spasm,

And wrenched his gnashing teeth asunder,
Like one who sees a strange phantasm
—
He lay, there was a silent chasm
Between his upper jaw and under. 50

And yellow death lay on his face;

And a fixed smile that was not human
Told, as I understand the case,
That he was gone to the wrong place:
I heard all this from the old woman. 55

Then there came down from Langdale Pike 6

Acloud with lightning, wind and hail;
It swept over the mountains like
—
An Ocean, and I heard it strike
The woods and crags of Grasmere vale. 7 6o

And I saw the black storm come

Nearer, minute after minute,

Its thunder made the cataracts 8 dumb,
With hiss, and clash, and hollow hum
It ncared as if the Devil was in it.
65

The Devil was in it: he had bought —

Peter for half a crown; and when
The storm which bore him vanished, nought
That in the house that storm had caught
Was ever seen again. 70

The gaping neighbours came next day

They found all vanished from the shore:
The Bible, whence he used to pray,
Half scorched under a hen-coop lav;
Smashed glass —and nothing more! 75

Part Second

THE DEVIL
Trie Devil, I safely can aver,
Has neither hoof, nor tail, nor sting;
Nor is he, as some sages swear,
A spirit, neither here nor there,

—what —
In nothing 8o
yet in every thing.
He is we are; for sometimes
6. The Langdale Pikes (or Peaks) are Grasmere. near the lake of the same
a group of mountains east of Grasmere. name, from Dec. 1799 until May 1813.
7. Wordsworth lived in the village of 8. Waterfalls of considerable size.
 — —
Peter Bell the Third • 329
The Devil is a gentleman;
At others a bard bartering rhymes
For sack; 9 a statesman spinning crimes,
A swindler, living as he can; 85

A who cometh in the night,

thief,
With whole boots and net pantaloons,
Like some one whom it were not right
To —
mention; or the luckless wight
From whom he steals nine silver spoons. 90

But in this case he did appear

Like a slop-merchant 1 from Wapping
And with smug face, and eye severe
On every side did perk and peer
Till he saw Peter dead or napping. 95

He had on an upper Benjamin

(For he was of the driving schism) 2
In the which he wrapt his skin
From the storm he travelled in,
For fear of rheumatism. I0 °

He called the ghost out of the corse; 3 —

was exceedingly like Peter,
It
Only its voice was hollow and hoarse
It had a queerish look of course
Its dress too was a little neater. I0 5

The Devil knew not, his name and lot;

Peter knew not that he was Bell:
Each had an upper stream of thought,
Which made all seem as it was not;
Fitting itself to all things well. II0

Peter thought he had parents dear,

Brothers, sisters, cousins, cronies,
In the fens o' Lincolnshire;
He perhaps had found them there
Had he gone and boldly shewn his "5
4
Solemn phiz in his own village;
Where he thought, oft when a boy
He'd clombe 5 the orchard walls to pillage
The produce of his neighbour's tillage,
With marvellous pride and joy. I2 °

9. The Poet Laureate (at this time self-assertive, or self-conceited attitude

Robert Southey) was paid in sack, a or air" (OED 1.1).
class of white and amber wines, includ- 2. I.e., one of his great pleasures was
ing sherries, imported from Spain and driving his own carriage, like Sir Tele-
the Canary Islands. graph Paxarett in Peacock's Melincourt;
1. A dealer in cheap sailor's clothes; upper Benjamin: short overcoat.
Wapping: A poor seamen's quarter (and 3. Corpse.
traditional place of executions) in the 4. Face (short for "physiognomy").
East End of London, along the Thames; 5. Climbed.
perk (line 94): "to assume ... a lively,
 ————
330 • Peter Bell the Third

And the Devil thought he had,

'Mid the misery and confusion
Of an unjust war, just made
A fortune by the gainful trade
Of giving soldiers rations bad I2 5

The world is full of strange delusion.

That he had a mansion planned
In a square like Grosvenor square, 6
That he was aping fashion, and
That he now came to Westmoreland »3o

To see what was romantic there.

And all this, though quite ideal,
Ready at a breath to vanish,
Was a state not more unreal
Than the peace he could not feel, J 35

Or the care he could not banish.

After alittle conversation

The Devil told Peter, if he chose
He'd bring him to the world of fashion
By giving him a situation *4o

In his own service —

and new clothes.
And Peter bowed, quite pleased and proud,
And after waiting some few davs
For a new livery — dirtv vcllow
Turned up with black — the wretched fellow x 45

Was bowled to Hell in the Devil's chaise.

Part Third

HELL
Hell is a city much like London
A populous and a smokv citv;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little orno fun done; I5 °

Small justice shown, and still less pity.

There is a Castles, and a Canning,

A Cobbett, and a Castlereagh; 7

6. Then a relatively new section of Lon- the Anti-Jacobin, government official,

don, inhabited by the nouveaux riches, and prime minister; William Cob-
later
including John Westbrook, the wealthy bett, popular journalist and demagogue,
coffeehouse owner who was Shelley's first whose Political Register urged radical
father-in-law, and William Gifford, editor reform; John Stewart. Viscount Castle-
of the Quarterly Review, who had begun reagh, an Anglo-Irish politician who at
as a dependent of Lord Grosvenor. this time, as foreign secretary, was the
7. John Castle(s), a government spy strong man in the reactionary govern-
and agent provocateur, led workmen into ment. Shelley groups them to show the>
conspiracies and then betrayed them; are equally unsavory, no matter v. hat
George Canning, brilliant Tory wit of their politics.
 ——————
Peter Bell the Third • 331

All sorts of caitiff corpses planning

All sorts of cozening for trepanning 8 ^5
Corpses less corrupt than they.
9
There is a * * *, who has lost
His wits, or sold them, none knows which;
He walks about a double ghost,
And though as thin as Fraud almost l6 °

Ever grows more grim and rich.

1
There is a Chancery Court, a King,
A manufacturing mob; a set
Of thieves who by themselves are sent
Similar thieves to represent; 2 l6 5

—
An Army; and a public debt.
Which last is a scheme of Paper money,
—
And means being interpreted
—
"Bees, keep your wax give us the honey
And we will plant while skies are sunny l i°
Flowers, which in winter serve instead." 3

There is a great talk of Revolution

And a great chance of despotism
— —
German soldiers 4 camps confusion
— — —
Tumults lotteries rage delusion J 75

—
Gin suicide and methodism;
Taxes too, on wine and bread,
And meat, and beer, and tea, and cheese, 5
From which those patriots pure are fed
Who gorge before .thev reel to bed l8 °

The tenfold essence of all these.

There are mincing women, mewing,

(Like cats, who amant misere,) 6

Of their own virtue, and pursuing

Their gentler sisters to that ruin, l8 s

—
Without which what were chastity? 7

8. caitiff: vile, base, mean; cozening: de- as kings of England, would bring in
ception or defrauding by deceit; trepan- German soldiers to suppress dissent
ning: cheating, entrapping. among the English people.
9. Possibly Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, 5. New regressive commodity taxes
who appears as "Fraud" in "The Mask passed in 1817 to pay the interest on
of Anarchy," line 14. the national debt put an added burden
1. The court presided over by the Lord on the poor.
Chancellor that decided matters of equity 6. Love misery. "One of the attributes
between individuals. Shelley's children by in Linnaeus's description of the Cat. To
Harriet were taken from him in a Chan- a similar cause the caterwauling of more
eery Court trial. than one species of this genus is to be
2. The unreformed Parliament. referred; —
except indeed that the poor
3. Shelley attacked the evils arising ."rom quadruped is compelled to quarrel with
the standing army, the national debt, and its own pleasures, whilst the biped is
paper money in his Philosophical View supposed only to quarrel with those of
of Reform (see Shelley and his Circle, others" (Shelley's note).
VI, 945ff.). 7. "What would this husk and excuse
4. The liberals repeatedly feared that for a Virtue be without its kernal prosti-
the Georges, Electors of Hanover as well tution, or the kernal prostitution without
 — — ————
332 • Peter Bell the Third

—— — —
Lawyers judges old hobnobbers 8
Are there Bailiffs Chancellors
—
Bishops great and little robbers
— w
Men
— the —
Rhymesters pamphleteers stock-jobbers 9
of glory in wars,

Things whose trade is, over ladies

To lean, and flirt, and stare, and simper,
Till all that is divine in woman
Grows cruel, courteous, 1 smooth, inhuman, *95

Crucified 'twixt a smile and whimper.

Thrusting, toiling, wailing, moiling, 2

Frowning, preaching such a riot! —
Each with never ceasing labour
Whilst he thinks he cheats his neighbour 2 °°

Cheating his own heart of quiet.

And all these meet at levees; 3 —

Dinners convivial and political;
Suppers of epic poets; teas, —
Where small talk dies in agonies; 2 °5

Breakfasts professional and critical;

Lunches and snacks so aldermanic

That one would furnish forth ten dinners,
Where reigns a Cretan-tongued 4 panic
Lest news Russ, Dutch, or Alemannic 5 2I °

Should make some losers, and some winners

At conversazioni — balls
Conventicles" and drawing-rooms.
—
Courts of law committees calls —
Of — —
morning clubs book stalls
a 2I 5

—
Churches masquerades and tombs.

And this is Hell —and

in this smother
damnable and damned;
All are
Each one damning, damns the other;
They arc damned by one another, 22 °

Bv none other are thev damned.

this husk of a Virtue? I wonder the 2. Drudging, working in wet and mire.
Women of the Town do not form an 3. In Great Britain, assemblies held in
association, like the Society for the the early afternoon by the sovereign or
Suppression of Vice, for the support of his representative, at which men only
what may be considered the 'King, are received.
church, and Constitution' of their order. 4. Lying. The Cretans were proverbial
But this subject is almost too horrible for as liars at least as early as the time of
a joke" (Shelley's note). the New Testament (see Titus 1:12).
8. Those who drink together or to each 5. German.
other, or who are on familiar terms. ial assemblies, often with discus-
9. Siockbrokers and speculators. sions of literature, art. or science.
1. I.e., with manners that befit the court 7. Nonconformist or dissenting mceting-
of a prince. houses, or the meetings themselves.
 ———
Peter Bell the Third • 333
Tis a lie to say, "God damns!" 8
Where was Heaven's Attorney General
When they first gave out such flams? 9
Let there be an end of shams, 22 5

They are mines of poisonous mineral.

Statesmen damn themselves to be
Cursed; and lawyers damn their souls
To the auction of a fee;
Churchmen damn themselves to see 2 3°

God's sweet love in burning coals.

The damned beyond all cure
rich are
To and starve, and trample on
taunt,
The weak and wretched: and the poor
Damn their broken hearts to endure 2 35

Stripe on stripe, 1 with groan on groan.

Sometimes the poor are damned indeed

—
To take, not means for being blessed,
But Cobbett's snuff, revenge; 2 that weed
From which the worms that it doth feed 2 4°

Squeeze less than they before possessed.

And some few, like we know who,

—
Damned but God alone knows why
To believe their minds are given
To make this ugly Hell a Heaven; 2 45

In which faith they3 live and die.

Thus, as in a Town, plague-stricken,

Each man be he sound or no
Must indifferently sicken;
As when day begins to thicken 25 °

None knows a pigeon from a crow,

So good and bad, sane and mad,
The oppressor and the oppressed;
Those who weep to see what others
Smile to inflict upon their brothers; 255

Lovers, haters, worst and best;

All are —
damned they breathe an air,
Thick, infected, joy-dispelling:
Each pursues what seems most fair,
Mining like moles, through mind, and there 26°

Scoop palace-caverns vast, where Care

In throned state is ever dwelling.
8. "This libel on our national oath, and 1. A stroke or lash with a whip or
this accusation of all our countrymen of scourge.
being in the daily practise of solemnly 2. Alluding to journalistic calls for re-
asseverating the most enormous false- venge on the ruling class in Cobbett's
hood I fear deserves the notice of a Political Register.
more active Attorney General than that 3. I.e., Hunt, Shelley himself, and other
here alluded to" (Shelley's note). idealistic reformers.
9. Deception, humbug.
334 • Peter Bell the Third

Part Fourth

SIN

Lo, Peter in Hell's Grosvenor square,

A footman in the Devil's service!
And the misjudging world would swear
That every man in service there
To virtue would prefer vice.

But Peter, though now damned, was not

What Peter was before damnation.
Men oftentimes prepare a lot
Which ere it them, is not what
finds
Suits with their genuine station.

All things that Peter saw and felt

Had a peculiar aspect to him;
And when they came within the belt
Of his own nature, seemed to melt
Like cloud to cloud, into him.

And so the outward world uniting

To that within him, he became
Considerably uninviting
To those, who meditation slighting,
Were moulded in a different frame.
And he scorned them, and they scorned him;
And he scorned all they did; and they
Did all that men of their own trim 4
Are wont to do to please their whim,
Drinking, lying, swearing, play.

Such were his fellow servants; thus

His virtue, like our own, was built
Too much on that indignant fuss
Hypocrite Pride stirs up in us
To bully one another's guilt.

He had a mind which was somehow

At once circumference and centre
Of all he might or feel or know;
Nothing went ever out, although
Something did ever enter.

He had as much imagination

—
As a pint-pot: he never could
Fancy another situation
From which to dart his contemplation.
Than that wherein he stood.

4. Nature, character, or manner.

 — —

Peter Bell the Third 335

Yet was individual mind,
his
And new created all he saw
In a new manner, and refined 305

Those new creations, and combined

Them, by a master-spirit's law,
Thus —though unimaginative,
An apprehension clear, intense,
Of his mind's work, had made alive 310

The things it wrought on; I believe

Wakening a sort of thought in sense. 5
But from the first 'twas Peter's drift
To be a kind of moral eunuch
He touched the hem of Nature's shift, 315

Felt faint —and never dared uplift

The closest, all-concealing tunic.

She laughed the while, with an arch smile,

And kissed him with a sister's
—
And said "My best Diogenes, 6
kiss,
320

I love you well — but, if you please,

Tempt not again my deepest bliss.

—
"Tis you are cold for I, not coy,
Yield love for love, frank, warm and true:
And Burns, a Scottish Peasant boy, 325

—
His errors prove it knew my joy
More, learned friend, than you.
"Bocca baciata non perdo. Ventura
Anzi rinnuova come fa la luna: 1 —
So thought Boccaccio, whose sweet words might cure a 330
Male prude like you from what you now endure, a
Low-tide in soul, like a stagnant laguna."
Then Peter rubbed his eyes severe,
And smoothed his spacious forehead down
—
With his broad palm; 'twixt love and fear, 335

He looked, as he no doubt felt, queer,

And in his dream sate down.
The Devil was no uncommon creature;
A
leaden-witted thief just
Out of the dross and scum of
— huddled
nature; 340

A toadlike lump 8 of limb and feature,

With mind, and heart, and fancy muddled.
5. Lines 293-312 can probably be taken cameron, Second Day, end of the Seventh
as Shelley's true (if somewhat sardoni- Novella).
cally expressed) evaluation of Words- 8. In two stanzas Shelley has coalesced
worth's genius. reminiscences of two classic passages
6. The Cynic philosopher of Athens; the Paradise Lost, IV.799fT., where guardian
name itself suggests that Peter is un- angels discover Satan "Squat like a Toad,
willing to seek ultimate truths. close at the eare of Eve," and Pope's
7. "A mouth that's been kissed does not character of Sporus in "Epistle to Dr.
lose its charm ;/Rather, it renews itself Arbuthnot" (lines 305-333), where Pope
as does the moon" (Boccaccio, De- echoes the same passage in Milton.
 ———— —
336 • Peter Bell the Third

He was that heavy, dull, cold thing

The spirit of evil well may be:
A drone 9 too base to have a sting; 345

Who gluts, and grimes his lazy wing,

And calls lust, luxury.

Now he was quite, the kind of wight 1

Round whom collect, at a fixed aera, 2
Venison, turtle, hock 3 and claret, 350

—
Good cheer and those who come to share it

And best East Indian madeira!

It was his fancy to invite
Men of science, wit and learning
Who came to lend each other Light: 355

He proudly thought that his gold's might

Had set those spirits burning.
And men of learning, science, wit,
Considered him
as you and I
Think of some rotten tree, and sit 360

Lounging and dining under it,

Exposed to the wide sky.

And all the while, with loose fat smile

The willing wretch sat winking there,
Believing 'twas his power that made 365

That jovial scene —

and that all paid
Homage to his unnoticed chair.

Though to be sure this place was Hell;

—
He was the Devil and all they
What though the claret circled well, 370

And Wit, like ocean, rose and fell?

Were damned eternally.

Part Fifth

GRACE

Among the guests who often staid

Till the Devil's petits soupers, 4
A man 5 there came, fair as a maid, 375

And Peter noted what he said,

Standing behind his master's chair.

9. The nonworking male honeybee whose 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Shelley, who
function is to impregnate the queen; admired Coleridge's writings, may have
hence, a lazy idler or sluggard. heard him lecture but seems never to
1. A person; here used with contempt. have met him socially; he had certainly
2. A memorable or important date. heard much of him from such mutual
3. White German wine. friends and acquaintances as Southey,
4. Little suppers to which only intimates Godwin, Hunt, Byron, and Maria Gis-
are admitted. borne.
 — — —— —
Peter Bell the Third • 337
He was a mighty poet —and
A subtle-souled Psychologist;
All things he seemed to understand 380

Of old or —
new of sea or land
But his —
own mind which was a mist.

This was a man who might have turned

—
Hell into Heaven and so in gladness
A Heaven unto himself have earned; 385

But he in shadows undiscerned

Trusted, —
and damned himself to madness.
He spoke of poetry, and how
—
"Divine it was a light a love —
A spirit which like wind doth blow 390

As it listeth, to and fro;

A dew rained down from God above
"A power which comes and goes like dream,
And which none can ever trace
Heaven's light on Earth —
Truth's brightest beam." 395

And when he ceased there lay the gleam

Of those words upon his face.

Now Peter, when he heard such talk

Would,heedless of a broken pate
Stand like a man asleep, or baulk 400

Some wishing guest of knife or fork, 6

Or drop and break his master's plate.
At night oft would start and wake
Like a lover, and began
In a wild measure songs to make 4° 5
On moor, and glen, and rocky lake,
And on the heart of man.
And on the universal sky
And the wide earth's bosom green,
And the sweet, strange mystery 4I °

Of what beyond these things may lie

And yet remain unseen.
For in his thought he visited
The and damned,
spots in which, ere dead
He wayward life had led;
his 4I 5

Yet knew not whence the thoughts were fed

Which thus his fancy crammed.
And these obscure remembrances
Stirred such harmony in Peter,
That, whensoever he should please, 420

He could speak of rocks and trees

In poetic metre.

6. I.e., intentionally omit the silverware.

 —
338 Peter Bell the Third

For though it was without a sense

Of memory, yet he remembered well
Many a ditch and quickset fence; 425

Of lakes he had intelligence-

He knew something of heath and fell.
7

He had also dim recollections

Of pedlars tramping on their rounds,
Milk pans and pails, and odd collections 430

Of saws, 8 and proverbs, and reflexions

Old parsons make in burying-grounds.
But Peter's verse was clear, and came
Announcing from the frozen hearth
Of a cold age, that none might tame 435

The soul of that diviner flame

It augured to the Earth:
Like gentle rains, on the dry plains,
Making that green which late was grey,
Or like the sudden moon, that stains **

Some gloomy chamber's windowpanes

With a broad light like day.
For language was in Peter's hand
Like clay while he was yet a potter;
And he made sings for all the land 4*5

Sweet both to feel and understand

As pipkins 9 late to mountain Cotter.
And Mr. , the Bookseller, 1
Gave twentv pounds for some: — then scorning
A footman's yellow coat to wear, 450

Peter, too proud of heart I fear,

Instantly gave the Devil warning.

Whereat the Devil took offence,

Andswore in his soul a great oath then,
"That for his damned impertinence, 455

He'd bring him to a proper sense

Of what was due to gentlemen!"

Part Sixth
DAMNATION
"O that mine enemv had written
A book!" — cried job: 1
'
—A fearful curse;
«6o
If to the Arab, as the Briton, . I
,,'

'Twas galling to be critic-bitten: ,1

The Devil to Peter wished no worse.
7. heath: a flat, uncultivated land covered chase (for 30 guineas) of the copyright
with low herbage; fell: an elevated stretch to Lyrical Ballads, though he may not
of waste or pasture land. have known all the details.
8. Traditional maxims. 2. Job 31:35; Job's "adversar>
9. Small earthenware pots or pans. God.
1. Shelley alludes to Joseph Cottle's pur-
 — —
Peter Bell the Third • 339
When Peter's next new book found vent,
The Devil to the first Reviews
all

A copy of it slyly sent 465

With five-pound note as compliment,

—
And this short notice 'Tray abuse" 3
Then seriatim, 4 month and quarter,
Appeared such mad tirades. — One said
"Peter seduced Mrs. Foy's daughter, 470

Then drowned the Mother in Ullswater, 5

The last thing as he went to bed."
—
Another "Let him shave his head!
—
Where's Dr. Willis? 6 Or is he joking?
What does the rascal mean or hope, 475

No longer imitating Pope,

In that barbarian Shakespeare poking?"

One more, — "Is incest not enough,

And must there be adultery too?
Grace after meat? Miscreant 7 and Liar! 480

Thief! Blackguard! Scoundrel! Fool! Hellfire

Is twenty times too good for you.

"By that last book of yours we think

You've double damned yourself to scorn:
We warned you whilst yet on the brink 485

You stood. From your black name will shrink

The babe that is unborn."
All these Reviews the Devil made
Up which he had
in a parcel,
Safely to Peter's house conveyed. 490
For carriage ten-pence Peter paid
—
Untied them read them went half mad. —
"What!" — Cried he, "this is my reward
For nights of thought, and days of toil?
Do poets, but to be abhorred 495
By men of whom they never heard,
Consume their spirits' oil?
3. The leading "Reviews" of Shelley's 4. One by one in succession,
day (as opposed to "magazines" and 5. Betty Foy is the mother of Words-
weekly "newspapers") were the quarterly worth's "Idiot Boy" (she has no daugh-
Edinburgh Review (1802ff.), Quarterly ter); Ullswater: one of the larger lakes
Review (1809ff.), and British Review in the Lake Country of Westmorland
(1811-1825), and the monthly Monthly and Cumberland counties.
Review (1749-1845), Critical Review 6. Francis Willis (1718-1807) and his
(1756-1817), and British Critic (1793- sons John (1751-1835) and Robert Dar-
1826). Though Francis Jeffrey's attacks ling Willis (1760-1821) were all phy-
on Wordsworth in the Edinburgh Review sicians specializing in the treatment of
are the most (in)famous, Wordsworth's mental illness; all treated King George
Poems: In Two Volumes (1807) was III. (The better known writer on in-
roughly handled by most reviewers. (For sanity, Robert Willis (1799-1878), was
facsimiles of these and other contem- too young for Shelley to have known of
porary rev'ews of the Romantic poets, see him.)
The Romantics Reviewed, ed. Donald H. 7. Vile wretch or villain.
Reiman [9 vols., New York, 1972].)
 —
340 • Peter Bell the Third

"What have I done to them? and — Who

Mrs. Foy? Tis very cruel
Is
To speak of me and Betty so! 500

Adultery! God defend me! Oh!

I've half a mind to fight a duel.

"Or," cried he, a grave look collecting,

"Is it my genius, like the moon,
Sets those who
stand her face inspecting, 505

(That face within their brain reflecting,)

Like a crazed bell chime, out of tune?" 8

For Peter did not know the town,

But thought, as country readers do,
For half a guinea or a crown, 510

He bought oblivion or renown

From God's own voice 9 in a review.
All Peter did on this occasion
Was, writing some sad stuff in prose. 1
It is a dangerous invasion 5I5

When Poets criticise: their station

Is to delight, not pose.

The Devil then sent to Leipsic fair,

For Born's translation of Kant's book: 2
A world of words, tail foremost, where 520

— —
Right wrong false true and foul and — — fair
As in a lotterv wheel are shook.
Five thousand crammed octavo pages
Of German he
psychologies, —
Who verborum* assuages
his furor 525

Thereon, deserves just seven months' wages

More than will e'er be due to me.
Ilooked on them nine several days,
And then I saw that they were bad:
A friend, too, spoke in their dispraise, 530

He never read them; with amaze —

I found Sir William Drummond had. 4

8. Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. i. 165- in the same volume ( 1.341-375).

166: "Now see that noble and most 2. G. Born's Latin translation of
F.
sovereign reason, /Like sweet bells Kant's works: Opera ad philosophiam
jangled, out of tune and harsh." criticam pertinenlia (4 vols., Leipzig,
9. "Vox populi, vox dei. As Mr. Godwin 1796-1798). Immanuel Kant (1724-
truly observes of a more famous saying, 1804), who spent his life in Koenigsberg,
of some merit as a popular maxim, but Prussia, was the leading moral and meta-
totally destitute of philosophical ac- physical philosopher of the late eight-
curacy" (Shelley's note). Vox populi, eenth century.
vox dei: The voice of the people [is] 3. The inspired frenzy of poets and
the voice of god. prophets
1. Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Bal- 4. Sir William Drummond (1770-1828)
lads (1800) and his preface to the col- criticized ideas in Academical
Kant's
lected Poems of 1815 (I,vii-xlii) and the Questions (London. 1805), a book that
"Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" greatly influenced Shelley.
 — — ———
Peter Bell the Third • 341

When the book came, the Devil sent

It to P. Verbovale 5 Esquire,
With a brief note of compliment, 535

By that night's Carlisle mail. It went

And set his soul on fire.

Fire;which ex luce prcebens fumum, 6

Made him beyond the bottom see
—
Of truth's clear well when I and you, Ma'am, 540

Go, as we shall do, subter humum, 7

We may know more than he.

Now Peter ran to seed in soul

Into a walking paradox;
For he was neither part nor whole, 545

—
Nor good, nor bad nor knave, nor fool,
—Among the woods and rocks
Furious he rode, where late he ran,
Lashing and spurring his tame hobby;
Turned to a formal Puritan, 550

A solemn and unsexual man,

He half believed White Obi\ 8
This steed in vision he would ride,
High trotting over nine-inch bridges,
With Flibbertigibbet, 9
imp of pride, 555

Mocking and mowing by his side

A mad brained goblin 1 for a guide
Over cornfields, gates and hedges.
After these ghastly rides, he came
Home to his heart, and found from thence 560

Much stolen of its accustomed flame:

His thoughts grew weak, drowsy, and lame
Of their intelligence.

To Peter's view, all seemed one hue;

He was no Whig, he was no Tory: 565

No Deist 2 and no Christian he;

He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.

5. —
"Quasi, Qui valet verba: i.e. all the to let light appear").
words which have been, are, or may be 7. Under the ground, i.e., die.
expended by, for, against, with, or on 8. See note 9, p. 324.
him. Asufficient proof of the utility of 9. The name of a devil or fiend (see
this History. Peter's progenitor who se- Shakespeare, King Lear, III. iv. 120).
lected this name seems to have possessed 1. Will-o'-the-wisp, the elusive light-
a pure anticipated cognition of the nature goblin who leads travelers astray,
and modesty of this ornament of his 2. One who believes in a deity that
posterity" (Shelley's note). created the universe and rules it through
6. "From light he then gives smoke" (an natural law, but who does not believe in
inversion of Horace's Ars poetica, 143- divine intervention in human affairs (or
144: "His thought is not to give flame in the divinity of Jesus).
first and then smoke, but from smoke
 ———
342 • Peter Bell the Third

One single point in his belief

From his organization sprung, 570

The heart enrooted faith, the chief

Ear in his doctrine's blighted sheaf,
That "happiness is wrong,"
So thought Calvin and Dominic; 3
So think their fierce successors, who* 575

Even now would neither stint nor stick

Our flesh from off our bones to pick,
If they might "do their do."

His morals thus were undermined:

The old Peter— the hard, old Potter— 580

Was born anew within his mind:

He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter. 4

In the death hues of agony

Lambently 5 flashing from a fish, 585

Now Peter felt amused to see

Shades, like a rainbow's, rise and flee,
Mixed with a certain hungry wish. 6
So Country's dying face
in his
He —
looked and, lovely as she lay, 590

Seeking in vain his last embrace,

Wailing her own abandoned case,
With hardened sneer he turned away:
And coolly to his own soul said;
"Do you not think that we might make 595

A poem on her when she's dead?

Or, no — a thought is in my head
Her shroud for a new sheet I'll take:

"My wife wants one. —

Let who will bury
This mangled corpse! —
And I and you, 6o°

3. John Calvin (1509-1564), the Geneva death of a number of trout, in the fourth
Protestant theologian, and St. Dominic part of a long poem in blank verse,
(1170-1221), Spanish founder of the published within a few years. [The Ex-
Catholic Dominican order. cursion, VIII. 568-71.] That poem con-
4. "A famous river in the new Atlantis tains curious evidence of the gradual
of the Dynastophylic Pantisocratists" hardening of a strong but circumscribed
(Shelley's note). Otter: The River Otter sensibility, of the perversion of a pene-
near Coleridge's boyhood home to which trating but panic stricken understanding,
he addressed one sonnet; he also wrote The Author might have derived a lesson
sonnets praising Pantisocracy, the plan which he had probably forgotten from
he, Southey, their wives (the Fricker these sweet and sublime verses: —
sisters), and other friends had concocted This lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
in 1794 to establish a Utopian community Taught both by what she [Nature] shews
on the banks of the Susquehanna River and what conceals,
in Pennsylvania. Dynastophylic refers to Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
Southey's and Coleridge's later support With sorrow of the meanest thing that
of the established dynasties of Europe. feels." (Shelley's note; the lines
5. Gilding over a surface. quoted are the last four of Words-
6. "See the description of the beautiful worth's "Hart-Leap Well" [1800]).
colours produced during the agonising
 ——— " —

Peter Bell the Third • 343

My dearest Soul, will then make merry,

As the Prince Regent did with Sherry, 7 —
—
"Ay and at last desert me too."
And so his Soul would not be gay,
But moaned within him; like a fawn, 6 °5

Moaning within a cave, it lay

Wounded and wasting, day by day,
Till all its life of life was gone.
As troubled skies stain waters clear;
The storm in Peter's heart and mind, 6l °

Now made his verses dark and queer:

They were the ghosts of what they were;
Shaking dim grave clothes in the wind.
For he now raved enormous folly,
6i s
Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools and Graves,
'Twould make George Colman 8 melancholy
To have heard him, like a male Molly, 9
Chaunting those stupid staves.

Yet the Reviews, who heaped abuse

On Peter, while he wrote for freedom, 62°

So soon as in his song they spy

The folly which soothes Tyranny,
Praise him, for those who feed 'em.

"He was a man, too great to scan;

A planet lost in truth's keen rays: 6*5

His virtue, awful and prodigious;

He was the most sublime, religious,
Pure-minded Poet of these days."

As soon —
he read that cried Peter,
as
63 °
"Eureka! I have found the way

To make a better thing of metre

Than e'er was made by living creature
Up to this blessed day."

Then Peter wrote odes to the Devil;

In one of which he meekly said: 635

"May Carnage and Slaughter,

Thy niece and thy daughter, 1
7. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751- color humor.
1816), dramatist, wit, and liberal Whig 9. male Molly: an effeminate man or
member of Parliament, was a friend and sodomite; staves: stanzas,
drinking companion of George IV in his 1. Cf. lines 636-637 with Wordsworth's
younger days as Prince of Wales As "Ode, 1815" (celebrating the defeat of
Regent, George turned reactionary and Napoleon at Waterloo) ". Almighty
: . .

abandoned Sheridan; (false) rumor had God!/. Thy most dreaded instrument,/
. .

it that George allowed "Sherry" to be In working out a pure intent, /Is Man
arrested for debt and die in poverty arrayed for mutual slaughter,/ Yea, —
without attempting to assist him. Carnage is thy daughter." Wordsworth
8. George Colman, the Younger (1762- drastically revised the lines for the edi-
1836), an important dramatist and writer tion of 1845.
of farces, was noted for his wit and off-
 —— —
344 • Peter Bell the Third

May Rapine and Famine,

Thy gorge ever cramming, 2
Glut thee with living and dead! 64o

"May death and Damnation,

And Consternation,
Flit up from Hell with pure intent!
Slash them Manchester, 3
at
Glasgow, Leeds and Chester; 6 45

Drench all with blood from Avon to Trent.

"Let thy body-guard yeomen

Hew down babes and women,
And laugh with bold triumph till Heaven be rent!
When Moloch 4 in Jewry 6 5°

Munched children with fury

It was thou, Devil, dining with pure intent." 5

Part Seventh

DOUBLE DAMNATION
The Devil now knew
his proper cue.
Soon he read the ode, he drove
as
To his friend Lord MacMurderchouse's, 6 6 55

A man of interest in both houses,

—
And said: "For money or for love
"Pray find some cure or sinecure,
To feed from the superfluous taxes
—
A friend of ours a Poet fewer — 66°

Have fluttered tamer to the lure

—
Than he." His Lordship stands and racks his
Stupid brains, while one might count
As manv beads as he had boroughs,
—
At length replies; from his mean front, ^5
Like one who rubs out an account,
Smoothing away the unmeaning furrows:
2. Pronounced "crammin." with the principles of legitimate murder;
3. An allusion to the Peterloo Massacre; whilst the other only makes a bad one
see "The Mask of Anarchy," pp. 301- ridiculous and odious.
310. "If either Peter or Cobbett should see
4. A Canaanite god to whom children this note, each will feel more indignation
were sacrificed as burnt offerings (Levi- at being compared to the other than at
ticus 18:21); one of Milton's devils in any censure implied in the moral per-
Paradise Lost (11.43). Moloch means version laid to their charge" (Shelley's
"king" in Hebrew (as Milton knew). note).
5. "It curious to observe how often
is 6. Chouse: to cheat or swindle, or (as a
extremes meet. Cobbett and Peter use noun) one who is a swindler. The noble-
the same language
for a different pur- man who actually obtained a government
pose: Peter is indeed a sort of metrical position for Wordsworth was (as Shelley
Cobbett. Cobbett is however more mis- knew) William I.owther, Earl of I

chievous than Peter, because he pollutes dale, the son of ("Mac-") the nobleman
a holy and now unconquerable cause who had cheated Wordsworth's family.
 — ——————
Peter Bell the Third • 345
"It happens fortunately, dear Sir,
I can. I hope I need require
No pledge from you, that he will stir 6 i°

In our affairs; — like Oliver, 7

That he'll be worthy of his hire."

These words exchanged, the news sent off

To Peter: —home the Devil hied;
Took to his bed; he had no cough, 675

No doctor, —meat and drink enough,

Yet that same night he died.

The Devil's corpse was leaded down.

His decent heirs enjoyed his pelf; 8
Mourning-coaches, many a one, 68 °

Followed his hearse along the town:

Where was the Devil himself?
When Peter heard of his promotion
His eyes grew like two stars for bliss:
There was a bow of sleek devotion 68 5

Engendering in his back; each motion

Seemed a Lord's shoe to kiss.
He hired a house, 9 bought plate, and made
A genteel drive up to his door,
With sifted gravel neatly laid, 69°

As if defying all who said

Peter was ever poor.

But a disease soon struck into

The veryand soul of Peter
life
He walked about
slept —
had the hue — ^5
Of health upon his cheeks an d few —
—
Dug better none a heartier eater.
t

And yet, a strange and horrid curse

Clung upon and day
Peter, night
Month after month the thing grew worse, 7 °°

And deadlier than in this my verse

I can find strength to say.

Peter was dull —he was at first

Dull —O, —
so dull so very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed 705

Stillwith this dulness was he cursed

—
Dull beyond all conception dull. —
7. W. J. Richards ("Oliver") was a ernment appointment as Distributor of
government spy and agent like Castle [Tax] Stamps for Westmorland and
(line 152). Cumberland counties and moved into
8. A deprecatory term for money or Rydal Mount, the larger house he was
wealth. to occupy till his death.
9. In 1813, Wordsworth received a gov-
 ———— —
346 • Peter Bell the Third

No one could read his books no mortal,—

But a few natural friends, would hear him:
The parson came not near his portal; 710

His state was like that of the immortal

Described by Swift 1 —
no man could bear him.

His sister, wife, and children yawned,

With a long, slow and drear ennui,"
All human patience far beyond; 715

Their hopes of Heaven each would have pawned,

Anywhere else to be.

But in his verse, and in his prose,

The essence of his dullness was
Concentred and compressed so close, 720

'Twould have made Guatimozin doze

On his red gridiron of brass. 2

A printer's boy, folding those pages,

Fell slumbrously upon one side:
Like those famed seven who slept three ages. 3 725

To wakeful frenzy's vigil rages

As opiates were the same applied.

Even the Reviewers who were hired

To do the work of his reviewing,
With adamantine nerves, grew tired; 730

Gaping and torpid they retired,

To dream of what they should be doing.
And worse and worse, the drowsy curse
—
Yawned in him till it grew a pest
A wide contagious atmosphere, 735
Creeping like cold through all things near;
A power to infect, and to infest.
His servant maids and dogs grew dull;
His kitten, late a sportive elf;
The woods and lakes, so beautiful, 740

Of dim stupidity were full,

All grew dull as Peter's self.

—
The earth under his feet the springs,
Which lived within it a quick life
The Air, the Winds of manv wings 745

That fan it with new munnurings,

1. One of the Struldbruggs, who are "Am I now reposing on a bed of

doomed to live forever, in Gulliver's flowers?"
Travels, Part III, chap. X. 3. Seven Christian youths of Ephesus,
2. The nephew and successor of Monte- sealed up in a cave during the Decian
-uma led the Aztec defense of Mexico persecution of ad. 250, awoke after a
City against Cortes; after his capture he sleep of (Gibbon calculates) 187 years—
and a friend were tortured on a hot about three lifetimes. See Gibbon, De-
metal grid. In order to keep up his dine and Fall, Chap, xxxiii.
companion's courage, Guatimozin said,
 ——
The Witch of Atlas • 347
Were dead to their harmonious strife.

The birds and beasts within the wood,

The insects, and each creeping thing,
Were now a silent multitude; 750

Love's work was left unwrought —no brood

Near Peter's house took wing.

And every neighbouring Cottager

Stupidly yawned upon the other;
No jackass brayed; no little cur — 755

Cocked up his ears; —no man would stir

To save a dying mother.

Yet all from that charmed district went

But some half idiot and half knave,
Who, rather than pay any rent, 760

Would live, with marvellous content,

Over his father's grave.

No bailiff dared within that space,

For fear of the dullcharm, to enter:
A man would bear upon his face, 765

For fifteen months, in any case,

The yawn of such a venture.

Seven miles above below around — —

This pest of dulness holds its sway:
A ghastly life without a sound; 770
To Peter's soul the spell is bound
How should it ever pass away?

The Witch of Atlas In August 1820, Shelley went on foot from

Lucca to a shrine high in the' Apennines atop Monte San Pellegrino, com-
pleting the entire journey in three days (August 11-13). Inspired during
this walk, Shelley spent the next three days (August 14-16) writing
"The Witch of Atlas."
The poem is written in the ottava rima stanzas of Italian seriocomic
poetry. In Juneand July, Shelley and Mary had been reading aloud II
Ricciardetto(1738) by Niccolo Forteguerri, an imitator of Luigi Pulci,
whose Morgante Maggiore had been the ultimate source of Byron's style in
Beppo, Don Juan, and A Vision of Judgment. But Shelley's ottava rima in
"The Witch of Atlas" (and in the Homeric "Hymn to Mercury," which
he translated during this period) is as distinctively different from Byron's
ottava rima as it is from Keats's use of the same form in Isabella.
The Witch —another embodiment of the Ideal — is treated seriously but
with lightness and without a note of sentimentality. Yet she plays pranks
with mortal creatures, and they —including the poet and his readers are —
aware that the consequences of her actions are not as satisfactory to
humankind as they might be. The tone holds the reader's feelings in
suspension, as the poet describes the incomparable beauty and perfection
of the Witch and, at the same time, her lack of understanding sympathy
with the problems of mortal creatures.
Though most of such "plot" as the poem exhibits is self-explanatory, a
348 • The Witch of Atlas
few comments on particular matters may be helpful. According to some
classical geographers, the Atlas Mountains, which were the Witch's home,
were the source of one branch of the Nile River, which was imagined to
loop from Morocco below the Sahara Desert and flow eastward into the
Sudan. So the Witch's final journey down the populated Nile Valley has
some connection with her childhood among the remote mountains. The
Witch's flight into the skies of the Southern Hemisphere (423-448) has
Though there had been some current
never been explained satisfactorily.
interest in Antarctica sinceCaptain James Cook's second voyage (1772-
1775) — reflected in the voyage of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner to the
southern land of "mist and snow" —
Shelley's portrait of an "Austral lake"
that is a calm haven seems to have its origins in myth rather than in
exploration. The only hint we can find in previous literature is Ulysses'
account of his final questing voyage in Dante's Inferno (Canto XXVI),
where he and his crew cross the equator and come within sight of the
Mount of Purgatory looming to the southwest.
Mary Shelley transcribed "The Witch of Atlas" in December 1820, and
Shelley mailed the poem to Oilier on January 20, 1821. On February 22
—
he instructed Oilier to publish it with his name but not to include it with
Julian and Maddalo. Oilier neglected issuing "The Witch," and it was first
published by Mary Shelley in Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824), though
without the introductory stanzas in which Shelley mocks Mary, the critics,
and Wordsworth's Peter Bell. Besides the first edition and Mary's subse-
quent collected editions of 1839, the chief textual authorities are Shelley's
intermediate fair copy (Bodleian MS. Shelley d.i, ff. 15-32) and a tran-
script in Mary's hand that Forman collated in his edition of 1876. Shelley's
fair copy is missing some lines and phrases, as is Mary's transcript, which

obviously derives from it. The fair copy by Mary sent to Oilier in January

1821 presumably served as press copy for Posthumous Poems (1824); it

is now lost. The transcript by Mary that Forman collated may have been

done in Mary had retrieved the com-

Italy after Shelley's death, before
pleted version sent to Oilier. We
have followed 1824 on most verbal
differences but have followed the manuscripts on several matters of spelling,
capitalization, and punctuation and on a few verbal points where the 1824
reading could have resulted from Mary's error in transcribing Shelley's
manuscript or the typesetter's in setting Mary's transcript.

The Witch of Atlas

To Mary
(on her objecting to the following poem, upon the score
of its containing no human interest)
I

How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten

(For vipers kill, though dead) 1 by some review,
That you condemn these verses I have written
1. "Experiments have shown that a off." (Joan Arehart-Treichel, Poisons
snake head severed from its body will and Toxins [New York, 1976], pp. 146-
remain alive and able to inflict a deadly 147.) We have not identified the contem-
bite for 15 to 30 minutes after being cut porary source of Shelley's information.
 The Witch of Atlas - 349
Because they tell no story, false or true?
What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, 5

May it not leap and play as grown cats do,

come? Prithee, for this one time,
Till its claws
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
ii

What hand would crush the silken-winged fly,

2

The youngest of inconstant April's minions, 3 I0

Because it cannot climb the purest sky

Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions? 4
Not thine. Thou knowest tis its doom to die
When Day shall hide within her twilight pinions 5
The lucent 6 eyes, and the eternal smile, *s

Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

in
To thy fair feet a winged Vision 7 came
Whose date should have been longer than a day,
And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame
And in thy sight its fading plumes display; 20

The watery bow burned in the evening flame,

—
But the shower fell, the swift Sun went his way.
And that is dead: 8 O, let me not believe
That anything of mine is fit to live!
IV
Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years 25

Considering and retouching Peter Bell; 9

Watering his laurels 1 with the killing tears
Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell
Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres
Of Heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well 30

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil

The over busy gardener's blundering toil.
v
My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature
As Ruth or Lucy, 2 whom his graceful praise
—
Clothes for our grandsons but she matches Peter 35

Though he took nineteen years, and she three days

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre
She wears: he, proud as dandy with his stays,
Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress
Like King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness." 3 40

2. Ephemerid, or dayfly, which lives only 7. Shelley alludes to his longest poem,
for a few hours to a few days (see Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam).
"The Sensitive-Plant," 11.49). 8. Both the sales and the reviews of The
3. Favorites or darlings. Revolt disappointed Shelley.
4. In classical mythology the swan, be- 9. For Wordsworth's Peter Bell, see the
lieved to sing shortly before its death, headnote to Peter Bell the Third, above,
was sacred to Apollo (the sun); the 1. The emblem of distinction in poetry,
swan appears in astronomy as the north- 2. Idealized girls in Wordsworth's Lyrical
em constellation Cygnus. Ballads.
5. Wings. 3. The reference is to Shakespeare, King
6. Shining or bright. Lear, III.iv.31.
 —
350 • The Witch of Atlas

VI
If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow
Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate
Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow,
A lean mark hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;
In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello. 4 45
you unveil my Witch, no Priest or Primate
If
Can shrive 5 you of that sin, if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.

The Witch of Atlas

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth

Incestuous Change bore to her father Time, 50

Error and Truth, had hunted from the earth

All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learned rhvme,
A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain 6 55

Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

11

Her mother was one of the Atlantides 7 —

The all-beholding Sun 8 had ne'er beholden
In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden 6°

In the warm shadow of her loveliness . . .

He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden

The chamber of grey rock in which she lay
She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away. 9
in
'Tis said, she first was changed into a vapour, 65

And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,

Like splendour-winged moths about a taper,
Round the red West when the sun dies in it:
And then into a meteor, 1 such as caper
On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit: 2 70

Then, into one of those mysterious stars

Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars.
4. Probably the puppet representing the 7. Daughters of Atlas and Hesperus or
stock character in Italian farce, Scara- Pleione, the Atlantides (also called Hes-
mouche, a coward and boaster constantly perides or Pleiades) were nymphs or
being cudgeled by Harlequin; Othello: goddesses made into a constellation after
black.
i.e., their deaths.
5. Impose penance on and administer 8. I.e., Apollo; see line 293 and note,
absolution for. 9. The all-beholding dissolved away:
. . .

6. The Atlas Mountains run from south- The circumstances of the Witch's birth
western Morocco to northeastern Algeria. are very similar to those of Spenser's
According to the myth. Atlas, a brother Belphoebe and Amoret (Faerie Queene,
of Prometheus, when shown Medusa's I II.vi.7ff ).
.

head by Perseus, was changed into the I. Aurora or halo.

mountain; he was believed to support 2. An interval of inaction; hence, the
the heavens on his shoulders. period when the moon is not visible.
 —— —
The Witch of Atlas • 351

IV
Ten times the Mother of the Months 3 had bent
Her bow beside the folding-star, 4 and bidden
With that bright sign the billows 5 to indent 75

—
The sea-deserted sand like children chidden
At her command they ever came and went
Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden
Took shape and motion with the living form
:

Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm. 8o

v
A lovely lady garmented in light
From —
her own beauty deep her eyes, as are
Two openings of unfathomable night
Seen through a Temple's cloven roof her hair —
—
Dark the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight 8s

Picturing her form —

her soft smiles shone afar,
And her low voice was heard like love, and drew
All living things towards this wonder new.
VI
And first the spotted cameleopard 6 came,
And then the wise and fearless elephant; *>

Then the sly serpent, in the golden flame

Of his own volumes intervolved; 7 all gaunt —
And sanguine 8 beasts her gentle looks made tame
They drank before herat her sacred fount
And every beast of beating heart grew bold, 95

Such gentleness and power even to behold.

VII
The brinded 9 young
lioness led forth her
That she might teach them how they should forego
Their inborn thirst of death —
the pard 1 unstrung
I0°
His sinews at her feet, and sought to know
With looks whose motions spoke without a tongue
How he might be as gentle as the doe.
The magic circle of her voice and eyes
All savage natures did imparadise.
VIII
And old Silenus, 2 shaking a green stick I0 5

Of lilies, and the wood-gods in a crew

Came, blithe, as in the olive copses thick
Cicadae 3 are, drunk with the noonday dew:

3. I.e., the moon; nine full months she 9. Tawny or brownish color, marked
bent her bow by filling out from a thin with streaks of a different hue.
crescent to the full moon. 1. Leopard or panther.
4. Venus, the evening star, rising at 2. A demigod, attendant of Bacchus. See
folding time (when sheep are pu* into Prometheus Unbound, Il.ii; wood-gods:
their folds for the night). probably the Sileni —fauns and satyrs in
5. Waves (figuratively, the tides). general.
6. Giraffe. 3. Locusts with large, transparent wings,
7. Wound up within his coils (volumes). often erroneously identified as grass-
8. Bloody; i.e., carnivorous or preda- hoppers; the male makes a shrill chirp-
tory. ing sound.
 — —— —
352 - The Witch of Atlas
And Dryope and Faunus 4 followed quick,
Teasing the God to sing them something new 1I0

Till in this cave they found the lady lone,

Sitting upon a seat of emerald stone.
IX
And Universal Pan, 5 'tis said, was there,
And though none saw him, through —
the adamant
n5
Of the deep mountains, through the trackless air,
And through those living spirits, like a want 6
He past out of his everlasting lair
Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant
And felt that wondrous lady all alone
And she felt him upon her emerald throne. 12 °

x
And, every Nymph of stream and spreading tree
And every shepherdess of Ocean's flocks 7
Who drives her white waves over the green Sea;
And Ocean with the brine on his grey locks,
And quaint Priapus 8 with his companv I2 5

All came, much wondering how the enwombed rocks

Could have brought forth so beautiful a birth;
Her love subdued their wonder and their mirth.
XI
The herdsmen and the mountain maidens came
And the rude kings of Pastoral Garamant 9 — x 3°

Their shook within them, as a flame

spirits
Stirred by the air under a cavern gaunt:
Pigmies, and Polyphemes, 1 by manv a name,
Centaurs and Satyrs, 2 and such shapes as haunt
—
Wet clefts, and lumps neither alive nor dead, *M
Dog-headed, bosom-eyed 3 and bird-footed.
XII
—
For she was beautiful her beauty made
The bright world dim, and every thing beside
Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade:
No thought of living spirit could abide I4 °

4. Dryope: a nymph; the name designates dite and Dionysus; he is represented with
both the Arcadian mother of Pan by a human face, goat's ears, a stick to
Mercury and an Italian nymph who was drive away birds, and pruning hook,
a
the mother of Tarquitus by Faunus, the 9. The Garamantes were an African
brave and wise legendary ruler of Italy, (north central Libya) people who lived
who was revered as a satyr-deity. in common and "scarce clothed them-
5. As god of shepherds, huntsmen, and selves" because of the warm climate,
inhabitants of Arcadia (an area in Greece 1. One-eyed giants; after Polyphemus,
in the center of the Peloponnesus), Pan the Cyclops (Odyssey, IX).
(sometimes identified with Faunus) was 2. Centaurs: a race of imaginary crea-
a ruddy, flat-nosed, horned man with tures, half man and half horse, of
the feet and legs of a goat— a satyr. Thessaly; Satyrs: see note 5, above.
6. Mole (OED, sb. 1 ); identified by Curt These creatures are both lascivious and
R. Zimansky. generally playful.
7. Daughters of Oceanus, the Oceanides, 3. The syntax of the entire line indicates

who also protected seamen. that the creatures have eyes like bosoms
8. The deity of gardens and genitalia, — i.e., bulging eyes, not (as has been
Priapus was the deformed son of Aphro- suggested) breasts filled with eyes.
 —— —
The Witch of Atlas • 353

Which to her looks had ever been betrayed,

On any object in the world so wide,
On any hope within the circling skies,
But on her form, and in her inmost eyes.
XIII
Which when the lady knew she took her spindle J 45

And twined three threads of fleecy mist, and three

Long lines of light such as the Dawn may kindle
The clouds and waves and mountains with, and she
As many star-beams, ere their lamps could dwindle
In the belated moon, wound skilfully; *s°

And with these threads a subtle veil she wove

A shadow for the splendour of her love.
XIV
The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling
Were stored with magic treasures Sounds of air, —
Which had the power all spirits of compelling, J 55
4
Folded in cells of chrystal silence there;
Such as we hear in youth, and think the feeling
—
Will never die yet ere we are aware,
The feeling and the sound are fled and gone,
And l6°
the regret they leave remains alone.
xv
And there lay Visions swift and sweet and quaint,
Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis, 5
Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint
With the soft burthen of intensest bliss;
It was its work to bear to many a saint l65

Whose heart adores the shrine which holiest is,

Even Love's —
and others white, green, grey and black,
And of all shapes —and each was at her beck.
XVI
And odours in a kind of aviary
I7 °
Of ever blooming Eden-trees she kept,
Clipt 6 in a floating net a love-sick Fairy
Had woven from dew beams while the moon yet slept
As bats at the wired window of a dairy
They beat their vans; 7
and each was an adept,
When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds, I7 5

To stir sweet thoughts or sad, in destined minds.

XVII
And and sweet, whose healthful might
liquors clear
Could medicine the sick soul to happy sleep
And change eternal death into a night
—
Of glorious dreams or if eyes needs must weep, l8 °

Could make their tears all wonder and delight,

She in her chrystal vials did closely keep

4. Small rooms in monasteries. 6. Embraced or held tightly.

5. Cocoon. 7. Wings.
 — )

354 • The Witch of Atlas

If men could drink of those clear vials, 'tis said
The living were not envied of 8 the dead.
XVIII
Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device, l8 5

The works of some Saturnian Archimage,

Which taught the expiations at whose price
Men from the Gods might win that happy age
Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice 9 —
And which might quench the earth-consuming rage I9°

—
Of gold and blood till men should live and move
Harmonious as the sacred stars above.
XIX
And how all seem untameable,
things that
Not to be checked and not to be confined,
Obey the spells of wisdom's wizard skill; J 95

—
Time, Earth and Fire the Ocean and the Wind
—
And all their shapes and man's imperial Will
And other scrolls whose writings did unbind
—
The inmost lore of Love let the prophane 1
20°
Tremble to ask what secrets they contain.
xx
And wondrous works of substances unknown,
To which the enchantment of her father's power
Had changed those ragged blocks of savage stone,
Were heaped in the recesses of her bower;
2° 5
Carved lamps and chalices and phials which shone
In their own golden beams —
each like a flower
Out of whose depth a fire fly shakes his light
Under a cypress in the starless night.
XXI
At she lived alone in this wild home,
first

And her own thoughts were each a minister, 2I °

Clothing themselves or 2 with the Ocean foam,

Or with the wind, or with the speed of fire,
To work whatever purposes might come
Into her mind; such power her mighty Sire
Had girt them with, whether to fly or run, 2I 5

Through all the regions which he shines upon.

XXII
The Ocean-Nymphs and Hamadryades,
Oreads and Naiads with long weedy locks.
Offered to do her bidding through the seas,
22 °
Under the earth, and in the hollow rocks,
And far beneath the matted roots of bees
And in the knarlcd heart of stubborn oaks.

8. By. time before the Fall, when men acquired

9. Unlike Archimago's books, which con- native vice or original sin. (Cf. "Letter
tain recipes for evil charms (Spenser's to Maria Gisborne," lines 106ff .

Faerie Queene, I.i.36), the Witch's scrolls 1. The uninitiated.

show how men can return to (hat happy 2. Either.
age: the Golden Age of Saturn or the
 ————
The Witch of Atlas • 355
So they might live forever in the light
Of her sweet presence —each a satellite. 3

"This
—
may not be " the wizard Maid replied;
XXIII
22 5

"The fountains where the Naiades bedew

Their shining hair at length are drained and dried;
The and strew
solid oaks forget their strength,
Their upon the mountains wide;
latest leaf
The boundless Ocean like a drop of dew 2 3°

—
Will be consumed the stubborn centre must
Be scattered like a cloud of summer dust
XXIV
"And ye with them one by one
will perish
If must sigh to think that this shall be
I

If I must weep when the surviving Sun 2 35

Shall smile on your decay Oh, ask not me —

To love you till your little race is run;
I cannot die as ye must over me . . .

—
Your leaves shall glance the streams in which ye dwell
Shall be my paths henceforth, and so, farewell!" 24°

XXV
—
She spoke and wept the dark and azure well
Sparkled beneath the shower of her bright tears,
And every little circlet where they fell
Flung to the cavern-roof inconstant spheres
And intertangled lines of light — a knell 4 2 45

Of sobbing voices came upon her ears

From those departing Forms, o'er the serene
Of the white streams and of the forest green.
XXVI
All day the wizard lady sate aloof
Spelling out scrolls of dread antiquity, 25 °

Under the cavern's fountain-lighted roof;

Or broidering the pictured poesv
Of some high tale upon her growing woof, 5
Which the sweet splendour of her smiles could dye
In hues outshining Heaven and ever she — 255

Added some grace to the wrought poesy.

XXVII
While on her hearth lay blazing many a piece
Of sandal wood, rare gums and cinnamon;
Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is

Each flame of it is as a precious stone 26°

Dissolved in ever moving light, and this

Belongs to each and all who gaze upon.
3. I.e., an attendant to an important 4. Adoleful cry or dirge, reminiscent of
person. The nymphs arebeautiful young a funeral bell.
girls and inferior deities, each of whom 5. The weft, or threads that cross at
lasts only as long as her special habitat: right angles to the warp (the lengthwise
forests and trees (Hamadryades) , moun- threads on the loom). In "Mont Blanc"
tains(Oreads), and fountains and streams (44) Shelley calls Poesy a witch.
(Naiads).
 —
356 • The Witch of Atlas

The Witch beheld it not, for in her hand

She held a woof that dimmed the burning brand. 6

XXVIII
This lady never 26 5
but lay in trance
slept,
All night within the fountain as in sleep. — .

Its emerald crags glowed in her beauty's glance:

Through the green splendour of the water deep
She saw the constellations reel and dance"
Like fire-flies —
and withal 7 did ever keep 2 7°

The tenour 8 of her contemplations calm,

With open eyes, closed feet and folded palm.
XXIX
And when the whirlwinds and the clouds descended
From the white pinnacles of that cold hill
She past at dewfall to a space extended 2 ?s

Where in a lawn of flowering asphodel

Amid a wood of pines and cedars blended
There yawned an inextinguishable well
Of crimson fire, full even to the brim

And overflowing all the margin trim. 28 °

XXX
Within the which she lav when the fierce war
Of wintry winds shook that innocuous liquor"
In many a mimic 1 moon and bearded star2
O'er woods and lawns —
the serpent heard it flicker
28 5
In sleep, and dreaming still, he crept afar
And when the windless snow descended thicker
Than autumn leaves she watched it as it came
Melt on the surface of the level flame.
XXXI
She had a Boat which some sav Vulcan wrought
For Venus, as the chariot of her star; 3 2 9°

But it was found too feeble to be fraught

With all the ardours in that Sphere which are,
And so she sold it, and Apollo 4 bought
And gave it to this daughter: from a car
Changed to the fairest and the lightest boat 29 *

Which ever upon mortal 5 stream did float.

XXXII
And others say, that when but three hours old
The first-born Love out of his cradle leapt, 6
And clove dun Chaos with his wings of gold,
6. Wood burning on the hearth; woof: Vulcan, craftsman among the gods, is
here, a piece of woven fabric. her deformed husband.
7. Nevertheless. 4. The sun and inventor and god of the
8. The procedure or course of progress. fine arts, including medicine, poetry.
9. The fire. music, and eloquence.
1. An or playful imitation of.
artistic 5. I.e., accessible to human beings, as
2. A comet with its tail (which always opposed to the sphere of Venus,
points away from the sun) preceding it. 6. Cf. Shelley's translation of Plato's
3. Venus is goddess of beauty, laughter. Symposium "Hesiod says . . that after
.

grace, and pleasure, and mother of Love; Chaos these two were produced, the
 ———— —
The Witch of Atlas • 357
And an horticultural adept,
like 300

Stole a strange seed,and wrapt it up in mould

And sowed it in his mother's star, 7 and kept
Watering it all the summer with sweet dew,
And with his wings fanning it as it grew.
XXXIII
The plant grew strong and green —
the snowy flower 305

Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began

To turn the light and dew by inward power
To its own substance; woven tracery ran
Of light firm texture, ribbed and branching, o'er
The solid rind, like a leaf's veined fan 310

Of which Love scooped this —

boat and with soft motion
Piloted it round the circumfluous 8 Ocean.
XXXIV
This boat she moored upon her fount, and lit

A living spirit within all its frame,

Breathing the soul of swiftness into it 315

Couched on the fountain, like a panther tame,

One of the twain at Evan's 9 feet that sit
Or as on Vesta's 1 sceptre a swift flame
Or on blind Homer's heart a winged thought
In joyous expectation lay the Boat. 320

XXXV
Then bv strange art she kneaded fire and snow
Together, tempering the repugnant mass
—
With liquid love all things together grow-
Through which the harmonv of love can pass;
And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow 325

A living Image, which did far surpass

In beauty that bright shape of vital stone
Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion. 2
XXXVI
A sexless thing it was, and in
its growth

It seemed have developed no defect

to 330

Of either sex, yet all the grace of both

In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked;

Earth and Love"; clove dun Chaos: i.e., love with a beautiful statue, which
fell in
split (clove) the dark or murky (dun) Venus changed into a living (vital) wo-
void (Chaos). man inresponse to his prayers. (Ovid,
7. The star, called Lucifer or the morning Metamorphoses, X.) In the classical
star, is actually the planet Venus. Here legend Hermaphroditus was the son of
Shelley combines the myth from Hesiod Hermes (Mercury) and Aphrodite
with that of Cupid, the son of Venus. (Venus); a nymph united her body with
8. Flowing around; in ancient geography, his, giving Hermaphroditus the perfect
Ocean was thought to be a river flowing beauty of both sexes. Though the Witch's
around the land. hermaphrodite is made of snow like the
9. Evan's: Bacchus' (Dionysus'). wicked witch's False Florimell in The
1. Roman goddess of the sacred hearth, Faerie Queene, III.viii.6, Spenser's crea-
which was tended by the vestal virgins. tion is inhabited by an evil Sprite and
2. Pygmalion, a legendary king of contains wax, mercury, and vermilion
Cyprus, after he had vowed never to love instead of fire.
a woman or to marry, sculptured and
 — —
358 • The Witch of Atlas
The bosom swelled lightly with its full youth
The countenance was such as might select
Some artist that his skill should never die, 335

Imaging forth such perfect purity.

XXXVII
From its smooth shoulders hung two rapid wings,
Fit to have borne it to the seventh sphere, 3
Tipt with the speed of liquid lightenings
Dyed in the ardours of the atmosphere 340

She led her creature to the boiling springs

Where the light boat was moored, and said: "Sit here!"
And pointed to the prow, and took her seat
Beside the rudder, with opposing feet.
XXXVIII
And down the streams which clove those mountains vast 345
Around their inland islets, and amid
The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast
Darkness and odours and a pleasure hid
In melancholy gloom, the pinnace 4 past
By many a star-surrounded pyramid 350

Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky

And caverns yawning round unfathomably.
XXXIX
The silver noon into that winding dell
With slanted gleam athwart the forest tops
Tempered like golden evening, feebly fell; 355

Agreen and glowing light like that which drops

From folded lilies in which glow worms dwell
When Earth over her face night's mantle wraps;
Between the severed mountains lay on high
Over the stream, a narrow rift 5 of sky. 36o

XL
And ever as she went, the Image lay
With folded wings and unawakened eyes;
And o'er its gentle countenance did play
The busv dreams, as thick as summer flies,
Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay, 36s

And drinking the warm tears, and the sweet sighs

Inhaling, which, with busy murmur vain,
Thev had aroused from that full heart and brain.
XLI
And ever down the prone 6 cloud
vale, like a
Upon a stream of wind, the pinnace went; 370

Now lingering on the pools, in which abode

The calm and darkness of the deep content

3. The transparent hollow globe carry- 4. A small boat.

ing Saturn; this sphere was next to that 5. An interval.
of the fixed stars, according to classical 6. Having a descending slope.
and medieval astronomy.
 —
The Witch of Atlas • 359
In which they paused, now o'er the shallow road
Of white and dancing waters all besprent 7
With sand and polished pebbles mortal Boat . .
375

In such a shallow rapid could not float.

XLII
And down the earthquaking cataracts 8 which shiver
Their snowlike waters into golden air,
Or under chasms unfathomable ever
Sepulchre 9 them, till in their rage they tear 380

A subterranean portal for the river,

It fled the circling sunbows 1 did upbear
. .

Its fall down the hoar2 precipice of spray,

Lighting it far upon its lampless way.
XLIII
And when the wizard lady would ascend 385

The labyrinths of some manv winding vale

Which to the inmost mountain upward tend
She called "Hermaphroditus!" —
and the pale
And heavy hue which slumber could extend
Over its lips and eyes, as on the gale 390

A rapid shadow from a slope of grass,

Into the darkness of the stream did pass.
XLIV
And it unfurled its heaven-coloured pinions 3
With stars of fire spotting the stream below;
And from above into the Sun's dominions 395

Flinging a glory, like the golden glow

In which Spring clothes her emerald-winged minions, 4
All interwoven with fine feathery snow
And moonlight splendour of intensest rime 5
With which Frost paints the pines in winter time. 4 °°

XLV
And then it winnowed the Elysian 6 air
Which ever hung about that lady bright,
—
With its aetherial vans and speeding there
Like a star up the torrent of the night
Or a swift eagle in the morning glare 4° 5

Breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight,

The pinnace, oared by those enchanted wings,
Clove the fierce streams towards their upper springs.
XLVI
The water flashed, like sunlight by the prow
Of a noon-wandering meteor 7 flung to Heaven; 410

7. Sprinkled or scattered. 3. it: the Hermaphrodite; pinions: wings,

8. Large waterfalls. 4. Favorites or darlings.
9. Entomb; the subject is which (377). 5. Frozen mist.
1. An arch of prismatic colors like a 6. Gloriously fragrant, as in Elysium,
rainbow, formed by refraction of light the Greek abode of the honorable dead;
in mist or vapor. winnowed: beat or flapped.
2. Grayish white. 7. A
flash or reflection of light.
 — —
360 • The Witch of Atlas

The still air seemed as if its waves did flow

In tempest down the mountains — loosely driven
The streamed to and fro:
lady's radiant hair
Beneath, the billows 8 having vainly striven
Indignant and impetuous, roared to feel 4I 5

The swift and steady motion of the keel.

XLVII
Or, when the weary moon was in the wane
Or in the noon of interlunar 9 night
The lady-witch in visions could not chain
Her spirit; but sailed forth under the light 420

Of shooting stars, and bade extend amain 1

Its storm-outspeeding wings, th' Hermaphrodite;
She to the Austral 2 waters took her
way
Beyond the fabulous Thamondocana, 3 —
XLVIII
Where like a meadow which no scythe has shaven, 425

Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake,

With the Antarctic constellations paven,
Canopus 4 and his crew, lay th' Austral lake
There she would build herself a windless haven
Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make 430

The bastions of the storm, when through the sky

The spirits of the tempest thundered by.
XLIX
A haven beneath whose translucent floor
The tremulous stars sparkled unfathomablv,
And around which, the solid vapours hoar, 435

Based on the level waters, to the sky

Lifted their dreadful crags; and like a shore
Of wintry mountains, inaccessibly
Hemmed in with rifts and precipices grey
And hanging crags, many a cove and bay. 440

L
And whilst the outer lake beneath the lash
Of the wind's scourge, 5 foamed like a wounded thing,
And the incessant hail with stony clash
Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing
Of the roused cormorant in the lightning flash 445

Looked like the wreck of some wind-wandering

Fragment of inky thundersmoke, this haven —
Was as a gem to copv Heaven engraven."

8. Great waves. 4. One of the brightest stars in the

9. The period between the old and the southern sky, in the constellation Argo.
new moon. 5. A flail or whip.
1. With full force and speed. 6. Black sea bird about three feet long,
2. Of the Southern Hemisphere. noted for its voracious appetite
3. The ancient name for Tombouctou 7. I.e., was like a gem engraved with a
(Timbuktu), located in Mali, south of copy of heaven.
the Sahara Desert.
 — —
The Witch of Atlas • 361

LI
On which that lady played her many pranks,
Circling the image of a shooting star, 450

Even as a tyger on Hydaspes' 8 banks

Outspeeds the antelopes which speediest are,
In her light boat; and many quips 9 and cranks
She played upon the water, till the car
Of the late moon, like a sick matron wan, 455
To journey from the misty east began.
LII
And then she called out of the hollow turrets
Of those high clouds, white, golden and vermilion,
The armies of her ministering Spirits
In mighty legions million after million 460

They came, each troop emblazoning its merits

On meteor flags, 1 and many a proud pavilion
Of the intertexture of the atmosphere
They pitched upon the plain of the calm mere. 2
LIII
They framed the imperial tent of their great Queen 465
Of woven exhalations, 3 underlaid
With lambent 4 lightning-fire, as may be seen
A dome of thin and open ivory inlaid
With crimson silk cressets 5 from the Serene
. .

Hung and on the water for her tread

there, 470

A tapestry of fleecelike mist was strewn

Dyed in the beams of the ascending moon.
LIV
And on a throne o'erlaid with starlight, caught
Upon those wandering isles of aery dew
Which highest shoals of mountain shipwreck not 475
She sate, and heard all that had happened new
Between the earth and moon, since they had brought
—
The last intelligence and now she grew
Pale as that moon lost in the watery night
And now she wept and now she laughed outright. 480

LV
—
These were tame pleasures She would often climb
The steepest ladder of the crudded rack 6
Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime,
And like Arion on the dolphin's back 7
8. A river of northeast Pakistan, now huge/Rose like an Exhalation" (Para-
called the Jhelum; it marked the eastern dise Lost, 1.710-711).
limit of Alexander's conquests. 4. Shining with a soft, clear light with-
9. Fanciful turns of speech; cranks: odd out fierce heat.
or fantastic actions. The expression is 5. Iron lamps (Milton's Pandemonium
from Milton's L' Allegro, 27. also contains cressets).
1. I.e., inscribing conspicuously (embla- 6. Abank of clouds (rack) resembling
zoning) on flashes of lightning (meteor coagulated curds (crudded).
flags). Shelley follows Milton's descrip- 7. Arion, seventh-century B.C. lyric poet
tion of an "Empyreal Host of Angels" in and musician, was threatened with death
Paradise Lost, V.583-594. for his riches while aboard a ship but
2. Lake. was saved when dolphins attracted by
3. Cf. Milton's Pandemonium: "a Fabric his music carried him away.
362 • The Witch of Atlas
Ride singing through the shoreless air. Ofttime 485
Following the serpent lightning's winding track
She ran upon the platforms of the wind
And laughed to hear the fireballs 8 roar behind.
LVI
And sometimes to those streams of upper air
Which whirl the earth in its diurnal ixmnd 490
She would ascend, and win the spirits there
To let her join their chorus. Mortals found
That on those days the sky was calm and fair,
And mystic snatches of harmonious sound 9
Wandered upon the earth where'er she past, 495
And happy thoughts of hope too sweet to last.
LVII
But her choice sport was, hours of sleep
in the
To glide adown
old Nilus, 1 where he threads
Egypt and ^Ethiopia, from the steep
Of utmost Axume, 2 until he spreads, 500

Like a calm flock of silver-fleeced sheep,

His waters on the plain: and crested heads
Of cities and proud temples gleam amid
And many a vapour 3 -belted pyramid.
LVIII
By Mceris and the Mareotid lakes, 4 505

Strewn with faint blooms like bridal chamber floors,

Where naked boys bridling tame Water snakes
Or charioteering ghastly alligators
Had left on the sweet waters mighty wakes
—
Of those huge forms within the brazen doors 3">

Of the great Labyrinth 5 slept both boy and beast,

Tired with the pomp of their Osirian feast. 6
LIX
And where within the surface of the River
The shadows of the massy 7 temples lie
—
And never are erased but tremble ever 515

Like things which every cloud can doom to die

8. Lightning in a globular form. was variously considered to be a son of

9. Lines 489—494 allude to the music of Jupiter or Saturn. In legends he is de-
the spheres. (Cf. Prometheus Unbound, picted as a wise and good king of Egypt
IV. 186-188, and "With a Guitar. To who taught his people agriculture, good
Jane," 75-78.) morals, and civilized ways and. as a
1. The Nile River. bloodless conqueror (like Dionysus) of
2. Probably the present site of Aksum in other peoples, bringing them civilization,
mountainous northeast Ethiopia. The most important religious myth* de-
3. Mist or fog. pict him as a vegetation god, killed and
4. Lake Mareotis located in the Nile
is cut to pieces by Set or Typhon and then
Delta; Lake Moeris (now called Birket- brought together and revived by his wife
Qarun) is southwest of Cairo and about Isis and their son Horus. Thus he was
120 miles southeast of Lake Mareotis. identifiedby comparative mythologists
5. A magnificent tomb and commemora- with Adonis and with various aspects of
tive structure of Egyptian royalty, con- Chnsi
taining 3,000 chambers. 7. Massive.
6. Osiris, one of the chief Egyptian gods.
 — ————
The Witch of Atlas - 363
Through lotus-pav'n canals, and wheresoever
The works of man pierced that serenest sky
With tombs, and towers, and fanes, 8 'twas her delight
To wander in the shadow of the night. 520

LX
With motion like the spirit of that wind
Whose deepens slumber, her light feet
soft step
Past through the peopled haunts of humankind;
Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet
Through fane and palace court and labyrinth mined 525

With many a dark and subterranean street

Under the Nile, through chambers high and deep
She past, observing mortals in their sleep.
LXI
A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see
Mortals subdued in the shapes of sleep.
all 530

Here lay two sister-twins in infancy;

There, a lone youth who in his dreams did weep;
Within, two lovers linked innocently
In their loose locks which over both did creep
Like ivy from one stem —
and there lay calm 535

Old age with snow bright hair and folded palm.

LXII
But other troubled forms of sleep she saw,
Not to be mirrored in a holy song
Distortions foul of supernatural awe,
And pale imaginings of visioned wrong 540

And the code of custom's lawless law

all

Written upon the brows of old and young:

"This," said the wizard maiden, "is the strife
Which stirs the liquid 9 surface of man's life."
LXIII
And did the sight disturb her soul
little 545

We, the weak mariners of that wide lake

Where'er its shores extend or billows roll,
Our course unpiloted and starless make
O'er its wild surface to an unknown goal
But she in the calm depths her way could take 55 °

Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide

Beneath the weltering 1 of the restless tide.
LXIV
And she saw princes couched under the glow
Of sunlike gems, and round each temple-court
In dormitories ranged, row after row, 555

—
She saw the priests asleep all of one sort
For all were educated to be so
The peasants in their huts, and in the port

8. Temples. 1. Surging.
9. I.e., changeable in shape.
 ——
364 • The Witch of Atlas

The she saw cradled on the waves,

sailors
And the dead lulled within their dreamless graves. 560

LXV
And all the forms in which those spirits lav
Were to her sight like the diaphanous
Veils, in which those sweet laches oft array
Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us
Only their scorn of all concealment: they 565

Move in the light of their own beauty thus.

But these and all now lay with sleep upon them
And little thought a Witch was looking on them.
LXVI
She, all those human figures breathing there
—
Beheld as living spirits to her eyes 57 °

The naked beauty of the soul lav bare,

And often through a rude and worn disguise
She saw the inner form most bright and fair
And then, she had a charm of strange device,
Which murmured on mute lips with tender tone, 575

Could make that Spirit mingle with her own.

LXVII
Alas, Aurora!what wouldst thou have given
For such a charm when Tithon became grey?-
Or how much, Venus, of thy silver Heaven
Wouldst thou have yielded, ere Proserpina 58 °

Had half (oh! why not all?) the debt forgiven

Which dear Adonis had been doomed to pay, 3
To any witch who would have taught you it?
The Heliad 4 doth not know its value yet.
LXVIII
Tis said in after times her spirit free 58s

Knew what love was, and felt itself alone

But holy Dian could not chaster be
Before she stooped to kiss Endymion
Than now this lady — bee*
like a sexless
Tasting all blossoms and confined to none 590

Among those mortal forms the wizard-maiden

Passed with an eve serene and heart unladen.

2. Aurora (Eos in Greek), goddess of and the rest of the year with her.
the dawn, loved Tithonus and at her 4. The Witch of Atlas; literally, child of
request Zeus gave him immortality, but Helius, or the sun.
she forgot to ask also for the gift of 5. Diana, goddess of the moon. Wt
eternal youth. When old age made him enamored by the beauty of Endymion,
decrepit, she changed him into a cicada a shepherd of Caria (modern Turkey),
(see note to line 108). that she descended nightly from heaven
3. Adonis, beloved of Venus, was killed to make love to him as he slept his
while hunting a wild boar; Proserpina eternal sleep on Mt. Latmos.
(Greek Persephone), queen of the under- 6. The undeveloped female (neuter) bee
world and wife of Pluto (Hades), re- is worker that produces wax. collects
the
stored Adonis to life on the condition honey, and stores it up for food in the
that he spend six months with Venus winter
 —
The Witch of Atlas • 365
LXIX
To those she saw most beautiful, she gave
Strange panacea 7 in a chrystal bowl . . .

They drank deep sleep of that sweet wave

in their 595

And lived thenceforward as if some control

Mightier than life, were in them; and the grave
Of such, when death oppressed the weary soul,
Was as a green and overarching bower
Litby the gems of many a starry flower. 6o°

LXX
For on the night that they were buried, she
Restored the embalmer's ruining, and shook
The light out of the funeral lamps, to be
A mimic 8 day within that deathly nook;
And she unwound the woven imagery 6 °5

Of second childhood's swaddling bands and took

The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche
And threw with contempt into a ditch.
it

LXXI
And there the body lay, age after age,
Mute, breathing, beating, warm and undecaying 6l °

Like one asleep in a green hermitage

With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing
And living in its dreams beyond the rage
Of death or life, while they were still arraying
In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind 6l 5

And fleeting generations of mankind.

LXXII
And she would write strange dreams upon the brain
Of who were less beautiful, and make
those
All harshand crooked purposes more vain
Than in the desart is the serpent's wake 6 *°

—
Which the sand covers all his evil gain
The miser in such dreams would rise and shake
Into a beggar's lap —the lying scribe 9
Would his own lies betray without a bribe.
LXXIII
The priests would write an explanation full, 62 5

Translating hieroglyphics into Greek,

How the god Apis, really was a bull 1
And nothing more; and bid the herald stick
The same against the temple doors, and pull
The old cant down; they licensed all to speak 6 3°

7. A medicine reputed to heal all dis- 1.A bull, supposedly the Egyptian god
eases. Apis, with special marking was much
8. Artistic imitation. venerated, with a festival, consultation
9. A public official in charge of writing for omens, and offerings of money,
and keeping accounts.
J66 The Witch of Atlas
Whatever they thought of hawks and cats and geese 2
Bj pastoral letters to each dioa
lxxtv
The king would chess an ape up in his crown
And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat, 3
And on the right hand of the sunlike throne 6 35

Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat

The chattering^ of the monkey. Every one —
Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet
Of their great Emperor when the morning came.
—
And kissed alas, how main kiss the same! ^°
\\v 1

The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, and

W alked out of quarters in somnambulism.
Round the red anvils you might sec them stand
Like Cvdopscs in Vulcan's sooty abysm,4
Beating their swords to ploughshares-"' in a band — ^5
The jailors sent those of the liberal schism
Be through the streets of Memphis, much. I w.
To the annoyance of king Amasis.1
i w\ i

And timid lovers who had been so coy

They hardly knew whether they loved or not, 6<i0

Would use out of their rest, and take sweet jov

fo the fulfillment of their inmost thought;
And when next day the maiden and the boy
Met one another, both, like sinners caught.
Blushed at the thing which each believed was done 6 ^-s

—
Onlv in fancy* till the tenth moon shone;
xxyii I

And then the Witch would let them take no ill:

Of many thousand schemes which lovers find
—
The Witch found one. and so they took their fill
Of happiness in marriage warm and kind; 66o

Friends who be practice of some envious skill.

Were torn apart, a wide wound, mind from mind!
She did unite again with visions clear
Of deep affection and of truth sincere.

2. The hawk, u.is sacred to Hocm Diana the false Fo\e him helped to arra>"
Bubastis transformed herself into a cat (1061—11
when the gods fled into Egypt Though 4 Vulcan. god
patron of of fire and
the sacred geese of Juno's temple were artists who worked metals, forged Jupi-
famous for warning the besieged Ro- ter's thunderbolts and arms f ( r heroes
mans of the Gauls' attack on the Capito- and gods with the aid of the Cyclopes
line Hill, the reference to geese as under Mt. Aetna in S
Fg\ptian sods may be intended as the s
M
reductio ad absurdiim of animal wor- 6> I e .
"1 k: jption of *'.

ship. beCMM <as a name com- an adverb meaning "certa

monl> applied in Shelle>'s time to a 7. Am. :6 B.C.). according to
foolish person (."s. Herodotus ill lMfT ). was a man who
J. Cf. Sper ropom. in which rose from a common soldier to king of
\pe "upon hishead The Crowne
and on his backe the skin he did. And 8. Fantas\ or dream.
 Song of Apollo • 367
LXXVIII
These were the pranks she played among the cities 66 s

Of mortal men, and what she did to sprites

And gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties
To do her will, and shew their subtle slights,
I will declare another time; for it is
A tale more fit for the weird winter nights 6 7°

Than for these garish summer days, when we

Scarcely believe much more than we can see.

1
Song of Apollo
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie
Curtained with star-enwoven tapestries
From the broad moonlight of the open sky;
Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,
Waken me when their mother, the grey Dawn, 5

Tells them that Dreams and that the moon is gone.

Then I arise; and climbing Heaven's blue dome,

walk over the mountains and the waves,

I

Leaving my robe upon the Ocean foam.

My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves I0

Are filled with my bright presence, and the air

Leaves the green Earth to mv embraces bare.

The sunbeams are my shafts with which I kill

Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day.

All men who do, or even imagine ill *5

Fly me; 2 and from the glory of my ray

Good minds, and open actions take new might
Until diminished, by the reign of night.

I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers

With their aetherial colours; the moon's globe 20

And the pure stars in their eternal bowers

Are cinctured 3 with my power as with a robe;
Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine
Are portions of one spirit; which is mine.

1. The following two "Songs" were lines long, tend to give static power and
written in 1820 by Shelley for inclusion dignity (along with considerable self-
in Mary Shelley's mythological drama satisfaction) to Apollo and a historical
Midas. In Mary's blank verse play, as progression toward a tragedy (and, hence,
in the well-known account in Ovid's considerable human sympathy) to Pan.
Metamorphoses (Book XI, fables 4 and Mary coulo not find a publisher for
5), Midas arrives on the scene just as her verse drama and published Shelley's
Tmolus, spirit of the mountain of the poems under the titles "Hymn of Apollo"
same name, is about to judge a sirging and "Hymn of Pan" in Shelley's Post-
contest between Apollo and Pan. In humous Poems (1824). The present texts
Ovid's version Pan sings first and Apollo are based on Shelley's draft in Bodleian
overpowers him; Mary Shelley reverses MS. Shelley adds, e.6, pp 23-29.
the order of the contest, having Apollo 2. Flee from me.
perform first and leaving the last word 3. Encircled, girdled,
to Pan. Shelley's poems, each thirty-six
 — —
368 • Song of Pan
I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven; 25

Then with unwilling steps, I linger down

Into the clouds of the Atlantic even.
For grief that I depart they weep and frown
What look is more delightful, than the smile
With which I soothe them from the Western isle? 3°

I am the eye with which the Universe

Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.
All harmonv of instrumentand verse,
All prophecv and medicine arc mine;
All light of art 4 or nature — to my song 35

Victorv and praise, in its own right, belong.

Song of Pan

From the forests and highlands

We come, we come,
From the river-girt islands
Where loud waves were dumb
Listening mysweet pipings. 5

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,

The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds in the myrtle bushes,
The cicadae above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass, I0

Were silent as even old Tmolus was,

Listening my sweet pipings.

Liquid Peneus was flowing

And all dark Tempe lay
In Olympus' shadow, 5 outgrowing f 5

The light of the dying day,

Speeded with my sweet pipings.
The sileni and sylvans and fauns
And the nymphs of the woods and the waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns
And the brink of the dewv caves,
And all that did then attend and follow
Were as silent for love, as you now, Apollo,
For envy of my sweet pipings.

4. Apollo, god of the fine arts, music, leyof Tempe, which lies between Mt.
poetry, eloquence, and medicine, re- Olympus to the northwest and Mt. Ossa
ceived from Jupiter the power of know- to the southeast.
ing the future and was the only god 6.sileni. sylvans. and fauns are various
whose oracles were in general repute male woodland and rural demigods, like
throughout the ancient world. satyrs. The nymphs are their (beautiful)
5. Peneus: a river in Thessaly that flows female equivalents,
northeastward through the beautiful Val-
 — — ——— — — —

The Indian Girl's Song • 369

Isang of the dancing stars, 25

7 Earth,
I sang of the daedal

And of Heaven, and the giant wars, 8

And Love and Death and Birth;
And then I changed my pipings,
Singing how, down the vales of Maenalus 30
9
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed;
They wept as, I think, both ye 1 now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood, 35

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

2
The Indian Girl's Song

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sleep of night
The winds are breathing low
And the stars are burning bright.
I arise from dreams of thee 5

And a spirit in my feet

—
Has borne me Who knows how?
To thy chamber window, sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark silent stream I0

The champak 3 odours fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale's complaint
It dies upon her heart
As I must die on thine '5

O beloved as thou art!

7. Intricately, artistically wrought (after of Shelley's major works realized that

Daedalus). this was unfair, pointing out the titles
8. The giants, who first aided Zeus under which the poem had been known
(Jupiter) and the Olympians in their "Song, Written for an Indian Air" (as
overthrow of the Titans, later rose up first published in the Liberal, no. II,
and attacked the Olympian gods, who 1823), "Lines to an Indian Air" (Post-
after a severe fright —
defeated them with humous Poems, 1824), and "The Indian
the help of Hercules. Serenade" (transcripts by Mary Shelley
9.The nymph Syrinx, when Pan tried to in The Harvard Shelley Notebook and
make love to her, was turned into a the Pierpont Morgan Library). The re-
reed (from which Pan made his musical emergence in 1962 of Shelley's own fair
pipes). Mcenalus: a mountain in Arcadia copy entitled "The Indian Girl's Song"
sacred to Pan. (first published by Chernaik, The Lyrics
1. Apollo and Tmolus; the first is accused of Shelley, 1972) shows that the poem is
of being silent through envy, the second purely dramatic. On the general problem
because of age. of dramatic personae in Shelley's poetry
2. The title of this poem has proved to see G. M. Matthews' essay "Shelley's
be the key to its meaning. For some Lyrics," pp. 681-694 below.
years critics hostile to Shelley's poetry 3. One species of magnolia, a tree of
used this minor lyric as an example of India bearing highly fragrant orange
Shelley's "sentimental" poetry. Students flowers.
 — —
370 • ["Rarely, rarely comest thou"]

lift me from the grass!

1 die, I faint, I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cold and white, alas!
cheek is

My heart beats loud and fast.

Oh press it close to thine again
Where it will break at last. .

Song 4
Rarely, rarelv comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day 5

Tis since thou art fled away.

How shall ever one like me

Win thee back again?
With the jovous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain. IO

thou hast forgot

Spirit false!
All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade

Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismayed; x 5

Even the sighs of grief

Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Letme set my mournful ditty

To a merry measure; 20

Thou wilt never come for pity

Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

25
I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves drest,
And the starrv night,
Autumn evening, and the mom
When the golden mists are born. 30

4. Shelley's holograph fair copy of this portant enough to include among those
poem inThe Harvard Shelley Notebook he had Mary transcribe for inclusion in
is dated "Pisa May— —
1820." The lyric Prometheus Unbound in mid-May 1820.
gives every indication of being a highly It first appeared in Posthumous Poems
successful conventional exercise; Shelley (II
did not, apparently, think this poem im-
 — — —
Epipsychidion • 371

I love snow,and all the forms

Ofthe radiant frost;
I love waves and winds and storms

Every thing almost

Which is Nature's and may be 35

Untainted by man's misery.

I love tranquil Solitude,

And such society
As is and good;
quiet, wise
Between thee and me 40

What difference? but thou dost possess

The things I seek —not love them less.

I love Love —though he has wings,

And like light can flee
But above all other things, 45
Spirit, I love thee
Thou art Love and Life! O come,
Make once more my heart thy home.

Epipsychidion In late November 1820, Mary Shelley and Claire

Clairmont were introduced to Teresa Viviani, the nineteen-year-old
daughter of the governor of Pisa, who was confined in the Convent of St.
Anna there. Shelley —always aroused by the sight of teen-age girls confined
by strict (or tyrannical) —took an
fathers interest in Teresa; he, Mary,
and Claire all visited and corresponded with her until her arranged
marriage (September 8, 1821). Teresa's biographer has argued that the
Shelleys referred to her as "Emilia" because her position in a triangle in-
volving two suitors was analogous to that of Emilia, the heroine of
Boccaccio's Teseida (the story that was the model for Chaucer's Knight's
Tale).
Shelley composed the lines that were to become Epipsychidion amid a
welter of other verses that were later sorted out to form two fragmentary
narrative poems on Italian themes
— "Ginevra" and "Fiordispina." On
February 16, 1821, Shelley sent the (now lost) faircopy of Epipsychidion
to his publisher Charles Oilier, asking him to publish it anonymously:
"indeed, in a certain sense, it is a production of a portion of me already
dead; and in this sense the advertisement is no fiction" (Letters, II, 262-
263). After Shelley's death Oilier told Mary Shelley that "it was the wish
of Mr. Shelley that the whole of the 'Epipsychidion' should be suppressed";
he turned over to John Hunt (on Mary's instructions) a remainder of 160
copies. (This shows that at least 200 or 250 copies were printed.) One
reason for the poem's suppression is cited in a letter published in Black-
wood's Edinburgh Magazine over the pseudonym "John Johnes," who was
apparently Oilier himself: "The poem was published anonymously, but
as people began to apply it to a certain individual, and make their own
inferences, it was, I believe, suddenly withdrawn from circulation." Shelley

later wrote to John Gisborne: "The 'Epipsychidion' I cannot look at; . . .

 .

372 - Epipsychidion
If you arc anxious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell

you something thereof. It is an ideal Ved history of my life and feelings"

(Letters, II, 434).
In addition to Shelley's indications of deep personal involvement in the
sentiments of Epipsychidion (and Mary Shelley's failure to write a note on
this alone among poems), we have the evidence of the text
Shelley's major
itself that it involves the core of Shelley's personal aspirations. Kenneth

Neill Cameron's essay "The Planet Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion,"

reprinted below (pp. 637-658), judiciously sorts out the probable sig-
nificance of some of the allegorized autobiography. At the same time, it
has been cogently argued that the poem is essentially about the role of
poetry as the most appropriate object of human desires. Those who accept
this view base their analysis on the comparison of this work with Dante's
Vita Nuova, to which Shelley calls attention in his Advertisement, and
with the biblical Song of Solomon or Song of Songs, to the language and
imagery of which there are frequent parallels in Epipsychidion.
In the absence of a fair-copy manuscript, our sole textual authority of
any consequence is the first edition of 1821. We have normalized a few
spellings according to Shelley's consistent practice (e.g., Ay to Aye in

line 33) and have adopted a few minor or conventional changes included
in other editions (such as italicizing the words "Vila Nuova' in the Ad-
vertisement), but have otherwise followed the printed text that is based on
Shelley's final holograph.
Epipsychidion can be divided into the following major sections: ( 1 ) lines

1-189 tell of the poet's relationship to "Emily" — first in an invocation

(1-71), then in an allegorical history of his encounter with her (72-129),
and finally in an address to her about the nature of love (130-189); (2)
lines 190-383 form the main part of the "idealized history of [Shelley's]
lifeand feelings," concluding with an address to Emily, Mary Shelley, and
(probably) Claire Clairmont under the symbols Sun, Moon, and Comet,
respectively; (3) after a short transitional prayerful address to Emily,
Shelley concludes the poem proper with a proposal that Emily elope with
him to an island paradise; and (4) the concluding envoy addressed to the

poem
Shelley's title is coined from the Greek preposition epi- (upon) and the
diminutive noun psychidion ("little soul") and means "On the Subject of
the Soul" (as in the Emperor Hadrian's poem De animula).
 Epipsychidion • 373

Epipsychidion:

VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE NOBLE AND UNFORTUNATE LADY,

EMILIA V NOW IMPRISONED IN THE CONVENT OF
,

L'anima amante si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nel infinito un

Mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro.
Her own words.*

ADVERTISEMENT
The Writer of the following Lines died at Florence, as he was
preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, which
he had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins of an old
building, and where it was his hope to have realised a scheme of
life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is

now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this. His life was

singular; lesson account of the romantic vicissitudes which diver-
sified than the ideal tinge which it received from his own char-
it,

acter and feelings. The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante,
is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a
matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and
to a certain other class must ever remain incomprehensible, from
it

a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it

treats. Not but that, gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa
sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse
denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace
intendimento 2 .

The present poem appears to have been intended by the Writer

as the dedication to some longer one. The stanza on the opposite
page 3 is almost a from Dante's famous Canzone
literal translation

Voi, cK intendendo, il terzo del movete, etc.

The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his own

composition will raise a smile at the expense of my unfortunate
friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity. S.

My Song, fear that thou wilt find but

I few
Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;

1. The quotation from Teresa Viviani being requested, could not strip his
may be translated: "The loving soul words of this dress so that they might
launches beyond creation, and creates have a true meaning."
for itself in the infinite a world all its 3. I.e., the nine lines that follow, which
own, far different from this dark and are translated from the final lines of the
terrifying gulf." first canzone of Dante's Convito, Trattato
2. "Great would be his shame who II. The opening line may be translated,
should rhyme anything under the garb "Ye who intelligent,the third sphere
of metcphor or rhetorical figure; and, move ."
. . (see note to line 117).
374 • Epipsychidion
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do),
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,

My last delight! tell them that they are dull,

And bid them own that thou art beautiful.

EPIPSYCHIDION
Sweet Spirit! Sister of that orphan one,
Whose empire is the name thou weepest on, 4
In my heart's temple I suspend to thee
These votive 5 wreaths of withered memory.

Poor captive bird! who, from thy narrow cage, 5

Pourest such music, that it might assuage

The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody;
This song shall be thy rose: its petals pale
Are dead, indeed, my adored Nightingale! I0

But soft and fragrant is the faded blossom,

And it has no thorn left to wound thy bosom.
High, spirit-winged Heart! who dost for ever
Beat thine unfeeling bars with vain endeavour,
'Till those bright plumes of thought, in which arrayed
J 5

It over-soared this low and worldly shade,

Lie shattered; and thy panting, wounded breast
Stains with dear blood its unmaternal nest!
I weep vain tears: blood would less bitter be,
20
Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee.

Seraph of Heaven! 6 too gentle to be human,

Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light, and love, and immortality!
25
Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe!
Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form
Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm!
Thou Wonder, and thou Beautv, and thou Terror!
30
Thou Harmony of Nature's art! Thou Mirror
In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun,

4. From Shelley's own Italian version of "Brother" and "Sister."

these lines, it appears that the orphan 5. Consecrated or dedicated, in fulfill-
one is Shelley's soul, to which Teresa's ment of a vow.
Sweet Spirit is a sister. The word 6. In medieval and Renaissance theology
"Percy" means "lost" (persi) in Italian. the Seraphim, excelling in love, were
A contrary explanation sees that orphan the highest of the nine orders of angels.
one as Mary Shelley's soul, in which just above the Cherubim (who excelled
case the empire would be the name of in wisdom). Milton first used the singu-
"wife" or "Mrs. Shelley." In Teresa's lar form "seraph" in English (Paradise
correspondence with Shelley and Mary Lost, 1 1 1.667).
she called and referred to them as her
 Epipsychidion • 375
All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!
Aye, even the dim words which obscure thee now
Flash, lightning-like, with unaccustomed glow;
I pray thee that thou blot from this sad song 35

All of its much mortality and wrong,

With those clear drops, which start like sacred dew
From the twin lights thy sweet soul darkens through,
Weeping, till sorrow becomes ecstasy:
Then smile on it, so that it may not die. 40

I never thought before my death to see

Youth's vision thus made perfect. Emily,

I love thee; though the world by no thin name

Will hide that love from its unvalued 7 shame.

Would we two had been twins of the same mother! 8 45

Or, that the name my heart lent to another

Could be a sister's bond for her and thee,
Blending two beams of one eternity!
Yet were one lawful and the other true,
These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due, so

How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!

I am not thine: I am a part of thee.

Sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burnt its wings;

Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings, 9
Young Love should teach Time, in his own grey style, 55

All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile,

A formed to be blest and bless?
lovely soul
A and secret happiness,
well of sealed
Whose waters like blithe light and music are,
Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A Star 6o

Which moves not in the moving Heavens, alone? 1

A smile amid dark frowns? a gentle tone
Amid rude voices? a beloved light?
A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight?
A which those whom love has taught to play
lute, 65

Make music on, to soothe the roughest day

And fond 2 grief asleep? a buried treasure?
lull
A cradle of young thoughts of wingless pleasure?
A violet-shrouded grave of Woe? 3 I measure —
The world of fancies, seeking one like thee, 70

And find — alas! mine own infirmity.

7. Extremely great. song").

8. Cf. the Song of Songs: "O that thou 1. I.e., the polestar, around which all
wert as my brother, that suckei the the other "fixed" stars seem to move as
breasts of my mother! I ...
would the earth rotates and revolves around
kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised" the sun.
(8:1). 2. Trivial or unreasonable.
9. According to classical and medieval 3. The violet, a persistent perennial
fables, swan, mute in its lifetime,
the which blooms early in the spring, recurs
was supposed to fly and sing a beautiful, as one of Shelley's symbols of rebirth
plaintive song just before its death ("swan and hope.
 —
376 • Epipsychidion
She met me, Stranger, 4 upon life's rough way,

And lured me towards sweet Death; as Night by Day,

Winter by Spring, or Sorrow by swift Hope,
Led into light, life, peace. An antelope, 75

In the suspended impulse of its lightness,

Were less ethereally light: the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless Heaven of June 8o

Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon

Burns, inextinguishably beautiful:
And from her lips, as from- a hyacinth full
Of honey-dew, 5 a liquid murmur drops,
Killing the sense with passion; sweet as stops 85

Of planetary music 6 heard in trance.

In her mild lights the starry spirits dance,
The sun-beams of those wells which ever leap
Under the lightnings of the soul —
too deep
For the brief fathom-line 7 of thought or sense. 90

The glory of her being, issuing thence,

Stains the dead, blank, cold air with a warm shade
Of unentangled intermixture, made
By Love, of light and motion: one intense
Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence, 95

Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing,

Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing
With the unintermitted blood, 8 which there
Quivers, (as in a fleece of snow-like air
The crimson pulse of living morning quiver,) IO°

Continuously prolonged, and ending never,

Till they are lost, and in that Beautv furled
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world;
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness.
Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress, I0 5

And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress

The air of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;
And in the soul a wild odour is felt,
II0
Beyond the sense, like ficrv dews that melt
Into the bosom of a frozen bud.
See where she stands! a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,
And motion which may change but cannot die;
II5
An image of some bright Eternity;
4. From Shelley's draft it is clear that 6.The harmonious music of the spheres
"Stranger" is the unknown reader of was supposed to have been audible by
the poem, addressed directly. human beings in the state of innocence.
5. A sweet, sticky substance found on or, since then, in ecstasy.
plants in very hot weather (Shelley re- 7. Aweighted line thrown over the rid*
peats the phrase at 262; it also appears of a boat to measure the depth of w.iter
in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," 53). 8. Uninterrupted.
 Epipsychidion • 377
A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour
Leaving the third sphere pilotless; 9 a tender
Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love
Under whose motions life's dull billows move;
A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning; I2 °

A Vision like incarnate April, warning,

With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy 1
Into his summer grave.

Ah, woe is me!

What have dared? where am I lifted?
I how
Shall I descend, and perish not? I know I2 5

That Love makes all things equal: I have heard

By mine own heart this joyous truth averred:
The spirit of the worm beneath the sod
In love and worship, blends itself with God.

Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate ^°

Whose course has been so starless! too late O
Beloved! O
too soon adored, by me!
For in the fields of immortality 2
My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,
A divine presence in a place divine; I3 $

Or should have moved beside it on this earth,

A shadow of that substance, from its birth;
—
But not as now: I love thee; yes, I feel
That on the fountain of my heart a seal 3
Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright I4°

For thee, since in those tears thou hast delight.

We—are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar;
Such difference without discord, as can make
Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake I45

As trembling leaves in a continuous air?

Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare

Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt.
I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select I5 °

Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, J 55

Who travel to their home among the dead

9. Splendour . pilotless: Splendor is

. . 1. Skeleton.
one of Dante's words for angels; the 2. The Elysian fields, the classical abode
third sphere in Dante's cosmology was of the blessed after death.
that of Venus, the realm of lovers (cf. 3. Symbol of a covenant.
Adverticement).
 :

378 - Epipsychidion

By the broad highway of the world, and so

With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay, l6°

That to divide is not to take away.

Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy, l6 s

As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills

The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. 4 Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, x 7°

The life that wears, the spirit that creates

One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.

Mind from its object differs most in this:

Evil from good; misery from happiness; I7 5

The baser from the nobler; the impure

And frail, from what is clear and must endure.

If you divide suffering and dross, 5 you may

Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought, l8 °

Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not

How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law l8s

By which those live, to whom this world of life

Is as a garden ravaged, 6 and whose strife

Tills for the promise of a later birth

The wilderness of this Elysian earth.

There was a Being whom my spirit oft I9°

Met on visioned wanderings, far aloft,

its

In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn,

Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves I9 *

Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor

Paved her light steps; —on an imagined shore,
Under the grev beak of some promontory
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,

4. An allusion to Apollo's slaying of 6. See "The Sensitive-Plant," pp. 210-

Python, a monstrous serpent. 219.
5. Worthless, impure matter.
 ——
Epipsychidion • 379
That I beheld her not. In solitudes 20 °

Her voice came to me through the whispering woods,

And from the fountains, and the odours deep
Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep
Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there,
Breathed but of her to the enamoured air; 2 °5

And from the breezes whether low or loud,

And from the rain of every passing cloud,
And from the singing of the summer-birds,
And from all sounds, all silence. In the words
Of antique verse and high romance, in form, — 2I °

—
Sound, colour in whatever checks that Storm
Which with the shattered present chokes the past; 7
And in that best philosophy, 8 whose taste
Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom 9
As glorious as a fiery martyrdom; 2I 5

Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.

Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth

I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,
And towards the loadstar 1 of my one desire,
I dizzy moth, whose flight
flitted, like a 22 °

Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light, 2

When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere 3
A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,
As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.
But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame, 22 5

Past, like a God throned on a winged planet,

Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it,
Into the dreary cone of our life's shade; 4
And as a man with mighty loss dismayed,
I would have followed, though the grave between 23 °

Yawned like a gulph whose spectres are unseen:

—
When a voice said: "O thou of hearts the weakest,
The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest."
— —
Then I "where?" the world's echo answered "where!"
And in that silence, and in my despair, 2 35

Iquestioned every tongueless wind that flew

Over my tower of mourning, if it knew
Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul; 5
And murmured names and spells which have controul

7.that Storm .past: The apparent

. . 9. Fate or destiny.
meaning is that the random experience 1. More commonly "lodestar" —a "guid-
of everyday current activity (shattered ing star."
present) ordinarily obscures the great 2. The dim light in which owls fly about,
achievements scattered through cultural 3. The planet Venus as the evening star,
history. 4. The "cone of night" or shadow cast
8. Shelley probably refers not to any by the earth away from the sun.
particular philosophical school but to a 5. See Shelley's essay "On Love," pp.
general attitude, described in 213-215, 473-474.
that seej suffering as meaningful.
380 - Epipsychidion
Over the sightless tyrants of our fate; 2 4°

But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate

The night which closed on her; nor uncreate
That world within this Chaos, mine and me,
Of which she was the veiled Divinity,
The world I say of thoughts that worshipped her: 2 45

And therefore I went forth, with hope and fear

And every gentle passion sick to death,
Feeding my course with expectation's breath,
Into the wintry forest of our life; 6
And struggling through its error with vain strife, 2 5°

And stumbling in my weakness and my haste,

And half bewildered by new forms, I past,
Seeking among those untaught foresters 7
If I could find one form resembling hers,
In which she might have masked herself from me. 2 55

There, —
One, 8 whose voice was venomed melodv
Sate by a well, under blue night-shade bowers; 9
The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers,
Her touch was as electric poison, flame —
Out of her looks into my vitals came, 26°

And from her living cheeks and bosom flew

A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew
Into the core of my
green heart, and lay
Upon its grown grey
leaves; until, as hair
O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown 1 prime 26 5

With ruins of unseasonable time.

In manv mortal forms I rashlv sought

The shadow of that idol of my thought. 2
—
And some were fair but beautv dies away:
—
Others were wise but honeyed words betray: 27 °

—
And One was true oh! why not true to me?
Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee,
I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay,

Wounded and weak and panting; 3 the cold day

Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain. 27 *

When, like a noon-dav dawn, there shone again

Deliverance. One stood on mv path who seemed
As like the glorious shape which I had dreamed,

6. The image of the hero's journey of 9. A poisonous plant, probably deadly

life passing through a dark, hostile nightshade (belladonna).
forest appears at the opening of Dante's 1. Not yet flowered.
Divine Comedy, among other works. 2. For a detailed discussion of the bio-
7. I.e., other human beings who had not graphical elements in 267-383, see K. N.
experienced such a revelation. Cameron's essay, pp. 511-519, below.
8. The relationship with a woman de- 3. For Shelley's other uses of this image
picted symbolically in lines 256ff. has of the Actaeon-like poet pursued by his
been variously interpreted as an en- own thoughts (hounds), see Prometheus
Counter with a prostitute or simply the Unbound, 1.454—457, and Adonais, 274—
first serious arousal of the youth's sexual 279.
desires.
 —— —
Epipsychidion • 381

As is the Moon, whose changes ever run

Into themselves, to the eternal Sun; 28 °

The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven's bright isles,

Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,
That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And warms not but illumines. Young and fair 2g 5

As the descended Spirit of that sphere,

She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night
From its own darkness, until all was bright
Between the Heaven and Earth of mv calm mind, 4
And, as a cloud charioted by the wind, 2 9°

She led me to a cave in that wild place,

And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon
Waxing and waning o'er Endvmion. 5
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb, 2 95

And all my being became bright or dim

As the Moon's image in a summer sea,
According as she smiled or frowned on me;
And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead: 3°°

For at her silver voice came Death and Life,

Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew, 305

And cried "Away, he is not of our crew."

I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,

Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse; 310

And how my soul was as a lampless sea,

And who was then its Tempest; and when She,
The Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost
Crept o'er those waters, 'till from coast to coast
The moving billows of my
being fell 315

Into a death of ice, immoveable;

—
And then what earthquakes made it gape and split,
The white Moon smiling all the while on it,
These words conceal: —
If not, each word would be
The key of staunchless tears. Weep not for me! 320

4. the poet's mind is between neaven

I.e., dition that he should sleep forever,
and earth, like the cloud used in the Diana, the moon goddess, fell in love
following simile. with his sleeping form and made love to
5. In the traditional myth Jupiter him every night. (See "The Witch of
granted the shepherd Endymion im- Atlas," line 588 and note.)
mortality and eternal youth on the con-
 —
382 • Epipsychidion
At length, into the obscure Forest 6 came
The Vision I had sought through grief and shame.

Athwart that wintry wilderness of thorns 7

Flashed from her motion splendour like the Morn's,
And from her presence life was radiated 325

Through the grey earth and branches bare and dead;

So that her way was paved, and roofed above
With flowers as soft as thoughts of budding love;
And music from her respiration spread
Like light, —all other sounds were penetrated 330

By the small, still, sweet spirit of that sound,

So that the savage winds hung mute around;
And odours warm and fresh fell from her hair
Dissolving the dull cold in the froze air:
Soft as an Incarnation of the Sun, 335

When light is changed to love, this glorious One

Floated into the cavern where I lay,
And called my Spirit, and the dreaming clay
Was lifted by the thing that dreamed below
As smoke by fire, and in her beauty's glow 340

I stood, and felt the dawn of my long night

Was penetrating me with living light:

I knew it was the Vision veiled from me

—
So many years that it was Emily.

Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth, 345

This world of love, this me; and into birth

Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart

Magnetic might into its central heart;

And lift its billows and its mists, and guide
By everlasting laws, each wind and tide 350

To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave;

And lull its storms, each in the craggy grave
Which was its cradle, luring to faint bowers

The armies of the rainbow-winged showers;

And, as those married lights, which from the towers 355

Of Heaven look forth and fold the wandering globe

In liquid sleep and splendour, as a robe;
And all their many-mingled influence blend,
If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end;
So ye, bright regents, with alternate sway 360

Govern my sphere of being, night and dav!

Thou, not disdaining even a borrowed might;
Thou, not eclipsing a remoter light;
And, through the shadow of the seasons three.
From Spring to Autumn's sere maturity, 365

6. I.e., dark forest (the selva oscura in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a "bush
Dante's Inferno, 1.2). of thorn" was a traditional property of
7. As in the mechanics' performance of the moon, as well as of the dark forest
"Pyramus and Thisbe" in Shakespeare's of life.
 Epipsychidion • 383
Light it into the Winter of the tomb,
Where it may ripen to a brighter bloom.
Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce,
Who drew the heart of this frail Universe
Towards thine own; till, wreckt in that convulsion, 370

Alternating attraction and repulsion,

Thine went astray and that was rent in twain;
Oh, float into our azure heaven again!
Be there love's folding-star 8 at thy return;
The living Sun will feed thee from its urn 375

Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn

In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn
Will worship thee with incense of calm breath
And lights and shadows; as the star of Death
And Birth 9 is worshipped bv those sisters wild 380

—
Called Hope and Fear upon the heart are piled
—
Their offerings, of this sacrifice divine
A World shall be the altar.
Lady mine,
Scorn not these flowers of thought, the fading birth
Which from its heart of hearts that plant puts forth 385

Whose fruit, made perfect by thy sunny eyes,

Will be as of the trees of Paradise.
The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me.
To whatsoe'er of dull mortality
Is mine, remain a vestal sister still; 390

To the intense, the deep, the imperishable,

Not mine but me, henceforth be thou united
Even as a bride, delighting and delighted. 1
—
The hour is come: the destined Star has risen
Which shall descend upon a vacant prison. 395

The walls are high, the gates are strong, thick set
—
The sentinels but true love never yet
Was thus constrained: it overleaps all fence:
Like lightning, with invisible violence
Piercing its continents; like Heaven's free breath, 400

Which he who grasps can hold not; liker Death,

Who rides upon a thought, and makes his way
Through temple, tower, and palace, and the array
Of arms: more strength has Love than he or they;
For it can burst his charnel, and make free 4° 5
The limbs in chains, the heart in agony,
The soul in dust and chaos.

8. Venus as the evening star

—
"The Star 1. Lines 389-393, with their reference
that bids the Shepherd fold [his sneep]" to the vestal virgins (see "The Witch of
(Milton, Comus, 93). See also "The Atlas," 318), have been cited to prove
Witch of Atlas," 74, and Hellas, 1029. that the overt sexual imagery in the last
9. Venus, as both the morning and the part of the poem is not to be taken
evening star. (Cf. "The Triumph of literally.
Life," 412-419.)
384 • Epipsychidion

Emily,
A ship is now,
floating in the harbour
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor, 410

No keel has ever ploughed that path before;

The halcyons 2 brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? 415
Our bark 3 is as an albatross, whose nest
Is a far Eden of the purple East;
And we between her wings will sit, while Night
And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight,
Our ministers, along the boundless Sea, 420
Treading each other's heels, unheededly.
It is an isle under Ionian skies, 4
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise,
And, for 5 the harbours are not safe and good,
This land would have remained a solitude 425

But for some pastoral people native there,

Who from the Elysian, 6 clear, and golden air
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,
Simple and spirited; innocent and bold.
The blue /Egean girds this chosen home, 430

With ever-changing sound and light and foam,

Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar;
And all the winds wandering along the shore

Undulate with the undulating tide:

There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide; 435

And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond,

As clear as elemental diamond,
Or serene morning air; and far bevond,
The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer
(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year,) 440

Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls

Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls
Illumining, with sound that never fails
Accompany the noon-da v nightingales; 7
And all the place is peopled with sweet airs; 445

The light clear element which the isle wears

2. According to the myth, when Ceyx the western coast of Asia Minor, to-
and Alcyone were turned into king- gether with the adjacent islands in the
fishers (halcyons), Alcyone's father, Aegean Sea, which had been colonized
Aeolus, god of the winds, granted his by Greeks who spoke the Ionian dialect,
daughter "seven days of calm in winter Among these islands were the Sporades
Tin which] Alcyone broods on the sea, (see Shelley's Advertisement).
wings outstretched over her nest" (Ovid, 5. Because.
Metamorphoses, XI. 10). 6. Having the quality of the Elysian
3. A small ship. fields, the classical version of paradise
4. Though the Ionian Sea lies between (see note to 133).
southern Italy and western Greece, the 7. Ordinarily the nightingale sings only
area called Ionia in classical times was at ni^ht.
 ——
Epipsychidion • 385
Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,
Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers,
And falls upon the eye-lids like faint sleep;
And from the moss violets and jonquils peep, 450

And dart their arrowy odour through the brain

'Till you might faint with that delicious pain.
And every motion, odour, beam, and tone,
With that deep music is in unison:
Which is a soul within the soul they seem — 455
Like echoes of an antenatal dream.
It is an isle 'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;
Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer, 8
Washed by the soft blue Oceans of young air. 460

It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight,

Pestilence, War and Earthquake, never light
Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they
Sail onward far upon their fatal way:
The winged storms, chaunting their thunder-psalm 465

To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm

Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew,
From which its fields and woods ever renew
Their green and golden immortality. 9
And from the sea there rise, and from the sky 470

There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright,

Veil after veil, each hiding some delight,
Which Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside,
naked bride
Till the isle's beauty, like a
Glowing at once with love and loveliness, 475

Blushes and trembles at its own excess:

Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less
Burns in the heart of this delicious isle,
An atom 1 of th' Eternal, whose own smile
Unfolds itself, and may be felt not seen 480

O'er the grey rocks, blue waves, and forests green,

Filling their bare and void interstices.
But the chief marvel of the wilderness
Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how
None of the rustic island-people know: 485

'Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height

It overtops the woods; but, for delight,
Some wise and tender Ocean-King, 2 ere crime
Had been invented, in the world's young prime,
Reared it, a wonder of that simple time, 490

8. Venus as the morning star ("Light- 2. One underlying myth may be that of
Bearer") is imagined as the home of Nereus, the eldest son of Oceanus;
unfallen Eden. Hesiod in the Theogony says that Nereus
9. The ever-renewing of the seasonal "is always right and always gentle; he
cycle of green foliage and golden harvests never forgets the laws, and is full of
is cited as a kind of immortality. just and gentle wisdom." His wife, Doris,
1. The smallest possible particle. was also a child of Oceanus.
 — ——
386 • Epipsychidion
An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house
Made sacred to his sister and his spouse.
It scarce seems now a wreck of human art,
But, as it were Titanic; 3 in the heart
Of Earth having assumed its form, then grown 495

Out of the mountains, from the living stone,

and high:
Lifting itself in caverns light
For the antique and learned imagerv
all

Has been erased, and in the place of it

The ivy and the wild-vine interknit 500

The volumes 4 of their many twining stems;

Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems
The lampless halls, and when thev fade, the sky
Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery
With Moon-light patches, or star atoms keen, 505

Or fragments of the day's intense serene;

Working mosaic on their Parian floors. 5
And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers
And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem
To sleep in one another's arms, and dream 510

Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we

Read in their smiles, and call reality.

This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed

Thee to be lady of the solitude.
And I have fitted up some chambers there 515

Looking towards the golden Eastern air,

And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below.
I have sent books and music there, and all

Those instruments with which high spirits call 52 °

The future from its cradle, and the past

Out of its grave, and make the present last
In thoughts and jovs which sleep, but cannot die,
Folded within their own eternity.
Our simple life wants little, and true taste 525

Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste

The scene it would adorn, and therefore still.
Nature, with all her children, haunts the hill.

The embowering ivy, yet

ring-dove, in the
Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit 53 °

Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance

Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;
The spotted deer bask in the fresh moon-light
Before our gate, and the slow, silent night

3. The origins are set back into the era duced crime as a category of thought
of the Titans— Kronus (Saturn) and his 4. Coils.
siblings —
before the advent of Zeus (Jupi- 5. Of fine white marble from the island
ter) and the Olympian gods, who intro- of Paros in the Cyclades.
 —
Epipsychidion • 387
measured by the pants of their calm sleep.
Is 535
Be this our home in life, and when years heap
Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,
Let us become the over-hanging day,
The living soul of this Elysian isle,

Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile 540

We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,
Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,
And wander in the meadows, or ascend
The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour; 6 545
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstacy,
Possessing and possest by all that is
Within that calm circumference of bliss, 550

And by each other, till to love and live

—
Be one: or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep
The moonlight of the expired night asleep,
Through which the awakened day can never peep; 555

A veil for our seclusion, close as Night's,

Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.
And we will talk, until thought's melody 560

Become too sweet for utterance, and it die

In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, 565

And our veins beat together; and our lips

With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be 57 °

Confused in passion's golden purity,

As mountain-springs under the morning Sun. 7
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, 575

'Till like two meteors of expanding flame,

Those spheres instinct with 8 it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, vet ever inconsumable:
6. Lover,i.e., the island. came streams, and Alpheus followed
7. wells . morning sun: Accompany-
. . Arethusa from Greece under the ocean
ing the fairly explicit sexual imagery is to Sicily, where their waters finally
an allusion to the myth of Alpheus, the mingled. (Shelley wrote two versions of
river-god, who pursued Arethusa, a vir- a poem on Arethusa.)
gin nyn.ph who served Diana. Both be- 8. Animated by.
 —
388 • Adoiiais

In one another's substance finding food, 580

Like flames too pure and light and unimbued 9

To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, 585

One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,

And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. 590

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

Weak go, kneel at your Sovereign's 1 feet,

And say:
—
Verses,
"We
are the masters of thy slave; 2
What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?"
Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, 595

All singing loud: "Love's very pain is sweet,

But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave."
So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste
Over the hearts of men, until ye meet 6o°

Marina, Vanna, Primus, 3 and the rest,

And bid them love each other and be blest:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
—
And come and be my guest, for I am Love's. 4

AdonaiS Shelley learned of John Keats's serious consumptive illness

from Leigh Hunt and from John and Maria Gishomc during their visit to
England. Late in July 1820, Shelley wrote, inviting Keats to visit him in
Italy. Keats conditionally accepted, and he and Joseph Severn sailed for
Naples in in id-September 1820, reached there on October 21, proceeded

to Rome on November 7 or 8, where they arrived on November 15. and

took lodgings on the Piazza di Spagna. There Keats died on February 2^.
1821. Shelley did not learn of this event until April 11. 1821, and almost
immediately began his elegy on Keats's death. By June 8, 1821, Shelley
wrote to Charles Oilier that he had completed his poem "of about forty
Spenser stanzas"; he finished the entire fifty five stanzas, had the poem
printed in Pisa, and sent a copy to the Gisborncs on July 13. Though
Shelley instructed have another edition printed in England,
Oilier to
Adoiiais sold so poorly that Oilier did no more than sell the copies he had
received (probably less than one hundred).
Shelley called Adoiiais "a highly wrought piece of art" and "the least

9. Unstained. liams (Shelley's first [i.e., primary]

1. I.e., Emily's. friend).
2. The poet. 4. This envoy, .iddressed to the poem
3. Marina, Vanna. Primus Mary Shelley. in Dante's manner, restates the central
J;ine (Giovanna) Williams, Edward Wil- theme of the entire composition.
 .

Adonais - 389
imperfect of my compositions." Later poets and critics have generally
agreed, and its artistry, its place in the long, distinguished tradition of the
pastoral elegy, subject have made it the most widely known of
and its

Shelley's book-length poems. That is not to say that Adonais has been
easily understood; though earlier commentators particularly W. M. Ros- —
setti in Clarendon Press Series edition of the poem (1891)
his had —
pointed out the poem's numerous parallels to Bion's Greek "Lament for
Adonis" and the "Elegy for Bion" attributed to Moschus, only recently
have critics been able to demonstrate the unity of the poem's imagery and
structure. Both Wasserman and Reiman see a symmetrical structure;
Wasserman, taking up the suggestion that the name Adonais embodies
both the Greek Adonis and the Hebrew word "Adonai" (Lord), shows
how this conflation reflects the ideas of contemporary syncretic mythol-
ogizers and raises the story above the level of mere fertility myth.
Wasserman divides the poem into three movements of seventeen, twenty-
one, and seventeen stanzas, and Reiman elaborates this by separating out
the three central stanzas (27-29) to leave sections of seventeen, nine,
three, nine, and seventeen stanzas. Silverman finds the key to the poem's
structure in that of Astrophel, Spenser's pastoral elegy on the death of Sir
Philip Sidney.
As the epigraph from the elegy Bion suggests, there are two chief
for
biographical focuses in the poem —onebeing Keats and the other the
anonymous Quarterly reviewer, whom Shelley believed to be Robert
Southey. The relevance to Adonais of Shelley's relations with Southey is

shown in Kenneth Neill Cameron's "Shelley vs. Southey: New Light on an

Old Quarrel" (PMLA, 1942), and Reiman gives the fullest treatment of
the other question in "Keats and Shelley: Personal and Literary Relations"
(Shelley and his Circle, V)
There being no surviving fair copy manuscript, the chief authorities for
the text are the first edition, which, Shelley wrote to Oilier, "is beautifully
printed, & what is of more consequence, correctly ." (Letters, II, 311), . .

and Mary Shelley's first edition of 1839, which contains (along with
several errors) at least three verbal changes that must have Shelley's
authority behind them. We have printed book titles in the Preface in
italics, altered a few minor points of orthography to conform to the con-

sistent practice in Shelley's manuscripts (e.g., ancient to antient, gray to

grey), and changed the possessive it's to its, to conform to the correct usage
of Shelley's day as found in his poems printed in England.
 2

390 • Adonais

Adonais
An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of
Endymion, Hyperion, Etc.

'AffTTjp irplv p.kv eXafjLTres evl ^wolaip 'E&os'

vvv 5e davojv \dp.irei.s "Eairepos iv (pdi/ievois- — PLATO 1

PREFACE
$dpfjiaKOV 7j\de, Bicov, irorl abv <TTOp.a, <pdpp.aKov etSes.
irios rev rots xetXecrcri Trore8pap.e, kovk iyXvK&vdr]',

Tt's 5e Pporbs rocaovTOv dvdpiepos, rj Kepdaai rot,

rj doVvai XaXeovri to (pdpp.a.Kov', <EK<t>vyev u)8dp.

— MOSCHUS, EPITAPH. BION.

It is my London edition of this poem, a

intention to subjoin to the
criticism lamented object to be classed among
upon the claims of its

the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. My
known repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which
several of his earlier compositions were modelled, prove, at least
that I am an impartial judge. I consider the fragment of Hyperion,
as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same
years. 3
John Keats, died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth
year, on the of ——
1821; and was buried in the romantic and
lonely cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid
which, is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now
mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of antient Rome.
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter
with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to
think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. 4
The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have
dedicated these unworthy verses, was not less delicate and fragile
than it was beautiful; and where cankerworms abound, what wonder

1. An epigram attributed to Plato, which given by Shelley, states: "Yet justice

Shelley translated: overtakes all."
T l„„ wert
Thou _.,_» ,.
the
„,
morning
. ,
star _
among ,,
the
3. Shelley,
,. ;'
thinking
6 that
..,
,
Keats died in
...
his twenty-fourth year before his twenty-
fourth birthday), and reading in the
Ere thy' fair light had fled-
Now, having died thou are as Hesperus, ^y^f ment *° .£* ^'""volume
'
(dated June 26, 1820) that Hyperion
ivi
kjJL r~i-~A~„ r ,u~ a a had been left unfinished because of the
New splendour .
to the dead. , ., , r .
unfavorable reception of Endymion
2. From "Elegy for Bion" (attrib-
the (1818), must have thought that the frag-
uted to Moschus) "Poison came, Bion,
: mentary Hyperion had been written by
to thy mouth —
poison didst thou eat.
How could it come to such lips as thine
Keats by late 1818 or early 1819, when
(according to Shelley's information) he
and not be sweetened? What mortal was would have been only twenty-one years
so cruel as to mix the drug for thee, or old.
to yivc it to thee, who heard thy voice? 4. Shelley's son William had been buried
He escapes [shall be nameless in] my there in 1819, as he himself was to be in
song." The poem's next clause, not 1822.
 Adonais • 391

young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on

if its

his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced

the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus
originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; 5 a
rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements
from more candid critics, 6 of the true greatness of his powers, were
ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.
It may be well said, that these wretched men know not what they
do. They scatter their insults and heed as to
their slanders without
whether the poisoned shaft on a heart made callous by many
lights
blows, or one, like Keats's composed of more penetrable stuff. One
of their associates, is, to my knowledge, a most base and un-
principled calumniator. As to Endymion, was it a poem, whatever
might be its defects, to be treated contemptuously by those who
had celebrated, with various degrees of complacency and panegyric,
Paris, and Woman, and a Syrian Tale, and Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr.
Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of the illustrious
obscure? 7 Are these the men, who in their venal good nature, pre-
sumed to draw a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord
Byron? What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed
all those camels? Against whatwoman taken in adultery, dares the
foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? 8
Miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced
one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor shall
it be your excuse, that, murderer as you are, you have spoken dag-

gers, but used none. 9

The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats's life were

n'ot made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press. 1

5. Shelley wrote to Byron on May 4, John Howard Payne, an American drama-

1821: "Hunt tells me that in the first tist who later courted the widowed Mary
paroxysms of his disappointment he burst Shelley, was reviewed harshly, not favor-
a blood-vessel; and thus laid the founda- ably, in the Quarterly for January 1820.
tion of a rapid consumption" (Letters, Works by the Rev. Henry Hart Milman
II, 289). The review in question appeared (Shelley's contemporary at both Eton
in the April 1818 number of the Quar- and Oxford) were favorably reviewed in
terly, which was published in September the Quarterly issues dated April 1816,
1818. See Reiman, The Romantics Re- July 1818, and May 1820. (Milman him-
viewed, Part C, II, 767-770. self was a reviewer for the Quarterly,
6. Shelley may allude to Francis Jef- and Shelley later came to suspect him
frey's favorable review of Endymion and of having written the scurrilous attack
the Lamia volume that appeared in the on Laon and Cythna in the number for
Edinburgh Review for August 1820 (see April 1819.)
The Romantics Reviewed, Part C, I, 8. The language of this sentence, like
385-390). that of the one that precedes it and the
7.Paris in 1815 (1817) by the Rev. first sentence in the paragraph, comes
George Croly was published anony- straight from the New Testament; see
mously and favorably reviewed in the Luke 23:34, Matthew 23:24, and John
Quarterly for April 1817. (Croly 'vrote 8:3-11.
a vicious review of Adonais for the 9. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. ii. 414.
Literary Gazette.) A later edition of 1. Shelley alludes to a letter to John
Woman (1810) by Eaton Stannard Bar- Gisborne from the Rev. Robert Finch,
rett, a Tory wit, was reviewed by the who gave a sentimentalized account of
Quarterly in the April 1818 number. Keats's last days.
 —
392 • Adonais
I am given to understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit
had received from the criticism of Endymion, was exasperated by
the bitter sense of unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have
been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had
wasted the promise of his genius, than those on whom he had
lavished his fortune and his care. He was accompanied to Rome, and
attended in his last by Mr. Severn, a # young artist of the
illness
highest promise, who, have been informed "almost risked his own
I

life, and sacrificed every prospect to unwearied attendance upon his

dying friend." Had I known these circumstances before the com-
pletion of my poem, I should have been tempted to add my feeble
tribute of applause to the more
recompense which the virtuous
solid
man finds in the recollection of his own motives. Mr. Severn can
dispense with a reward from "such stuff as dreams are made of." 2
His conduct is a golden augurv of the success of his future career
may the unextinguished Spirit of his illustrious friend animate the
creations of his pencil, and plead against Oblivion for his name!

Iweep for Adonais he is dead! —

O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, 3 selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thv obscure compeers, 5

And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me

Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light 4 unto eternity!
2
IO
Wherewert thou mighty Mother, 5 when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced bv the shaft which flies
In darkness? 6 where was lorn 7 Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, 8 with soft enamoured breath, J 5

Rekindled all the fading melodies,

With which, like flowers that mock the corse 9 beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.

2. Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV.i.156- Lost (Books I. VII). and Uranian

157. Venus, the goddess seen as patroness of
3. As in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley ideal love.
follows the classical poetic convention of 6. Cf. "Thou shalt not be afraid for
personifying the Horae (Hours), god- the terror by night; nor for the arrow
desses of the seasons, that flieth by day" (Psalms 91:5). Shel-
4. The distinction between the senses of ley alludes to the anonymous attack on
sound and sight plays a significant part Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Re-
in the poem's symbolism. v/>h-. XIX (April 1818), 204-208.
5. Urania (line 12). a name used for the 7. Forsaken.
Muse of astronomy, the "Heavenly 8. One of the personified Echoes.
Muse" invoked by Milton in Paradise 9. Corpse.
 Adonais • 393

3
—
O, weep for Adonais he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! 20

Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed

Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
—
Descend; oh, dream not that the amorous Deep 1 25

Will yet restore him to the vital air;

Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.
4
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
—
Lament anew, Urania! He died, 2
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, 30

Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,

The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,
Trampled and mocked with manv a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; 3 he went, unterrified,
Into the gulph of death; but his clear Sprite 35

Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light. 4

5
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And happier they their happiness who knew,
WTiose tapers yet burn through that night of time 40

In which suns perished; 5 others more sublime,

Struck by the envious wrath of man or God,
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime;
And some yet live, treading the thorny road,
Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode. 6 45
6
But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished
The nursling of thy widowhood, 7 who grew,
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
And fed with true love tears, instead of dew; 8
Most musical of mourners, weep anew! 50

Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,

The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew9
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lily lies —the storm is overpast.

1. An unfathomable abyss. during their lifetime.

2. I.e., Milton. 6. some . serene abode:
. . Byron and
3. Lines 31-34 refer to the Restoration Shelley, among others.
of the Stuart monarchy, when the "regi- 7. Keats as a poet is depicted as the
—
cides" those responsible for executing posthumous child of Milton (Sire of
—
King Charles I were killed. line 30). Shelley admired Keats's Hy-
4. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley says perion, his most Miltonic poem.
that Milton was the third great epic 8. Lines 48^49 allude to the story of
poet, along with Homer and Dante; Keats's poem "Isabella; or, The Pot of
Sprite: spirit. Basil."
5. Lines 38-41 characterize minor poets 9. Bloomed or achieved perfection,
who were content to have minor fame
 ——
394 • Adonais

To that high Capital, 1 where kingly Death 55

Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,

He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal. Come away! —
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still 6°

He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;

Awake him not! surely he takes his fill

Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.

8
He awake no more, oh, never more!
will
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace, 65

The shadow of white Death, and at the door

Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface 70

So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law

Of change, shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw. 2

O, weep for Adonais! —The 9quick Dreams, 3

The passion-winged Ministers of thought,

Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams 75

Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught

The love which was its music, wander not,
Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, 4 8o

They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.

10
And one 5 with trembling hands clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries;
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eves, 8*

Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies

A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain. 90

11
One from a lucid urn of starry dew
Washed his light limbs as if embalming them;
Another dipt her profuse locks, and threw
1. Rome, the Eternal City, where Keats life as his flocks, according to the tradi-
died. tion of the pastoral elegy.
2. In the first edition this line read: "Of 4. Such use of oxymoron is common in
mortal change, shall fill the grave which Keats's poetry, hut relatively unusual in
is her maw." Shelley's.
3. I.e., "living Dreams"; Shelley per- 5. One of the Dreams, etc., of stanza 9.
sonifies various aspects of Keats's mental 6. Luminous.
 Adonais • 395
The wreath upon him, like an anadem, 7

Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem; 95

Another in her wilful grief would break

Her bow and winged reeds, 8 as if to stem
A greater loss with one which was more weak;
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.
12
Another Splendour 9 on his mouth alit, I0 °

That mouth, whence it was wont draw the breath to

Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath
With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon his icy lips; I0 5

And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath

Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips, 1
It flushed through his pale limbs, and past to its eclipse.

}3
And others came Desires and Adorations,
. . .

Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, II0

Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations

Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eves, "5
—
Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream. 2

All he had loved, and moulded into thought,

From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought I2 °

Her eastern watchtower, and her hair unbound,

Wet
with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle dav;
Afar the melancholv thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, I25

And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.

Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,

And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more replv to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, x 3°

Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;

Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
Than those for whose disdain she pined away

7. Garland for the head, usually of of thought, etc.

flowers. 9. Cf. Dante's word splendori (Paradiso,
8. arrows;
I.e., Shelley is here para- XXIII. 82).
phrasing Bion's "Lament for Adonis," 1. Embraces.
where the mourning creatures are Loves 2. Lines 116-117 allude to Keats's "To
(Cupids) rather than Dreams, Ministers Autumn."
396 • Adonais
Into a shadow of all sounds: 3 — a drear
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear. *35

16
Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown
For whom should she have waked the sullen year?
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear4 . mo
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both
Thou Adonais: wan they stand and sere r>

Amid the faint companions of their youth,

With dew all turned to tears; odour, to sighing ruth. 6

Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale 7 ms

Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth with morning, 8 doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest, x 5°

As Albion 9 wails for thee: the curse of Cain 1

Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
And scared the angel soul that was its earthlv guest!
18
Ah woe is come and gone,
is me! Winter
But with the revolving year;
grief returns x 55

The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;

The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere; 2 l6°

And the green lizard, and the golden snake,

Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean
A quickening from the Earth's heart has burst
life
As it has ever done, 3 with change and motion, l6 5

3. When the nymph Echo was rebuffed (which burned the scales from its eyes)
by Narcissus, whom she loved, she faded and then diving into a fountain.
into an echo of sounds; Narcissus 9. England.
scorned Echo, fell in love with his own 1. The first murderer was cursed to be
reflection, and was transformed into a "a fugitive and a vagabond ... in the
flower. earth."
4. Hyacinthus was a youth beloved by 2. The original form of "brier"; thorny
Phoebus Apollo, who mourned him when bushes in general, or wild rosebushes;
jealous Zephyrus caused his death. Apollo brake: thicket or clump of bushes,
turned Hyacinthus into a flower. 3. The renewal of the animal and vege-
5. Dry or withered. table species in the contrasted
spring,
6. Pity. with the linear termination of the indi-
7. Besides echoing the elegy on Bion, vidual human life, leads toa lament (in
this image alludes to Keats's "Ode to a the manner of the late Latin poem
Nightingale " Pervigilium Veneris) that destroys the
8. eagle . morning: According to
. . comfort earlier provided by the myth
tradition, the eagle could renew its youth- in which Adonais was reborn annually,
ful vision by first flying toward the sun
 Adonais • 397
From the great morning of the world when first

God dawned on Chaos; in steam immersed

its

The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;

All baser things pant withlife's sacred thirst;

Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight, J 7Q

The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

20
The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath; 4
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Ischanged to fragrance, they illumine death J 75

And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;

Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows 5
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
—
By sightless 6 lightning? th'intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. l8 °

21
Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as had not been,
if it

And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!

Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators? Great and mean l8 s

Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
22
He will awake no more, oh, never more! I9°

"Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise

Out of thy sleep, and slake, 7 in thy heart's core,
A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs."
And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,
And the Echoes whom their sister's song 8
all r 95

Hadheld in holy silence, cried: "Arise!"

Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung,
From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung.
23
She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear 20 °

The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,

Even ghost abandoning a bier,
as a
Had the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear
left
So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;
2° 5
So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.

4. Anemones, or windflowers. 7. Render less acute or painful.

5. The human mind. 8. The sister is Echo (127), who re-
6. Both invisible and blind, amoral. peated Adonais' poem.
398 • Adonais
24
Out of her secret Paradise she sped,
Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,
And human hearts, which to her aery tread 2I °

Yielding not, wounded the invisible

Palms 9 of her tender feet where'er they fell:
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they
Rent the soft Form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May, 2I 5

Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.

25
In the death chamber for a moment Death
Shamed by the presence of that living Might
Blushed to annihilation, and the breath
Revisited those lips, and life's pale light 22 °

Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.

"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
Leave me not!" cried Urania: her distress
Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress. 22 *
26
"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive
With food of saddest memory kept alive, 2 3°

Now thou art dead, as if it were a part

Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!
27
"Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, 235

Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men

Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon 1 in his den?
Defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then
Wisdom the mirrored shield, 2 or scorn the spear? 2 *°

Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when

Thy spirit should have filled its crescent 3 sphere,
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.
28
"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead; ^5
The vultures to the conqueror's banner true
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,

9. Shelley's use ofpalm for "sole" of lieved,had crushed Keats's spirit.

the foot here and in Prometheus Un- 2. Amirrored shield appears in the
bound (IV. 123) and "The Triumph of legend of Perseus, who succeeds in slay-
Iife" (361) is, so far as we can dis- ing Medusa by viewing her only in-
cover, entirely without precedent. directly in the shield.
1. The hostile critic(s) who, Shelley be- 3. Growing.
 Adonais • 399
And whose wings rain contagion; how they fled, —
When from his golden bow,
like Apollo,
The Pythian of the age 4 one arrow sped 2 5°

—
And smiled! The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low. 5

"The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;

He and each ephemeral insect 6 then
sets,
Is gathered into death without a dawn, 2 55

And the immortal stars awake again;

So is it in the world of living men:
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bareand veiling heaven, and when
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light 26°

Leave to its kindred lamps 7 the spirit's awful night."

3°
Thus ceased and the mountain shepherds 8 came
she:
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, 9 whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent, 26 5

An early but enduring monument,

Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ieme sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong, 1
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue. 2 7°

1
3
Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, 2
A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, 2 ?5

Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray

With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey. 3

4. Byron, his one arrow being English independence and liberty (see especially
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which Milton's L' Allegro, 36, and Wordsworth's
silenced the critics as Apollo killed the poetry passim).
Python. 9. Byron, alluding particularly to Childe
5. The edition read "as they go" in-
first Harold's Pilgrimage.
stead oflying low; Mary Shelley's 1. Thomas Moore from Ireland (Ieme),
emendation of this line and line 72 cer- famous for his Irish Melodies, his trans-
tainly reflects Shelley's wishes. lations of the love songs of Anacreon,
6. For Shelley's other uses of the ephe- and his anti-government satirical poetry
merid, see "The Sensitive -Plant" (11.49) (see notes to the Dedication of Peter
and "The Witch of Atlas" (9). Bell the Third).
7. The stars (other creative minds) that 2. I.e., Shelley.
the glare of sunlight, diffused through 3. For the association of the Actaeon
the atmosphere, had "veiled" (258). myth (in which the hunter Actaeon was
8. In pastoral elegies the fellow poets of destroyed by his own dogs because he
the poet being mourned are also char- saw Diana naked) with the Shakespear-
acterized -^s shepherds; here they are ean image of thoughts pursuing their
mountain shepherds because of the tra- father-mind, see note to Prometheus Un-
ditional associations of mountains with bound, 1.454—457.
 —
400 - Adonais

32
A pardlike 4 Spirit beautiful and swift 28°

A Love in desolation masked; —a Power

Girt round with weakness; —
it can scarce uplift

The weight of the superincumbent hour; 5

It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
—
A breaking billow; even whilst we speak 2g 5

Is it not broken? On the withering flower"

The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
33
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; 29°

And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,

Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew 6
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew 2 95

He came neglected and apart;

the last,
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.
34
All stood aloof, and at his partial 7 moan
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own; 300

As in the accents of an unknown land,

He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned
The Stranger's mien, and murmured: "who art thou?"
He answered not, but with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, 3°5

Which was like Cain's or Christ's 8 Oh! that it should — be so!

35
What hushed over the dead?
softer voice is

Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?

What form leans sadlv o'er the white death-bed,
In mockery of monumental stone, 9 3 10

The heavy heart heaving without a moan?

If it be He, 1 who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one;
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice. 3*5

4. Apard is a panther or leopard, sacred 7. Having a bias.

to Dionysus (Bacchus). 8.The forehead of Cain was branded by
5. Lines 281-283: The "overlying" or God with a mark to distinguish him; the
"overhanging" hour is that which marks crown of thoms bloodied {ensanguined)
the death of Adonais (see 4—9); this Christ's brow.
hour masks Cupid (Love) with desola- 9. The figure leans silent and still.
lion, godlike Power with weakness. posing likea memorial statue, yet
6. The thyrsus, a staff with an
tipped mocking such a statue because his heart
evergreen cone and wrapped with ivy continues to beat.
or grape leaves. In the Dionysia, the 1. Leigh Hunt. Keats's first literary
festival honoring Dionysus, the Greeks patron and champion; he took Keats
carried the thyrsus (which had clear into his house and cared for him at the
phallic symbolism) and garlanded their beginning of his final illness,
heads with ivy, violets, and other flowers.
 — — —
Adonais • 401

36
Our Adonais has drunk poison oh! —
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe? 2
The nameless worm 3 would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape the magic tone 320

Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong,

But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.
37
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! 325

Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,

Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thv season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow: 330

Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee;

Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt as now. —
38
Nor
let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites 4 that scream below; 335

He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;

Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. 5 —
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came, 6
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow 340

Through time and change, unquenchably the same,

Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
39
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
Hehath awakened from the dream of life
who lost in stormy visions, keep
'Tis we, 345
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. decay We
Like corpses in a chamel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us dav by day, 350

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

2. Throughout this and the following 5. Again addressing the Quarterly re-
stanza Shelley attacks the anonymous viewer, Shelley adapts (and inverts the
author of the Quarterly Review's attack implications of) an image from Para-
on Keats. Shelley believed him to be dise Lost, IV.828-829, in which fallen
Robert Southey, who (Shelley thought) Satan rebukes Ithuriel and Zephon for
was also the hostile reviewer of works failing to recognize him, who had once
by Hunt and himself. The actual re- been "sitting where ye durst not soare."
viewer of Keats was John Wilson Croker, 6. The concept of spirit as a fiery
while the attacks on Hunt and Shelley emanation flowing from the divine fire
had been written by John Taylor Cole- appears in the writings of the neo-
ridge, nephew of S. T. Coleridge. platonic philosopher Plotinus (Enneads,
3. Snake. IV.iii.9-10) and had been widely dis-
4. Birds of the hawk family. seminated in in the Platonic tradition.
402 • Adonais

4o
Hehas outsoared the shadow of our night; 7
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again; 355

From the contagion of the world's slow stain

He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in«vain; 8
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. 360

—
He lives, he wakes 'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young Dawn —
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! 365

Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air

Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the jovous stars which smile on its despair! 9
42
He is made one with Nature:
there is heard 370

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; 1
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power 2 may move 375

Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

43
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear 380

His part, while the one Spirit's plastic* stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th'unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass mav bear; 385

And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

7. The shadow cast by the earth away the stars would be visible in daytime,
from the sun. That shadow can eclipse as well as at night
the moon but none of the planets. I. The nightingale.
8. Shelley undoubtedly thought of Sou- 2. Power was the eighteenth-century
they, whose youthful liberalism had har- philosophical term for an impersonal
dened into conservatism by the time God (note the pronoun its in line 376).
Shelley met him at Keswick late in 1811. 3. Capable of shaping or molding form-
9. If there were no moisture-laden air less matter,
to diffuse sunlight into a general glow.
 —

Adonais • 403

44
The splendours of the firmament of time 4
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb 390

And death is low mist which cannot blot

a
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there 5 395

And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

45
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown 6
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not 400

Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought

And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. 405

46
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark
But whose transmitted effluence 7 cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
"Thou art become as one of us," they cry, 410

"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long

Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an Heaven of song. 8
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!"

4. Adonais and other creative spirits are is yet greater than mine." He is the
now called splendours, which at line 100 subject of Spenser's pastoral elegy
was the term used to designate one of Astrophel. Lucan: Marcus Annaeus Lu-
Adonais' mental creations. canus (39-65 a.d.) was the author of
5. The examples of the illustrious dead the Pharsalia (Bellum Civile), which
influence the lives of young imaginative praised the republican ideals of Pompey
persons torn between the ideals pursued and Cato in their war against Caesar;
by their desires (love) and the sordid forced to commit suicide when his role
realities of everyday life; doom: destiny. in a plot against Nero was discovered,
6. Those who died young before re- Lucan recited a passage from his own
ceiving their just recognition. Thomas poetry to his friends while bleeding to
Chatterton, to whose memory Keats had death.
dedicated Endymion, committed suicide 7. Emanation.
in 1770 at the age of seventeen while 8. Traditionally each sphere that en-
facing starvation, after writing brilliant circled the earth was thought to be
poetry (purporting to be the work of a piloted by a particular god or genius
medieval monk named Thomas Ro' iey). a spirit that gave vitality to it. Adonais
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), courtier is to be the genius of the third sphere
and poet, while dying from wounds, of Venus, also known as Lucifer (morn-
directed that a cup of water intended ing star) and Hesperus or Vesper
for himself be given to a wounded (evening star),
common soldier, saying, "Thy necessity
404 - Adonais

47
Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth 415

Fond 9 wretch! and know thyself and him aright.

Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth; 1
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: 2 then shrink * 20
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink. 3
48
Or go to Rome, 4 which is the sepulchre
O, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought 425

That ages, empires, and religions there

Lie buried in the ravage thev have wrought;
For such as he can lend, they 5 borrow not —
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought 430
Whowaged contention with their time's decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
49
Go thou to Rome, —
once the Paradise,
at
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, 6 435
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation's nakedness
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant's smile, 7 over the dead, 440

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. 8

50
And grev walls 9 moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoarv brand; 1

9. Unreasonable or foolish. and the Baths of Caracalla, where Shelley

1. The earth is like a pendulum in that wrote Prometheus Unbound, were over-
its orbit is irregular and from a cosmic grown with vegetation and almost seemed
vantage point it would appear to be to have returned to natural hills,
oscillating at the end of its cone-shaped 7. Shelley's and Mary's eldest son. Wil-
shadow (umbra). liam Shelley, had died in Rome on June
2. "Poetry is indeed something divine. 7, 1819; his grave was in the Protestant
It is at once the centre and circumfer- Cemetery (Cimitero Acattolico) near the
ence of knowledge ..." (Defence of spot where Keats was later buried.
Poetry, p. 503). 8. Before he died. Keats had asked
3. The edge of a precipice or a grave. Severn to look at the cemetery, and he
4. When the imagination shrinks to a had expressed pleasure at the "descrip-
single point, centre,aafter having tion of the locality ., particularly
. .

reached out
scan the universe in
to the innumerable violets" and the daisies
stanza 47, the poet suggests Rome as the among the grass.
proper point within time (our day and 9. The twelve-mile walls of Rome be-
night) to explore. gun under Aurelian (emperor, 270-275
5. I.e., those such as he, creative spirits a.d. ) form one boundary of the ceme-
as opposed to political and ecclesiastical tery; the Porta San Paolo is the nearby
rulers, who merely ravage the world. gate in the Aurelian wall.
6. The remains of Nero's palace and 1. A log that has been covered with
other imperial buildings, the city walls, white ash while burning on the hearth.
 Adonais • 405
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, 2
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned 445
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
Afield is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death 3
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath. 450
1
5
Here pause: these graves too young as yet
are all
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, 4
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find 455
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind 5
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
52
The One remains, the many change and pass; 460

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. 6 Die, —
Ifthou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! 465

—
Follow where all is fled! Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

Thy hopes gone before; 7 from all things here
are 470
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, —the low wind whispers near: 475
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

2. The pyramidal tomb of Caius Cestius, white light into the colors of the rain-
praetor and tribune of Rome during the bow, Life distorts the universal One
latter half of the first century B.C., had into many imperfect particulars, until
been incorporated into the Aurelian wall. Death permits the individual to reunite
3. One common name for a cemetery in with the One.
Italy is camposanto, "holy camp." Shel- 7. Shelley at this period regretted the
ley is punning seriously on the Italian deaths of his children William and Clara
word. (as well as the legal loss of his children
4. Shelley alludes to his sorrow at the by Harriet), alienation from Mary Shel-
death of his son. ley, animosity from the reviewers, ne-
5. William Shelley died in an epidemic gleet by his publisher and the reading
of malaria (Italian for "bad [or evil] public, and exile from his country and
air"), possibly another Italian-English his few closest friends. Most of his early
serious pun. hopes, personal and political, had ap-
6. As the atmosphere refracts the sun's parently failed.
406 • Hellas

54
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, 8
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse 48 °

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love

Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, 485

Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

55
The breath whose might have invoked in song
I

Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given; 9 490

The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar:

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 495

HellaS In December 1820, Professor Francesco Pacchiani (who was

then bringing Teresa Viviani to the Shelleys' attention) introduced them
to a group of exiled Greek aristocrats living in Pisa, the leading figure of
whom was Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos (1791-1865). Mavrocordato
(as his name was usually Westernized) remained friendly with the
Shelleys —
especially Mary, to whom he taught Greek in return for English
lessons. In April 1821 news reached Pisa that the Greeks, who had been
subject to Turkey for several centuries, had revolted and declared their
independence. In June, Mavrocordato left Italy to take part in the fight,
which continued in various forms until 1832 and in which he was to have
a major role; Mavrocordato later served as prime minister of independent
Greece on four different occasions between 1833 and 1855.
Shelley wrote most of his poem on the War of Greek Independence
during the first three weeks of October 1821. As early as October 11,
Shelley wrote to Oilier that his "dramatic poem called 'Hellas' will soon
be ready" (Edward Williams' suggestion of the name to Shelley on October
25 was, therefore, after the fact). Williams transcribed Hellas for the
press, November 6-10, and on November 11, Shelley, after correcting it,
mailed it to London with a cover letter instructing Oilier to "send the Mv
instantly to a Printer, & the moment you get a proof, dispatch it to me
by the Post," but also giving the publisher "liberty to suppress" anything
in the notes he considered dangerous under the laws of the time. Oilier

canceled some lines in the poem as well as passages in the notes, he did

8. This line and several others in stanza 9. Lines 488-490 echo but recast the
54 echo the opening lines of Dante's idea of the opening lines of Canto II of
Paradiso: "The glory of him who moves Dante's Paradiso: "O ye who in your
all things penetrates throughout the uni- little skiff [harca], longing to hear, have
verse and rekindles [glows again] in one followed behind my keel that goes
part more, and in another less. I have singing, turn back to your own shores;
been in that sphere which most receives do not give yourself to the open sea. lest.
his light." losing me, you would remain lost."
 —

Hellas • 407
not send proofs for Shelley to read, and Hellas had not been printed by
February 19, 1822, according to Maria Gisborne; but when a copy first
reached Pisa early in April, Shelley wrote to Oilier that it was "prettily
printed, & with fewer mistakes than any poem
In I ever published."
another letter written to Oilier the following day Shelley did include
several important errata (some errors in the manuscript rather than the
printing), but the text of Hellas is relatively authoritative because both the
presscopy manuscript and the errata list have survived (both at the Henry
E. Huntington Library, 329). HM
Hellas is based, as Shelley himself states, on The Persians of Aeschylus.
That play, the only surviving Greek drama with contemporary to deal
Greek defeat of the Persian grand army led by
historical events, relates the
Xerxes. A series of messengers bearing the bad news to the Persian capital,
where Atossa, the queen mother, and a chorus of Persian elders counseled —
by the ghost of Darius the Great summoned by his widow from the dead
lament the misdirected pride of Xerxes and the destruction of their empire's
greatness.
Shelley's drama is purely Greek in its external form, observing perfectly
the unities of time (twenty-four hours), place (the Sultan's palace in
Constantinople), and action (news of the fortunes of the war between the
Greeks and the Turks). Structurally, it consists of seven sections — four of
choral lyrics flanking three long sections of blank verse dialogue. For a
discussion of the political implications of the drama, see the excerpt from
Carl Woodring's Politics in English Romantic Poetry, pages 675-681; for
the grim realities of the War
Greek Independence, of which Shelley
of
(like other outsiders) was totally ignorant, see William St. Clair, That

Greece Might Still Be Free (Oxford University Press, 1972).

Hellas

A Lyrical Drama

MANTIS 'EIM' 'EZGAfiN 'ArfiNfiN.— oedip. colon.*

To His Excellency

Prince Alexander Mavrocordato

late Secretary for foreign affairs to the Hospodar of Wallachia

The drama of Hellas is inscribed as an

imperfect token of the admiration,
sympathy, and friendship of
the Author.
Pisa, November 1st, 1821.

PREFACE
The Poem of Hellas, written at the suggestion of the events of the
moment, is a mere improvise, and derives its interest (should it be

* "I am a prophet of glorious struggles." Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1080.

408 • Hellas

found to possess any) solely from the intense sympathy which the
Author feels with the cause he would celebrate.
The subject in its present state, is insusceptible of being treated
otherwise than lyrically, and if I this poem a drama from
have called
the circumstance of its being composed in dialogue, the licence is
not greater than that which has been assumed by other poets who
have called their productions epics, only because they have been
divided into twelve or twenty-four books.
The Persce of /Eschylus afforded me the first model of my con-
ception, although the decision of the glorious contest now waging in
Greece being yet suspended forbids a catastrophe parallel to the re-
turn of Xerxes and the desolation of the Persians. I have, therefore,
contented myself with exhibiting a series of lyric pictures, and with
having wrought upon the curtain of futurity which falls upon the
unfinished scene such figures of indistinct and visionarv delineation
as suggest the final triumph of the Greek cause as a portion of the
cause of civilization and social improvement.
The drama (if drama it must be called) is, however, so inartificial
that I doubt whether, if recited on the Thespian waggon to an
Athenian village at the Dionysiaca, it would have obtained the prize
of the goat. 1 I shall bear with equanimity any punishment greater
than the loss of such a reward which the Aristarchi 2 of the hour may
think fit to inflict.
The only goat-song which I have yet attempted has, I confess, in
spite of the unfavourable nature of the subject, received a greater
and a more valuable portion of applause than I expected or than it

deserved.
Common fame is the only authority which I can alledge for the
details which form the basis of the poem, and I must trespass upon
the forgiveness of my readers for the display of newspaper erudition
to which have been reduced. Undoubtedly, until the conclusion of
I

the war, will be impossible to obtain an account of it sufficiently

it

authentic for historical materials; but poets have their privilege, and
it is unquestionable that actions of the most exalted courage have

been performed by the Greeks, that they have gained more than one
naval victory, and that their defeat in Wallachia 3 was signalized by
circumstances of heroism, more glorious even than victory.
The apathy of the rulers of the civilized world to the astonishing
circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe
their civilization rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin is
something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shews of

1. The word "tragedy" is generally sup- 2. Aristarchus of Samothrace (ca. 220-

posed to derive from the Greek for 143 b.c.) was an Alexandrian grammarian
"goat-song," and the common explana- and critic noted for his harsh criticisms
tion is that the winner of a dramatic of the Greek (.lassies
competition at the festival of Dionysus 3. A Turkish province north of the
received a goat as prize. Danube; now part of Rumania
 Hellas • 409
this mortal scene. We
are all Greeks —
our laws, our literature, our
religion, our have their root in Greece. But for Greece, Rome,
arts
the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors
would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still
have been savages, and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have
arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as
China and Japan possess.
The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in
Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions
whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propa-
gated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of
manifest or imperceptible operation to ennoble and delight mankind
until the extinction of the race.
The modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings
whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging
to our Kind, and he inherits much of their sensibility, their rapidity
of conception, their enthusiasm, and their courage. If in many
instances he is degraded, by moral and political slavery to the practise
of the basest vices it engenders, and that below the level of ordinary
degradation; let us reflect that the corruption of the best produces
the worst, and that habits which subsist only in relation to a peculiar
state of social institution may be expected to cease so soon as that
relation is dissolved. In fact, the Greeks, since the admirable novel of
Anastasius* could have been a faithful picture of their manners,
have undergone most important changes; the flower of their Youth,
returning to their Country from the universities of Italv, Germany
and France have communicated to their fellow citizens the latest
results of that social perfection of which their ancestors were the

original source. The university of Chios contained before the break-

ing out of the Revolution eight hundred students, and among them
several Germans and Americans. The munificence and energy of
many of the Greek princes and merchants, directed to the renovation
of their country with a spirit and a wisdom which has few examples,
is above all praise.
The English permit their own oppressors to act according to their
natural sympathy with the Turkish tyrant, and to brand upon their
name the indelible blot of an alliance with the enemies of domestic
happiness, of Christianity and civilization.
Russia desires to possess not to liberate Greece, and is contented
to see the Turks, its natural enemies, and the Greeks, its intended
slaves, enfeeble each other until one or both fall into its net. The
wise and generous policy of England would have consisted in es-
tablishing the independence of Greece, and in maintaining it both

4. Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Greek, a three-volume novel by Thomas Hope pub-

lished anonymously in 1819.
 — —
410 • Hellas

against Russia and the Turk; —but when was the oppressor generous
or just?
Should the English people ever become free they will reflect upon
the part which those who presume to represent their will, have
played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings
which it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the
war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those
ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called
Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy
and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier
fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual
members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in
the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will

continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny

which tyrants foresee and dread. 5
The Spanish peninsula is already free. France is tranquil in the
enjoyment of a partial exemption from the abuses which its un-
natural and feeble government are vainly attempting to revive. The
seed of blood and misery has been sown in Italy and a more vigorous
race is arising to go forth to the harvest. The world waits only the
news of a revolution of Germany to see the Tyrants who have
pinnacled themselves on its supinencss precipitated into the ruin
from which they shall never arise. Well do these destroyers of man-
kind know their enemy when they impute the insurrection in
Greece to the same spirit before which they tremble throughout the
rest of Europe, and that enemy well knows the power and the cun-
ning of its opponents, and watches the moment of their approaching
weakness and inevitable division to wrest the bloody sceptres from
their grasp.

Dramatis Persona

Mali mud. Daood.

Hassan. Ahasuerus, a Jew .

Chorus of Greek Captive Women.

Messengers, Slaves, and Attendants.
Scene, Constantinople. Time, Sunset.

Scene. A terrace on the Seraglio. Mahmud sleeping, an

Indian slave sitting beside his couch.

Chorus of Greek Captive Women.

We strew these opiate flowers
On thy restless pillow,
5. This paragraph, deleted by Oilier (1892).
from the first edition, was first published 6. Turkish palace (or, sometimes, the
by H. Buxton Forman in his Aldine palace in which the harem was located).
Edition of Shelley's Poetical Works
 1

Hellas • 41

They were stript from Orient bowers,

By the Indian billow.
Be thy sleep 5

Calm and deep,

Like theirs who fell, not ours who weep!

Indian.

Away, unlovely dreams!

Away, false shapes of sleep!
Be his, as Heaven seems I0

Clear and bright and deep!

Soft as love, and calm as death,
Sweet as a summer night without a breath.

Chorus.
Sleep, sleep! our song is laden

With the soul of slumber; l5

It was sung by Samian 7 maiden

a
Whose lover was of the number
Who now keep
That calm sleep
Whence none may wake, where none shall weep. 20

Indian.

touch thy temples pale!

I

I breathe my soul on thee!

And could my prayers avail,

All my joy should be
Dead, and I would live to weep, 2s

So thou might'st win one hour of quiet sleep.

Chorus.
Breathe low, low!
The mighty mistress now
spell of the
When
Conscience lulls her sated snake
And Tyrants sleep, let Freedom wake. 3°

Breathe! low low —

The words which like secret fire shall flow
Through the veins of the frozen earth — low, low!

Semichorus I.

Lifemay change, but it may fly not;

Hope may vanish, but can die not; 35

Truth be veiled but still it burnetii;

—
Love repulsed, but it returneth!

7. From the Aegean island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor.
 — — —
412 • Hellas

Semichorus II.

Yet were Life a charnel where

Hope lay coffined with despair;
Yet were Truth a sacred lie, 40

Love were Lust

Semichorus I.

If Liberty
Lent not Life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet's robe to wear,
Love its power to give and bear. 45

Chorus.
In the great Morning of the world
The spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over chaos,
And all its banded anarchs 8 fled
Like Vultures frighted from Imaus 9 50

Before an Earthquake's tread.

So from Time's tempestuous dawn
Freedom's splendour burst and shone:
Thermopylae and Marathon 1
Caught, like mountains beacon-lighted, 55

—
The springing Fire. The winged Glorv
On Philippi 2 half-alighted,
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
Hie quenchless ashes of Milan. 3 6°

From age to age, from man to man,

It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, 4 Switzerland.

Then Night fell —and as from night

Re-assuming fiery flight 6s

From the West swift Freedom came

Against the course of Heaven and doom,
A second sun arrayed in flame
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
8. Tyrants in a group or pack (cf. and all the Spartans had been killed.
Adonais, 244). 2. A city in Macedonia where, in 42
9. A mountain central Asia; in Para-
in B.C., Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar
dise Lost, Milton describes Satan as "a put an end to the power of the sena-
Vultur on lmaus bred" (1 11.431). torial (republican) party by defeating
1. In 490 B.r. eleven thousand Athenians the army of Brutus and Cassius.
and Plataeans destroyed the much larger 3. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
invading Persian army of Darius I on Milan was the leading city of the Lom-
the plain of Marathon; ten years later bard League of Italian democratic com-
(480 B.r.) the Spartans and their allies munes that defied and eventually de-
under Leonidas held the host of Xerxes feated the Holy Roman Emperor
at bay in the narrow defile of Ther- Frederick I ( Barbarossa).
mopylae, between the mountains and the 4. England,
sea, for three bloody days until Leonidas
 —
Hellas • 413
From far Atlantis 5 its young beams 70

Chased the shadows and the dreams

France, with all her sanguine steams 6
Hid but quench 'd it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain. 75

As an eagle fed with morning

Scorns the embattled tempest's warning
When she seeks her aiery hanging
In the mountain-cedar's hair
And her brood expect the clanging 8o

Of her wings through the wild air

Sick with famine —
Freedom so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
Like orient mountains lost in day. 85

Beneath the safety of her wings

Her renovated nurslings prey,
And in the naked lightnings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
Let Freedom leave, where'er she flies, 90

A Desart or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.

Semichorus I.

With the gifts of gladness

Greece did thy cradle strew 95

Semichorus II.

With the tears of sadness

Greece did thy shroud bedew!

Semichorus I.

With an orphan's affection

She followed thy bier through Time

Semichorus II.

And I0°
at thy resurrection
Reappeareth, like thou, sublime!

Semichorus I.

If Heaven should resume thee,

To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;

5. The United States of America. 6. The French Revolution.

 —
414 • Hellas

Semichorus II.

If Hell should entomb thee,

To Hell shall her high hearts bend. I0 5

Semichorus I.

If annihilation

Semichorus II.

Dust her glories be!

let
And a name and a nation
Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!

Indian
—
His brow grows darker breathe not move not! — II0

—
He starts he shudders ye that love not,—
With your panting loud and fast,
Have awakened him at last.

Mahmud (starting from his sleep). Man the Seraglio-guard! —make

fast the gate.
What! from a cannonade of three short hours? "3
'Tis false! that breach towards the Bosphorus 7
Cannot be practicable yet —who stirs?
Stand to the match! that when the foe prevails
One spark may mix in reconciling ruin
The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower I2 °

Into the gap —

wrench off the roof!
(Enter hassan.) Ha! what!
The truth of day lightens upon my dream
And I am Mahmud, still,

Hassan. Your sublime highness

Is strangely moved.
Mahmud. The times do cast strange shadows
On those who watch and who must rule their course, I2 5

Lest they being first in peril as in glory

Be whelmed in the fierce ebb: —
and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
I3 °
It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea,
Leaving no figure upon memory's glass.
Would that —
no matter thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle
Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
I bade thee summon him
—
'tis said his tribe
,35

Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.

Hassan. The Jew of whom I spake is old so old —
He seems to have outlived a world's dc
7. Constantinople is on the west side of (which, in turn, connects with the Aegean
the Bosporus, the strait that connects through the Dardanelles),
the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara
 —
Hellas • 41 5

The hoan- mountains and the wrinkled ocean

—
Seem younger still than he his hair and beard J 4o

Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow.

His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct 8
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift x 45

—
To the winter wind but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The present, and the past, and the to-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
J 5o
Jesus, the Son of Joseph, for his mockery
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch 9 — others dream
He was preadamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence *55

And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,

Deep contemplation, and unwearied studv
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science 1
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts l6°

Which others fear and know not.

Mahmud. I would talk
With this old Jew.
Hassan. Thy will is even now
Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea cavern
Mid the Demonesi, 2 less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him l6 5

Must sail alone at sunset where the stream

Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle, I7 °

Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow

Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water.
Then must the lonelv helmsman cry aloud,
Ahasuerus! and the caverns round
x 75
Will answer Ahasuerus! If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmora, 3 and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine forest
And with the wind a storm of harmony
1 80
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:

8. Imbued or inflamed. died but was taken alive by God.

9. "And Enoch walked with God: and 1. Mastery.
he was not; for God took him" (Genesis 2. Islands in the Sea of Marmara.
5:24); this ambiguous poetic phrasing 3. Small "sea" between the Dardanelles
has led some commentators to say that and the Bosporus.
Enoch (the father of Methuselah) never
 — — —
416 • Hellas

Thence at the hour and place and circumstance

Fit for the matter of their conference
The Jew appears. Few dare and feu who dare
Win the desired communion but that shout — l8 5

Bodes [a shout within.

Mahmud. Evil doubtless like all human sounds.
Let me converse with spirits.
Hassan. That shout again.
Mahmud. This Jew whom thou hast summoned
Hassan. Will be here
Mahmud. When the omnipotent hour to which are yoked
He, I, and all things shall compel —enough. l 9°

Silence those mutineers — that drunken crew,

That crowd about the pilot in the storm.
Aye! strike the foremost shorter by a head.
They weary me and I have need of rest.
Kings are like stars —
thev rise and set, thev have I95

The worship of the world but no repose. [exeunt severally.

Chorus. 4
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away. 20°

But they are still immortal

Who
through Birth's orient portal
And Death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
2 °5
In the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots as they go;
New shapes they still may weave,
New Gods, new Laws receive,
Bright or dim are they as the robes they last
On Death's bare ribs had cast. 2I °

A Power from the unknown God,

A Promethean Conqueror, 5 came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
4. "The popular notions of Christianity gence may have attained. Let it not be
are represented in this chorus as true in supposed that I mean to dogmatise upon
their relation to the worship they super- a subject, concerning which all men are
seded, . without considering their
. . equally ignorant, or that I think the
merits in a relation more universal. The Gordian knot of the origin of evil can
first stanza contrasts the immortality of be disentangled by that or any similar
the living and thinking beings which in- assertions. ... as it is the province of
habit the planets, and to use a common the poet to attach himself to those ideas
and inadequate phrase, clothe themselves which exalt and ennoble humanity, let
in matter, with the transcience of the him be permitted to have conjectured
noblest manifestations of the external the condition of that futurity towards
world. which we are all impelled by an inex-
"The concluding verses indicate a pro- tinguishable thirst for immortality" (Shel-
^rcssivc state of more or less exalted ley's Bote).
existence, according to the degree of 5. Jesus C hnsi
perfection which every distinct intelli-
 — —
Hellas • 417
A mortal shape to him 215

Was like the vapour dim

Which the orient planet 6 animates with light;
and Slavery came
Hell, Sin,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed, until their Lord had taken flight; 22 °

The moon of Mahomet 7

Arose, and it shall set,
While blazoned as on Heaven's immortal noon
The cross leads generations on. 8

Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep 22 5

From one whose dreams are Paradise

Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And Day peers forth with her blank eyes;
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The Powers of earth and air 2 3o

Fled from the folding star 9 of Bethlehem;

Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them; 1
Our hills and seas and streams, 2 35

Dispeopled of their dreams,

Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years.

Enter mahmud, hassan, daood, and others.

Mahmud. More gold? our ancestors bought gold with victory,
And shall I sell it for defeat?
Daood. The Janizars 2 2 4°

Clamour for pay

Mahmud. Go! bid them pay themselves
With Christian blood! Are there no Grecian virgins
Whose shrieks and spasms and tears they may enjoy?
No impale on spears?
infidel children to
No hoary priests after that Patriarch 3 2 45

Who bent the curse against his country's heart,

Which clove his own at last? Go! bid them kill

6. Venus as the morning star. 2. The janizaries were, from the end of
7. The crescent moon is the chief symbol the fourteenth century on, the chief
of Islam. standing army of the Turkish Empire; they
8.The Roman emperor Constantine I were originally recruited from Christian
(who named Constantinople) was con- children who were demanded as tribute,
verted to Christianity, according to his converted to Islam, and trained as
own account, when he saw a cross of soldiers by the Turks. In 1826, Mahmud
light superimposed on the noonday sun. II abolished the corps of janizaries.
9. The evening star, which appears about 3. After the Greeks rebelled and slew
the time shepherds bring their sheep back Turks among them, the Turks retaliated
to the fold. by massacring the Greeks in Asia Minor,
1. In this stanza Shelley alludes to the including Gregorios, the Orthodox Patri-
story Milton tells in "On the Morning arch of Constantinople, who was hanged
of Christ's Nativity" (165-236) of the on April 22, 1821.
downfall of the pagan gods.
418 • Hellas

Blood is the seed of gold.

Daood. It has been sown,
And yet the harvest to the sicklemen
Is as a grain to each.
Mahmud. Then, take this signet. 2 s°

Unlock the seventh chamber in which lie

The treasures of victorious Solyman, 4 —
An Empire's spoil stored for a day of ruin.
O spirit of my sires, is it not come?
The prey-birds and the wolves are gorged and sleep, 2 55

But these, who spread their feast on the red earth,

Hunger for gold, which fills not see them fed; —
Then, lead them to the rivers of fresh death. [Exit daood.
O, miserable dawn after a night
More glorious than the day which it usurped! 26°

O, faith in God! O power on earth! O word

Of the great prophet, whose o'ershadowing wings
Darkened the thrones and idols of the West:
—
Now bright! for thy sake cursed be the hour,
26 5
Even as a father by an evil child
When th 'orient moon of Islam roll'd in triumph
From Caucasus to white Ceraunia! 5
Ruin above, and anarchy below;
Terror without, and treachery within;
The chalice of destruction full, and all 27 °

Thirsting to drink, and who among us dares

To dash it from his lips? and where is hope?
Hassan. The lamp of our dominion still rides high,
One God is God — Mahomet is his prophet.
27 s
Four hundred thousand Moslems, from the limits
Of utmost Asia, irresistibly
Throng, like full clouds at the Sirocco's 6 cry;
But not like them to weep their strength in tears:
They bear destroying lightning and their step
Wakes earthquake to consume and overwhelm
And reign in ruin. Phrygian Olympus,
Tmolus and Latinos and Mycale 7 roughen
With horrent arms; and loftv ships even now-
Like vapours anchored to a mountain's edge,
Freighted with fire and whirlwind, wait at Scala 8 28s

The convoy of the ever-veering wind.

4. Suleiman I, the Magnificent (sultan. Black Sea and the Caspian Sea separated
1520-1566), had defeated Persia, con- Russia from Turkey; the Ceraunian (or
quered Hungary (threatening Austria), Acroceraunian) Mountains of Epirus in
Rhodes, and Venetian strongholds in northwestern Greece mark the separation
southern Greece, and defeated the com- of the Ionian Sea from the Adriatic,
bined fleets of Spain and Venice off 6. The sultry southeast wind.
Preveza (1538). His reign also saw the 7. Mountains in northwestern
highest achievements of the Ottoman Minor, the Ottoman homeland.
Empire in law, literature, art, and 8. The port of Scala Tyriorum in
architecture. Phoenicia
5. The Caucasus Mountains between the
 Hellas • 419
Samos is drunk with blood; —the Greek has paid
Brief victory with swift loss and long despair.
The false Moldavian 9 serfs fled fastand far
When the fierce shout of Allah-illa-allah! 1 2 9<>

Rose like the war-cry of the northern wind

Which kills the sluggish clouds, and leaves a flock
Of wild swans struggling with the naked storm.
So were the lost Greeks on the Danube's day! 2
If night is mute, yet the returning sun 2 95

Kindles the voices of the morning birds;

Nor at thy bidding less exultinglv
Than birds rejoicing in the golden day,
The Anarchies of Africa 3 unleash
Their tempest-winged cities of the sea 300

To speak in thunder to the rebel world.

Like sulphurous clouds half shattered by the storm
They sweep the pale /Egean, while the Queen
Of Ocean, 4 bound upon her island-throne
Far in the West sits mourning that her sons 305

Who frown on Freedom spare a smile for thee.

Russia still hovers as an Eagle might
Within a cloud, near which a kite and crane
Hang tangled in inextricable fight,
—
To stoop upon the victor for she fears 310

The name of Freedom even as she hates thine.

But recreant 5 Austria loves thee as the Grave
Loves Pestilence, and her slow dogs of war
Fleshed with the chase come up from Italy
And howl upon their limits; for they see 315

The panther Freedom fled to her old cover

'Mid seas and mountains and a mightier brood
Crouch round. What anarch wears a crown or mitre,
Or bears the sword, or grasps the key of gold,
Whose friends are not thy friends, whose foes thy foes? 320

Our arsenals and our armouries are full;

—
Our forts defy assault ten thousand cannon
Lie ranged upon the beach, and hour bv hour
Their earth-convulsing wheels affright the city;
The galloping of fierv steeds makes pale 325

The Christian merchant; and the yellow Jew

Hides his hoard deeper in the faithless earth.
Like clouds and like the shadows of the clouds,

9. Moldavia or Bessarabia, now part of Russia into Moldavia in March 1821,

the USSR, lies between Rumania and but was soon defeated and fled to
the Ukraine; it was then a dependency of Austria, where he was imprisoned until
the Turks and a buffer against Russia. 1827.
1. The Islamic war cry: "There is no 3. The corsair or pirate states of Algiers,
god but God." Tunis, and Tripoli.
2. Alexandros Ypsilantis began the War 4. Great Britain,
of Greek Independence by crossing from 5. Cowardly.
 — ;

420 • Hellas

Over the hills of Anatolia 6

Swift in wide troops the Tartar chivalry 330

—
Sweep the far flashing of their starry lances
Reverberates the dying light of day.
We have one God, one King, one hope, one law
But many-headed Insurrection stands
Divided in itself, and soon must fall. 335

Malimud. Proud words when deeds come slTort are seasonable.

Look, Hassan, on yon crescent moon emblazoned
Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud
Which leads the rear of the departing day,
Wan emblem of an empire fading now. 340

See! How trembles in the blood-red air

it

And like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent

Shrinks on the horizon's edge while from above
One star 7 with insolent and victorious light
Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams 345

Like arrows through a fainting antelope

Strikes its weak form to death.
Hassan. Even as that moon
Renews itself
Mahmud. Shall we be not renewed!
Far other bark 8 than ours were needed now
To stem the torrent of descending time; 350

The spirit that lifts the slave before his lord

Stalks through the capitals of armed kings
And spreads his ensign in the wilderness,
Exults in chains, and when the rebel falls
Cries like the blood of Abel" from the dust; 355

And the inheritors of the earth, like beasts

When earthquake is unleashed, with idiot fear
Cower in their kingly dens as I do now. —
What were Defeat when Victory must appal?
Or Danger when Security looks pale? 36°

How said the messenger who from the fort

Islanded in the Danube, saw the battle
Of Bucharest? 1
— that—
Hassan. Ibrahim's scymitar
Drew with its gleam swift victorv from heaven,
To burn before him in the night of battle 365

A light and
a destruction
Mahmud. Aye! the day
Was ours but how? —
Hassan. The light Wallachians,
The Amaut, Servian, and Albanian allies

6. The central plateau of Asia Minor. Bucharest briefh. he had retreated in

7. Venus as the evening star. the face of the advancing Turks, and his
Kill ship. decisive defeat, which Shelley describes
9. The second son of Adam, who was in the following pas^a^c. look place at
killed by his brother, Cain. Drigltlni, about one hundred miles to
1. Though Alexandros Ypsilantis held the west-northwest.
 — ——
Hellas • 421

Fled from the glance of our artillery

Almost before the thunderstone alit. 370

One half the Grecian army made a bridge

Of safe and slow retreat with Moslem dead;
The other—
Mahmud. Speak —
tremble not.
Hassan. Islanded
By victor myriads formed in hollow square
With rough and steadfast front, and thrice flung back 375

The deluge of our foaming cavalry;

Thrice their keen wedge of battle pierced our lines.
Our baffled army trembled like one man
Before a host, and gave them space, but soon
From the surrounding hills the batteries blazed, 38 °

Kneading them down with fire and iron rain:

Yet none approached till like a field of corn
Under the hook of the swart sickleman
The band, intrenched in mounds of Turkish dead,
—
Grew weak and few then said the Pacha, "Slaves, 385

—
Render yourselves they have abandoned you,
What hope of refuge, or retreat or aid?
We grant your lives." "Grant that which is thine own!"
Cried one, and fell upon his sword and died!
—
Another "God, and man, and hope abandon me 390

But I to them and to myself remain

—
Constant" he bowed his head and his heart burst.
A third exclaimed, "There is a refuge, tyrant,
Where thou darest not pursue and canst not harm
Should'st thou pursue; there we shall meet again." 395

Then held his breath and, after a brief spasm

The indignant spirit cast its mortal garment
—
Among the slain; dead earth upon the earth!
So these survivors, each by different ways,
Some strange, all sudden, none dishonorable, 4°°

Met in triumphant death; and when our army

Closed in, while yet wonder and awe and shame
Held back the base hyenas of the battle
That feed upon the dead and fly the living,
One rose out of the chaos of the slain: 405

And were a corpse which some dread

if it spirit
Of the old saviours of the land we rule
Had lifted in its anger, wandering by;
Or if there burned within the dying man
Unquenchable disdain of death, and faith 410

Creating what it feigned; —

I cannot tell

But he cried, "Phantoms of f he free, we come!

Armies of the Eternal, ye who strike
To dust the citadels of sanguine 2 kings,
And shake the souls throned on their stony hearts 415

2. Bloody.
 — — ———
422 Hellas

And thaw their frostwork diadems like dew;

O ye who float around this clime, and weave
The garment of the glory which it wears,
Whose fame though earth betray the dust it clasped,
Lies sepulchred in monumental thought; 420

Progenitors of all that yet is great,

Ascribe to your bright senate, accept O
In your high ministrations, us, your Sons.
Us first, and the more glorious yet to come!
And ye, weak conquerors! giants who look pale 425

When the crushed worm rebels beneath your tread,

The vultures and the dogs, your pensioners tame,
Are overgorged, but like oppressors, still
They crave the relic of destruction's feast;
The exhalations and the thirsty winds 430

Are sick with blood; the dew is foul with death;

Heaven's light is quenched in slaughter; thus, where'er
Upon your camps, cities, or towers, or fleets
The obscene birds the reeking remnants cast
—
Of these dead limbs, upon your streams and mountains, 435

Upon your fields, your gardens, and your housetops,

Where'er the winds shall creep or the clouds fly
Or the dews fall or the angry sun look down
—
With poisoned light Famine and Pestilence
44 °
And Panic shall wage war upon our side;
Nature from all her boundaries is moved
—
Against ye; Time has found ye light as foam;
The Earth rebels; and Good and Evil stake
Their empire o'er the unborn world of men
—
On this one cast; but ere the die be thrown 4*5

The renovated Genius* of our race,

Proud umpire of the impious game, descends,
A seraph-winged Victory, bestriding
The tempest of the Omnipotence of God
Which sweeps all things to their appointed doom 45 °

—
And vou to oblivion!" More he would have said
But—
—
Mahmud. Died as thou should'st ere thy lips had painted
Their ruin in the hues of our success
A rebel's crime gilt with a rebel's tongue!
Your heart is Greek, Hassan.
Hassan. It may be so: 455

A spirit not my own wrenched me within

And I have spoken words I fear and hate;
Yet would I die for
Mahmud. Live! O live! outlive
Me and this sinking Empire. But the fleet
Hassan. Alas!

3. Protective guiding spirit.

 — — —
Hellas • 423
Mahmud. The fleet which like a flock of clouds 460

Chased by the wind flies the insurgent banner.

Our winged castles from their merchant ships!
Our myriads before their weak pirate bands! 4
Our arms before their chains! our years of Empire
Before their centuries of servile fear! 465
Death is awake! Repulse is on the waters!
They own no more the thunder-bearing banner
Of Mahmud; but like hounds of a base breed,
Gorge from a stranger's hand and rend their master.
Hassan. Latmos, and Ampelos and Phanae 5 saw 470
The wreck
Mahmud. The caves of the Icarian isles
Told each to the other in loud mockery,
And with the tongue as of a thousand echoes
First of the sea convulsing fight —and, then,
Thou darest to speak — senseless are the mountains; 475
Interpret thou their voice!
Hassan. My presence bore
A part in that day's shame. The Grecian fleet
Bore down at day-break from the North, and hung,
As multitudinous on the ocean line
As cranes upon the cloudless Thracian wind. 480

Our squadron convoying ten thousand men

Was stretching towards Nauplia 6 when the battle
Was kindled.
First through the hail of our artillery
The Hydriote 7 barks with press of sail
agile 485

—
Dashed ship to ship, cannon to cannon, man
To man were grappled in the embrace of war,
Inextricable but by death or victory
The tempest of the raging fight convulsed
To its chrystalline depths that stainless sea 490

And shook Heaven's roof of golden morning clouds

Poised on a hundred azure mountain-isles.
In the brief trances of the artillery
One cry from the destroyed and the destroyer
Rose, and a cloud of desolation wrapt 495

The unforeseen event till the north wind

Sprung from the sea lifting the heavy veil
—
Of battle-smoke then Victory Victory! —
4. For many years the Turkish navy had and south of the island of Icaria and
depended upon the seamanship of sub- the Icarian Sea (near Samos).
ject Greek sailors and navigators, who 6. Nauplia, at the head of the Gulf of
during the war either deserted or could Argolis, on the east coast of the Pelo-
not be trusted. The irregular Greek ponnesus, the Greek peninsula south of
ships outsailed and frequently de feated the Gulf of Corinth, was the center of
the Turks early in the war. Greek rebels led by Dimitrios Ypsilantis
5. Latmos and Ampelos are mountains (younger brother of Alexandros).
and Phanae is a mountainous promontory 7. From the island of Hydra (Idhra),
on the mainland of Asia Minor to the off the eastern coast of the Peloponnesus,
east; the Icarian isles are to the north
 — — —
424 • Hellas

For as we thought three frigates from Algiers

Bore down from Naxos 8 to our aid, but soon 500

The abhorred cross glimmered behind, before,

Among, around us; and that fatal sign
Dried with its beams the strength in Moslem hearts,
As the sun drinks the dew what more? — fled! We
Our noondav path over the sanguine foam 505

—
Was beaconed, and the glare struck the sun pale
By our consuming transports; the fierce light
Made all the shadows of our sails blood red
And every countenance blank. Some ships lay feeding
The ravening fire even to the water's level; 510

—
Some were blown up some settling heavily
Sunk; and the shrieks of our companions died
Upon the wind that bore us fast and far
—
Even after they were dead Nine thousand perished!
We met the vultures legioned in the air 515

Stemming the torrent of the tainted wind;

They, screaming from their cloudv mountain peaks,
Stooped through the sulphurous battle-smoke and perched
Each on the weltering carcase that we loved
Like its ill angel or its damned soul, 520

Riding upon the bosom of the sea.

We saw the dog-fish hastening to their feast,
Jov waked the voiceless people of the sea,
And ravening Famine left his ocean cave
To dwell with war, with us and with despair. 525

We met Night three hours to the west of Patmos 9

And with Night, tempest
Mahmud. Cease!

Enter a Messenger.
Messenger. Your sublime Highness,
That Christian hound, the Muscovite Ambassador.
Has left the city— if the rebel fleet
Had anchored in the port, had Victory 53 °

Crowned the Greek legions in the hippodrome, 1

—
Panic were tamer Obedience and Mutiny
Like giants in contention, planet-struck, 2
Stand gazing on each other there is peace —
In Stamboul
Mahmud. Is the grave not calmer still? 535

Its ruins shall be mine.

Hassan. Fear not the Russian:
The not with the stag at bay
tiger leagues
—
Against the hunter cunning, base, and cruel,

8. A large island of the Cyclades, half- 1. A hippodrome was the site of chariot
way between Rhodes and Nauplia. races in classical times.
9. An island to the east-northeast of 2. Paralyzed with fear
Naxos.
 —
Hellas 425
He crouches watching till the spoil be won
And must be paid for his reserve in blood. 540

After the war fought yield the sleek Russian

is

That which thou can'st not keep, his deserved portion

Of blood, which shall not flow through streets and fields,
Rivers and seas, like that which we may win,
But stagnate in the veins of Christian slaves! 545

Enter second Messenger.

Second Messenger. Nauplia, Tripolizza, Mothon, Athens,
Navarin, Artas, Monembasia, 3
Corinth and Thebes are carried by assault
And every Islamite who made his dogs
Fat with the flesh of Galilean slaves 550

Passed at the edge of the sword; the lust of blood

Which made our warriors drunk, is quenched in death;
But like a fiery plague breaks out anew
In deeds which make the Christian cause look pale
In its own light. The garrison of Patras 4 555

Has store but for ten days, nor is there hope

But from the Briton; at once slave and tyrant
His wishes still are weaker than his fears
Or he would sell what faith may yet remain
From the oaths broke in Genoa and in Norway; 5 560

And if you buy him not, your treasury

Is empty even of promises his own coin. —
The freedman of a western poet chief 6
Holds Attica with seven thousand rebels
And has beat back the Pacha of Negropont 7 — 565

The aged Ali sits in Yanina 8

3. Tripolizza (Tripolis) was in the in- took Norway (formerly a Danish posses-
terior of thePeloponnesus, not far from sion), but the Norwegians rebelled and
Nauplia (see note to line 482); Mothon set up a constitutional monarchy; this
(Methoni) and Navarin (Pilos) were independence was partially quelled by
near the southwest corner of the penin- a Swedish invasion in 1818, to which
sula (off which the decisive Battle of Britain and the Holy Alliance acqui-
Navarino was to be fought in 1827 in esced.
which the Turkish and Egyptian fleets 6. "A Greek who had been Lord Byron's
were destroyed by French and British servant commands
the insurgents in At-
fleets).Artas (Arta) was far to the tica. Greek, Lord Byron informs
This
northwest in southern Epirus, and Mo- me, though a poet and an enthusiastic
nembasia (Monemvasia) is in the far patriot, gave him rather the idea of a
southeast corner of the Peloponnesus. timid and unenterprising person. It ap-
Things, the messenger says, are going pears that circumstances make men what
badly for the Turks all over Greece. they are .
." (Shelley's note).
.

4. Patras (Patrai) is on the northwest 7. Euboea, a large island in the Aegean

coast of the Peloponnesus, just outside off the coast of Attica.
the narrows of the Gulf of Corinth. The 8. Ali (1741-1822), pacha or governor
British held a protectorate over the in Albania, was a famous warrior, in-
nearby Ionian Islands. triguer, and murderer who had by 1810
5. During the Napoleonic Wars, Sir Wil- or so established a virtually independent
Ham Bentinck had promised the restora- state with Yanina (Ioannina) as his
tion of the Genovese Republic, leading capital. He was finally defeated and
the people to revolt against the French, killed by the army of Sultan Mahmud
only to have their city given to the II in May 1822.
kingdom of Sardinia. In 1814 Sweden
 —
426 • Hellas

A crownless metaphor of empire:

His name, that shadow of his withered might,
Holds our besieging army like a spell
In prey to Famine, Pest, and Mutiny; 570

He, bastioned in his citadel, looks forth

Joyless upon the sapphire lake that mirrors
The ruins of the city where he reigned
Childless and sceptreless. The Greek has reaped
The costly harvest his own blood matured, 575

Not the sower, Ali who has bought— a truce

From Ypsilanti 9 with ten camel loads
Of Indian gold

Enter a third Messenger.

Mahmud. What more?
Third Messenger. The Christian tribes
Of Lebanon and the Syrian wilderness
—
Are in revolt Damascus, Hems, Aleppo 580

—
Tremble the Arab menaces Medina,
The Ethiop has intrenched himself in Senaar,
And keeps the Egyptian rebel well employed
Who denies homage, claims investiture
—
As price of tardy aid Persia demands 585

The cities on the Tigris, and the Georgians

Refuse their living tribute. 1 Crete and Cyprus
Like mountain-twins that from each other's veins
Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake spasm,
Shake in the general fever. Through the city 590

Like birds before a storm the Santons 2 shriek

And prophesyings horrible and new
Are heard among the crowd that sea of men —
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Dervise3 learned in the Koran preaches 595

That it is how
the sins of Islam
written
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West 4
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory.
But in the omnipresence of that spirit 6o°

In which all live and are. Ominous signs

Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky.
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;
It has rained blood, and monstrous births declare

9. Alexandras Ypsilantis (see notes to the Sultan's harem.

lines 289 and 294) had begun the in- 2. Mohammedan holy men or dervishes,
vasion of Moldavia to take advantage of 3. A Mohammedan holy man who has
the conflict between the Sultan and Ali taken vows of poverty and austere life.
Pacha. It is quite possible that (as 4. "It is reported that this Messiah had
Shelley must have heard) Ali and Ypsil- arrived at a seaport near Lacedaemon
antis had cooperated against their com- in an American brig. The association of
mon enemy. names and ideas is irresistibly ludicrous.
1. Georgia, in Caucasus Mountains
the but the of such a rumour
prevalence
(now a Soviet state), was famous for strongly marks the state of popular en-
the beautiful girls who were sent for thusiasm in Greece" (Shelley's note).
 — —
Hellas • 427
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord. 605

The army encamped upon the Cydaris, 5

Was roused last night by the alarm of battle
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time
Cast on the mirror of the night; while yet — 6l °

The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm

Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the spirit of the plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents;
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead. 6l 5

The news from the camp

last is that a thousand
Have sickened, and

Enter a fourth Messenger.

Mahmud. And, thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumour —speak!
Fourth Messenger. One comes
Fainting with covered with foam and blood:
toil,

He stood, he says, on Chelonites' 62°

Promontory, 6 which o'erlooks the isles that groan

Under the Briton's frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon
When as the wandering clouds unveiled or hid
Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets 6z s

Stalk through the night in the horizon's glimmer,

Mingling fierce thunders and sulphurious gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco 6 3°

Awoke and drove his flock of thunder clouds

Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objects —
save that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dreamed he saw, the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war 6 35

With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven

Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorred cross

Enter an Attendant.
Attendant. Your sublime highness,
The Jew, who-
Mahmud. Could not come more seasonably:
Bid him attend — I'llhear no more! too long 6 4o

We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,

And multiply upon our shat f ered hopes
—
The images of ruin come what will!
Tomorrow and tomorrow are as lamps

5. Not identified. land of the Peloponnesus (in Elis, in

6. The westernmost point on the main- the northwest part of the peninsula).
428 • Hellas

Set in our path to light us to the edge ^5

Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer aught
Which he inflicts not in whose hand we are. [exeunt.

Semichorus I.

Would I were the winged cloud

Of a tempest swift and loud,
I would scorn • 6 5°

The smile of morn

And the wave where the moon rise is born!
I would leave
The spirits of eve
A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave 6 55

From other threads than mine!

Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
Who
would, not I. —
Semichorus II.

Whither to fly?

Semichorus I.

Where the rocks that gird th' yEgean 66°

Echo to the battle paean 7

Of the free—
I would flee,

A
tempestuous herald of Victory,
My golden rain
For the Grecian slain
Should mingle in tears with the bloody main
And my solemn thunder knell
Should ring to the world the passing bell
Of tyranny! 6 7°

Semichorus II.

Ha king! wilt thou chain

The rack 8 and the rain,
Wilt thou fetter the lightning and hurricane?
The storms are free-

But we?

Chorus.
O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime,
Killing its and leaving its thorns bare!
flowers
Thy touch has stamped these limbs with crime,
These brows thy branding garland bear.
68 °
But the free heart, the impassive soul
Scorn thy controul!
7. In Greek antiquity a war song in 8. Cloud mass in the upper air driven by
advancing to battle, addressed to Ares the wind.
(Roman Mars).
 — —
Hellas • 429
Semichorus I.

Let there be light! said Liberty,

And from the sea,
like sunrise
—
Athens arose! around her born,
Shone like mountains in the morn 68 5

—
Glorious states, and are they now
Ashes, wrecks, oblivion?

Semichorus II.

Go,
Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed
Persia, 9 as the sand does foam.
Deluge upon deluge followed, 6 9<>

Discord, Macedon and Rome:

And lastly Thou!

Semichorus I.

Temples and towers,

Citadels and marts and they
Who live and die there, have been ours
And may be thine, and must decay, 695

But Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,
Based on the chrystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits, 700

Rule the present from the past,

On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set

Semichorus II.

Hear ye the blast

Whose Orphic 1 thunder thrilling calls
From ruin her Titanian walls? 7 °5

Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones

Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete
Hear, and from their mountain thrones
The daemons and the nymphs 2 repeat
The harmony.

Semichorus I.

I hear! I hear! 710

9. The rivers near which were fought Thracian whose music charmed all of
Thermopylae (480 b.c.) and Plataea (479 nature.
B.C.)—the first and last land battles 2. In Greek mythology, supernatural
during Xerxes' unsuccessful invasion of beings intermediate between gods and
Greece. men.
1. Associated with Orpheus, the mythical
 — —
430 • Hellas

Semichorus II.

The world's eyeless charioteer,

Destiny, is hurrying by!
What faith is crushed, what empire bleeds
Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?
What eagle winged victory sits 715

At her right hand? what shadow flits

Before? what splendour rolls Behind?
Ruin and Renovation cry
"Who but we?"
Semichorus I.

I hear! I hear.
The hiss as of a rushing wind, 720

The roar as of an ocean foaming,

The thunder as of earthquake coming.
I hear! I hear!

The crash as of an empire falling,

The shrieks as of a people calling 725

"Mercv? Mercy!" how thev thrill!

Then a shout of "Kill! Kill! Kill!"

And then a small still voice, thus

Semichorus II.

For
Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are, 73 °

Their den is in the guiltv mind

And Conscience feeds them with despair.

Semichorus I.

In sacred Athens, near the fane

Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood.
Serve not the unknown God in vain, 735

But pay that broken shrine again,

Love for hate and tears for blood!

Enter mahmud and ahasuerus.

Mahmud. Thou art a man, thou sayest, even as wc.
Ahasuerus. No more!
Mahmud. But raised above thy fellow men
By thought, as I by power.
Ahasuerus. Thou sayest so. 74 °

Mahmud. Thou an adept in the difficult lore

art
Of Greek and Frank 3 philosophy; thou numberest

3. The Greeks, Turks, and other peoples "Franks" (the Germanic tribe from
of the eastern Mediterranean referred to which France takes its name),
all those from western Europe as
 —
Hellas • 431
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the past, and sees 745
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness,
And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
—
And all its narrow circles it is much 750
I honour and would be what thou art
thee,
—
Were I not what I am but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehended not 755
What thou has taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the future present let it come! — 760
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours;
Thou art as God whom thou contemplatest.
Ahasuerus. Disdain thee? not the worm beneath thy feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made Pride for those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem 765

—
That which they are not Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the future and the past;
But look on that which cannot change the One, —
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space and the isles of life or light that gem 770

The sapphire floods of interstellar air,

This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With cressets 4 of immortal fire
all its

Whose outwall bastioned impregnably

Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them 775

As Calpe 5 the Atlantic clouds this Whole —

Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision —
all that it inherits 78 °

Are motes 6 of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;

Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
—
Of thought's eternal flight they have no being.
785
Nought but that which feels itself to be.
is

Mahmud. What meanest thou? thy words stream like a tempest

Of dazzling mist within my brain they shake —
4. Vessels of burning oil used for illu- that marks the end of the Straits of
mination, usually atop a pole or sus- Gibraltar and the beginning of the Medi-
pended from a roof. terranean Sea.
5. The old name for the Rock of Gi- 6. The small dust particles visible in a
braltar, a promontory in southern Spain sunbeam.
 — — — —
432 • Hellas

The earth on which I stand, and hang like night

On Heaven above me. What can they avail?
They cast on all things surest, brightest, best, 790

Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.

Ahasuerus. Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dodona's forest 7 to an acorn's cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that

—
Which is the absent to the present. Thought* 795

Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,

Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard, appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o'er, worlds, worms, 8o°

—
Empires and superstitions what has thought
To do with time or place or circumstance?
Would'st thou behold the future? ask and have! —
Knock and it shall be opened look and lo! —
The coming age is shadowed on the past 8 °5

As on a glass.
Mahmud. Wild —wilder thoughts convulse
My spirit — did not Mahomet the Second 8
Win Stamboul?
Ahasuerus. Thou would'st ask that giant spirit
The written fortunes of thy house and faith
8l °
Thou would'st cite one out of the grave to tell
How what was born in blood must die
Mahmud. Thy words
Have power on me! — I see
Ahasuerus. What hearest, thou?
Mahmud. A far whisper
Terrible silence
Ahasuerus. What succeeds?
Mahmud. The sound
8l5
As of the assault of an imperial city 9
The hiss of inextinguishable fire,
The roar of giant cannon; —the earthquaking
and precipitous towers,
Fall of vast bastions
The shock of crags shot from strange engin'ry,
820
The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs
And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck
Of adamantine mountains — the mad blast

7. Dodona, in Epirus (northwest Greece), the spirit of Mahomet the Second will
was in ancient times the site of a be censured as over subtle. ... I have
famous oak grove surrounding an oracle preferred to represent the Jew as dis-
of Zeus (Jupiter). The rustling of the claiming all pretension, or even belief,
leaves of these trees was interpreted by in supernatural agency, and as tempting
the oracle as messages from the god. Mahmud to that state of mind in which
8. Sultan Mohammed II (1451-1481), ideas may be supposed to assume the
"the Conqueror," captured Constanti- force of sensations ." (from Shelley's
. .

nople (Istanbul) in 1453. note).

9. "The manner of the invocation of
 — —
Hellas - 433
Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,
The shrieks of women whose thrill 1 jars the blood
And one sweet laugh most horrible to hear 82 5

As waked and playing

of a joyous infant
With its dead mother's breast, and now more loud
—
The mingled battle cry, ha! hear I not
—"
"Ev rovru, v iK V "Allah-Ilia, Allah!" 2
Ahasuerus. The sulphurous mist is raised thou see'st
Mahmud. A chasm 8 3°

As of two mountains in the wall of Stamboul

And in that ghastly breach the Islamites
Like giants on the ruins of a world
Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust
Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one 835

Of regal port has cast himself beneath

The stream of war: another proudly clad
In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb3
Into the gap and with his iron mace
Directs the torrent of that tide of men 8 4°

And seems —he is, Mahomet!

Ahasuerus. What thou see'st
Isbut the ghost of thy forgotten dream.
A dream itself, yet, less, perhaps, than that
Thou callest reality. Thou mayest behold
How cities, on which empire sleeps enthroned, 8 *5

Bow their tower'd crests to Mutability.

Poised by the flood, e'en on the height thou holdest,
Thou may'st now learn how the full tide of power
—
Ebbs to its depths. Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished 85 °

With tears and toil, thou see'st the mortal throes

Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet would'st thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou 855

Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,

Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which called it from the uncreated deep
Yon cloud of war with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will 86 °

The imperial shade hither [Exit ahasuerus. The

Phantom of mahomet the second appears.
Mahmud. Approach!
Phantom. I come
Thence whither thou must go! the grave is fitter

To take the living than give up the dead;

1. Vibration. ("There is no god but God!").

2. The war cries of theByzantine Greeks 3. Horse, noted for speed and endurance,
("In this [sign], Victory") and the Turks from Tartary.
 — —
434 • Hellas

Yet has thy and I am here.

faith prevailed
The heavy fragments power which fell
of the 86 5

When I arose like shapeless crags and clouds

Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return
A later Empire nods in its decay: 8 7°

The autumn of a greener faith is come,

And wolfish Change, like winter howls to strip
The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built
Her aiery, while Dominion whelped below.
The storm is in its branches, and the frost 87 5

Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects

Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil,

—
Ruin on ruin thou art slow my son;
The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep
A throne for thee round which thine empire lies 88 °

Boundless and mute, and for thy subjects thou,

Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,
The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now
Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears
And hopes that sate themselves on dust and die, 88 5

Stript of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.

Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death
And the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
if

Unfold itself even in the shape of that 89°

Which gathers birth in its decav Woe! woe! —

To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.
Mahmud. Spirit, woe to all!

Woe to the wronged and the avenger! woe

To the destroyer; woe to the destroyed! 89 5

Woe to the dupe; and woe to the deceiver!

Woe to the oppressed; and woe to the oppressor!
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict,
Those who are bom and those who die! but say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am, 9°°

When, how, bv whom, Destruction must accomplish

Her consummation?
Phantom. Ask the cold pale Hour
Rich in reversion of impending death
When he shall fall upon whose ripe grey hairs
Sit Care and Sorrow and Infirmity, 9° 5

The weight which Crime whose wings are plumed with years
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!
He leans upon his crutch and talks of years ' ,0
 —
Hellas • 435
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and
Voice without. Victory! Victory!
[The Phantom vanishes.
Mahmud. What sound of the importunate earth has broken
My mighty trance?
Voice without. Victory! Victory!
Mahmud. Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile 915
Of dying Islam! Voice, which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear? 920

It matters not! —
for nought we see or dream,
Possess or lose or grasp at can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The Future must become the Past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour, 925

This gloomy crag of Time to which I cling

Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained. 1 must rebuke

This drunkenness of triumph ere it die

And dying, bring despair. Victory? poor slaves! [Exit mahmud.
Voice without. Shout in the jubilee of death! the Greeks 931

Are as a brood of lions in the net

Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans and gold, the fruit of death 935

From Thule 4 to the Girdle of the World,

Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation's blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink and die!

Semichorus I.

Victorious Wrong with vulture scream 94 °

Salutes the risen sun, pursues the flying day!

I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant's dream,

Perch on the trembling pyramid of night

Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
In Visions of the dawning undelight. 945

Who
shall impede her flight?
Who
rob her of her prey?

Voice without. Victory! Victory! Russia's famished Eagles

Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light. 5
Impale the remnant of the Greeks? despoil? 950

Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!

4. The type of the extreme limit of czars featured a double-headed eagle; the
travel and discovery. Turkish flag, the crescent moon.
5. The flag of Russia under the Romanov
 —
436 Hellas

Semichorus II.

Thou Voice which art

The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode 955

When Desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed.

O bear me to those isles of jagged cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightening,
Or to some toppling promontory proud 960

Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,

Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightening
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire
When Heaven and Earth are light, and only light 965

In the thunder night!

Voice without. Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England

And that tame Serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry Peace, and that means Death when monarchs speak. 6
—
Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes, 970

These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners

Than Greeks. Kill, plunder, burn! let none remain.

Semichorus I.

Alas! for Liberty!

If numbers, wealth or unfulfilling vears
Or fate can quell the free! 975

Alas! for Virtue when

Torments or contumely or the sneers
Of erring judging men
Can break the heart where it abides.
Alas! Love whose smile makes this obscure world splendid
if 980

Can change with its false times and tides,

Like hope and terror,
Alas for Love!
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou can'st veil thy lie consuming mirror 985

Before the dazzled eyes of Error, 7

Alas for thee! Image of the Above.

Semichorus II.

Repulse, with plumes from Conquest torn.

Led the Ten Thousand from the limits of the morn
Through main an hostile Anarchy! 990

6. In this line and 1008, Shelley echoes a desert [or solitude] and call it peace"
the famous sentence Tacitus puts into (Life of Agricola, 30).
the mouth of Galgacus. one of the lead- 7. As Arthur's shield dazzles Duessa
ers of the Britons fighting for their free- (Spenser, r aerie Queene. I.vm.xx).
dom against the Romans: "They make
 ——— —
Hellas • 437
At length they wept aloud and cried, "The sea! the sea!" 8

Through exile, persecution and despair,

Rome was, and young Atlantis 9 shall become
The wonder, or the terror or the tomb
Of whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage
all lair: 995
But Greece was as a hermit child,
Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman's growth, by dreams so mild,
She knew not pain or guilt;
—
And now O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble I00 °

When ye desert the free

If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime I0°5

To Amphionic music 1 on some cape sublime

Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.

Semichorus I.

Let the tyrants rule the desart they have made 2 —

Let the free possess the paradise they claim,
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed I0I °

With our ruin, our resistance and our name!

Semichorus II.

Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,

Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away
Their dishonour a remembrance to abide! I0I 5

Voice without. Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends

The Keys of Ocean
to the Islamite
Now blazon of the cross be veiled
shall the
And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunderstrike rebel Victory. keep holy O I02 °

This jubilee of unrevenged blood

Kill, crush, despoil! Let not a Greek escape!

Semichorus I.

Darkness has dawned in the East

On the noon of Time:
I02 5
The death-birds descend to their feast,
From the hungry clime.

8. The reference is to the retreat of the 1. Amphion, fabled son of Zeus by

ten thousand Greek mercenaries from Antiope, supposedly built the walls of
Persia as described by Xenophon in his Thebes simply by playing his lyre.
Anabasis. 2. See note to 969.
9. The United States of America.
 —
438 • Hellas

Let Freedom and Peace flee far

To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love's folding star3
To the Evening-land! 4 I0 3°

Semichorus II.

The young moon has fed

Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire.

The weak day is dead,

But the night
is not born, I0 35

And panting with wild desire

like Loveliness
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night
And pants in its beauty, and speed with light
Fast flashing, soft and bright. I0 4°

Thou beacon of love, thou lamp of the free!

Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day
Thou art hidden
From waves on which wean- noon I0 45

Faints in her summer swoon

Between Kingless continents sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Prankt 5 on the sapphire sea.

Semichorus I.

Through the sunset of Hope I0 5°

Like the shapes of a dream

What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
Beneath Heaven's copc, <!

Their shadows more clear float by

The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky, I0 55

The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe

Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,
Through the walls of our prison;
And Greece which was dead is arisen!

Chorus. 7
The world's great age begins anew, Io6°

The golden vears return, 8

3. Venus as Hesperus (1038), the even- happiness is a more hazardous exercise,
ing star, which appears at the time sheep ... It will remind the reader ... of
are returned to the fold. Isaiah and Virgil, whose ardent spirits
4. The West generally (German: Abend- overleaping the actual reign of e\.l
land); more specifically, America. which we endure and bewail, already
5. Set, as jewels. saw the possible and perhaps approach-
6. Vault or canopy. ing state of society in which the 'lion
7. "The final chorus is indistinct and shall lie down with the lamb' ." (from . .

obscure. . Prophecies of wars

. . . . . Shelley's note).
may safely be made by poet or prophet 8. The mythical reign of Saturn, which
in any age, but to anticipate however the Greeks believed had been a Golden
darkly a period of regeneration and Age.
 Hellas • 439
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds 9 outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. Io6 5

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains

From waves serener far,
A new Peneus 1 rolls his fountains
Against the morning-star,
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep I0 7°

Young Cyclads 2 on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo 3 cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
Andloves, and weeps, and dies; 4 I0 75

A new Ulysses leaves once more

Calypso for his native shore. 5

O, write no more the tale of Troy,

Death's scroll must be!
If earth
Nor mix with Laian rage 6 the joy Io8 °

Which dawns upon the free;

Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time Io8 5

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendour of its prime,
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose I0 9°

Shall burst, 7 more bright and good

Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued;
9. Clothing (i.e., skin). loved him and detained him for seven
1. A river in Thessaly (northeastern years, so that he can return to his island-
Greece) that flowed through the valley kingdom of Ithaca and his wife, Pene-
of Tempe (1070), famed for its beauty. lope.
2. The Cyclades, a chain of about fifty 6. King Laius of Thebes ordered the
islands in the Aegean southeast of Attica. death of his son, Oedipus, but the in-
3. The ship in which Jason and the fant grew up to slay his father in an
Argonauts sailed in the quest for the argument, solve the riddle of the mon-
Golden Fleece. strous Sphinx (1082), and become king
4. Reputed by some to be the son of of Thebes and wife of his mother,
Apollo by the muse Calliope, Orpheus Jocasta.
charmed all natural things with the 7. "Saturn and Love were among
the
music of his lyre. He wept for the double deities of a real or imaginary state of
loss of his wife Eurydice —
first when she innocence and happiness. All those who
died and afterwards when he failed to fell, the Gods of Greece, Asia, and
. . .

rescue her from the realm of Hades Egypt; the One who rose, Jesus . . .

when he looked back too soon. He was Christ .; and the many unsubdued,
. .

—
torn apart by maenads maddened female . .the monstrous objects of the idolatry
.

devotees of Dionysus (Bacchus). of China, India, the Antarctic islands,

5. In the Odyssey, Odysseus leaves the and the native tribes of America ." . .

island of Calypso, the nymph who has (from Shelley's note).

 —
440 - Written on . . . the Death of Napoleon

Not gold, not blood their altar dowers

But votive tears and symbol flowers. I0 95

O cease! must hate and death return?

Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past, .
II0°

O might it die or rest at last!

Written on Hearing the News of the

1
Death of Napoleon

What! alive and

oh Earth? so bold,
Art thou not overbold?
What! leapest thou forth as of old
In the light of thy morning mirth,
The last of the flock of the starry fold? 5

Ha! leapest thou forth as of old?

Are not the limbs still when the ghost is fled,
And canst thou move, Napoleon being dead?
2
How! not thy quick heart cold?
is

What spark is alive on thy hearth? 2 I0

How! is not his death-knell knolled?

And livest thou still, Mother Earth?
Thou wert warming thy fingers old
O'er the embers covered and cold
Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled J s

What, Mother, do you laugh now he is dead?

"Who has known me of old," replied Earth,

"Or who has my story told?
It is thou who art overbold."
And the lightning of scorn laughed forth 20

1. Napoleon Buonaparte died on May 5, followed both Mary Shelley's transcript

1821, on the island of St. Helena in the (now in Huntington Library,
the HM
south Atlantic, but it was some weeks 330), which Shelley approved as press
before the news of his death reached copy for Hellas, and the first edition in
Europe. Claire Clairmont at Florence the Hellas volume (1821). The eight-line
firstheard the official report on July 16 stanzas, as R. D. Havens pointed out
(Journals, p. 242). Shelley sent his poetic (PMLA, 1950), are intricately woven,
reaction to Oilier with the manuscript of using only three basic rhymes and re-
Hellas on November 11, 1821, with in- peating the rhyme words in different
structions to print it "at the end"; Oilier patterns in the manner of the sestina.
followed those instructions, and this poem Shelley himself referred to the poem as
was the last lyric by Shelley to reach "the ode to Napoleon."
print during his lifetime. 2. Vesta (identified with Tellus) u.is one
Though the title usually given is "Lines of the names under which the ancients
Written on Hearing . . . [etc.]." we have worshiped the earth.
 —— —
The Flower That Smiles Today • 441
As she sung, "To my bosom I fold
All my sons when their knell is knolled
And so with livingmotion all are fed
And the quick spring like weeds out of the dead.
4
bold," shouted Earth, 25
"Still alive and still

"I grow bolder and still more bold.

The dead fill me ten thousand fold
Fuller of speed and splendour and mirth.
I was cloudy, and sullen, and cold,
Like a frozen chaos uprolled 30

Till by the spirit of the mighty dead

My heart grew warm. I feed on whom I fed.

"Aye, alive and still bold," muttered Earth,

"Napoleon's fierce spirit rolled,
In terror, and blood, and gold, 35

A torrent of ruin to death from his birth.

Leave the millions who follow to mould
The metal before it be cold,
And weave into his shame, which like the dead
Shrouds me, the hopes that from his glory fled." 40

The Flower That Smiles Today 3

The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies;

What is this world's delight? 5

Lightning, that mocks the night,

Brief even as bright.

Virtue, how frail it is!

Friendship, how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss I0

For proud despair!

But these though soon they fall,

Survive their joy, and all

Which ours we call.
Whilst skies are blue and bright, *s

Whilst flowers are gay,

Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;

3. First published in Posthumous Poems We have gone to the holograph fair copy
under the title "Mutability," this lyric for our text. On the origin of the poem
has recently been reedited by Judith as a dramatic lyric intended for Hellas,
Chernaik from the fair copy by Shelley, see G. M. Matthews, "Shelley's Lyrics,"
Bodleian MS Shelley adds, e.7, p. 154 p. 690.
(The Lyrics of Shelley, pp. 252-253).
 — ————
442 • Memory
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
—
Dream thou and from thy sleep 2°

Then wake to weep.

When Passion's Trance Is Overpast

4

When passion's trance is overpast,

If tenderness and truth could last
—
Or live whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep
I should not weep, I should not weep! 5

It were enough to feel, to see

Thy soft eyes gazing tenderlv . . .

—
And dream the rest and bum and be
The secret food of fires unseen,
Could 5 thou but be what thou hast been! xo

After the slumber of the year

The woodland violets reappear;
All things revive in field or grove
And sky and sea, but two, which move
—
And form all others life and love. "3

6
To
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory.
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved's bed
And so thv thoughts, when thou art gone.
Love itself shall slumber on. . . .

Memory
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed,
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone.
Love itself shall slumber on. . . .

4. This lyric, first published in 1824 in 5. The verb is subjuncti\e.

Posthumous Poems, was placed by Mary 6. "To " and "Memory" are different
Shelley among Shelley's poems written versions of a poem Shelley
drafted or —
in 1821. Our text follows the only known began to draft— in Bodleian MS. Shelley
contemporary manuscript. Shelley's draft adds. e.8. p. 154 reverso. The first \er-
(Bodleian MS. Shelley adds, e .12. pp. 7 sion was published by Mary Shelley m
and 6). The poem strongly reflects Shel- Posthumous Poems (1824) and the sec-
ley's estrangement from Mary during ond by Irving Massey in JEGP, 59
tneir years together. The
last phrase (1960). 430—131 We consider evidence
"dream the rest" (8) echoes Pope's of the manuscript on the order of the
"Eloisa to Abelard," line 124. two stanzas to be inconclusive.
 ——— — —
To Jane. The Invitation • 443
Music, when soft voices die, 5

Vibrates in the memory.

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

7
To Jane. The Invitation

Best and brightest, come away

Fairer far than this fair day
Which like thee to those in sorrow
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough year just awake 5

In its cradle on the brake. 8 —

The brightest hour of unborn spring
Through the winter wandering
Found, it seems, this halcyon mom
To hoar Februarv bom; I0

Bending from Heaven in azure mirth

It kissed the forehead of the earth
And smiled upon the silent sea,
And bade the frozen streams be free
And waked to music all their fountains, x5

And breathed upon the frozen mountains,

And like a prophetess of May
Strewed flowers upon the barren way,
Making the wintry world appear
Like one on whom thou smilest, dear. 20

Away, away from men and towns

To the wild wood and the downs,
To the silent wilderness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music lest it should not find 25

An echo in another's mind,

While the touch of Nature's art
Harmonizes heart to heart.
I leave this notice on my door

For each accustomed visitor 3o

7.The two poems known as "To Jane. No. 2 (May 1833), 196-197.
The Invitation" and "To Jane. The Jane and Mary's other friends had not
Recollection" were originally published brought these poems to Mary's attention
by Mary Shelley in Shelley's Posthumous earlier because, though the walk that
Poems (1824) from Shelley's rough draft inspired them on January 2, 1822, was
as a single poem entitled "The Pine taken by Mary, Jane, and Shelley to-
Forest of the Cascine, near Pisa." The gether. Jane alone evoked Shelley's hap-
fair copy manuscripts of the two, which piness and the bittersweet memories of
had been given to Jane Williams, came the departed joys here commemorated,
to Mary's attention later, and she in- —
Shelley's fair copies that of "The In-
cluded the finished versions in the second vitation" in Cambridge University Li-
tone-volume) edition of her collected brary and "The Recollection" in the
Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley British Museum — are the bases of our
(1839). There had been a hitherto un- texts.
noted printing of "To Jane. The Invita- 8. Thicket,
tion" in the short-lived New Anti-Jacobin,
 — ——— —
444 • To Jane. The Recollection

"I am gone
into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields.
Reflexion, you may come tomorrow,
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow
You, with the unpaid bill, Despair, 35

You, tiresome verse-reciter Care,

I will pay you in the grave,

Death will listen to your stave . —

Expectation too, be off!
To-day is for itself enough 40

Hope, in pity mock not woe

With smiles, nor follow where I go;
Long having lived on thy sweet food,
At length I find one moment's good
After long pain —
with all your love 45

This you never told me of."

Radiant Sister of the day,

i^jl^y^ Awake, arise and come away
To the wild woods and the plains
And the pools where winter-rains so

Image all their roof of leaves,

Where the pine its garland weaves
Of sapless green and ivy dun
Round stems that never kiss the Sun
Where the lawns and pastures be 55

And the sandhills of the sea

Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
And wind-flowers, and violets
WTiich yet join not scent to hue ^
Crown the pale year weak and new,
When the night is left behind
In the deep east dun and blind
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous 6s

Billows murmur at our feet

Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal Sun.

To Jane. The Recollection

Feb. 2, 1822

Now the last day of many days,

All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest and the last, is dead.
Rise, Memorv, and write its praise!
Up to thy wonted work! come, trace
 ——
To Jane. The Recollection • 445
The epitaph of glory fled;
For now the Earth has changed its face,
A frown is on the Heaven's brow.
1.

We wandered to the pine forest

That skirts the ocean foam; I0

The lightest wind was in its nest,

The Tempest in its home;
The whispering waves were half asleep,
The clouds were gone to play,
And on the bosom of the deep *s

The smile of Heaven lay;

Itseemed as if the hour were one
Sent from beyond the skies,
Which scattered from above the sun
A light of Paradise. 20

2.
We paused amid the pines that stood
The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
As serpents interlaced,
And soothed by every azure breath 25

That under Heaven is blown

To harmonies and hues beneath,
As tender as its own;
Now all the tree-tops lay asleep

Like green waves on the sea, 30

As still as in the silent deep

The Ocean woods may be.
3-
How calm it was! the silence there
By such was bound
a chain
That even the busy woodpecker 35

Made stiller with her sound

The inviolable quietness;
The breath of peace we drew
With its soft motion made not less
The calm that round us grew. 4°

There seemed from the remotest seat

Of the white mountain-waste,
To the soft flower beneath our feet
A magic circle traced,
A spirit interfused around 45

A thrilling silent life,

To momentary peace it bound
Our mortal nature's strife;
And still I felt the centre of
The magic circle there so

Was one fair form that filled with love

The lifeless atmosphere.
 — ——
446 • One Word Is Too Often Profaned
4-
We paused beside the pools that lie

Under the forest bough

Each seemed as 'twere, a little sky 55

Gulphed in a world below;

A firmament of purple light
Which in the dark earth lay
More boundless than the depth of "night
And purer than the day, 6o

In which the lovely forests grew

As in the upper air,
More perfect, both in shape and hue,
Than any spreading there;
There lay the glade, the neighboring lawn, 65

And through the dark green wood

The white sun twinkling like the dawn
Out of a speckled cloud.

Sweet views, which in our world above

Can never well be seen, 70

Were imaged in the water's love

Of that fair forest green;
And all was interfused beneath
With an Elysian glow,
An atmosphere without a breath, 75

A softer day below

Like one beloved, the scene had lent
To the dark water's breast,
Its every leaf and lineament
With more than truth exprest; 8o

Until an envious wind crept by,

Like an unwelcome thought
WTiich from the mind's too faithful eye
Blots one dear image out.
Though thou art ever fair and kind 8s

And forests ever green,

Less oft is peac e in S[helley]'s mind
Than calm in water seen.

One Word Is Too Often Profaned 9

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained

For thee to disdain it;

9. Mary Shelley published this poem

first ley's later years for which no manuscript
in Posthumous Poems (1824) from a in the poet's own hand is known to
fair copy she had made in one of her exist. Critics have often associated the
notebooks (Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. poem with Jane Williams.
d.7). It is almost the only lyric of Shel-
 — — — —
The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise • 447
One hope is too like despair 5

For prudence to smother,

And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

can give not what men call love,

I

But wilt thou accept not I0

The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar *5

From the sphere of our sorrow?

The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise1

The serpent shut out from Paradise 2

is —
The wounded deer must seek the herb no more
In which its heart's cure lies
The widowed dove must cease to haunt a bower
Like that from which its mate with feigned sighs 5

Fled in the April hour.

I, too, must seldom seek again

Near happy friends a mitigated pain.

2
Of hatred I am proud, —with scorn content;
Indifference, which once hurt me, now is grown I0

Itself indifferent.
But not to speak of love, Pity alone
Can break a spirit already more than bent.
The miserable one
Turns the mind's poison into food: *3

Its medicine is tears, its evil, good.

1. Shelley gave these stanzas, enclosed Jane in mind.

in a note, to Edward Williams on Janu- The text has always been reprinted in
ary 26, 1822, with the injunction that a corrupt state deriving from the Ascham
he show them to no one else but Jane copy, though Shelley's fair copy manu-
and preferably not even her. Williams script, which has been available for
noted in his journal, "S sent us some years in the University of Edinburgh
beautiful but too melancholy lines," the Library, shows no less than five sig-
ns suggesting that he and Jane both read nificant verbal variants from the Oxford
them. The poem, on its first book publi- Standard Authors text. (A more or less
cation in John Ascham's two-volume correct transcription is found in Shelley,
pirated edition of 1834, was entitled Letters, II, 385-386.) The present text
simply, "Stanzas to * * * *"; William is based on Shelley's holograph.
Michael Rossetti supplied its popular 2. See Genesis 3:14,24. Shelley was at
title, "To Edward Williams," in his this time called "the snake" by Byron
edition of 1870, but it can be argued —
and others in the Pisan circle probably
particularly on the basis of lines 17-20 a pun on the name "Bysshe Shelley" and
that the poem was written primarily with the Italian bischelli, a small snake.
 —
448 - The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise

Therefore,if now I see you seldomer,

Dear friends, dear friend, 3 know that I only fly

Your looks, because they stir
Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die. 20

The very comfort which they minister

I scarce can bear; yet I,

(So deeply is the arrow gone)

Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
4
When I return to my cold home, you ask 25

Why am I not as I have lately been?

You spoil me for the task
Of acting a forced part in life's dull scene.
Of wearing on my brow the idle mask
Of author, great or mean, 30

In the world's carnival. I sought

Peace thus, and but in vou I found it not.
5
Full half an hour, to-day, I tried my lot
With various flowers, and every one still said,
"She me, loves me not."
loves 35

And if this meant a Vision long since fled

If it meant Fortune, Fame, or Peace of thought,

To
If it —
meant (but I dread
speak what you may know too well)
Still there was truth in the sad oracle. 4°

6
The crane o'er seas and forests seeks her home.
No bird so wild, but has its quiet nest,
When it no more would roam.
The sleepless billows on the Ocean's breast
Break like a bursting heart, and die in foam 45

And thus, at length, find rest.

Doubtless there is a place of peace
Where my weak heart and all its throbs will cease.
7
I asked her4 yesterday if she believed
That I had resolution. One who had so

Would ne'er have thus relieved

His heart with words, but what his judgment bade
Would do, and leave the scorner unrelieved.
These verses were too sad
To send to you, but 5 that I know, 55

Happy yourself, you feel another's woe.

[[

3. The plural certainly refers to Jane sleep, and hopes that cannot die."
and Edward Williams; the reference in 4. I.e., Mary Shelley.
the emphatic singular is less clear, but 5. Except; were (54): subjunctive verb <j

it is difficult to understand why Edward's to express a condition contrary to fact.

looks would "stir/Griefs that should
 With a Guitar. To Jane • 449

With a Guitar.
6
To Jane.

Ariel to Miranda; —Take

This slave of music for the sake
Of him who is the slave of thee;
And teach it all the harmony,
In which thou can'st, and only thou, 5

Make the delighted spirit glow,

'Till joy denies itself again
And too intense is turned to pain;
For by permission and command
Of thine own prince Ferdinand I0

Poor Ariel sends this silent token

Of more than ever can be spoken;
Your guardian spirit Ariel, who
From life to life must still pursue
Your happiness, for thus alone J5

Can Ariel ever find his own;

From Prospero's enchanted cell,
As the mighty verses tell,

To the throne of Naples he

Lit you o'er the trackless sea, 20

Flitting on, your prow before,

Like a living meteor.
When you die, the silent Moon
In her interlunar 7 swoon
Is not sadder in her cell 25

Than deserted Ariel;

When you live again on Earth
Like an unseen Star of birth 8
Ariel guides you o'er the sea
Of from your nativity;
life 3©

Many changes have been run

Since Ferdinand and you begun
Your course of love, and Ariel still
Has tracked your steps and served your will;

6. Shelley purchased an Italian guitar for punctuated in his best copying hand,
Jane Williams, accompanying the gift is now the Bodleian Library (MS.
in
with an urbane poem depicting her, Shelley adds. e.3). Our text follows that
Edward Williams, and Shelley himself manuscript; the earliest published texts
in the roles of Miranda, her beloved (the first in the Athenesum, October 20,
Ferdinand, and the spirit Ariel from 1832) derive from copies made by
Shakespeare's The Tempest. Thomas Medwin.
Edward John Trelawny, who came 7. The period between the old and the
upon Shelley drafting the poem in a new moon.
secluded retreat in the marshy pine 8. According to various astrological tra-
forest near Pisa, described the initial ditions, each individual lives under the
draft as a "frightful scrawl" that he influence of a natal star that shapes his
found virtually illegible. The copy Shel- temperament and destiny,
ley gave to Jane, beautifully written and
 — ———
450 • With a Guitar. To Jane.

Now, in humbler, happier lot 35

This is all remembered not;

And now, 9
alas! the poor sprite is
Imprisoned for some fault of his
In a body like a grave:
From you, he only dares to crave 40

For his service and his sorrow

A smile today, a song tomorrow. •

The artist who

this idol 1 wrought
To echo harmonious thought
all
Felled a tree, while on the steep 45

The woods were in their winter sleep

Rocked in that repose divine
On the wind-swept Apennine;
And dreaming, some of autumn past
And some of spring approaching fast, 50

And some of April buds and showers

And some of songs in Julv bowers
And all of love, —and so this tree
O that such our death may be
Died in sleep, and no pain,
felt 55

To live in happier form again,

From which, beneath Heaven's fairest star, 2
The artist wrought this loved guitar,
And taught it justly to reply
To all who question skilfully ^
In language gentle as thine own;
Whispering in enamoured tone
Sweet oracles of woods and dells
And summer winds in sylvan cells
For it had leamt all harmonies 6s

Of the plains and of the skies,

Of the forests and the mountains,
And the many-voiced fountains,
The clearest echoes of the hills,
The softest notes of falling rills, 70

The melodies of birds and bees,

The murmuring of summer seas,
And pattering rain and breathing dew
And airs of evening; —
and it knew
That seldom heard mysterious sound, 75

Which, driven on its diurnal 3 round

As through boundless day
it floats

Our world enkindles on its way

All this it knows, but will not tell
To those who cannot question well
9. In The Tempest, Ariel is a disem- 2. Venus, the evening/morning star of
bodied spirit of the elements of fire and love,
air. 3. Daily.
1. I.e., the guitar.
 —— ——
To Jane ("The keen stars were twinkling") •
451
The spirit that inhabits it:
It talks according to the wit
Of companions, and no more
its

Is heard than has been felt before

By those who tempt it to betray 85

These secrets of an elder day.

But, sweetly as its answers will
Flatter hands of perfect skill,
It keeps its highest holiest tone
For our beloved Jane alone. 90

4
To Jane

The keen stars were twinkling

And the fair moon was rising among them,
Dear Jane.
The guitar was tinkling
But the notes were not sweet 'till you sung them 5

Again.
As the moon's soft splendour
O'er the faint cold starlight of Heaven
Is thrown
So your voice most tender I0

To the strings without soul had then given

Its own.

The stars will awaken,

Though the moon sleep a full hour later,
Tonight; x5

No leaf will be shaken

While the dews of your melodv scatter
Delight.
Thoughthe sound overpowers
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing 20

A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.

4. The draft of this poem written at— Works (1839); in her second one-volume
Lerici during the last month of Shelley's edition of Poetical Works (1840) she
life —
is scattered in three separate folios finally published a complete text. Our
of the Bodleian manuscript of "The text is taken from the fair copy holo-
Triumph of Life" (Bod. MS. Shelley graph, which also contains this note from
adds, c.4, 56, 33v, and 38v reverso) A . Shelley to Jane: "I sate down to write
holograph fair copy is in the University some words for an ariette which might
of Manchester Library. The first printed —
be profane but it was in vain to struggle
version, entitled "An Ariette for Music," with the ruling spirit, who compelled me
published by Thomas Medwin in the to speak of things sacred to yours &
Atherusum (November 17, 1832) and Wilhelmeister's [i.e., Edward Williams']
The Shelley Papers (1833), was incom- —
indulgence I commit them to your se-
plete. Mary Shelley followed this text in crecy & your mercy & will try & do better
her first edition of Shelley's Poetical another time."
 ——— — —

452 • Lines written in the Bay of Lerici

Lines written in the Bay of Lerici 5

Bright wanderer, 6 fair coquette of Heaven,

To whom alone it has been given
To change and be adored for ever. . . .

Envy not this dim world, for never

But once within its shadow grew " 5

One fair as [thou], but far more true.

She left me at the silent time
When the moon had ceased to climb
The azure dome of Heaven's steep,
And like an albatross asleep, I0

Balanced on her wings of light,

Hovered in the purple night,
Ere she sought her Ocean nest
In the chambers of the west.
She left me, and I staid alone x 5

Thinking over every tone,

Which though now silent to the ear
The enchanted heart could hear
Like notes which die when born, but still

Haunt the echoes of the hill: 20

And feeling ever—O too much

The soft vibrations of her
touch
As her gentle hand even now
if

Lightly trembled on my brow;

And thus although she absent were 25

Memory gave me all of her

That even fancy dares to claim.
Her presence had made weak and tame
All passions, and I lived alone,
In the time which is our own; 30

The past and future were forgot

As they had been, and would be, not.
But soon, the guardian angel gone,
The demon reassumed his throne

5. Shelley probably wrote this unfinished line, VI (June 1862), 122-123. and
lyric, which Jane Williams as its
has with the opening lines of it given as a
main two or three weeks before
subject, —
separate fragment in Garnett's Relics
his death. Drafted on two conjugate of Shelley (London, 1862). The first
leaves of the paper on which Shelley complete text was published by G. M.
wrote "The Triumph of Life" and still Matthews in "Shelley and Jane Wil-
M
kept with that MS (Bodleian MS. Shel- liams, RES, n.s. XII (February 1961),
ley adds, c.4, ff.35-36), it was probably 40-48. Later emendations were proposed
composed before lines 373ff. of "The by Reiman in the book cited and by
Triumph" and presumably dates from Chernaik in The Lyrics of Shelley. We
between June 16 and June 30, 1822 (see believe that since the last couplet in the
Reiman, Shelley's "The Triumph of draft is manifestly incomplete, the poem
Life": A Critical Study, pp. 244-250). is probably unfinished in its present state,
The poem was first published, and its in spite of aphoristic endings dewsed by
titledevised, by Richard Garnett in a imaginative editors,
truncated version in Macmillan's Maga- 6. The moon.
 :

The Triumph of Life • 453

In my
faint heart ... I dare not speak 35

My thoughts; but thus disturbed and weak

I sate and watched the vessels glide

Along the ocean bright and wide,

Like spirit-winged chariots sent
O'er some serenest element 40

To ministrations strange and far;

As if to some Elysian star
They medicine
sailed for drink to
Such sweet and bitter pain as mine.
And the wind that winged their flight 45

From the land came fresh and light,

And the scent of sleeping flowers
And the coolness of the hours
Of dew, and the sweet warmth of day
Was scattered o'er the twinkling bay; 50

And the fisher with his lamp

And spear, about the low rocks damp
Crept, and struck the fish who came
To worship the delusive flame:
Too happy, they whose pleasure sought 55

Extinguishes all sense and thought

Of the regret that pleasure [ ]
7

Destroying life alone not peace.

The Triumph of Life Written, probably in May and June 1822,

at Casa Magni, San Terenzo, on the Bay of Lerici, "The Triumph of Life"
was Shelley's final major effort. Though most of it was left in a very un-
finished state in a rough draft manuscript, the poem exhibits such vitality
and incisiveness that even Mary Shelley, who disliked the dark tone and
"lack of human interest" (i.e., the philosophical nature) of the fragment,
gave itprominent place among Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824). In
a
the twentieth century it has been hailed by T. S. Eliot as Shelley's finest
work.
"The Triumph of Life" is written in terza rima, the interlocking rhyme
scheme that Dante employs in the Divine Comedy and that Petrarch uses
in his Trionfi, or Triumphs (a sequence of seven poems celebrating the
successive "Triumphs" of Love over Man, Chastity over Love, Death over
Chastity, Fame over Death, Time over Fame, and God over Time)
Besides Dante and Petrarch, Milton, Wordsworth, Lucretius, and Plato
figure prominently as recognizable influences on the thought and language
of particular passages. Also important both as an epitomizing character in
the poem and as a literary influence on it is Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose
novel Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Helo'ise provides the organizing metaphor for

7. Various editors have added a con- Destroying life alone not peace,
eluding word to line 57 and/or read a (Garnett)
slightly different version of
58 to line Of the regret that pleasure [ ]

come up with the following final couplets Seeking Life alone not peace.
Of the regret that pleasure leaves (Matthews)
454 • The Triumph of Life
a large section of the poem. In Book IX of his Confessions, Rousseau
wrote of the year 1756: "I believed that I was approaching the end of my
days almost without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for
which my heart thirsted, without having ever tasted that passion which,
. . .

through lack of an object, was always suppressed. The impossibility of . . .

attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and
seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them
in an ideal world which my creative imagination sopn peopled with beings
aftermy own heart." (The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans.
J.
M. Cohen [Penguin Books, 1954], pp. 396, 398). Out of these reveries
grew Julie, in which a young tutor named Saint-Preux falls in love with
his pupil Julie (as the medieval French theologian Peter Abelard fell in
love with his pupil Hcloise). After their love has been consummated once,
Julie sends Saint-Preux away and —out of a sense of duty —marries her
father's friend Wolmar. Saint-Preux later returns to Vevey, where Julie and
Wolmar are living quietly, and he eventually learns to control his passions
sufficiently to achieve happiness, if not ecstasy, as a friend and confidant of
his beloved. This temporary happiness ends for all the idealized circle (in-
cluding Julie's friend Claire and Saint-Preux's English friend Lord Bomston)
when Julie drowns
in Lake Geneva. As Rousseau tells in his Confessions,

was intertwined with his last great passion that for the
his writing of Julie —
Countess d'Houdetot, a passion that remained chaste because of Mme.
d'Houdetot's love for Rousseau's friend Saint-Lambert. As Shelley's lyrics
to Jane Williams indicate, there was a parallel between Shelley's situation
in 1822, in which his partial estrangement from Mary was accompanied by

attachment to both Jane and Edward Williams, while the two couples were
living in isolation at Casa Magni.
"The Triumph of Life," Rousseau, who represents the generation that
In
prepared for the modern age centering on the French Revolution, acts as
the interpreter of the pageant seen by Shelley's persona, just as Virgil
guides Dante through the Inferno and as Love's Triumph is explained to
Petrarch by a Florentine acquaintance in the pageant. Shelley uses Rousseau
to comment on recent events and the historical process and also, through
Rousseau's symbolic autobiography (which is abstracted from Julie), to
provide an analogue of Shelley's own quest for ideal love (cf. Epipsychi-
dion), together with a warning concerning the pursuit of shadows. In both
the political sphere and in love, Rousseau warns, it is a mistake both to run
to extremes of optimism and to give way to despair when idealized ex-

pectations fail.

Though left incomplete by Shelley's sudden death, "The Triumph of

Life" as it exists shows a firm structural development: after an introduc-
tion (1-40) focusing on the Poet and his unstated personal crisis, which

is set against the harmony of nature, there is the Poet's first encounter
with the visionary triumphal pageant (41-175); his desire to know more
explicitly the meaning of what he has seen evokes the shade of Rousseau,
who identifies many of the great in the train of Life and warns the Poet
against giving way to inaction because of despair by distinguishing relative
degrees of resistance to Life's evil influence (176-295). In the last com-
pleted section of the fragment (296-543) Rousseau tells his own story
 The Triumph of Life - 455
through a series of allegories.
—
Another question by the Poet "Then, what
is Life?" —has just introduced another major section of the poem when the
fragment breaks off in the first few words of Rousseau's reply. Critics dis-

agree about how — or even whether — Shelley would have continued the
poem.
Mary Shelley published "The Triumph of Life" in Shelley's Posthumous
—
Poems (1824), and this text slightly modified by Mary herself in 1839
and by other editors over the years —remained standard until the 1960s,
when new were published by G. M. Matthews (in Studia
redactions
Neophilologica, 32 [i960], 271-309) and Donald H. Reiman (in Shelley's
"The Triumph of Life" [Urbana, 111., 1965]), who independently re-
examined the Bodleian manuscript on which Mary's texts were based. The
present text is based on Reiman's text, slightly revised in the light of both
suggestions by Matthews in his review of Reiman (JEGP, 1967) and a
discussion by Matthews and Reiman held at the Bodleian Library in
August 1971 with the manuscript before them.

The Triumph of Life

Swift as a spirit hastening to his task

Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask

Of darkness from the awakened Earth.

fell
The smokeless the mountain snows
altars of 5

Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth

Of the Ocean's orison arose
light,
To which the birds tempered their matin lay. 1
All flowers in field or forest which unclose

I0
Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
Swinging their censers 2 in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray
Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air,
And in succession due, did Continent, I5

Isle, all things that in them wear

Ocean, and
The form and character of mortal mould
Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

Their portion of the toil which he of old

Took 20
as his own and then imposed on them;
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem

The cone of night, 3 now they were laid asleep,
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem
1. A morning song; orison: a prayer. 3. The cone-shaped shadow (umbra) cast
2. Vessels in which incense is burned. by the earth away from the sun.
456 - The Triumph of Life

Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep 25

Of a green Apennine: 4 before me fled

The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head

When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread 30

Was so transparent that the scene came tnrough

As clear as when a veil of light is drawn
O'er evening hills they 5 glimmer; and I knew

That I had feltthe freshness of that dawn,

Bathed in the same cold dew my brow and hair 35

And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn

Under the same bough, and heard as there

self
The and the Ocean hold
birds, the fountains
Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air.
And then a Vision on mv brain was rolled. ... 4°

As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay

This was the tenour of my waking dream.
Methought I sate beside a public way

Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream

Of people there was hurrying to and fro 45

Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

All hastening onward, yetnone seemed to know

Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, yet so
Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky 50

One of the million leaves of summer's bier. 6 —

Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,

Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,

Some flyingfrom the thing they feared and some
Seeking the object of another's fear, 55

And others as with steps towards the tomb

Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom
4. A peak of the Apennines, a mountain crowds of gnats (46) are found in Pe-
range constituting most of the Italian trarch's "Triumph of Death" and Dante's
peninsula south of the Po Valley. Inferno, respectively; the simile compar-
5. I.e., the hills. ing the dead with fallen leaves had
6. The phrase public way (43) and the earlier been used by Homer, Virgil,
comparison of the souls of men with Dante, and Milton
 . —
The Triumph of Life • 457
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death . . .

And some fled from it 7 as it were a ghost, 6°

Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath.

But more with motions which each other crost

Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw
Or birds within the noonday ether lost,

Upon that path where flowers never grew; 65

And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst

Heard not the fountains whose melodious dew
Out of their mossy cells forever burst
Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told
Of grassy paths, and wood lawns interpersed 70

With overarching elms and caverns cold,

And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they
Pursued their serious folly as of old. . . .

And as I gazed methought that in the way

The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June 75

When the South wind 8 shakes the extinguished day.

And a cold glare, intenser than the noon
But icy cold, obscured with light9
[ ]

The Sun as he the stars. Like the young Moon

When on the sunlit limits of the night 8o

Her white shell trembles amid crimson air

And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might

Doth, its coming, bear

as a herald of
The
ghost of her dead Mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair, 1 85

So came a chariot on the silent storm

Of its own
rushing splendour, and a Shape
So sate within as one whom years deform
Beneath a dusky hood and double cape
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb, 9°

And o'er what seemed the head a cloud like crape 2

Was dun and faint etherial gloom
bent, a
Tempering the light; upon the chariot's beam
A Janus-visaged 3 Shadow did assume

7. I.e., shadow. of Sir Patrick Spence" on "the new

8. The the southwest wind in
libeccio, Moon, /With the old Moon in her arms"
Italy, iswind of hot storms and of
the as the sign of an approaching storm,
the evening onshore breeze on the west- 2. cloud (91) is the subject of Was bent;
ern coast. crape (91): black material worn on the
9. Mary Shelley filled this blank with the clothes of those in mourning,
adjective "blinding." 3. Janus, the Roman god of beginnings
1. The image in lines 79-85 is that of and endings, was represented in art as
the crescent new moon (shaped like a having either two faces {Janus Bifrons)
chariot body) with the shadow of the or four faces, one on each side of his
rest of the moon over it; Coleridge, in head {Janus Quadrifrons)
"Dejection An Ode," quotes the "Ballad
:
 —
458 • The Triumph of Life

The guidance of that wonder-winged team. 95

The Shapes which drew it in thick lightnings

Were lost: I heard alone on the air's soft stream
The music of their ever moving wings.
All the four faces of that charioteer
Had their eyes banded . . . little profit brings I0°

Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,

Nor then avail the beams that quench the Sun
Or that these banded eyes could pierce the sphere

Of that is, has been, or will be done.

all
So illwas the car guided, but it past I0 5

With solemn speed majestically on . . .

The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,

Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw like clouds upon the thunder blast
The million with fierce song and maniac dance II0

Raging around; such seemed the jubilee

As when to greet some conqueror's advance

Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea

From senatehouse and prison and theatre
When Freedom left those who upon the free IJ 5

Had bound a yoke which soon they stooped to bear. 5

Nor wanted here the just similitude
Of a triumphal pageant, for where'er

The chariot rolled a captive multitude

Was driven; all those who had grown old in power I2 °

Or misery, —
all who have their age subdued, (5

By action or by suffering, and whose hour

Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,
So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower;

All those whose fame or infamy must grow 12 5

Till the great winter lay the form and name

Of their own earth with them forever low —
4. I.e., the cold glare of line 77. gan about the end of the Republic, when
5. jubilee . stooped to bear: Though
. . the Romans themselves were enslaved
in the Old Testament the Year of by emperors, and variants of them con-
Jubilee was the "year of release" in tinued in Western civilization, both in
which slaves were freed (Deuteronomy literature, as in triumphal processions of
15), Shelley ironically uses jubilee to Lucifera (Faerie Queene, I.iv.2) and
describe a Roman triumph, in which a Dulness (Pope, Dunciad, IV), where
victorious army displayed the people the associations were often evil, and in
they had conquered, forcing them to life, as in the pageantry in London in
march under a yoke to symbolize their 1815 celebrating the fall of Napoleon,
subservience. Such public triumphs be- 6. Era, historical period.
 The Triumph of Life • 459
All but the sacredfew who could not tame
Their the Conqueror, but as soon
spirits to
As they had touched the world with living flame J 3

Fled back like eagles to their native noon,

Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems, till the last one
Were there; for they of Athens and Jerusalem 7
Were neither mid the mighty captives seen J 35

Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them

Or fled before. Swift, fierce and obscene
. . .

The wild dance maddens in the van, and those

Who lead it, fleet as shadows on the green,

Outspeed the chariot and without repose r 4°

Mix with each other in tempestuous measure

To savage music. Wilder as it grows,
. . .

They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure,

Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds 8 spun
Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure x 45

Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,

Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair,
And in their dance round her who dims the Sun
Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air
As their feet twinkle; now recede and now I 5°

Bending within each other's atmosphere

Kindle invisibly; and as thev glow

Like moths by light attracted and repelled,
Oft to new bright destruction come and go,

two clouds into one vale impelled

Till like I55

That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle

—
And die in rain, the fiery band which held
Their natures, snaps ere the shock cease to tingle
. . .

One falls and then another in the path

Senseless, nor is the desolation single, l6°

Yet ere I can say where the chariot hath

Past over them; nor other trace I find

But as of foam after the Ocean's wrath

Is spent upon the desert —

shore. Behind,
Old men, and women foully disarrayed l6 5

Shake their grey hair in the insulting wind,

7. The sacred few (128) include the lead- 8. The carnal sinners of the Second
ing representatives of the Hellenic and Circle in Dante's Inferno (Canto V) are
Hebraic civilization, among them Socrates blown about by whirling winds,
and Jesus
 ——
460 - The Triumph of Life

Limp dance and strain with limbs decayed

in the
Toreach the car of light which leaves them still
Farther behind and deeper in the shade.

But not the less with impotence of will no

They wheel, though ghastly shadows interpose
Round them and round each other, and fulfill

Their work and to the dust whence they arose

Sink and corruption veils them as they lie
And frost in these performs what fire in those. 9 '75

Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry,

Half to myself I said, "And what is this?
Whose shape is that within the car? & why"
Iwould have added "is all here amiss?"
—
But a voice answered "Life" ... I turned and knew
. .
l8 °

(O Heaven have mercy on such wretchedness!)

That what I thought was an old root which grew

To strange distortion out of the hill side

Was indeed one of that deluded crew,
And that the grass which methought hung so wide l8 5

And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,

And that the holes it vainly sought to hide
Were or had been eyes. "If thou canst forbear —
To join the dance, which I had well forborne,"
Said the grim Feature, 1 of my thought aware, I ^°

"I will tell all that which to this deep scorn

Led me and my companions, and relate
The progress of the pageant since the morn;

"If thirst of knowledge doth not thus abate,

Follow it even to the night, but I l *s

Am weary" .Then like one who with the weight

. .

Of his own words is staggered, wearily

He paused, and ere he could resume, I cried,
"First who art thou?" "Before thy . . . memory
and died, 2 2 °°
"I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did,
And the spark with which Heaven lit my
if spirit
Earth had with purer nutriment supplied
9. The coldness (frost) of the old men Milton describes Death in Paradise Lost
and women (165) destroys them just as (X.279) as a "grim Feature." using
the uncontrolled passions (fire) de- "feature" in the sense of its Latin root-
stroy the maidens and youths (149). J. word, factura, as a "shaped," or
C. Maxwell has pointed out that the "created," thing.
line echoes Paradise Lost, 11.595. 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau lived from
1. The shade of Rousseau (see 204); 1712 to 1778.
 —— ——
The Triumph of Life • 461

"Corruption would not now thus much inherit

Of what was once Rousseau nor this disguise —
Stain that within which still disdains to wear it. 2 °5

"IfI have been extinguished, yet there rise

A thousand beacons from the spark I bore."

"And who are those chained to the car?" "The Wise,
"The great, the unforgotten: they who wore
Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreathes of light, 3 2I °

Signs of thought's empire over thought; their lore

"Taught them not this to know themselves;— their might

Could not repress the mutiny within,
And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night

"Caught them ere evening." "Who is he with chin 2I 5

Upon his breast and hands crost on his chain?"

"The Child of a fierce hour; 4 he sought to win

"The world, and lost all it did contain

Of greatness, in its hope destroyed; and more
Of fame and peace than Virtue's self can gain 22 °

"Without the opportunity which bore

Him on its eagle's pinion to the peak
From which a thousand climbers have before
"Fall'n as Napoleon fell." — I felt my cheek
22 5
Alter to see the great form pass away
Whose grasp had left the giant world so weak
That every pigmy kicked it as it lay
And much I grieved to think how power and will
In opposition rule our mortal day

And why God made irreconcilable 23 °

Good and the means of good; 5 and for despair

I half disdained mine eye's desire to fill

With the spent vision of the times that were

And scarce have ceased to be . . . "Dost thou behold,"
Said then my guide, "those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire, 2 35

"Frederic, and Kant, Catherine, and Leopold,

Chained hoary anarchs, demagogue and sage
Whose name the fresh world thinks already old 6 —
3. The headgear respectively of bishops, and Leopold II (1747-1792), Grand Duke
warriors, kings, and (as 211 explains) of Tuscany and later Holy Roman Em-
sages, peror. These are three of the "enlight-
4. Napoleon. ened despots"; Shelley called such self-
5. Compare with this sentiment of the willed absolute rulers anarchs following
Poet (a view contradicted by Rous eau Milton's use of the word for Chaos in
in their continuing dialogue) the tor- Paradise Lost (11.988), and Pope's use
turing Prometheus by the Furies,
of of it for Chaos in The Dunciad (IV.
who him to despair (Pro-
tried to drive 655). Voltaire (1694-1778), who led
metheus Unbound, 1.625-631). these despots intellectually, is the dema-
6. King Frederick II, "the Great," of gogue, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the
Prussia (1712-1786), Czarina Catherine sage.
II, "the Great," of Russia (1729-17%),
 — —— —
462 • The Triumph of Life

"For in the battle Life and they did wage

She remained conqueror I was overcome — 2 *°

By my own heart alone, which neither age

"Nor
Could temper
tears nor infamy nor
—now the tomb
"Let them pass"
I cried
—"the world and
to its object."
its mysterious doom
"Is not so much more glorious than it was 2 *5

That I desire to worship those who drew

New figures on its false and fragile glass

"As the old faded."

—"Figures
ever new
Rise on the bubble, paint them how you may;
We have but thrown, as those before us threw, 2 5°

"Our shadows on it as it past away.

But mark, how chained to the triumphal chair
The mighty phantoms of an elder day
"All that is mortal of great Plato there
Expiates the joy and woe his master knew not; 2 55

That star that ruled his doom was far too fair 7 —
"And Life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not,
Conquered the heart by love which gold or pain
Or age or sloth or slavery could subdue not

"And near [ ]
walk the [ ]
twain. 8 26°

The tutor and his pupil, whom Dominion

Followed as tame as vulture in a chain.

"The world was darkened beneath either pinion

Of him whom from the flock of conquerors
Fame singled as her thunderbearing minion; 26 5

"The other long outlived both woes and wars,

Throned in new thoughts of men, 9 and still had kept
The jealous keys of truth's eternal doors

"If Bacon's spirit 1 had not leapt

[ ]

2 ~i°
Like lightning out of darkness; he compelled
The Proteus shape 2 of Nature's as it slept
7. Socrates (Plato's master) refrained 9. Sir Francis Bacon wrote of Aristotle:
from passionate love affairs with boys, "I will think of him that he learned the
but Plato loved a youth named Aster humour of his scholar, with whom it
(which means "star" in Greek and is seemeth he did emulate, the one to
the name of a flower —hence, flower of conquer all opinions, as the other to
heaven). See the epigram attributed to conquer all nations."
Plato that Shelley uses as the epigraph 1. Bacon's introduction of the founda-
to Adonais. tions of scientific methodology broke the
8. Mary Shelley filled in the first blank hold of scholastic dogmatism.
with "him"; a later editor suggested 2. In The Wisdom of the Ancients,
"Macedonian" as a proper adjective for Bacon discusses the myth of Proteus as
twain, inasmuch as the tutor and his an allegory of physical matter and its
pupil are Aristotle and Alexander the transformations.
Great.
 — I —— —
The Triumph of Life • 463
"To wake and to unbar the caves that held
The treasure of the secrets of its reign 3 —
See the great bards of old 4 who inly quelled

"The passions which they sung, as by their strain 2 75

May well be known: their living melody

Tempers 5 its own contagion to the vein

"Of those who are infected with it —

Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!

"And so my words were seeds of misery 280

Even as the deeds of others." 6

—"Not as theirs," 7
I said —he pointed to a company
In which I recognized amid the heirs
Of Caesar's crime from him to Constantine. 8
The Anarchs old whose force and murderous snares 2g 5

Had founded many a sceptre bearing line

And spread the plague of blood and gold abroad,
And Gregory and John 9 and men divine
Who rose likeshadows between Man and god
Till that eclipse, still hanging under Heaven, 2 9o

Was worshipped by the world o'er which they strode

—
For the true Sun it quenched. "Their power was given
But to destroy," replied the leader "I —
Am one of those who have created, even
"If it be but a world of agony." 2 95

"Whence and whither goest thou?

earnest thou
How did thy course begin," I said,, "and why?

"Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow

Of people, and my heart of one sad thought.
Speak." "Whence I came, partly I seem to know, 3 °°

"And how and by what paths I have been brought

To this dread pass, methinks even thou mayst guess;

Why this should be my mind can compass not;

3. These are allusions to the Cave of therefore they enflame others as ill-
Mammon in Spenser's Faerie Queene considered actions do.
(II.vii)and to Bacon's quotation from 7. The Poet answers Rousseau that his
Democritus that "the truth of nature writings are not as bad as the deeds of
lieth hid in certain deep mines and political and ecclesiastical rulers of the
caves." Roman Empire and medieval Europe.
4. Acanceled reading in the manuscript: 8. Julius Caesar founded the power of
"Homer & his brethren." the Roman emperors; Constantine first
5. Restrains or checks. made Christianity the state religion in the
6. Whereas the classical writers sup- empire, combining the political and ec-
pressed their passions, as their har- clesiastical tyranny.
monious poetry shows (see Defence of 9. Gregory VII (Hildebrand) established
Poetry, pp. 492-493), Rousseau acted the temporal power of the papacy; John
out his passions before writing them, so was the name most commonly used by
that his writings lack tranquillity, and popes.
 —— —

464 • The Triumph of Life

"Whither the conqueror hurries me still less.

But follow thou, and from spectator turn 305

Actor or victim in this wretchedness,

"And what thou wouldst be taught I then may learn

—
From thee. Now listen ... In the April prime
When all the forest tops began to burn

"With kindling green, touched by the azure clime 310

Of the young year, I found myself asleep

Under a mountain, which from unknown time

"Had yawned into a cavern high and deep,

And from it came a gentle rivulet
Whose water like clear air in its calm sweep 315

"Bent the soft grass and kept for ever wet

The stems of the sweet flowers, and filled the grove
With sound which all who hear must needs forget
"All pleasure and all pain, all hate and love,
Which they had known before that hour of rest: 320

A sleeping mother then would dream not of

"The only child who died upon her breast
At eventide, a king would mourn no more
The crown of which his brow was dispossest
"When the sun lingered o'er the Ocean floor 325

To gild his rival's new prosperity.

Thou wouldst forget thus vainlv to deplore

"Ills, which if ills, can find no cure from thee,

The thought of which no other sleep will quell
Nor other music blot from memory 330

"So sweet and deep is the oblivious 1 spell.

Whether my life had been before that sleep
The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell
"Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep,
I know not. I arose and for a space 335

The scene of woods and waters seemed to keep,

"Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace

Of light diviner than the common Sun
Sheds on the common Earth, but all the place

"Was filled with many sounds woven into one 340

Oblivious melody, confusing sense

Amid the gliding waves and shadows dun;

1. Attended by forgetfulness.
 —
The Triumph of Life • 465
"And as I looked the bright omnipresence
Of morning through the orient cavern flowed,
And the Sun's image radiantly intense 345

"Burned on the waters 2 of the well that glowed

Like gold, and threaded all the forest maze
With winding paths of emerald fire there stood —
"Amid the sun, as he amid the blaze
Of his own glory, on the vibrating 350

Floor of the fountain, paved with flashing rays,

"A shape all light, 3 which with one hand did fling
Dew on the earth, as she were the Dawn
if

Whose invisible rain forever seemed to sing

"A silver music on the mossy lawn, 355

And still before her on the dusky grass

Iris 4 her many coloured scarf had drawn.

"In her right hand she bore a chrystal glass

Mantling with bright Nepenthe; 5 the fierce splendour— 360
Fell from her as she moved under the mass

"Of the deep cavern, and with palms 6 so tender

Their tread broke not the mirror of its billow,
Glided along the river, and did bend her

"Head under the dark boughs, till like a willow

Her fair hair swept the bosom of the stream 365

That whispered with delight to be their pillow. 7 —

"As one enamoured is upborne in dream
O'er lily-paven lakes mid silver mist
To wondrous music, so this shape might seem
"Partly to tread the waves with feet which kist 370

The dancing foam, partly to glide along

The airs that roughened the moist amethyst,
"Or the slant morning beams that fell among
The trees, or the soft shadows of the trees;
And her feet ever to the ceaseless song 375

"Of and winds and waves and birds and bees

leaves
And falling dropsmoved in a measure new
Yet sweet, as on the summer evening breeze

2. The sun, symbol of the deity, is re- is the son of Circe, the daughter of the
fleeted from water, symbol of mortality. Sun, as seducing virtuous travelers by
3. Literally the glare of the light from offering them "orient liquor in a Crystal
the Sun (345) reflected from the waters Glasse" that is greater than "that Ne-
of the well (346) — the Ideal creativity penthes," a drug to erase all pain, anger,
reflected by an earthly medium (the and sorrow, which Helen of Troy gives
human imagination). to Telemachus (Odyssey, IV).
4. The rainbow. 6. See Adonais, 212 and note.
5. InComus, 63-66, 672-677, Milton 7. The shape all light (352) assumes the
describes Comus, the evil magician who shape of a rainbow.
 — —— —
466 • The Triumph of Life

"Up from the lake a shape of golden dew

Between two rocks, athwart the rising moon, 380

Dances i' the wind where eagle never flew.

"And still her feet, no less than the sweet tune

To which they moved, seemed as they moved, to blot
The thoughts of him who gazed on them, and soon
*
"All that was seemed as if it had been not, 385

As if the gazer's mind was strewn beneath

Her feet like embers, and she, thought by thought,

"Trampled its fires into the dust of death,

As Day upon the threshold of the east
Treads out the lamps of night, until the breath 390

"Of darkness reillumines even the least

Of heaven's living eyes like day she came, —
Making the night a dream; and ere she ceased

"To move, as one between desire and shame

—
Suspended, I said 'If, as it doth seem, 395

Thou comest from the realm without a name,

" 'Into this valley of perpetual dream,
Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why

Pass not away upon the passing stream.'

" 'Arise and quench thy thirst,' was her reply. 400

And as a shut lily, stricken by the wand

Of dewy morning's vital alchemy,

"I rose; and, bending at her sweet command,

Touched with faint lips the cup she raised,
And suddenly my brain became as sand 405

"Where the first wave had more than half erased

The track of deer on desert Labrador,
Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed

"Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore

Until the second bursts so on mv sight — * 10

Burst a new Vision never seen before.

"And the fair shape waned in the coming light

As veil by the silent splendour drops
veil
From Lucifer, 8 amid the chrysolite

"Of sunrise ere it strike the mountain tops 415

And as the presence of that fairest planet

Although unseen is felt by one who hopes
8. Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, is the morn- Shelley's poetry); Chrysolite is a gem,
ing star (always the planet Venus in olivine, of pale yellowish-green color.
 —— —
The Triumph of Life • 467
"That his day's path may end as he began it

In that star's smile, 9 whose light is like the scent

Of a jonquil when evening breezes fan it,
42 °

"Or the soft notes in which his dear lament

The
Brescian shepherd breathes, 1 or the caress
That turned his weary slumber to content.

"So knew I in that light's severe excess

The presence of that shape which on the stream 425

Moved, as I moved along the wilderness,

"More dimly than a day appearing dream,

The ghost of a forgotten form of sleep,
A light from Heaven whose half extinguished beam

"Through the sick day in which we wake to weep 430

Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost.

So did that shape its obscure tenour keep

"Beside my path, as silent as a ghost;

But the new Vision, and its cold bright car,
With savage music, stunning music, crost 435

"The forest, and as if from some dread war

Triumphantly returning, the loud million
Fiercely extolled the fortune of her star.

"A moving arch of victory the vermilion

And green and azure plumes of Iris had 440
Built high over her wind-winged pavilion, 2

"And underneath aetherial glory clad

The wilderness, and far before her flew
The tempest of the splendour which forbade

"Shadow to fall from leaf or stone; the crew — 445

Seemed in that light like atomies 3 that dance

—
Within a sunbeam. Some upon the new

"Embroidery of flowers that did enhance

The grassy vesture of the desart, played,
Forgetful of the chariot's swift advance; 450

"Others stood gazing till within the shade

Of the great mountain its light left them dim.

Others outspeeded it, and others made

9. Venus, as morning and evening r tar. rectly west of Verona (and thus almost
1. "Thefavorite song, 'Stanco di pas- due west of Venice).
colar le peccorelle,' [I am weary of 2. The rainbow forms an arch of tri-
pasturing my sheep] is a Brescian na- umph for the conquering chariot of Life,
tional air," (Mary Shelley's note). 3. Tiny particles (motes) of dust.
Brescia is a city in northern Italy, di-
 — —
468 • The Triumph of Life

"Circles around it like the clouds that swim

Round the high moon in a bright sea of air, 455

And more did follow, with exulting hymn,

"The chariot and the captives fettered there,
But all like bubbles on an eddying flood

Fell into the same track at last and were

"Borne onward. —
I among the multitude" 460

Was swept; me sweetest flowers delayed not long,

Me not the shadow nor the solitude,

"Me not the falling stream's Lethean 4 song,

Me, not the phantom of that early form
Which moved upon its motion, but among — 465

"The thickest billows of the living storm

I plunged, and bared my bosom to the clime
Of that cold light, whose airs too soon deform.

"Before the chariot had begun to climb

The opposing steep of that mysterious dell, 470
Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme

"Of him 5 who from the lowest depths of Hell

Through every Paradise and through all glory
Love led serene, and who returned to tell

"In words of hate and awe the wondrous story 475

How all things are transfigured, except Love;

For deaf as is a sea which wrath makes hoar)'

"The world can hear not the sweet notes that move
The sphere whose light is melody to lovers
A wonder worthy of his —
rhyme the grove 480

"Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,

The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air <}

Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers

"A flock of vampire-bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing ere evening 485

Strange night upon some Indian isle, thus were —

"Phantoms diffused around, and some did fling
Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves,
Behind them, some like eaglets on the wing
4. According to Greek mythology, the even to retaining the ungrammatical who.
River Lethe has the power to produce 6. In Book IV of De rerum natura,
forgetfulness of the past when its water Lucretius describes how ideas, supersti-
is drunk. tions, and passions are given off by men
5. Dante; who is, properly, the object of in the form of simulacra or masks that
Love led (474), and some editors alter peel off and float around in the air.
the word to "whom," but the awkward Contrast the reversal of this procedure
sound of "him whom" might well have in Prometheus Unbound. III.iT.
led Shelley to find another solution.
 The Triumph of Life • 469
"Were lost in thewhite blaze, others like elves 49°

Danced in athousand unimagined shapes

Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves;

"And others sate chattering like restless apes

On vulgar paws and voluble like fire.
Some made a cradle of the ermined capes 495

"Of kingly mantles, some upon the tiar 7

Of pontiffs sate like vultures, others played
Within the crown which girt with empire

"A baby's or an idiot's brow, and made

Their nests in it; the old anatomies 8 500

Sate hatching their bare brood under the shade

"Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes

To reassume the delegated power
Arrayed in which these worms did monarchize

"Who make this earth their charnel. 9 —Others more 505

Humble, like falcons sate upon the fist

Of common men, and round their heads did soar,

"Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist

On evening marshes, thronged about the brow
Of lawyer, statesman, priest and theorist, sio

"And snow
others like discoloured flakes of
On bosoms and the sunniest hair
fairest
Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

"Which they extinguished; for like tears, they were

A veil tothose from whose faint lids they rained 515

In drops of sorrow. —
I became aware

"Of whence those forms proceeded which thus stained

The track in which we moved; after brief space
From every form the beauty slowlv waned,
"From every firmest limb and fairest face 520

The strength and freshness fell like dust, and left

The action and the shape without the grace
"Of life; the marble brow of youth was cleft
With care, and in the eyes where once hope shone
Desire like a lioness bereft 525

"Of its last cub, glared ere it died; each one

Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly
These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

7. Tiara or triple crown, symbolic of the 9. A charnel house, where bones of the
sovereignty and dignity of the papacy. dead are kept.
8. Skeletons.
 — —
470 • The Triumph of Life

"In Autumn evening from a poplar tree

Each, like himself and like each other were, 1 530

At first, but soon distorted, seemed to be

"Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air;

And of this stuff the car's creative ray

Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there

—
"As the sun shapes the clouds thus, on the- way 535

Mask after mask fell from the countenance

And form of all, and long before the day
"Was old, the joy which waked like Heaven's glance
The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died,
And some grew weary of the ghastly dance 540

"And fell, as I have fallen by the way side,

Those soonest from whose forms most shadows past

And least of strength and beauty did abide."
"Then, what is Life?" I said the cripple cast
. . .

His eye upon the car which now had rolled 545

Onward, as if that look must be the last,

And answered. . . . "Happv those for whom the fold
Of

1. Each shadow was like himself who sembled all the other simulacra given off
gave them off, and each shadow re- by the same person.
The Prose
 On Love
1

What is Love? —Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who
adores what is God.
I know not the internal constitution of other men, or even of
thine whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes
they resemble me, but when misled by that appearance I have
thought to appeal to something in common and unburthen my
inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood
like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities
they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the
interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of
sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such
proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have every
where sought, and have found only repulse and disappointment.
Thou demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction
towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves
when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient
void and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community
with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would
be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of
our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would
that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams
of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our
own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering
and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love. This is
the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with
man, but with every thing which exists. We are born into the
world and there is something within us which from the instant
that we live and move thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in
correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from
the bosom of its mother; this propensity developes itself with the
developement of our nature. We
dimly see within our intellectual
nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of
all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every
thing excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as

1. The original draft of "On Love" ap- Keepsake for 1829 (1828), from which it
pears on pp. 1-9 of Bodleian MS. Shelley was immediately reprinted in England
adds, e.ll, having been written (as the and translated in a French periodical,
contents of the notebook suggest) in Thomas Medwin published a somewhat
the summer of 1818 —
very likely between different version in The Shelley Papers
July 20 and 25, after Shelley fhrshed (1833). For a full discussion of the
his translation of Plato's Symposium essay's date, text, and ideas, see Shelley
and before he began "Discourse of the and his Circle, VI (1973), 633-647. Our
Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative text is based on Shelley's Bodleian holo-
to the Subject of Love." Mary Shelley graph,
first published the essay in the annual

473
 — "

474 • On Life

belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our

external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particulars of
which our nature is composed: 2 a mirror whose surface reflects

only the forms of purity and brightness: a soul within our soul
that describes a circle around its proper Paradise which pain
and sorrow and evil dare not overleap. To this we eagerly refer
all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond
with it. The discovery of its antitype: the meeting with an under-
standing capable of clearly estimating the deductions of our own,
an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle
and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish
and unfold in secret, with a frame whose nerves, like the chords
of two exquisite lyres strung to the accompaniment of one delight-
ful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and of a
combination of all these in such proportion as the type within
demands: this is the invisible and unattainable point to which
Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of
man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession
of which there is no rest or respite to the heart over which it
rules. Hence in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are
surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathise not with
us, we love the flowers, the grass and the waters and the sky.
In the motion of the very leaves of spring in the blue air there
is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is
eloquence in the tongueless wind and a melody in the flowing of
brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them which by their
inconceivable to something within the soul, awaken
relation
the spirits dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of
to a
mysterious tenderness to the eyes like the enthusiasm of patriotic
success or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne
says that if he were in a desart he would love some cypress. * .

So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living

sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk
of what once he was.

On Life'

Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are

and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures

"These words are inefficient and meta- Shelley's fragmentary essay "On Life"
2.
phorical — Most words so No help — — 1.

grew directly from an early passage in

(Shelley's note). his View of Reform and
Philosophical
3. David Lee Clark has found this senti- was sometime late in 1819. in
written,
ment expressed not in Sterne but in the back of the notebook in which he
Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Ac- drafted A Philosophical View. The leaves
rive and Moral Powers of Man. This containing "On Life" were later re-
book was not, however, published until moved from the notebook and are now in
1828, and Shelley's source remains un- the Pierpont Morgan Library. Thomas
identified. Medwin first published a version of "On
 On Life • 475
from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration
at some of its transient modifications; but it is itself the great
miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties with
the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the
extinction of religions and of political systems to life? What are
the revolutions of the globe which we
and the operations
inhabit,
of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life?
What is the universe of stars and suns [of] which this inhabited
earth is one and their motions and their destiny compared with
life? Life, the great miracle, we admire not, because it is so
miraculous. It is well that we by the familiarity
are thus shielded
of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable from an
astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the
functions of that which is [its] object.
If any artist (I do not say had executed) but had merely con-

ceived in his mind the system of the sun and stars and planets,
they not existing, and had painted to us in words or upon canvas,
the spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of Heaven and
illustrated it by the wisdom of astronomy, how great would be
our admiration. Or had he imagined the scenery of this earth,
the mountains, the seas and the rivers, and the grass and the
flowers and the variety of the forms and masses of the leaves of
the woods and the colours which attend the setting and the
rising sun, and the hues of the atmosphere, turbid or serene,
these things not before existing, truly we should have been
astonished and it would have been more than a vain boast to have
said of such a man, "Non merita nome di creatore, sennon Iddio
ed il Poeta." 2 But now these things are looked on with little
wonder and to be conscious of them with intense delight is
esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordi-
nary person. The multitude of those men care not for them. It
is thus with Life — that which includes all.

What
is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our

will,and we employ words to express them. We are born, and

our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in
fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension
of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the

mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our

Life" in the Athen&um for September implications of "On Life," see the
29, 1832, and again the next year in critical from C. E. Pulos's
selections
The Shelley Papers. Mary Shelley pro- The Deep and Donald H. Rei-
Truth
vided a more correct version in her man's Shelley's "The Triumph of Life,"
edition of Shelley's Essays, Letters from pp. 110-116.
Abroad, etc. (1840). Our text is based 2. "None deserves the name of Creator
on Shelley's manuscript in the Pierpont exceptGod and the Poet." Shelley quotes
Morgan Library and contains several im- from a saying attributed to the Italian
portant changes from previous texts. epic poet Tasso in Pierantonio Serassi's
For a discussion of the ideas and Life of Torquato Tasso.
476 - On Life

ignorance to ourselves, and this is much. For what are we?

Whence do we come, and whither do we go? Is birth the com-
mencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth
and death?
The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of
life which, though startling to the apprehension, is in fact that

which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has ex-

tinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from
this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who am
unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philos-
ophers, who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.
It is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle, and
we must be long convicted, before we can be convinced that the
solid universe of external things dreams are made
is "such stuff as
of." 3 —
The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of
mind and matter, and its fatal consequences in morals, their
violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early
conducted me to materialism. This materialism is a seducing
system to young and superficial minds. It allows its disciples to
talk and dispenses them from thinking. But I was discontented
with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of
high aspirations "looking both before and after," 4 whose "thoughts
that wander through eternity," 5 disclaim alliance with transience
and decay, incapable of imagining to himself annihilation, existing
but in the future and the past, being, not what he is, but what
he has been, and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final
destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothing-
ness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character
of all life and being. —
Each is at once the centre and the circum-
ference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line
in which all things are contained. —
Such contemplations as these
materialism and the popular philosophy of mind and matter, alike
forbid; they are consistent only with the intellectual system.
It is absurd to enter into a long recapitulation of arguments
sufficiently familiar to those enquiring minds whom alone a
writeron abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the
most clear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is
to be found in Sir W. Drummond's Academical Questions. 6 After
such an exposition it would be idle to translate into other words
what could only lose its energy and fitness by the change.
Examined point by point and word bv word, the most discrimi-
3. Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV. i. 156- 6. For the influence on Shelley of Sir
57. William Drumond's Academical Ques-
4. Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV.iv.37. See tions (1805), see Pulos, pages 519-524.
also. "To a Sky-Lark," 86-87. below.
5. Milton, Paradise Lost, 11.148.
 —
On Life 477
nating intellects have been able to discover no train of thoughts
in the process of reasoning, which does not conduct inevitably
its

to the conclusion which has been stated.

What follows from the admission? It establishes no new truth,
it gives us no additional insight into our hidden nature, neither

its action, nor itself- Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build,

has much work yet remaining as pioneer 7 for the overgrowth of

ages. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error, and
the roots of error. It leaves, what is too often the duty of the
reformer in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy. It
reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted,
but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its
—
own creation. By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense,
including what is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly
mean. In this latter sense almost all familiar objects are signs,
standing not for themselves but for others, in their capacity of
suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts.
Our whole life is thus an education of error.
Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and
intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves. Many
of the circumstances of social life were then important to us,
which are now no longer so. But that is not the point of com-
parison on which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished
all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were

to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect
are always children. Those who are subject to the state called
reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding
universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into
their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are
stateswhich precede or accompany or follow an unusually intense
and vivid apprehension of life. As men grow up, this power com-
monly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents.
Their feelings and their reasonings are the combined result of
a multitude of entangled thoughts, of a series of what are called
impressions, planted by reiteration.
The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of
the intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but
as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those
two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by the
names of ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread
of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds similar to
that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is
likewise found to be a delusion. The words, I, you, they, are not

7. A foot soldier who went ahead to clear a path for the main body of troops.
 —
478 • A Defence of Poetry
signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage
of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to
denote the different modifications of the one mind.
Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the mon-
strous presumption, that I, the person who now write and think,
am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, and you
and they are grammatical devices invented simplv for arrangement
and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually
attached to them. It is difficult to find terms adequately to express
so subtle a conception as that to which the intellectual philosophy
has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us,
and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss
of —how little we know.
The relations of things remain unchanged by whatever system.
By the word things is to be understood any object of thought, that
is, any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with

an apprehension of distinction. The relations of these remain

unchanged; and such is the material of our knowledge.
—
What is the cause of life? that is, how was it produced, or
what agencies distinct from life, have acted or act upon life? All
recorded generations of mankind have wearily busied themselves
in inventing answers to this question. And the result has been . .

Religion. Yet, that the basis of all things cannot be, as the popular
philosophy alledges, mind is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as
we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience
how vain is argument, cannot create, it can only perceive. It is
said also to be the Cause? But cause is only a word expressing
a certain state of the human mind with regard to the manner in
which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to each other.
If any one desires to know how unsatisfactorily the popular philos-

ophy employs itself upon this great question, they need only
impartially reflect upon the manner in which thoughts develope
themselves in their minds. —
It is infinitely improbable that the
cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind. It is said
that mind produces motion and it might as well have been said
that motion produces mind.

A Defence of Poetry In the first (and only) issue of Ollier's

Literary Miscellany (1820), a periodical published by Charles Oilier.
Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock published a half serious essay
entitled "The Four Ages of Poetry." Peacock argued that poetry passed
through repeated four stage cycles: first, an iron age, in which literature
was crude and simple (the period of court bards, folk ballads, and romances,
both primitive and medieval )
; an age of gold, in which genius develops
the great epic and tragic forms (from Homer to Euripides and from Dante
 A Defence of Poetry • 479
to Milton); a silver age of polished and civilized, but derivative, poetry
governed by fixed rules (the Augustan age in Rome and the English
Augustan age from Dryden to Pope); and, finally, the age of brass, in
which the narrow vein of polished social poetry and satire having been
exhausted, poets seek novelty in pseudo-simplicity. This is the age Peacock
saw in the England of his own time: "Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and
cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and
pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek islands. . . .

Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons;
and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired from similar
sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of
German metaphysics ." . .

Peacock, who had failed as a poet and had recently begun work at the
East India Company, urged intelligent men to stop wasting their time
writing poetry and apply themselves to the new sciences, including eco-
nomics and political theory, which would improve the world.
Shelley wrote his answer in February and March 1821, hoping to have
it appear in a subsequent issue of the Literary Miscellany. Later he wished

to have it issued as a pamphlet, but he died before he could complete the

arrangements. Late in 1822, Mary Shelley tried to include the paper in the
Liberal, but that periodical, too, failed before the Defence could appear.
Finally, Mary included it in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and
Fragments (1840), without the references to Peacock's by then long for-
gotten essay.
The Defence of Poetry exists major manuscripts a rough draft
in four —
(BodleianMS. Shelley d.i) and copy (Bod. MS. Shelley adds.
a partial fair
e.20) in Shelley's hand and two transcripts by Mary, one containing
Shelley's corrections and sent as press copy to Oilier in 1821 (Bod. MS.
Shelley e.6) and the other from Mary's transcript book of 1822-1824,
which was removed to serve as press copy for the 1840 first edition (Bod.
MS. Shelley adds. d.8). Most
early texts derived from the first edition;
some recent texts —notably
John E. Jordan's carefully edited text in the
Bobbs-Merrill Library of the Liberal Arts —
use Shelley's fair copy as their
copy text. It seems clear, however, that the transcript by Mary with
Shelley's corrections that was sent to Oilier in 1821 is later than Shelley's
fair copy and is in some ways more authoritative than any other surviving
manuscript, since it is the only version Shelley himself approved for publi-
cation. We have, therefore, followed Bodleian MS. Shelley e.6, correcting
some spelling and punctuation from Shelley's holographs and restoring a
few words in Shelley's fair copy that may have been accidentally omitted by
Mary while transcribing. Since completing our edition, we have consulted
Fanny Delisle's Study of Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry": A Textual and
Critical Evaluation (2 vols. Salzburg, 1974) and have altered a few points
on the basis of her suggestions.
480 • A Defence of Poetry

A Defence of Poetry
or Remarks Suggested by an Essay
Entitled "The Four Ages' of Poetry"

[According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental

action, which are and imagination, the former may
called reason
be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one
thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind
acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own
light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts,
each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity?/
The one is the to "irbfav, or the principle of synthesis, and has for
its objects those forms which are common to universal nature

and existence itself; the other is the T6 koyt^eiv, 1 or principle of

analysis, and its action regards the relations of things, simply as
relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unitv, but
as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general
results. ^Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known;
imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities,
both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences,
and imagination the similitudes of things. R eason is to Im aginatio n
as the installment to the a gent , as the body to the spirit, as the
s hadow to the subsiariceTA
/* Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression 1]
"
,of the Imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man.
Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal
impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing
wind over an .^olianjyre, which move it by their motion to ever-
changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being,
and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than
in the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony, by
an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to
the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could
accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them,
in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can
accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at
play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions;
and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact
relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions
which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impres-
sion; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has

1. The two Greek terms can be transliterated (and translated) poiein (making) and
logizein (reasoning).
 1

A Defence of Poetry • 48
died away, so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions
the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of
the cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these
expressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for
the savage is what the child is to years) expresses the emo-
to ages
tions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner;
and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imita-
tion, become the image of the combined effect of those objects,
and of his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his
passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions
and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces
an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and
the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the
medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue,
the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws
from which as from its elements society results, begin to develope
themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist;
the future is contained within the present as the plant within
the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence,
become the principles alone capable of affording the motives
according to which the will of a social being is determined to
action, inasmuch
tion, virtue in
as he is

sentiment, beauty in
social; and constitute pleasure
art, truth in reasoning,
in sensa-
and
F§
I
£*J&"
love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the infancy
of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, I?
distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented ^ .

"2;

by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from

which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considera- ^
tions which might involve an enquiry into the principles of
society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the \
imagination is expressed upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate
natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a
certain rhythm or And, although all men observe a similar,
order.
they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance,
in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in
^)
the series of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a i^
certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of
mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator
receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the
sense of an approximation to this order has been called taste, by
modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art, observes an
order which approximates more or less closely to that from which
this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently
marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those
 482 • A Defence of Poetry
instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation
to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the rela-
tion between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great.
Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal
sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in
which they express the influence of society or nature upon their
own minds, communicates itself to others, arjd gathers a sort of
reduplication from that community. [Their language is vitally

$»"'
A jii^ metaphorical;f that is, it marks the b ef ore "una pp reh ended relations
things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words

y which represent them— become through time signs for ppjliojis

_or__classes of thoughts 2 ! instead of pictures of integral thoughts;
and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associa-
tions which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead
to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes
or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same foot-
steps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world" 3 —
and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the store-
house of axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancv of
society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself
is and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beau-
poetry;
tiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting,

first between existence and perception, and secondly between

perception and expression. Every original language near to its
source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of
lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a
later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the crea-
tions of Poetry.
\But Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible
order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the
dance and architecture and statuary and painting: they are the
institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the
inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into
a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial
apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called
religion^Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible
of allegory, and like Janus 4 have a double face of false and true.
Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in
which they appeared, were called epochs of the world
in the earlier
legislators or prophets :**a poet essentially comprises and unites
both these characters. (£o For he not only beholds intensely the
J

2. I.e., abstract concepts. sometimes four) faces on a single head

3. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 5. As
Sir Philip Sidney pointed out in
Book III, chap. 1. his Apologie fur Poetrie (1505). vales.
4. Roman god of beginnings (January) the Romans' term for poet, means "a
and endings, represented with two (or diviner, fore-seer, or Prophet."
 A Defence of Poetry • 483
present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present

things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the

present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the
fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in
the gross sense of the word^/or that they can foretell the form
as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence
of superstition which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy,
rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. /A Poet participates
in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his
conceptions, time and place and number are not/ The gram-
matical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference
of persons and the distinction of place are convertible with respect
to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry, and the choruses
of /Eschylu s, andhe book of lob, and Dante 's Paradise would
t

afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if

the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of
sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.
^Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action
/
are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called
poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a
synonime of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense
expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical
language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne
is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs

from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representa-

tion of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is
susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour,
form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the
controul of that faculty of which it is the creationJFor language
is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and nas relation to
thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions
y
of art, have relations among each other, which limit and interpose
1 between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror
vvrlich reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of

which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame

of sculptors, painters and musicians, although the intrinsic powers
of the great masters of these arts, mav yield in no degree to that of
those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their
thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense
of the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal
effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and
founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems
to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely
be a question whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their
flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates,
484 - A Defence of Poetry
together with that which belonged to them in their higher character
of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the meaning of the word Poetry
within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the

most perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary how-

ever to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinc-
tion between measured and unmeasured language; for the popular
division into prose and verse is inadmissible in" accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each
other and towards that which they represent, and a perception
of the order of those relations has always been found connected
with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence
the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and
harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry,
and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication
of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to
that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as
wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the
formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from
one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must
spring again from its seed or it will bear no flower and this is —
the burthen of the curse of Babel.
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of this
harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its

relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of tradi-

tional forms of harmony of language. Yet it is by no means essential
that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional
form, so that the harmony which is its spirit, be observed. The
practise is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred,
especially in such composition as includes much form and action:
but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of
his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification.
The between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.
distinction
The between philosophers and poets has been antici-
distinction
pated. Plato was essentially a poet —
the truth and splendour of
his imagery and the melody of his language is the most intense
that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the
epic, dramatic, and lvrical forms, because he sought to kindle a
harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore
to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under
determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero 6 sought
to imitate the cadence of his periods but with little success. Lord

6. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106—43 B.C.). most famous for his speeches in law
Roman statesman and man of letters, courts and before the Senate.
 A Defence of Poetry •
485
Bacon was a poet. 7 His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm,
which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wis-
dom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which
distends, and then bursts the circumference of the hearer's mind,
and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element
with which it has perpetual sympathy/All the authors of revolu
tions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors
nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of thing
by images which participate in the life of truth; but as thei
periods are harmonious and rhythmical and contain in themselve;
the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor
are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms
of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects,
lesscapable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than
those who have omitted that form. Shakespea re, Dant e and Milton
(to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the
veryjoftiest power.
^Apoem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truthTj
There is this between a story and a poem, that a
difference
story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond
of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect;
the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable
forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator,
which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial,
and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain
combination of events which can never again recur; the other is
universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to
whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties
of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
of the story of particular facts, stript of the poetry which should
invest them, augments that of Poetry, and for ever developes new
and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains.
Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; 8
they eat out the poetry of it. The story of particular facts is as
a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beau-
tiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is
distorted.
The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the com-
position as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be con-
sidered as a whole though it be found in a series of unassimilated

7. "See the Filium Labyrinthi and the developed the essay in English.
Essay on Death particularly" (Shelley's 8. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, II.
note). Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam ii.4: "Asfor the corruptions and moths
and Viscount St. Albans (1561-1626), of history, which are epitomes, the use
Lord Chancellor of England, was a lead- of them deserveth to be banished."
ing philosopher and man of letters who
 486 - A Defence of Poetry
portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch,
Livy, were poets; 9 and although the plan of these writers, especially
that of Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its
highest degree, they make copious and ample amends for their
subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living
images.
Having determined what is poetry, and w"ho are poets, let us
proceed to estimate its effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which
it falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled
with its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets them-
selves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of
poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond
and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations
to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all
the strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times,
no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury
which sits in judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to
all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by

Time from the selectest of the wise of many generationsjA Poet

is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own

solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced

by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved
J^and softened, yet know not whence or why. 1 The poems of Horner
and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they
were the elements of that social system which is the column upon
which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied
the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we
doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition
of becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses: the truth and
beauty of friendship, patriotism and persevering devotion to an
object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations:
the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged
by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until
from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified
themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be
objected, that these characters are remote from moral perfection,
and that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns
for general imitation. Every epoch under names more or less specious

9. Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) wrote 120 a.d.) wrote the Parallel Lives of
the first Greek history in nine books out- eminent Greeks and Romans in Greek;
lining the events in all the kingdoms of Titus Livius (ca. 59 b.c.-a.d. 17) wrote
the eastern Mediterranean leading up to a history of Rome in 142 books. 35 of
the wars between the Greek states and which survive,
the Persian Empire; Plutarch (ca. 46- 1. Cf. "To a Sky-Lark," lines 36-40.
 A Defence of Poetry • 487
has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked Idol of the
worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled Image
of unknown evil before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But
a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary
dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover
without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic
or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul,
as he may the antient armour or the modern uniform around his
body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than
either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far
concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its
form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate
the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic
form and graceful motions will express themselves through the
most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest
class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions
in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the
alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to temper this
planetary music2 for mortal ears.
The whole objection however of the immorality of poetry rests
upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to
produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges
the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes
and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for
want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and
censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But Poetry acts
in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind
itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended

combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden

beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were
not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersona-
tions clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds
of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that
gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts
and actions with which it coexists. \The great secret of morals is
Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or
person, not our own. 3 A man, to be greatly good, must imagine

2. The "music of the spheres," sup- sentences in Shelley's translation of the

posedly accompanying the movements of dialogue reads: "Love, therefore, and
the planets, could not (according to tra- every thing else that desires anything,
dition) be heard by men in their fallen desires that which is absent and beyond
condition since Adam's sin. his reach, that which it has not, that
3. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates ex- which is not itself, that which it
plains to Agathon that love arises not wants . .
." (James Notopoulos, The
from richness and fulfillment, but from Platonism of Shelley [Durham, N.C.,
lack and need. One of Socrates' key 1949], p. 440).
488 • A Defence of Poetry
intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place
of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his
species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good
is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect bv acting

upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the cir cumferen ce of the imagination
by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have
the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all
other thoughtsjand which form new intervals and interstices whose
void for ever craves fresh foodAPoetry strengthens that faculty which
is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as

exercise strengthens a limb^A Poet therefore would do ill to

embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are
usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which
participate in neither. By
assumption of the inferior office
this
of interpreting the effect, which perhaps after all he might
in
acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign the glory in a
participation in the cause. There was little danger that Homer,
or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood
themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion.
Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as
Euripides, Lucan, 4 Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral
aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion
to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval
by the dramatic and lyrical Poets of Athens, who flourished con-
temporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred
expressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music,
the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and we may add the forms of
civil For although the scheme of Athenian society was de-
life.

formed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in Chivalry

and Christianity have erased from the habits and institutions of
modern Europe; 5 yet never at any other period has so much energy,
beauty, and virtue, been developed; never was blind strength and
stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of
man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful
and the true, as during the century which preceded the death of
Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we
records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the
divinity inman. But it is Poetrv alone, in form, in action, or in
language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above all
others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For
written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other

4. For Lucan, see Adonais, 404, and chief blots on Athenian society as
note. slavery and the subjugation of women.
5. Shelley elsewhere identifies the two
 A Defence of Poetry • 489
arts, and it is an idle enquiry to demand which gave and which
received the light, which all as from a common focus have scat-
tered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no
more of cause and than a constant conjunction of events:
effect
Poetry is ever found to coexist with whatever other arts contribute
to the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal to what has
already been established to distinguish between the cause and the
effect.

was at the period here adverted to, that the Drama had its
It

birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or

surpassed those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which
have been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself
never was understood or practised according to the true philosophy
of it, as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action,
music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to produce
a common effect in the representation of the highest idealisms of
passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect
in its kind by artists of the most consummate skill, and was
disciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity one towards
another. On the modern stage a few only of the elements capable
of expressing the image of the poet's conception are employed
at once. We
have tragedy without music and dancing; and music
and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they
are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity.
Religious institution has indeed been usually banished from the
stage. Our system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on
which the many expressions appropriated to his dramatic character
might be moulded into one permanent and unchanging expression,
is favourable only to a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit

for nothing but a monologue, where all the attention may be

directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. The modern prac-
tice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great
abuse in point of practise, is undoubtedly an extension of the
dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in King Lear,
universal, and sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of
ideal,
this which determines the balance in favour of King
principle
Lear against the CEdipus Tyrannus or the Agamemnon, or, if you
will the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the intense
power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be
considered as restoring the equilibrium. 6 King Lear, if it can
sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect
specimen of the dramatic ait existing in the world; in spite of the

6. Shakespeare's King Lear is compared Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus and

with plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus, Aeschylus' trilogy of Argos, known as
each the first play of a trilogy Sopho- — —
the Oresteia Agamemnon, The Libation-
cles' Theban cycle of Oedipus the King, Bearers, and The Eumenides.
490 • A Defence of Poetry
narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance
of the philosophy of the Drama which has prevailed in modern
Europe. Calderon in his religious Autos has attempted to fulfil some
of the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by
Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama
and religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing;
but he omits the observation of conditions stillmore important, and
more is lost than gained bv a substitution of the rigidly-defined and
ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living
impersonations of the truth of human passion. 7
But we digress. —The Author of the Four Ages of Poetry
has prudently omitted to dispute on the effect of the Drama upon
life if I know the knight bv the device of his
and manners. For,
shield, have only to inscribe Philoctetes 8 or Agamemnon or
I

Othello upon mine to put to flight the giant sophisms which

have enchanted him, as the mirror of intolerable light, though
on the arm of one of the weakest of the Paladins, could blind
and scatter whole armies of necromancers and pagans. The con-
nexion of scenic exhibitions with the improvement or corrup-
tion of the manners of men, has been universallv recognized: in
other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect
and universal form has been found to be connected with good
and evil in conduct and habit. The corruption which has been
imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry
employed in its constitution, ends: I appeal to the history of
manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the
decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness
equal to any other example of moral cause and effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have ap-
proached to its perfection, coexisted with the moral and intellectual
greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as
mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin
disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection
and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all
that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is
enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that
they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which
they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity,
indignation, terror and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged
from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of
familiar life; even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all
its contagion bv being represented as the fatal consequence of

7. Shelley learned Spanish primarily to Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681).

read the plays and autos sacramentales 8. A tragedy by Sophocles,
(allegorical or religious dramas) of Pedro
 A Defence of Poetry • 491

the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of

its men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
wilfulness;
choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for
censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-

respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless
reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as
it is as a prismatic and many-sided
continues to express poetry,
mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and
divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary
forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies
all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating

its like wherever it may fall.

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes

with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form
of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious
accompaniment of the kindred and often the very form
arts;

misunderstood: or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which

the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no
more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness with
which the author in common with his auditors are infected.
Hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama.
Addison's "Cato" is a specimen of the one; and would it were
not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes
Poetry cannot be made sword of lightning,
subservient. Poetry is a
ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain
it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature

are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and

passion: which, divested of imagination, are other names for
caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest
degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II when all
forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed
became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and
virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him.
At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms
of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon
them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour;
we laugh from self-complacency and triumph instead of pleasure;
malignity, sarcasm and contempt, succeed to sympathetic merri-
ment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever
blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the
very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a
monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth
new food, which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of
modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined
492 • A Defence of Poetry
than any other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more
observable in the drama than in whatever other form: and it is

indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has

ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that
the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where
ithas once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and
an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life.
But, as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be
preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing
back the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect to
poetry in most extended sense: all language, institution and
its

form, require not only to be produced but to be sustained: the

office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature

as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.

Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first
of the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms were so manv
symbols of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in
Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the
lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives
of its most glorious reign. 9 Their poetry is intensely melodious; '

like the odour of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit
with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age
was as ameadow-gale of June which mingles the fragrance of all
the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing

spirit of its own which endows the sense with a power of sustain-

ing its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written
poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and
the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions which
distinguished the epoch to which we now refer. Nor is it the
poetical faculty itself, or anv misapplication of it, to which this
want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to the
influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the i

writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former especially has clothed

sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their
superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence
of thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our
those
nature, not in the absence of those which are connected with
the external; their incomparable perfection consists in an harmony
of the union of all. It is not what the erotic writers have, but
what thev have not, in which their imperfection consists. It is
not inasmuch as they were Poets, but inasmuch as thev were not
Poets, that thev can be considered with any plausibility as con-

9. Theocritus (ca. 310-250 B.C.). Calli- Egypt, under the Ptolemy kings or at
machus (fl. 260 B.C.), Moschus (fl. 150 Syracuse in Sicily. They developed the
b.c), and Bion (fl. 100 b.c.) were poets slighter forms of Greek poetry, including
writing in Greek who lived in Alexandria, the pastoral idyll.
 A Defence of Poetry • 493

nected with the corruption of their age. Had that corruption availed
so as to extinguish in them the and
sensibility to pleasure, passion
natural scenery, imputed to them as an imperfection,
which is

the last triumph of evil would have been atchieved. For the end
of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and
therefore it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the
intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing
venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all
become a torpid mass in which sense hardly survives. At the
approach of such a period, Poetry ever addresses itself to those
faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard,
like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the world. 1 Poetry
ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of
receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever
of beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time.
It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens
of Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems
of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel and sensual than the remnant
of their tribe. But ^corruption must have utterly destroyed the
fabric of human society before Poetry can ever cease. The sacred
links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which
descending through the minds of many men is attached to those
great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is
sent for th which at once connects, animates and sustains the
life of alTjlt is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds
at once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not circum-
scribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits
of the sensibility of those to whom
it was addressed, [fhey may

have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply

as fragments and isolated portionsi those who are more finely
organized, born in a happier age, mav recognize them as
or
poem, which all poets, like the co-operating
episodes to that great
thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning
of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in
antient Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never
seem been perfectly saturated with the poetical element.
to have
The Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest
treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and
to have abstained from creating in measured language, sculpture,

1. Astraea, variously said to be the wife of Saturn. During the Golden Age
daughter of Astraeus, the Titan king of she lived on earth, but the evil of men
Arcadia, of Titan (Saturn's brother) by drove her into heaven as the zodiacal
Aurora, or of Zeus (Jupiter) and Themis constellation Virgo. She is represented
("law"), she was the goddess of justice, as a stern virgin holding balance scales
and was sometimes identified with Rhea, in one hand and a sword in the other.
494 • A Defence of Poetry-

music or architecture, anything which might bear a particular

relation to their own condition, whilst it should bear a general
one to the universal constitution of the world. But we judge
from partial evidence; and we judge perhaps Ennius,
partially.
Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. 2
Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a
creator. The chosen delicacv of the expressions of the latter is

as a mist of light which conceals from us the intense and exceeding

truth of his conceptions of nature. Liw is instinct with poetrv.
Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generallv the other great writers
of the Yirgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece.
The institutions also and the religion of Rome were less poetical
than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the sub-
stance.Hence poetry in Rome, seemed to follow rather than
accompanv the perfection of political and domestic society. The
true Poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of
beautiful, true and majestic thev contained could have sprung
onlv from the facultv which creates the order in which they
consist. The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expecta-
tion of the Senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls;
the refusal of the Republic to make peace with Hannibal after
the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined
calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from
such a rhythm and order in the shews of life, who were
to those
at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. 3 The
imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of
itself according to its own idea: the consequence
was empire,
and the reward ever-living fame. These things are not the less
poetry, quia carent rate sacw. 4 They are the episodes of the cyclic
poem written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like

2. Quintus Ennius (239-169 B.C.). the ever it was threatened; his humanity to
fathering genius of Latin literature, wrote conquered enemy cities gained Rome
his epic entitled Annates in Latin hexa- many allies. Marcus Atilius Regulus.
meter verse adapted from the Greek; captured in 255 B.C., was paroled by the
about 600 lines survive. Of his nineteen Carthaginians in order to have him per-
tragedies, 420 lines remain. Marcus Pacu- suade his Roman countrymen to make
vius (220-ca. 130 b.c), his nephew, was peace; instead, he urged them to con-
the first important Latin tragic drama- tinue the war. Then, to honor the terms
tist; of his thirteen known plays, only of his parole, he returned to Carthage.
400 lines survive. Marcus Terentius Varro where he was tortured to death. When
(116-27 b.c), the leading scholar of his the Gauls entered Rome in 390 b.c.
day, wrote seventy-four works, of which the Senators sat so still in such a digni-
only his Res rusticae, a dialogue about fied manner that the Gauls at first mis-
managing a farm, survives intact. Lucius took them for statues. After Hannibal
Accius or Attius (170-ca. 85 B.c.) was had destroyed two Roman armie^
the greatest Roman tragic poet. Of his and 216 B.C.). many of Rome's Italian
forty or more plays, only 700 lines allies went over to the Carthaginians,
survive. but the Romans persisted until the
3. Marcus Furius Camillus (fl. 3% B.C. defeat of Carthage.
d. 365 b.c), rejected by the
though 4. "Because they lack a sacred poet"
Roman common people, continued to (Horace. Odes, IX.28).
return to aid the young republic when-
 A Defence of Poetry • 495
an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations
with their harmony.
At length the antient system of religion and manners had
fulfilled the circle of its revolution. And the world would have
fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found
poets among the authors of the Christian and Chivalric systems
of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action
never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of
men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts.
It is foreign to the to touch upon the evil
present purpose
produced by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground
of the principles already established, that no portion of it can
be imputed to the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the astonishing poetry of Moses, Job, David,

Solomon and Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind
of Jesusand his disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to
us by the biographers of this extraordinary person, are all instinct
with the most vivid poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been
quickly distorted. At a certain period after the prevalence of
a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by him,
the three forms into which Plato had distributed the faculties of
mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and became the object of
the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to be confessed
that "Light seems to thicken," and

The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,

Good things of day begin to droop and drowze,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouze. 5
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and
blood of this fierce chaos! how the World, as from a resurrection,
balancing on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope,
itself

has reassumed yet unwearied flight into the Heaven of time.

its

Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a

ceaseless and invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with
strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology
and institutions of the Celtic 6 conquerors of the Roman empire,
outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their
growth and victory, and blended themselves into a new fabric
of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance
of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance
of the Celtic nations. Wha Lever of evil their agencies may have

5. Shakespeare, Macbeth, III. ii. 50-53. barbarian tribes to the north of the
6. Shelley always uses "Celt" and "Cel- Mediterranean civilizations,
tic" in the original Greek meaning:
496 • A Defence of Poetry
contained sprung from the extinction of the poetical principle,
connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. Men,
from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible
and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and yet they were
its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear,

avarice, crueltyand fraud, characterised a race amongst whom no

one was to be found capable of creating in form, language, or
institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are
not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately
connected with them, and those events are most entitled to our
approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is un-
fortunate for those who cannot distinguish words from thoughts,
that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our
popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the
poetry of the Christian and Chivalric systems began to manifest
themselves. The principle of equality had been discovered and
applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the
mode which the materials of pleasure and of power produced
in
by the common
skill and labour of human beings ought to be

distributed among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted

by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the
utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus

and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of

doctrine comprehending at once the past, the present, and the
future condition of man. 7 Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and
eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity,
in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric
doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorpora-
tion of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the
South, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their
mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action
and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be
assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any
other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which
it supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and

the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading

restraints of antiquity were among the consequences of these events.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive.
political
The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love

7.Pythagoras ca. 530 B.C.), a Greek

(fl. ence and in morals and religion. The
from Samos, founded a religio-philo- Timaeus mentioned here was probably
sophical sect at Crotona in southern Pythagoras' pupil, who wrote a (Mill
Italy, which was influential in ancient extant) treatise on the nature and soul
thought in mathematics, music, and sci- of the world.
 A Defence of Poetry • 497
became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
with and motion and had walked forth among their worship-
life

pers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner

world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became
wonderful and heavenly; and a paradise was created as out of
the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its
creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art:
"Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse." 8 The Provengal Trouveurs,
or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which
unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in
the grief of Love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming
a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous
to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind con-
nected with these sacred emotions can render men more amiable,
more generous, and and lift them out of the dull vapours
wise,
of the little world of self.Dante understood the secret things of
love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible
fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized
history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were
dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the
gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by
steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the
Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry.
The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement of the
vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the "Divine Drama," in
the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell,
Purgatory and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of ever-
lasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of
all the antients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest

writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the
caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of
arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso,
Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers
of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting
as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory
over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other
by the sexes into which human kind is distributed has become
lessmisunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity
with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has become partially
recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe,

8. "Gallehaut [Galahad] was the book vere, Dante and other Italians used the
and he who wrote it" (Dante, Inferno, name (as English-speaking readers use
V.137). Since in medieval romances Pandarus) to signify a go-between in
Galahad introduced Lancelot and Guine- arranging illicit romance.
498 • A Defence of Poetry
we owe this great benefit to the worship of which Chivalry was
the law, and poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown
over the stream of time, which unites the modern and antient
world. The distorted notions of invisible thingswhich Dante
and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the
mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped
and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they
were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in
their minds between their own creeds and that of the people.
Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by
placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls justissimus unus, in Paradise, 9
and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of
rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself
a philosophical refutation of that system of which, by a strange
and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing
can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan
as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he
could ever have been intended for the popular personification of
evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement

of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these

things are evil; and although venial in a slave are not to be
forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed bv much that ennobles
his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his
conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far
superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which
he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture,
is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts

the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken
notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but
with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new tor-

ments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall
be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of
moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of
a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy
of Milton's genius. He mingled as it were the elements of human
nature, as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them into
the composition of his great picture according to the laws of
epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by
which a series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent
and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeed

9. Riphaeus, whom Virgil's Aeneas in pears in Dante's Paradiso in the Circle

his tale to called the "one man who
Dido of the Just: "Who would believe, in the
was most just" among the Trojans and erring world below, that Ripheus the
whose senseless death led the Trojan Trojan would be in this circle the fifth
hero to reflect that "the gods' ways are of the holy lights?" (XX.67-69).
not as ours" (Aeneid, 11.424-^27), ap-
 A Defence of Poetry • 499
ing generations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and Paradise
Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form;
and when change and time shall have added one more supersti-
tion to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon
the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating
the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because
it have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
will
Homer wasthe first, and Dante the second epic poet: that is,
the second poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and
intelligible relation to the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion,
and political conditions of the age in which he lived, and of
the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence
with their developement. For Lucretius had limed the wings of
and Virgil, with
his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world;
a modesty which became his genius, had affected the fame of an
ill

imitator even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and

none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were
sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber Smyrnaeus, Nonnus,
Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, 1 have sought even to fulfil a single
condition of epic truth. Milton was the third Epic Poet. For if

the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the /Eneid, still

less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme

Libera ta, the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen. 2
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the antient
and its spirit exists in their poetry
religion of the civilized world;
probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in the
unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and
the other followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals.
Dante was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him
rather in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness of his
censures of papal Dante was the first awakener of
usurpation.
entranced Europe; he created a language in itself music and
persuasion out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the
congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection
of learning; the Lucifer3 of that starry flock which in the thirteenth
century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven,

1. Apollonius of Rhodes (born ca. 295 Lucan, author of the Pharsalia, see the
b.c.) wrote his Greek romance-epic, the note to Adonais, 404. Publius Papinius
Argonautica, in Alexandria. Quintus Statius (ca. a.d. 45-96), a Roman court
Smyrnaeus (fl. ca. a.d. 375) was called poet, wrote two Latin epics, the fin-
"Calaber" because the manuscript of his ished twelve-book one entitled Thebais,
Posthomerica, a fourteen-book Greek on the struggle between Polynices and
sequel to Homer's Iliad, was discovered Eteocles for Thebes. Claudius Claudianus
in Calabria. Nonnus (fl. ca. a.d. 425- (ca. a.d. 370-404) wrote a mythological
450) wrote Dionysiaca, a Greek epic in Latin epic on the rape of Proserpine,
forty-eight books about Dionysus' con- 2. Romance epics by Ariosto and Tasso
quest of India. (He was a favorite poet in Italian, Luis de Camoens in Portu-
of Peacock, who in "The Four Ages of guese, and Spenser.
Poetry" labeled the classical "bronze 3. "Light-Bearer," or morning star,
age" of poetry the "Nonnic" age.) For
500 • A Defence of Poetry
into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are
instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inex-
tinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of
their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found
no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn,
which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn,
and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A
great Poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of
wisdom and delight; and
one person and one age has ex-
after
hausted all its which their peculiar relations
divine effluence
enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and
new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen
and an unconceived delight.
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture,
music, and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration,
and the superstructure of English literature is based upon the
materials of Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history
of Poetry and its influence on Society. Be it enough to have
pointed out the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of
the word, upon their own and all succeeding times and to revert
to the partial instances cited as illustrations of an opinion the
reverse of that attempted to be established in the Four Ages of
Poetry.
But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to
reasoners and mechanists on another plea. It is admitted that
the exercise of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged
that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds
of this distinction, what is here meant by Utility. Pleasure or
good in a general sense, is that which the consciousness of a
sensitive and being seeks, and in which when found
intelligent
it acquiesces. 4
There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, uni-
versal, and permanent; the other transitory and particular. Utility
mav either express the means of producing the former or the
latter. In the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies

the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense,

is useful. But the meaning in which the Author of the Four
Ages of Poetry seems to have employed the word utility is the
narrower one of banishing the importunity of the wants of our
animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the

4. Shelley's real challenge is to the grow- defined simply as "pleasure" to the —

ing school of radical reformers (not yet greatest number of people. Shelley here
called "utilitarians") who followed anticipates John Stuart Mill's interest in
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and ar- qualitative as well as quantitative ele-
gued that the goal of life was to provide ments in the calculation of pleasure,
the greatest quantity of "good" always —
 A Defence of Poetry • SOI

dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating

such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist
with the motives of personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility in this limited sense,
have their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of
poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of
common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions
are of the highest value so long as they confine their administration
of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within the
limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys
him spare to deface, as some of the French
gross superstitions, let
writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the
imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the
political oeconomist combines, labour, let them beware that their
speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles
which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in
modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury
and want. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him that hath,
more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that
he hath shall be taken away." 5 The rich have become richer,
and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state
is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis 6 of anarchy and
despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an
unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the defini-
tion involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human
nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the
pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror,
anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an
approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction
depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow
of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of
the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody.
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of
pleasure itself. And hence is better to go to the
the saying, "It
house of mourning, than to the house of mirth." 7 Not that this
highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The
delight of love and friendship, the extacy of the admiration of
nature, the joy of the perception and still more of the creation
of poetry is often wholly unalloyed.
The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense

5. Oneof the sayings of Jesus (Matthew Italy, and endangered ships (Homer's
25:29; Mark
4:25; Luke 8:18, 19:26). Odyssey, XII); the names came to repre-
6. Alegendary group of rocks and a sent dangers from any two opposite
whirlpool that flanked the Straits of extremes.
Messina, between Sicily and the toe of 7. Cf. Ecclesiastes 7:2.
S02 - A Defence of Poetry
is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure
are Poets or poetical philosophers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, 8
and and deluded humanity,
their disciples, in favour of oppressed
are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate
the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world
would have exhibited, had they never lived. AJittle more nonsense
would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a
few more men, women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might
not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the
abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. 9 But it exceeds all imagina-
tion to conceive what would have been the moral condition of
the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shake-
speare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if

Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew
poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of
Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of
antient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry
of the religion of the antient world had been extinguished together
with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the
intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the
invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical
reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted
to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative
faculty itself.

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we

know how to reduce into practise; we have more scientific and
oeconomical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just
distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in
these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of
facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge
respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and
political ceconomy, or at least, what is wiser and better than
what men now practise and endure. But we let "I dare not wait
upon I would, like the poor cat i' the adage." 1 We want the crea-
tive faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the gen-
erous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry
of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten
more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which
have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external
world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally cir-

8. "I follow the classification adopted 9. The Spanish Inquisition had been sup-
by the author of the Four Ages of pressed after the Spanish Revolution of
Poetry. But Rousseau was essentially a 1820; it was restored in 1823 and
poet. The others, even Voltaire, were finally abolished in 1834.
mere reasoners" (Shelley's note). 1. Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.vii.44-45.
 —
A Defence of Poetry • 503

cumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved

the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation
of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence
of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to
be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining
labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? From
what other cause has it which should
arisen that the discoveries
have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on
Adam? 2 Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is
the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world. 3
The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it
creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by
the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and
arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may
be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is
never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the
selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials

of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating

them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then
become too unwieldy for that which animates it. —
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all
science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is
at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of
thought: it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns
all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed,

and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the
succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and
consummate surface and bloom of things; it is as the odour
and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which
compose it, as the form and the splendour of unfaded beauty to
the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were Virtue, Love,
Patriotism, Friendship &c. —
what were the scenery of this beau-
tiful Universe which we inhabit —
what were our consolations on
this side of the grave —and what were our aspirations beyond it
if Poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal

regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever

soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according
to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will com-
pose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind

2. "In the sweat of thy face shah thou either he will hate the one, and love
eat bread, till thou return unto the the other; or else he will hold to the
ground; for out of it wast thou taken: one, and despise the other. Ye cannot
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt serve God and mammon" (Matthew 6:24;
thou return" (Genesis 3:19). see also Luke 16:13).
3. "No man can serve two masters: for
504 - A Defence of Poetry
in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence,
likean inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this
power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of
our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.
Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force,
it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results: but when
composition begins, on the decline, and
inspiration is already
the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the
world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of
the poet. I appeal to the greatest Poets of the present day,
whether be not an error to assert that the finest passages of
it

poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay
recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no
more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and
an artificial connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by
the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only im-
posed by a limitedness of the poetical faculty itself. For Milton
conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in
portions. We
have his own authoritv also for the Muse having
"dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song," 4 and let this be an
answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings
of the first Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced
line of the
are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and
intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the
plasticand pictorial arts: a great statue or picture grows under
the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb, and
the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable
of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media
of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of
the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations
of thought and
sometimes associated with place or person,
feeling
sometimes own mind alone, and always arising
regarding our
unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful
beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret
they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does
in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of
a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like
those of a wind over a sea, which the coming calm erases, and
whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it.
These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced

4. ". . . my Celestial Patroness, who spires/Easie my unpremeditated Verse"

deignes/Her nightly visitation unimplor'd, (Milton. Paradise Last, IX. 21-24).
/And dictates to me slumb'ring, or in-
 —
A Defence of Poetry • 505
principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most
enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with these emotions;
and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a
Universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that
they combine with the evanescent hues of this etherial world; a
word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch
the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever
experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image
of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and
most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions
which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in
language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing
sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide
abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns
of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. 5 Poetry
redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of
that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which
is most deformed: it marries exultation and horror, grief and
pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light
yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches,
and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is
changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit
which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the
poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips
the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked
and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to
the percipient. "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make
a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." 6 But poetry defeats the curse
which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding
impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or
withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it
equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the
inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It
reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and
percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of
familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It
compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that
which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been

5. I.e., all have kindred visions, but most municate them.

people remain unable to express or com- 6. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.254—255.
 —
S06 • A Defence of Poetry
annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted
by reiteration. It justifies that bold and true word of Tasso Non
merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. 1
A Poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom,
pleasure, virtue and
he ought personally to be the
glory, so
happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.
As to his glory, let Time be challenged to declare whether the
fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that
of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best,
inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest
poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most
consummate prudence, and, if we could look into the interior of
their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as
they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high
yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confirm
rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the
arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our
own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge
and executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form,
that certain motives of those who are "there sitting where we
dare not soar" 8 are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was
a drunkard, that Virgil was Horace was a coward,
a flatterer, that
that Tasso was a madman, Bacon was a peculator, that
that Lord
Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. 9 It is
inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets,
but Posterity has done ample justice to the great names now
referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have
been dust in the balance; if their sins "were as scarlet, they are
now white as snow"; they have been washed in the blood of
the mediator and the redeemer Time. Observe in what a ludicrous
chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been con-
fused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets;
consider how little is, as it appears or appears, as — it is; look
to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, in this respect differs from logic,
that it is not subject to the controul of the active powers of
the mind, and that its birth and recurrence has no necessary
connexion with consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to deter-
mine that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causa-
tion, when mental effects are experienced insusceptible of being
referred to them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power,

7. "None deserves the name of Creator also Adonais, 337.

except God and the Poet." Quoted in 9. Shelley believed that Robert Southey.
Pierantonio Serassi's Italian Life of then Poet Laureate, had slandered him
Torquato Tasso (1785). in articles and reviews.
8. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV. 829. See
 A Defence of Poetry • 507
it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind an habit of
order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its
effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and
they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a
man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under
which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately organized
than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his own
and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this
difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when
he neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects
of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one
another's garments.
But there is evil in this error, and thus
nothing necessarily
and the passions purely evil, have
cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice,
never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives
of poets.
I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to
set down these remarks according to the order in which they
were suggested to my mind by a consideration of the subject itself,
instead of following that of the treatise that excited me to make
them public. Thus although devoid of the formality of a polemical
reply; if the view they contain be just, they will be found to

involve a refutation of the Four Ages of Poetry, so far at least

as regards the first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture
what should have moved the gall of the learned and intelligent
author of that paper; I confess myself like him unwilling to be
stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius
and Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable per-
sons. 1 But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather
than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to Poetry in its
elements and principles; and it has been shewn, as well as the
narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is called
common source with all other
poetry, in a restricted sense, has a
forms of order and of beauty according to which the materials
of human life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is

poetry in an universal sense.

The second part will have for its object an application of these
principles to the present state of the cultivation of Poetry, and
a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners
and opinion, and compel them into a subordination to the imagina-
tive and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an ener-

1. Codrus, author of the Theseid, Ba- poets castigated by Juvenal, Virgil, and
vius, ard Maevius were inferior Latin Horace.
 .

508 • A Defence of Poetry

gctic developement of which has ever preceded or accompanied
a great and free developement of the national will, has arisen as it
were from a new birth. In spite of the low-though ted envy which
would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable
age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philoso-
phers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have ap-
peared since the last national struggle for civil and religious libertx
The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awaken-
ing of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or
institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of
the power of communicating and receiving intense and impas-
sioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in
whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many por-
tions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with
that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even
whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve,
the Power which is seated upon the throne of their own soul. It
is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated
writers of the present day without being startled with the electric
life which burns within their words. Thev measure the circum-

ference and sound the depths of human nature with a com-

prehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and thev are themselves per-
haps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is
less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hiero-
phants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic
shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which
express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to
battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is
moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators
of the World.
Criticism
 —

General Studies

KENNETH NEILL CAMERON

The Social Philosophy of Shelley*

It is a lamentable, but indubitable, fact, that, in spite of the

efforts of a number of socially-minded scholars from H. Buxton
Forman to Newman Ivey White, the prevalent view of Shelley is

still that of a mystic visionary, —the "ineffectual angel" of Mat-

thew Arnold, the winsome "child" of Francis Thompson, the im-
pulsive Ariel of Andre Maurois. If any doubt that this is so,
let him but consult those stolid barometers of average academic

opinion, the textbooks and anthologies. The anthologies he will

find interminably reprinting the same minor lyrics "To A Sky-
—
lark," "To Night," "When the lamp is shattered" etc., etc.,
lyrics which are entirely unrepresentative of the major channels

of Shelley's philosophy. The textbooks he will find re-echoing

(with unimportant and pedestrian variations) the catch-phrases of
Arnold, Thompson, Hogg, Clutton Brock and their ilk.
Upon what postulates, we may inquire, is this view based?
Only one of its proponents, so far as I can find, has been suffi-
ciently rash to advance any, namely George Santayana, who, in
Winds of Doctrine, has the following to offer:

Shelley was one of those spokesmen of the a priori, one of those

nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic,
inspired, perfect and incorrigible creature. . . . Being a finished
child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature,
history and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear
sense but was obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of for-
tune. The cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into
most of us what little wisdom we have, left Shelley dazed and
sore, perhaps, but uninstructed. When the storm was over he
began chirping again his own natural note. If the world con-
tinued to confine and oppress him, he hated the world, and
gasped for freedom. Being incapable of understanding reality, he
revelled in creating world after world in idea.

t First published in The Sewanee Review, the permission of the University of the
L, 4 (Autumn, 1942). Reprinted with South.

511
 —
512 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
The view of the angelic school, then, rests upon two postulates:
Shelley was not, like other human beings, a product of a social
environment but a mystic outgrowth of nature, "like a bee or
a butterfly"; Shelley's philosophy is, likewise, not the product of
a social environment — or, apparently, of an intellectual one either
—but is of the pure substance of his own mind, a dream fantasy,
"creating world after world in idea".
It is in the hope of driving one more nail into the coffin of
this apparently unburiable view that I undertake the present brief
outline of Shelley's social philosophy, a philosophy which both
Shelley and Mary looked upon as expressing the essence of his
message to mankind.
Shelley, fortunately, has left us a picture of this philosophy
not in his poetry alone, but also — been insufficiently noted
as has
— in his prose, where it is presented with an expository directness
which is inevitably lacking in the more symbolic medium of poetry.
The key to the understanding of the poetry, in fact, is to be found
in the prose.
The main inspirational force in Shelley's work, as many critics

have recognized, though they have not always expressed it in

quite these terms, is his theory of historical evolution. The essence
of this theory, as given in the first chapter of A Philosophical
View of Reform and other works, is that history is essentially
a struggle between two sets of forces, the forces of liberty and the
forces of despotism. Sometimes the despotic forces were in the
ascendent — asRome or the England of Charles I;
in ancient
sometimes the forces of liberty as in Athens or the medieval —
Italian states or the England of Cromwell. In recent times two
events had raised the power of the forces of liberty to tidal wave
proportions, —
the American Revolutionary War and the French
Revolution.

The system of government in the United States of America

wrote Shelley (in 1819) —
the first practical illustration of the
is

new philosophy. Sufficiently remote, it will be confessed, from

the accuracy of ideal excellence, is that representative system
which will soon cover the extent of that vast Continent. But it is
scarcely less remote from the insolent and contaminating tyran-
nies under which, with some limitations of these terms as regards
England, Europe groaned at the period of the successful rebellion
of America. America holds forth the victorious example of an
immensely populous, and as far as the external arts of life are
concerned, a highly civilized community administered according
to republican forms. The just and successful Revolt of
. . .

America corresponded with a state of public opinion in Europe

of which it was the first result. The French Revolution was the
second.
 —
The Social Philosophy of Shelley . 513
These two advances of the forces of liberty, Shelley believed,
were of such a magnitude as to make any future repression of
them but temporary. Specifically applied to the contemporary
European scene, this meant that the extensive counter-revolu-
tionary network of Metternich, Castlereagh and the Quadruple
Alliance would eventually be torn asunder. Shelley —running
against the tide of pessimism then so common among liberal
thinkers —believed that he could perceive signs of such an awaken-
ing in Europe, especially in the revolutionary events in Spain,
Naples and Greece (1820 and 1821). As he wrote in 1821, the year
before his death —
at a time when, according to some critics, he
had ceased to be a revolutionary and had become a mystic

This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors,
and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of
murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for
aid against the common enemy and suspend their mutual jealous-
ies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all
the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has
arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the
opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce
fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee
and dread.
The Spanish Peninsula is already free. France is tranquil in
the enjoyment of a partial exemption from the abuses which its
unnatural and feeble government are vainly attempting to revive.
The seed of blood and misery has been sown in Italy, and a more
vigorous race is arising to go forth to the harvest. The world
waits only the news of a revolution in Germany to see the tyrants
who have pinnacled themselves on its supineness precipitated
into the ruin from which they shall never arise. Well do these
destroyers of mankind know their enemy, when they impute the
insurrection in Greece to the same spirit before which they
tremble throughout the rest of Europe, and that enemy well
knows the power and cunning of its opponents, and watches for
the moment of their approaching weakness and inevitable division
to wrest the bloody sceptres from their grasp.

It is in this theory of historical development from ancient —

—
Greece to his own times and beyond that we have the basis for
what is usually called Shelley's "optimism", that chirping after
the storm of which Professor Santayana speaks. That it was not
at all, however, a purely emotional, subjective optimism but was
based on a study of historical movements is shown by the fact
that a little more than a quarter of a century after Shelley
uttered these words, the aristocratic-militaristic Europe of Met-
ternich had been torn to shreds under the impetus of those
two celebrated years of revolutions, 1830 and 1848, and the more
514 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
democratic states, which Shelley anticipated, were either estab-
lished, or had, at least, had their foundations laid.
Shelley did not believe that the historical forces unloosed by
the American and French revolutions would stop with the establish-
ment of democratic republics, but they would continue bevond
this form of state into an equalitarian society, a society, that is
to say, in which every person would possess an equal amount of
private property. This he looked upon as a matter for the rather
remote future, and urged his contemporaries to concentrate their
attention upon the problems of the present.

Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost re-

finements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system
of society, toward which with whatever hope of ultimate success,
it is our duty to tend. We
may and ought to advert to it as to the
elementary principle, as to the goal unattainable, perhaps by us,
but which, as it were, we revive in our posterity to pursue. We
derive tranquillitv and courage and grandeur of soul from con-
templating an object which is, because we will it, and must be if
succeeding generations of the enlightened sincerelv and earnestly
seek it. But our present business is with the difficult and un-
. . .

bending realities of actual life, and when we have drawn inspira-

tion from the great object of our hopes it becomes us with
patience and resolution to applv ourselves to accommodating our
theories to immediate practice.

Nor did Shelley himself fail to "accommodate his theories to

immediate practice." In regard to the continent of Europe he felt
that the existing despotic governments could be overthrown only
by revolution, and his letters and work show a constant attention
to the development of such movements in Spain, in Naples, —
in Paris, in Greece, as well as in Mexico, South America and
Ireland (which he had visited as a youth in advocacy of the repeal
of the union with England and the establishment of Catholic
Emancipation). In regard to England he hoped that a democratic
state could be achieved by peaceful means and wrote three polit-
ical tracts in support of the movement for the reform of parliament.
For a time he supported that group known as the moderate
reformers, who demanded the vote onlv for those who paid property
taxes, in preference to the radical reformers, who demanded the
vote for all adult males. His reason for doing so was not that

he accepted limited suffrage as a final objective, but that he

believed complete suffrage could best be obtained in two stages;
and this, we might note, was how it finally did happen: limited
suffrage was established in 1832 and extended in 186- and 1885,
until complete male suffrage was achieved.
 — —
The Social Philosophy of Shelley • 515
Such, then, in brief, is the essence of Shelley's social philosophy
as expressed in hisIt seems hardly the kind of
prose works.
philosophy that one would suck from nature "like a bee or a
butterfly." The belief that the people would over-
progressive
throw the aristocratic, dictatorial states by revolution on the con-
tinent and by reform in England was no "creating world after
world in idea". These views were the result of an analysis of
the contemporary international situation, the product of a mind
shaped by the forces of the French Revolution and the English
reform movement. They were views, moreover, shared in large
part by such advanced political thinkers as Holbach, Condorcet,
Volney, Paine, Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Leigh Hunt, Wil-
liam Cobbett, Sir Francis Burdett and Jeremy Bentham. Were
all these thinkers, too, we might legitimately inquire, obsessed by
subjectivedream fantasies, "ineffectual angels"?
Nor can it be claimed that Shelley had one social philosophy
for his prose and another for his poetry. I have discussed the
prose first simply as a matter of convenience, but everything brought
out in relation to the one applies also to the other. Shelley's analysis
of the contemporary situation in England and its reform move-
ment will be found in "The Mask of Anarchy" and "Swellfoot
The Tyrant"; his views on the revolutionary movement on the
continent, in the "Ode Written in October, 1819", the "Ode
to Liberty" —
on the Spanish revolution of 1820 the "Ode to —
—
Naples" on the war of the Kingdom of Naples against Austrian
— —
domination and "Hellas" on the Greek struggle for liberation
from the Turkish empire; his interpretation of the rise and fall
of the French Revolution and the emergence of the tyranny of
the Quadruple Alliance, in "The Revolt of Islam"; his general
theory of historical evolution, in "Queen Mab" and "Prometheus
Unbound".
To poems on affairs in England:
glance briefly at one of Shelley's
the central thought of "The Mask of Anarchy" is that if the
ruling aristocratic class continued its policy of repression (as at
"Peterloo") social anarchv would result, and such a disaster could
be prevented only if the people of England would rally around
the central issues of the reform movement for a peaceful trans-
ference of power. This, too, is the main thought of chapters two
and three of A Philosophical View of Reform; and like A Philo-
sophical View of Reform the poem ends on a sterner note:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanqmshable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many —they are few.
 — —
516 - Kenneth Neill Cameron
The most encouraging and significant event on the continent,
Shelley was the beginning, in 1821, of the revolutionary war
felt,

of the Greek people, significant because it represented the first

major cracking of the Metternich system, and hence a culminating
point in the historical evolution of the forces of liberty. It is in
this perspective that he treats the Greek revolution in "Hellas"
putting into flaming lyrical verse the same concept of historical
development we have already noted in his prose.

In the great morning of the world,

The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
Like vultures frighted from Imaus,
Before an earthquake's tread,
So from Time's tempestuous dawn
Freedom's splendour burst and shone:
Thermopylae and Marathon
Caught like mountains beacon-lighted,
—
The springing Fire. The winged glory
On Philippi half-alighted
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
The quenchless ashes of Milan.
From age to age, from man to man,
It lived, and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.

Then night fell; and, as from night,

Reassuming fiery flight,
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of Heaven and doom,
A second sun arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
From far Atlantis, its voung beams
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine streams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain.
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest's warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain-cedar's hair,
And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air.
Sick with famine; — Freedom so
To what of Greece remained! now
Returns; her hoarv ruins glow
 :

The Social Philosophy of Shelley • 517

Like Orient mountains lost in day;
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings prey
And in the naked lightenings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
—
Let Freedom leave where'er she flies,
A Desert or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory or a grave.

It is clear that Shelley is not, as his critics usually assume, treating

the Greek revolution as an isolated event, but in terms of an
integrated philosophy of historical evolution.
In "The Revolt
of Islam" Shelley depicts what he calls a beau
ideal ofFrench Revolution and its aftermath, basing his
the
picture upon Volney, Mary Wollstonecraft and other historians
of the revolution. He gives a striking picture of the people
under tyrannical oppression, grave and hoary demagogues sent
among them to prove that "among mankind/The many to the few
belong,/By heaven and nature and necessity." He traces the vic-
torious rise of the (French) people and their inspired establish-
ment of a new order based upon wisdom, love and equality, as a
result of which the other nations of Europe will likewise attain
freedom, for "Thoughts have gone forth whose powers can sleep
no more!" Then comes the treacherous attack of the king and
his fellow rulers, followed by bloody warfare the Napoleonic —
wars —
and ended by a peace more horrible than the war itself:

Peace in the desert fields and villages,

Between the glutted beasts and mangled dead!
Peace in the silent streets.

In the midst of these horrors the rulers call a meeting (parallel

to the Congress of Vienna )

Ye Princes of the Earth, ye sit aghast

Amid the ruin which yourselves have made,
Yes, Desolation heard your trumpet's blast
And sprang from sleep! —
dark Terror has obeyed
Your bidding. . . .

It is a terrible and powerful picture, but no more terrible than

the reality of a Europe bloody from a quarter century of wars and
revolutions, which inspired it.

In "Prometheus Unbound" Shelley takes a still broader canvas,

depicting the vast movemert of historical evolution from a period
immediately before the outbreak of the French Revolution into
the immediate future of the overthrow of the despotic state,
and the remoter future, of the equalitarian society. The struggle
 : — .

518 - Kenneth Neill Cameron

of Prometheus is the struggle of the leader of humanity — specifically
the peoples of post-war Europe — against the despotic state (Jupiter)
— specifically the rule of the Quadruple Alliance. In this struggle
humanity is assisted by the forces of historical evolution (Demo-
gorgon) and by the strength of human love and comradeship (Asia)
Aided by these forces mankind overthrows the despotic state and
advances into the new order.
Because of the very vastness of the subject* Shelley does not use
the detailed method he employs in "The Revolt of Islam" but
treats it in more general terms, a technique which has proved
misleading to a number of critics, for they have viewed what are
really generalizations of actual historical movements as pure
abstractions. A poem and its symbolism reveals
detailed study of the
the same theories and interpretations that we have already noted
in the other poems and the prose. To give an example: the Furies
represent, in their historical-political significance, the same thing
that the armies of the despots do in "The Revolt of Islam",
namely the allied armies of the Napoleonic Wars. The Furies, we
remember, come "From the ends of the earth, from the ends of
the earth,/Where the night has its grave and the morning its
birth"; the armies in "The Revolt of Islam:"

From every nations of the earth they came,

The multitude of heartless moving things,
Whom slaves call men; obediently thev came.
These armies, in "The Revolt of Islam," are joined by the forces
of other tyrants —— a reference, mainly, to the English declaration
of war on France "Myriads —
had come millions were on their
way"; of the Furies, too, one group comes first and calls to its

fellows

We are steaming up from Hell's wide gate

And we burthen the blast of the atmosphere,
But vainly we toil till ye come here.

To give a second example: When, in A Philosophical View

of Reform, Shelley writes that in spite of the defeat of the revolu-
tion, France will rise again
— "But the military project of the great
tyrant [Napoleon] having failed, and there being no attempt
and, if there were any attempt, there being not the remotest
possibility of reestablishing the enormous system of tyranny abol-
ished by the Revolution, France, is as it were, regenerated"
we have the same basic conception as in the song of the spirits
to Prometheus at the conclusion of the first act when they indicate
to him triumph in Europe
that the forces of liberty will again
following the crushing of the French Revolution, a message which
Shelley expresses also in the "Ode To The West Wind":
 —
[The Role of Scepticism in Shelley's Thought] • 5J9
O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odour plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which are moving everywhere;

Destroyer and Preserver; hear, oh, hear!

The "winged seeds" are the dormant forces of democratic

progress; the "wild spirit", the "destroyer and preserver", the
"West Wind" is the mighty tide of historical evolution gathering
to sweep away the old order of aristocratic despotism.

C. E. PULOS

[The Role of Scepticism in Shelley's Thought]

During the years 1811-1816 much of Shelley's reading in philos-
ophy was devoted to sceptics. Hume and Drummond familiarized
him with the most recent developments in sceptical thought
developments interpreted by Hume's chief British adversaries, the
Common Sense school of thinkers, as the logical and inevitable
result of a doctrine pervading nearly all modern speculation.
Cicero and Diogenes Laertius introduced Shelley to the scepticism
of antiquity; Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne, to the scep-
ticism of the Renaissance. The impact on the poet's mind of the
sceptical tradition, as variously represented by these authors, is

largely responsible for those modifications thought which

in his
critics have long recognized as distinguishing the mature from the
young Shelley.
To appreciate, however, the possibility of this conclusion, it is

necessary to bear in mind that the sceptical tradition, from its

origin down to Shelley's own time, possesses a positive side as

well as a negative, and that the former rests on disparate principles.
On its negative side scepticism attempts to demonstrate the limita-
tions of reason and knowledge. Sceptics differ on this point only
in degree, that is, in the thoroughness and depth of their argu-

t Reprinted from The Deep Truth: A Pulos, by permission of the University

Study of Shelley's Scepticism (chap. VII, of Nebraska Press, © 1954 by the Uni-
"Conclusion," pp. 105-112), by C. E. versity of Nebraska.
520 • C. E. Pulos

ments. But on its positive side scepticism branches off into dis-
similar principles; sceptics disagree in their sceptical solutions to
doubt. Some rely mainly on custom, others on faith, still others
on the doctrine of probability. The main difference lies between
the first and the last of these solutions, while the second is

compatible with either of the other two. The reliance on custom

naturally leads to the adoption of conservative ideas. Probabilism,
on the other hand, may and often does co'nduct to unorthodox
views.
The fundamental doctrine on the negative side of Shelley's
scepticism is a theory of causation — a theory that the poet first

encountered Godwin; its full implications, however, did not

in
dawn on him until after he read and reread Hume and Drummond.
All knowledge, according to this theory, depends on the rela-
tionship which we call cause and effect. But a scrupulous examina-
tion of this relationship reveals that the concept is founded on
habit, that it arises from our experience of the constant conjunc-
tion of objects. Such an analysis of cause and effect banishes at
once all possibility of certitude on any matter whatsoever. A
provisional science, based on the observation of the constant
conjunction of objects, is altogether possible. But where the
opportunity of observing the constant conjunction of objects is

denied us — which is the case in cosmological, ontological, and

theological speculations —
reasoning from cause to effect collapses
into an exercise of the fancy. Thus reason conducts us to an
astonishing awareness of our ignorance; in Shelley's words, we
reach ''the verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if
we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we
know" (p. 478).
But like every sceptic before him, Shelley cultivated a sceptical
solution to doubt, even to the extent of expressing various degrees
of assent to propositions regarding ultimate reality.He nowhere
relieson custom to escape the sceptic's dilemma, as conformity
to the status quo was quite incompatible with his social philos-
ophy, his passion for reforming the world. But either faith or the
doctrine of probability is implicit in all of his affirmations regard-
ing the transcendent. By overlooking their tentative character or
conditional nature, we may confound these with otherwise similar
affirmations in Coleridge or Wordsworth or Emerson; Shelley's
affirmations, however, are not dogmatic intuitions but aspects of
his sceptical solution to doubt. And it is their character as such
that gives them their distinctive quality and effect.

The charges of inconsistency not infrequently made against

Shelley's thought ... are the direct result of the overlooking of
this distinction. These charges appear baseless when the poet's
 [The Role of Scepticism in Shelley s Thought] • 521

thought is interpreted, as it should be interpreted, partly in the

light of the sceptical tradition. It is true, of course, that Holbach's
necessarianism and Berkeley's idealism can hardly be integrated
into a coherent metaphysics. That Shelley's thought sometimes
reflects such irreconcilable elements rests on two assumptions:
that the poet rejected common-sense materialism through Berkeley's
influence and that his concept of Necessity agrees with that of
the French materialists. Both of these assumptions, however, are
erroneous.
There is not the slightest evidence that Berkeley had any
significant influence on Shelley's rejection of common-sense
materialism. In fact, the poet plainly tells us that Berkeley's argu-
ments did not impress him. What led Shelley to reject common-
sense materialism was Hume's theory of causation as applied by
both Hume and Drummond to the question of the independent
existence of external objects: we cannot assume the existence of
a material world as the cause of our sensations, for all we know
of cause is the constant conjunction of ideas in our own mind;
the cause of our sensations is unknown.
It is true, of course, that Shelley makes affirmations regarding
this unknown but these have the sceptical character of
reality;
resting on faith or probability. Furthermore, his clearest positive
remark about ultimate reality is that it must differ from mind;
for it is supremely creative, while mind is largely passive. Nothing
could be further from Berkeley than this doctrine. On the other
hand, Shelley's theory of the "one mind," of which all individual
minds are a portion, resembles Berkeley; but the resemblance is
quite superficial: Shelley's concept refers to something less than
"the basis of all things" or reality; hence, it is quite unlike Berkeley's
idea of an infinite mind acting as the cause of phenomena.
Just as Shelley's scepticism renders his idealism significantly
unlike Berkeley's, so makes his doctrine of Necessity significantly
it

unlike that of the French materialists. Shelley's doctrine is not

dogmatic, nor does it subsume a materialist world-view. Its source
was Hume's theory of causation and the restatement of that
theory in Godwin and Drummond. As an historical concept,
Shelley's Necessity refers to the constant conjunction of events
observable in the evolution of society. 1 As a metaphysical concept,
which is the main concern here, it is the unknown cause of our
sensations, the mysterious principle that governs the universe.
The poet's interpretation of this unknown power as favoring the
triumph of good over evil is partly the expression of faith, partly
a form of probabilism based on the study of historical evolution.

1. Cf. Kenneth Neill Cameron, "The Review, L (1942), 457-466. [See pre-
Social Philosophy of Shelley," Sewanee ceding essay.]
S22 • C. E. Pu/os

Due attention to Shelley's scepticism disposes not onlv of

the alleged inconsistency between his idealism and necessarianism,
but also of his alleged pseudo-Platonism. By liberating him from
the prejudices against the Greek philosopher which he had
inherited from the philosophies, scepticism was to an important
degree responsible for the renascence of Platonism which occurred
in Shelley in 1817. But it was responsible also for the poet's con-
siderable deviation from Plato. Shelley's concept of Beauty, unlike
Plato's, is not dialectically arrived at; nor does it involve a theory
of ultimate reality —except the sceptic's denial of the possibility
of man's knowing ultimate reality. It is essentially an "unknown
and awful" power, which man apprehends onlv as an ecstasy
"within his heart" (Hymn to Intellectual Beauty). Sometimes
Shelley expresses the faith that death will reveal to us this "unknown
and awful power" in all its splendor (Adonais), but this tendency
of thought is counterbalanced by the opposite one of seeking
Beauty in a concrete and mortal form (Epipsychidion) In brief, .

Shelley is not a pseudo-Platonist but a consistent Platonist in the

sceptical tradition.
But while scepticism presented Plato to Shellev in a new light,
ithad little effect on his hostility toward organized Christianity.
As a sceptic, the poet agreed with the fideists that the main bulwark
of any religion is faith, not reason. But this admission did not
imply the result one might expect: the sceptic Shelley is almost
as hostile toward organized Christianitv as the materialist Shelley
had been. From his earlv reading of anti-Christian authors and
from his own experience of the reactionary and intolerant charac-
ter of early nineteenth-century Christianity, Shelley had come to
entertain certain moral objections to the Christian religion. These
would have remained obstacles to his reconciliation with his ances-
tral creed regardless of what metaphysical views he later em-

braced. He was willing, as a sceptic, to accept as much of the

Christian religion as was free from his moral objections to it. But
the qualification included too much of the Christian religion to
allow any real departure from his original unfavorable attitude.
The references to "God" his later poems
in —
which suggest to
some critics that the poet was becoming more orthodox in his
religious opinions — probably refer to the deity whom he thought
Christ worshipped: a mysterious and inconceivable being, differ-
ing from man and the mind of man. Shelley's acceptance of God
in this sense in no wav contradicts his continued strictures against
the Christian religion.
Read, then, in the light of the sceptical tradition, Shelley's
philosophv reveals itself as remarkably consistent and coherent.

The assertion that the poet "never lost a piece of intellectual

 [The Role of Scepticism in Shelley s Thought] • 523

baggage which he had at any time collected" has no foundation

in fact: Shelley did not "collect" ideas in the mechanical manner
implied; furthermore, he did discard ideas — like those essential
to materialism — in the course of his intellectual development. Noi
was Shelley "an enthusiast" who adopted any attractive idea
"without first ascertaining whether was consistent with others it

previously avowed." On the contrary, he resisted a new idea, as

the history of his attitude toward immaterialism suggests, until
the relation of that idea to others previously avowed became
perfectly clear to him; or he modified ideas before adopting them,
as the sceptical quality of his Platonism indicates, if in their
original form they were inconsistent with his established convictions.
What bearing, one may now enquire, has this monograph upon
the evaluation of Shelley as a poet?
A theoretical world-view is not essential to great poetry: the
Iliadand The Book of Job both antedate the emergence of philos-
ophy. On the other hand, any respectable theoretical system of
thought is compatible with the highest poetic achievement:
materialism served Lucretius as well as scholasticism served Dante. 2
Yet nothing incorporated in a poem is logically irrelevant to the
evaluation of thatpoem. If form and content are inseparable in
a given work of art, any irreconcilable philosophical elements in
it, unless they serve a special purpose, must be viewed as a defect.
"Between artistic coherence . . . and philosophical coherence there
is some kind of correlation."
3

If this principle of literary theory is in general sound, Shelley's

scepticism is important because it provides us with a possible clue
to the unity of his thought in all its variety. To begin with,
scepticism is quite compatible with the four main traditions that
shaped his mind — political radicalism, empiricism, Platonism, and
Christianity. While scepticism is in conflict with the metaphysical
views of most radicals, it is not conflict with political radicalism
as such. Scepticism and empiricism are also harmonious; in fact,
all more elaborate forms of scepticism arc inseparable from
the
empirical premises. Not unrelated, too, are scepticism and Plato-
nism; for an idealist may make profound concessions to scepticism,
while a sceptic may develop the positive side of his thought into
a So closely related, finally, are the sceptical
qualified idealism.
and Christian traditions that the real problem here is to explain
why sometimes, as in the case of Shelley, their reconciliation is

incomplete.
But scepticism not only is quite compatible with the main

2. Cf. Stephen C. Pepper, The Basis of Theory of Literature (New York, 1949),
Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, 1946). p. 27.
3. Ren6 V/ellek and Austin Warren, The
524 • Earl R. Wasserman
traditions known to have profoundly influenced Shelley, but also
is capable of reconciling two of those traditions that normally
stand in disagreement. The central conflict in Shelley's philosophy
is that between his empiricism and his Platonism. The poet's
resolution of this conflict could have been suggested only by a
philosopher who had dealt with the same problem; this considera-
tion eliminates a host of philosophers known to have influenced
Shelley in other respects, including Plato a'nd Hume. The most
plausible theory to date is that in this question Shelley was a
disciple of Berkeley. But Shelley's relation to Hume invalidates
this theory — a theory that can only lead to the conclusion that
the poet was a confused follower of Berkeley. There remains,
however, the possibility of reconciling empiricism and Platonism
through the positive issues of scepticism probability and faith. —
This mode and Platonic traditions was
of reconciling the empirical
implied in Drummond's Academical Questions. That Shelley em-
ployed the same mode is supported by his admiration for Drum-
mond, by his relation to Hume and the sceptical tradition, and by
a certain note in his idealism —
a note ranging from the tentative
to the mystical. In other words, scepticism had consequences in
Shelley which it did not have in Hume; and it is in these conse-
quences, not in the mere agreement with Hume, that the real
significance of the poet's scepticism is to be found.

EARL R. WASSERMAN
[Shelley's Use of Myth]*
Man's works of art, according to Prometheus, are

the mediators
Of that best worship, love, by him and us
Given and returned. (III. iii. 58-60)

Art mediates, that is, between the mutable diversity and division of
the human mind on the one hand and the immutable unity of
the One Mind, or absolute Existence, on the other; and the radical
principle of the —
Defence of Poetry order, arrangement, combina-
tion, relation, —
harmony, or rhythm is the human means of shaping
diversity into an approximation of perfect unity, which is truth,
beauty, and goodness. The poetic imagination is as Shelley con- —
sidered himself to be —
a revolutionist and reformer, first shaking

t From Shelley: A Critical Reading, by pp. 269-275. C"op> right 1971 by The
<

Earl Wasserman, (Baltimore: The

R. Johns Hopkins University Press. Re-
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), printed by permission of the publisher.
 —
[Shelley's Use of Myth] • 525
"Thought's stagnant chaos" (IV. 380), shattering false and im-
perfect arrangements of thought, and then striving to rearrange
the liberated elements into the formal perfection they ought to
have according to a poetics which is also an ethics. In Prometheus
Unbound this doctrine of the workings and purpose of the plastic
imagination is responsible for the transformation and syncretism

of the myths that constitute the body of the drama.

Peacock reports that Shelley once commented on Spenser's giant
who holds the scales and wishes to "rectify the physical and moral
evils which result from inequality of condition." 1 Artegall, Shelley

explained, "argues with the Giant; the Giant has the best of the
argument; Artegall's iron man knocks him over into the sea and
drowns him. This is the usual way in which power deals with
opinion." When Peacock objected that this is not the lesson
Spenser intended, Shelley replied, "Perhaps not; it is the lesson
which he conveys to me. I am of the Giant's faction." 2 In the
giant's intention to reduce all things "unto equality," Spenser
saw the impending dissolution of hierarchy and the return to
chaos; from Shelley's point of view Spenser's conception of order
was wrong and therefore the ordering of his myth was wrong, for
what to Spenser was necessary superiority and subordination was
to republican Shelley the frustration of all possibility of perfect unity.
The occasion for Peacock's note was a letter in which Shelley alluded
to Artegall's giant in order, it is significant, to define the purpose

of the recently completed Act I of Prometheus Unbound: the act,

Shelley writes, is an attempt to "cast what weight I can into the
right scale of that balance which the Giant (of Arthegall) holds." 3
For egalitarian Shelley was engaged in reforming and reinterpreting
the myth of god-fearing Aeschylus at least as radically as he did
that of Spenser, the defender of hierarchism, and to the same end
of perfect order. Recasting that myth into the shape and proportions
that, according to his imaginative vision, it ought to have as the
highest unity of which its components are capable meant to Shelley
not only the achievement of the highest formal beauty but also
since it amounts to the same thing —
the purging of error and the
attainment of truth.
To
Shelley myth is not fanciful fable. Whatever its genesis, it
is not mistaken for external fact, and therefore it is more truly
real than the sensory world that man falsely believes to reside

outside his mind. Since "things" actually exist for man only as
thoughts, the elements organized by the poet are thoughts recog-

1. Letters, II, 71n. Arts and Industry in the second an

2. Peacock adds that Shelley also "held oligarchical impostor overthrowing truth
that the Enchanter in the first canto [of by power" (ibid.).
Thomson's Castle of Indolence] was a 3.To Peacock [23-24 January 1819]
true philanthropist, and the Knight of (Letters, II, 71).
S26 • Earl R. Wasserman
nized as wholly mental and not mistaken for any independent
externality.The thoughts composed by the imagination are those
upon which the mind has already acted "so as to colour them
with its own light," 4 which is a reflection of the light of the
perfect One. Or, as Shelley expresses the same idea in Prometheus
Unbound, the poet does not heed objects as external "things,"
but first watches the "lake-reflected sun illume" them and then
organizes ("creates") these transfigured tnoughts into "Forms
more real than living man, / Nurslings of immortality!" (I. 744-
49). The elements of myth, being unmistakably mental apprehen-
sions of "things," are pre-eminently thoughts and therefore pre-
eminently the valid materials to which the poet is obliged to give
the "purest and most perfect shape."
But if the constituent details of myths are especially real for
Shelley, it component elements of one myth are
follows that the
as valid as those of any other, since they are all thoughts. Syncretic
mythology had been revitalized in the eighteenth century, especially
by those deists who, arguing for the common basis of all faiths,
had attempted to demonstrate the interconvertibilitv of all myths. 5
This tradition of syncretism was part of Shelley's intellectual
heritage, and his mentalistic ontology provided it with a special
philosophic justification. If, then, all mythic data, from Jupiter
to King Bladud, are real and valid, the various received myths are
not to be thought of as discrete narratives or distinct national faiths,
but only as variant efforts of the mind to apprehend the same truth.
Hence, the stuff of all myths is, collectively and indiscriminately,
available to the mythopoeist for his task of compelling thoughts to
their most nearly perfect structure. Indeed, directly after announcing
to Peacock the completion of the first act of his mythopoeic drama
and directly before his idiosyncratic interpretation of Artegall's
giant, Shelley wrote that he could conceive of a "great work,"
not of poetry but of moral and political science, "embodying the
discoveries of all ages, & harmonizing the contending creeds by
which mankind have been ruled." For it is Shelley's assumption
that if all creeds, or their mythic embodiments, were shaped into
the highest form they admit, they would be precisely translatable
into each other. Despite his modest disclaimer
—
"Far from me
is such an attempt" —
the syncretism of this "great work" is at
the heart of Prometheus Unbound.
Moreover, given Shelley's interpretation of "thought," it follows
that empirical science, folk science, legends, and all literature that
has been assimilated as an operative part of human culture are

4. Defence of Poetry (Julian, VII, 109). logicalSyncretism," PMLA, 71 (1956).

5. See Albert J. Kuhn, "English Deism 1094-1116.
and the Development of Romantic Mytho-
 [Shelley s Use of Myth] - 527
also mental configurations of thoughts that recognize the mental
nature of "things"; they, at least asmuch as conventional myths,
are also permanently real in the sense that supposedly objective
things are not. Consequently, all these thoughts, too, are among
the materials for the poet's imagination to syncretize and interlock
into the most nearly perfect form. Adonais, for example, is not
merely another variant of the Venus and Adonis myth; it recasts
that myth into a new and presumably true system of interrela-
tionships, but it also organically integrates the reformed myth
with the ancient belief that souls derive from stars, with astronomy
scientific and fabular, with the science of optics, and with various
traditional metaphors and symbols, all of them having the same
kind and degree of eternal reality because they are the mind's
conceptions, rather than perceptions, of things. Myth so inclusively
defined is not an assemblage of accepted fictional terms supporting
an accretion of rich connotations, as was for Dryden and Pope;
it

nor merely a fiction that reveals truth better than facts; nor an

upsurging from the unconscious. Its components are indestructible

and eternal mental possessions. Consequently, however diverse and
unrelated their traditional contexts, they ask, like all other thoughts,
to be interwoven into a beautiful whole "containing within itself

the principle of its own integrity." If the structures of given myths

are already beautiful and true, Shelley held, they are integral
thoughts having "the power of attracting and assimilating to their
own nature all other thoughts," 6 and thus any conventional myth
so organized is inexhaustibly capable of rendering truths for a
poet by giving its shape to them. On the other hand, since error,
ugliness, and but various modes of disorder, the task of
evil are
the imagination is misshapen myths ac-
also to reform erroneous,
cording to the model of the mind's extraordinary apprehensions of
perfect unity.
Such a conception of myth and of the function of the imagination
entailsan especially ambiguous relation between the traditional
form of a legend or myth and the poet's use of it, and demands
of the reader an equally ambiguous frame of mind. When, in his
Rape of the Lock, Pope calls Thalestris to Belinda's aid, the mere
appearance of this queen of the Amazons tacitly attaches to Belinda
an unnatural displacement in the sexual hierarchy, a belligerent
rejection of men, and the Amazonian ideal of a self-sufficient female
society, just as Pope's casting Clarissa's advice in the form of
Sarpedon's speech seriocomically elevates that advice to heroic
stature and demands of Belinda quasi-heroic deeds. Through
knowledge already in the reader's mind, traditional and
qualities

6. Defence of Poetry (Julian, VII, 118).

528 - Earl R. Wasserman
meanings outside the poem attach themselves to elements in the
poem. Or, for ironic purposes, the likening of Belinda's apotheosized
lock to Berenice's evokes the reader's knowledge that Catullus'
Berenice sacrificed her hair that her husband might be returned
to her, and the clash between that intimated fact outside the
poem and Belinda's rejection of the Baron within the poem is
central to what the poem is saying. In either kind of instance,
the established structures of the myths upon which Pope draws
operate allusively in the poem, and the reader, when called upon,
must bring them to bear so that they may perform upon the text
their acts of supplying, amplifying, and complicating significances.
But according to the implications of Shelley's theory, the myths
that appear in his poetry, however traditional, are to be under-
stood as really having no inherited contexts at all. As either
actually or potentially true-beautiful organizations of thought, they
are universal and eternal forms that become limited only insofar
as they are thought of as specific myths; and any particular previous
appearance of the myth is not a locus for literary allusion but
merely another instance of the actual or potential archetypal form.
For example, the myth of Aurora, goddess of the dawn, and
her union with the beautiful mortal, Tithonus, is recognizable
behind Shelley's account of the creation of works of art:

And lovely apparitions, dim at first,

Then radiant, as the mind, arising bright
From the embrace of beauty, whence the forms
Of which these are the phantoms, casts on them
The gathered rays which are reality. (III. iii. 49-53)

Yet in the more important sense the myth is not present at all
behind the symbols of dawn and light, which are themselves
adequate to incorporate the meaning; and although the myth does
provide an additional propriety to the word "embrace," Shelley
certainly does nothing to evoke the myth as an efficient rever-
berating echo. The Aurora myth is not to be understood as a
particular narrative generally current in Western culture; it is
the mind's composition of thoughts into an integral and self-
sustaining thought that, because of its beauty and truth as a
composition, has here assimilated to its own form another body
of thoughts — or, rather, form to a body of thoughts
has given its

and thus lost its own Awareness of the myth will

special identity.
allow the reader to recognize the patterning source; and yet the
end product of this recognition is, paradoxically, that he think as
though no myth were present, but only the perfect archetypal ar-
rangement, of which the storv of Aurora and Tithonus is a limited
instance. Of the same order is Shelley's adaptation of the legend
 [Shelley's Use of Myth] • 529
of King Bladud, the mythical founder of Bath, who stumbled upon
the curative hot springs when, a banished leper, he followed one
of his afflicted swine, and whose dramatic return after his cure
enraptured his mother. 7 Hate, fear, and pain, Shelley writes, are to

Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left,

Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft

Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured;
Then when it wanders home with rosy smile,
Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile
It is a spirit, then, weeps on her child restored. (IV. 388-93)

Although this is Bladud's legendary history in every detail, the

poet's refusal to call it into conscious attention makes present
only a beautiful pattern, not a special allusion. Nor in the following
speech does Shelley borrow from King Lear the term "thought-
executing" in order to call up some functional reaction between
the plot of Lear and the relation of Jupiter to Prometheus, whose
words these are:

Evil minds
Change good to their own gave all
nature. I

He [Jupiter] has; and in return he chains me here

Years, ages, night and day . . .

Whilst my beloved race is trampled down

By his thought-executing ministers.
Such is the tyrant's recompense: 'tis just:
He who is evil can receive no good;
And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost,
He can feel hate, fear, shame; not gratitude:
He but requites me for his own misdeed.
Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks
With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge.
Submission, thou dost know I cannot try. 8 (I. 380-95)

An interpretation of Lear's relation to his daughter is, I think,

formally present and yet otherwise inoperative; it is present for
the poet —and the critic —not for the "pure" reader that the play
hypothesizes, who is work as though it is autono-
to experience the
mous, not allusive. The assumption behind the creative act is
that Shakespeare formed a beautiful and true arrangement of
thoughts, and Shelley is fulfilling his doctrine that such mythic
orderings are always capable of attracting other truths to their
shape; but he is not engaging Shakespeare's play in his text to
illuminate it or to complicate its meaning. These are, admittedly,

7. The allusion has been pointed out by (Bath, 1801).

G. M. Matthews, "Shelley's Grasp upon 8. The basis of this speech, but not of its
the Actual," Essays in Criticism, 4 form or thematic elaboration, is Prome-
(1954), 329. The legend is recorded in theus Bound 223-27 '.

full in Richard Warner's History of Bath

530 - Donald H. Reiman
extreme examples of Shelley's assimilation of myths as archetypal
orderings, but they are symptomatic of his mythopoeic methods
and indicate the paradoxical informed ignorance they demand for
the most complete reading.
Wehave seen, however, that Shelley conceives of the poet as
not merely an assimilator of beautiful mythic forms: inasmuch as he
is creative, he is a mythopoeist, not by inventing myths, but by
reconstituting the imperfect ones that already exist. His creations
are "beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they
are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man or
in nature," but because of "the whole produced by their combina-
tion." Virgil was not an imitator of Homer, Shelley wrote in an
unused passage of the Preface to Prometheus Unbound; "the
< ideal > conceptions had been new modelled within his mind, they
had been born again." 9 Indeed, just as Shelley held that all human
minds are portions of the One Mind, so he believed that, because
of the interconnection and interdependence of all poems, each is
a fragment of, or partial movement toward, "that great poem,
which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind,
have built up since the beginning of the world." 1 Evidence of
his respect for this position is to be found not only in his resort
to traditional materials but even in his refraining from forging
new links to regroup and interrelate diverse myths; for his implicit
assumption is that the true and beautiful relationships of wholeness
already exist potentially in the qualities of the given materials,
waiting to be properly drawn out. Consequently, he rather strictly

confines himself to the inherent syntactical potentials, however

minor or neglected they may be in the conventional myths, and
his mythopoeic art lies especially in eliciting and exploiting these
potentials to form new combinations.

DONALD H. REIMAN
The Purpose and Method of Shelley's Poetry f

Fundamental and central to all of Shelley's writings —poetry and

prose —was the moral law that Shelley found within himself. It is,

perhaps, profitless to speculate about what aspects of his childhood

training and experience formed the young Shelley's conscience or

9. Zillman, p. 636, where "new" inac- pp. 3-18. Copyright 1965 by Donald
curately reads "now." H. Reiman. Reprinted by permission of
1. Defence of Poetry (Julian, VII, 124). the author and the University of Illinois
t From Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": Press.
A Critical Study (Urbana, 111., 1965),
 1

The Purpose and Method of Shelley s Poetry • 53

how his later readings in the eighteenth -century humanitarian

authors like Godwin molded his concepts of virtue and justice.

Shelley recorded in the Dedication to The Revolt of telam (iii-v)

a boyhood experience in which he imagined that the sound of

voices "from the near schoolroom / Were but one echo from
. . .

a world of woes/' but he whose ear could thus catch the still sad
music of humanity had listened attentively long before that "fresh
May-dawn" dispersed "the clouds which wrap this world from
youth." Shelley's early formative influences, like those of most
men, are shrouded in obscurity; only the results of those lost
experiences remained in the cast of his adult mind.
The moral law that governed Shelley's mature thought and
action insisted upon both the right and the duty of each individual
to rule his own destiny: Each human being was entitled to the
liberty to seek his own happiness, but, at the same time, he was
obligated to do all in his power to secure this freedom for the less
fortunate. From these axioms Shelley dedicated his efforts to the
destruction of tyranny in all its forms —the tyranny of marital,
parental, pedagogical, political, and religious authoritarianism, the
tyranny of poverty and ignorance. He believed that the individual
human spirit was the measure of all values within the limitations
of mortal experience and that institutions were good only insofar
as they promoted the welfare of the individual. Societies and institu-
tions were abstractions, whereas men were real, and a family, a
church, or a nation derived its only value from the benefit it
conferred on the men and women who constituted it. 1 Like the
ethical philosophy of Kant, Shelley's ideas depend ultimately upon
the single, categorical imperative that human beings must be
treated always as ends, never as means.
Besides the doctrines of benevolence and sympathy, derived from
philosophers of the eighteenth century, which gave shape to Shelley's
humanitarian ideals, 2 Shelley (again like Kant) inherited the
epistemological dilemma of the British empirical philosophers.
After reading Locke, Berkeley, Sir William Drum-
Hume, and
mond, he concluded that there no innate ideas, that sense
are
impressions initiate the learning process, and that, since one can-
not be certain that the impressions of the senses correspond to
an external reality, one must remain ultimately sceptical on all

1. "Government can have no rights: it Hon of Philanthropists ..... Shelley's

is a delegation for the purpose of secur- Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquer-
ing them to others. . The strength of
. . que, 1954), p. 64. See also A Declara-
government is the happiness of the tion of Rights, Prose, p. 70.
governed. All government existing for 2. See Roy R. Male, Jr., "Shelley and the
the happiness of others is just only so Doctrine of Sympathy," University of
far as it exists by their consent, and Texas Studies in English, XXIX (1950),
useful only so far as it operates to their 183-203.
well-being." Proposals for an Associa-
532 • Donald H. Reiman
ontological questions. 3 Such a sceptical epistemology thwarted
Shelley's desire to discover a firm metaphysical foundation for the
moral values that he found so strong within himself. At the same
time, however, the limitations of human knowledge made it impos-
sible for experience or reason to destroy his hope that the ultimate
character of the universe was good rather than evil, for even if

all empirical evidence and all arguments indicated that

rational
human moral values were an anomaly in an amoral universe, that
evidence and those reasonings, the products of fallible cognitive
powers, might yet be mistaken. Shelley's severe intellectual honesty
forced him to write an ''Essay on a Future State," in which he
concluded that there was absolutely no evidence of immortalitv
and that something akin to the physical law of inertia, a "desire
to be for ever as we are, the reluctance to a violent and unexperi-
enced change which is common to all the animated and inanimate
combinations of the universe," was the sole origin of the hope for
"a future state" (Prose, p. 178); but with his sceptical distrust
of human reasoning, he could continue to hope that beyond the
ken of mortal understanding the "Everlasting No" of ordinary
human experience would give place to the "Everlasting Yea" of a
realm in which the Good, the True, and the Beautiful would
triumph.
Shelley sought support for his ethical ideals in the inner caverns
of the human mind. An acute observer of the events of nature and
society (as his letters from abroad, for example, prove), he could
portrav in concrete terms the interactions of people and things
about him, and sometimes, when it furthers his purpose, he does
so; but as a student of the natural sciences who saw behind the
appearances of these events to their underlying psychological or
physical causes, he often describes the operations of these hidden
forces, and as a follower of the "intellectual philosophy" 4 thai
denied the authority of the senses and even postulated the ultimate
unreality of the physical universe, he often turned to an examina-

3. The antecedents and nature of Shel- he says, "Perhaps the most clear and
ley's scepticism have been admirably vigorous statement of the intellectual sys-
outlined by Pulos in The Deep Truth: tern is to be found in Sir William Drum-
A Study of Shelley's Scepticism. Pro- mond's Academical Questions" (Prose,
fessor Pulos' claims for the influence on p. 173). C. E. Pulos has demonstrated
Shelley of Sir William Drummond's that the term "intellectual philosophy"
Academical Questions (London, 1805) was used to designate the thought of
are conservative; the sceptical ideas and Berkeley and Hume as contrasted to the
attitudes expressed by Drummond seem "common sense" philosophy that reacted
to permeate every area of Shelley's phi- against them. Drummond and Shelley,
losophy, though Shelley found it impos- as classicists, connected Hume's scepti-
sible to accept fideistic theism. Drum- cism with the Greek sceptics of the New
mond's implicit solution to the sceptical Academy, with Cicero, and with Bacon
dilemma. and Montaigne and the Renaissance re-
4. Shelley speaks repeatedly of the "in- vival of scepticism. See Pulos. The Deep
tellectual system" and "Intellectual Phi- Truth, chaps. 2, 3
losophy" in his "Essay on Life," where
 The Purpose and Method of Shelley s Poetry • 533

tion of the processes of the mind, from which, he believed, one

could learn more about the relationship between the impressions
apprehended by the mind and the nature of reality. Through
examination of the instrument that responds to sensory impressions
and molds them into organic relationships, Shelley attempted to
gather knowledge that external impressions themselves could not
give. His best poems fuse three levels of experience into images
that at the "phenomenal" level describe in detail an event or
scene (often one that Shelley has actually witnessed), at the
"scientific" level suggest the underlying physical or psychological
causes of the phenomenon, and at the "philosophical" level infer its
hidden moral implications. 5
One cannot understand Shelley's philosophical position ethical, —
epistemological, or ontological —
without a thorough knowledge of
his prose. Once the main outlines of his thought are clear, the
corpus of Shelley's poetry, together with the prefaces and notes he
himself supplied, is usually sufficient to clarify the theme of any

single poem, but when one wishes to plumb its subtleties, not only
Shelley's essays, letters, and recorded conversations, but even the
books he read illuminate modulations of meaning. 6 No English
poet is more allusive than Shelley, and certainly few read more
widely or brought to their poetry a more varied range of symbolic
reference: He knew the literature, history, and science of Western
civilization from Homer and the Pentateuch to Goethe and Cole-
ridge. He read ceaselessly and omnivorously, devouring books on
agricultural chemistry, the histories of Gibbon and Sismondi, the
myths of Plato and the scepticism of Hume, the dramas of Athens
and England, Calderon and Alfieri, the theological and philosophi-
cal works of Aristotle and Augustine, Lucretius and Spinoza all —
in their original languages, which he mastered so that he might
not lose the harmonious sounds and subtleties of diction. 7 Shelley,

5. Elsewhere I have attempted to show allusions, almost without exception, en-

how these three levels are integrated in rich and modify the surface statements
one of Shelley's earlier poems: "Struc- of his poetry, usually in such a manner
ture, Symbol, and Theme in 'Lines Writ- that one cannot imagine the same sub-
ten among the Euganean Hills,' " PMLA, tlety and complexity being achieved by
LXXVII (September 1962), 404-413. more direct means.
6. Though it may be, in our day, super- 7. ". the language of poets has ever
. .

fluous to justify poetic obscurity, the affected a certain uniform and harmoni-
writings of most poets contain many ous recurrence of sound, without which it
references that are meaningless to the were not poetry, and which is scarcely
casual reader. Obscurities resulting from less indispensable to the communication
recondite biographical, historical, or liter- of influence than the words themselves,
its
ary allusions or from the author's indi- without reference to that peculiar order,
vidual symbolic vocabulary can usually Hence the vanity of translation" (A De-
bt explained after intensive study o r the fence of Poetry, Prose, p. 280). See also
author's life, works, and reading. The Shelley's letter "To a Lady," Spring,
sole difference, between legitimate ob- 1821 (Julian, X, 267-268), where he in-
scurity and the other kind is that the veighs at length against studying a
former results from complexity rather literary work in any but its original
than from indistinctness or confusion of language.
poetic attitude and conception. Shelley's
534 • Donald H. Reiman
far from becoming merely eclectic, however, integrated with his
personal philosophical perspective the knowledge and wisdom he
garnered from his studies.
Throughout his maturity Shellcv never changed his basic atti-
tudes and ideals; he persisted in his desire to extend liberty of
thought under the guidance of benevolent love to every human
being,and he continued also to hold the sceptical epistemology that
prevented him from declaring categorically that the ideal to which
he aspired was in fact congruent with an objective reality. He
attempted, therefore, to portray through his poetry the ideals that
he found both within himself and in the records of the greatest
human spirits. The conceptions of man, nature, history, and im-
mortality in Shelley's poems are not declared to be objectively true,
but are, like the myths of Plato, poetic "guesses at truth"; of the
problem of evil and the immortality of the soul Shelley wrote:
"Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatise upon a subject,
concerning which all men are equallv ignorant. [but] as it is . . .

the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt
and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured
the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by
an inextinguishable thirst for immortality." 8 To "exalt and ennoble
humanity," to embody the highest human ideas in such attractive
forms that men will desire the good, and to image evil in such
repulsive forms that they will abhor it, in short, to familiarize
men "with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence" 9 this was —
the purpose of Shelley's poetry. He could honestly declare that
didactic poetry was his abhorrence because he never pretended to
"teach" in an intellectual sense; despite the vast range of knowledge
he brought to his poetry, his purpose was never to discuss the
nature of things, scientifically or philosophically. He attempted,
rather, to purifyand stretch the imaginations of his readers through
self-acknowledged myths that tell not what exists, or even what
within the limitations of the mortal world can exist, but what
according to the profoundest moral insights of Western civilization
should exist; Shelley, unlike most poets, never confused the realm
of "is" with that of "ought." Those critics who have concluded
that Shelley's picture of human history in a poem like Prometheus
Unbound is "unrealistic" had only to turn to Shelley's Preface to

8. Note to Hellas, Shelley, Poetical Represent vice, as indignant virtue will

Works, Oxford Standard Authors edition always represent it, as hideous, loath-
("P.W."), p. 478. some, and deformed. will cannot
. . .

9. Preface to Prometheus Unbound, be changed, while sentiment remains un-

P.W., p. 207. Cf. Sir William Drum- altered. There is no power, by which
mond: "If you wish to make men virtu- men can create, or destroy their feelings,"
ous, endeavour to inspire into them the Sensation alone overcomes sensation
love of virtue. Show them the beauty of Academical Questions, pp. 20-21.
order, and the fitness of things. . . .
 :

The Purpose and Method of Shelley s Poetry • 53 5

find him admitting as much. 1

In The Cenci Shelley exhibits the
"sad reality" of the world that "is," a world starkly contrasting
with the moral world of "ought" that appears in Prometheus. This
sharp division between "is" and "ought," between the hard limita-
tions of thehuman situation and man's apprehension of ideal per-
fection,remained for Shelley the basic ethical dilemma, and the
poet's problem was to find a language through which the two
worlds, irreconcilably disparate in "phenomenal" human experi-
ence, —
might be harmonized or at least related in the artistic —
universe of the poem.
Since 1900 when William Butler Yeats wrote his significant
essays on "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry," 2 critics have
recognized with more or less perception that Shelley transmits his
meaning partly through a system of symbols that remain relatively
consistent from poem to poem. . . .

For him, as for other poets, subtleties of diction were the heart
and soul of poetry. 3 Anyone who has worked with the manuscripts of
Shelley's poetry —
or who has read the criticism of those who have
— ought to be aware that Shelley corrected and revised in a never
ending search for the exact words to convey his meaning, though
in his struggle to communicate his apprehensions exactly as they
came to him, he became cognizant of the limitations of language
and the difficulty of communication: "These words are ineffectual
and metaphorical. Most words are so No help!" 4 Although in —
A Defence of Poetry Shelley first designates as "poetry" any
product of human imagination, he soon narrows his definition,
first to "those arrangements of language and especially metrical

language which are created by that imperial faculty. ." 5 As a scep- .

.

tic who denied that there was a necessary correspondence between

1. "... it is a mistake to suppose that Evil and, more recently, in Essays and
I dedicate my poetical compositions Introductions (New York, 1961).
solely to the direct enforcement of re- 3. Acontrary opinion has recently been
form, or that I consider them in any —
expressed though in no respect docu-
degree as containing a reasoned system mented —by David Perkins in The Quest
on the theory of human life. Didactic for Permanence (Cambridge, Mass.,
poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can 1959), p. 109. Shelley's own statements
be equally well expressed in prose that on the value of language are unequivocal
is not tedious and supererogatory in see A Defence of Poetry, Prose, pp. 279-
verse. My purpose has hitherto been 280; Letter "To a Lady," Julian, X, 267-
simply to familiarise the highly refined 268.
imagination of the more select classes 4. Note to "Essay on Love," Prose, p.
of poetical readers with beautiful ideal- 170. But although Shelley recognized the
isms of moral excellence; aware that —
metaphorical we would say "symbolic"
until the mind can love, and admire, — nature of language, he did not impugn
and trust, and hope, and endure, rea- its value within his sceptical epistemol-
soned principles of moral conduct are ogy; though it is "vain ... to think
seeds cast upon the highway of life that words can penetrate the mystery of
which the unconscious passenger tramples our being . rightly used they may
. .

into dust, although they would bear the make evident our ignorance to ourselves,
harvest of his happiness" (Preface to and this is much" ("Essay on Life,"
Prometheus Unbound, P.W., p. 207). Prose, p. 172).
2. First published in The Dome (July 5. Prose, p. 279.
1900); reprinted in Ideas of Good and
536 - Donald H. Reiman
the mind's impressions and any external causes, Shelley believed that
the "nature itself of language" could provide "a more direct
representation of the actions and passions of our internal being
and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations than
color, form, or motion . .
." because language, the medium of
thought itself, "is more
and obedient to the control of
plastic
that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitra re-
produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone;
but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art" have
physical relations and properties "which limit and interpose be-
tween conception and expression." 6 Moreover, the sounds of
language, he believed, constitute a sensory medium apart from
the intellectual content of words and have relations both with one
another and with the ideas they represent; the poetic mind must,
therefore, perceive "the order of those relations" at the same time
that it perceives "the order of those relations of thoughts." 7 Since,
therefore, the imagination will hannonize not only the ideas of
words but their sounds as well into meaningful relationships, "the
authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as
they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent
analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth
but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical . .
." (Prose,

P 281).
.

The poetic imagination for Shelley thus perfectly integrated

three aspects of language: first, the relations of words to "ideas,"
their complex denotative and connotative significance; second, the
relations through analogies or metaphors of these verbal concepts
to the "impressions" that a nonsceptic would term "objective
reality"; and third, the relations of both the "ideas" and the "im-
pressions" of words to their sounds. For Shelley, then, the best
poetry first exhibits unity of conception as an organic creation
according to the laws of an integrated imagination; it expresses
this truth in images that have coherent analogical relations to the
"things of nature" or the world of sensorv apprehension; and, finally,

it orders the sounds of the words in a way that not only commends
its meaning through the delight of pleasant harmonies but supports
that meaning wherever possible by onomatopoeic effects.
The relation of two of these three aspects requires some elabora-
tion and explanation. That Shelley sought coherent analogical rela-
tions between the terms in his poems and the natural objects or
beings commonly designated by those words does not mean that

6. Prose, pp. 279-280. acteristics of language, never the visual

7. Prose, p. 280. See note 7 above. In appearance or arrangement of words on
Shelley's discussions of the nature of the printed page.
poetry, he discusses only the aural char-
 The Purpose and Method of Shelley s Poetry •
537
he used words "naturalistically" or "realistically." On the contrary,
Shelley did not believe in the truth of relations between words and
the so-called "physical" entities they designated (their referents)
but only between words and the concepts of the mind that the
words expressed; that is, because the reality of external nature must
remain ever doubtful to the limited human mind, words take their
significance not from an external world but from the ordered laws
of the mind itself. Man's understanding of the phenomenal world
is continually in flux, as science describes and postulates more and
more about the behavior of animals, the causes of meteorological
phenomena, and the like, but the individual human mind retains
conceptions and attitudes that give to each word connotations
quite distinct from the "objective" nature of its referent. In most
instances, however, the connotative "idea" designated by the word
bears some relation to the qualities of the "external object" also
designated by the word. The lion, for example, may not in fact
be the King of Beasts: it may actually fear the rhinoceros or the
elephant. But its regal appearance and its carnivorous habits lend
to it associations that justify the "idea" of the lion as King of
Beasts. Shelley, therefore, never restricted his use of referential
words to the empirical nature or behavior of their referents, though
he did utilize such scientific "facts" as would contribute to the
"idea" of the word. He drew symbol of the eagle, for
his poetic
example, more from Pliny's Natural History and from Biblical
and bestiary tradition than from nineteenth-century knowledge of
the eagle's nature and habits, because the ancient traditions gave
moral and symbolic dimensions to the bird that Shelley like the —
—
American republic 8 found useful in symbolizing his ideas. Inas-
much as he did not assign symbolic values to his words and images
on empirical grounds, his mind could chart a consistent significance
for each word. 9 From his reading and his own experience Shelley
came to associate various words with particular phases of man's
moral life. Heat and cold, light and darkness, owls and eagles,
violets and roses, sun and moon, all came to symbolize certain
moral and epistemological concepts. To communicate his ideas
8. Benjamin Franklin, an eighteenth- poetry. For example, as I shall try to
century rationalist, attempted to over- show in my
explication of "The Triumph
throw this traditional symbolism and to of Life," the word "Sun" has good as-
prevent the United States from adopting sociations, whereas the word "day" has
the bald eagle as its national bird, pre- bad connotations. Or, to turn to the
ferring the turkey, whose characteristic eagle again, in Prometheus Unbound,
habits he found more in accord with the where Jupiter is evil, Jupiter's sacred bird
ideals of the American republic. cannot be called an "eagle" (which, in
9. Since Shelley was not especially con- spite of continued misreading, always
cerned with the referents of words, but carries good connotations in Shelley's
with language itself, which "is arbitrarily poetry); instead, the bird is referred to
produced by the imagination and has as "Heaven's winged hound" (1.34).
relation to thoughts alone" (Prose, p. Hounds, like wolves, are always symbols
279), he often gives synonyms quite of evil in Shelley's poetry.
different symbolic connotations in his
538 • Donald H. Reiman
to the reader, he drew these symbolic significances from earlier
poetic tradition, modifying the usages of earlier poets only as he
had to in order to express his individualized conceptions of man
and the universe.
Shelley's symbolic universewill be fully elucidated onlv after
scholars have examined dozens of key words in various contexts in
his poetry (and prose) and have then studied the associations of
these same words in the philosophical, religious, and literary writ-
ings that are known to have impressed Shelley. Because such study
of his symbolism is still in its infancy, readers of his poetrv have
often been unable to grasp the significance of a recurring word or
phrase that seems to symbolize something bevond itself. Some
critics have assumed that many of Shelley's symbols were original

and arbitrary, having little relation to those of other writers, while

others have attempted to trace all of his symbols to a single tradi-
tion, usually Platonism. Recent studies of Shelley's use of Lucretius
and of Bacon, 1 however, joined with previous recognition of his
debts to the Bible, Plato, /Eschylus, Spenser, Milton, Dante, Cal-
deron, Goethe, and others, demonstrate the variety of Shelley's
sources, and Earl R. Wasserman's brilliant reading of Adonais
shows the complexity with which Shellev syncretized symbolic oxer-
tones from many sources into his highly original poetrv.-
In the "Essay on Life" (perhaps the most important single docu-
ment of Shelley's intellectual development), Shellev divides natural
phenomena into two major categories: First he speaks of "the
system of the sun, and the stars, and planets the spectacle now
. . .

afforded by the nightly cope of heaven," and then of "the scenery

of this earth. .
." 3 This distinction between celestial and ter-
.

restrial —
phenomena between the "cope of heaven" and the
"scenery of this earth" —
plays an important role in Shelley's symbol-
ism. Shelley adopted for poetic purposes a pre-Copernican cosmol-
ogy that considered all created things beneath the moon subject to
mutability, whereas the sun, planets, and stars beyond the moon
existed in a realm of permanence. The moon, "to whom alone it
has been given/ To change and be adored forever," 4 was mutable

1. William O. Scott. "Shelley's Admira- he uses in The holograph of

the essay.)
tion for Bacon," PMLA, LXXII (June "Essay on Life" (now in the Pierpont
1958), 228-236; Paul Turner, "Shelley Morgan Library) was originally part of
and Lucretius," RES, n.s., X (August the same notebook (now in the Carl H.
1959), 269-282. Pforzheimer Library) that contained the
2. "Adonais: Progressive Revelation as holograph of A Philosophical View of
a Poetic Mode," ELH, XXI (December Reform (1819-20) (see Kenneth Neill
1954), 274-326. Slightly revised and re- Cameron, Shelley and His Circle: 1773-
printed in The Subtler Language. 1822, II, 897).
3. Prose, p. 172. Clark, in a headnote 4. "Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici."
to the "Essay on Life," dates it 1812-14, 2-3 (see G. M. Matthews. "Shelley and
an error that his first footnote refutes. Jane Williams," RES, n.s.. XII (Feb.
(He shows that in 1818 Shelley probably 1961), p. 41).
first saw the quotation from Tasso that
 The Purpose and Method of Shelley s Poetry • 539
but eternal and regular in its mutations; it governed the sublunar
world and was the abiding symbol of its limitations. Whereas the
celestial bodies consisted of but the single element of fire, terrestrial

creation contained the four elements — fire, air, water, and earth.
Earth —often referred to as dust —represented inert matter; water
symbolized purely mortal or terrestrial generation; fire, the element
of the sun and stars, symbolized spiritual energy; and the air,

which existed between the earth and waters of the mutable and
the fires of the eternal, was the realm of those ideas and abstractions
that raise men above the merely mortal perspective but which are
limited and distorted by the imperfections of human condition.
Besides distinguishing between the pure fires of Heaven and the
sublunar creation, Shelley recognized two subdivisions within ter-
restrial nature. The quotation from the "Essay on Life" continues:

"the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas, and the rivers;
the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of the forms and masses
of the leaves of the woods, and the colors which attend the setting
and the rising sun, and the hues of the atmosphere, turbid or
serene .
." (Prose, p. 172). As the punctuation of this passage
.

indicates, 5 Shelley distinguished those elemental natural forms

such as mountain, sea, and river (that consist of a single one of the
three terrestial elements of earth, water, and air) from those slighter
phenomena such as cloud, wave, leaf, dew, mist, rainbow, moth,
and flower.
A terrestrial feature like an ocean, a continent, or even a river or
a mountain, exhibits the qualities of its element (water or earth)
in a general or abstract way. The sea or ocean in Shelley's poetry,
for example, often symbolizes the realm of temporal existence upon
which man pursues his voyage of life. 6 Sometimes a small stream
symbolizes the course of life of some particular individual, whereas
a river may signify the history of some particular community. 7 The
smaller, ephemeral terrestrial creatures frequently image a particular
aspect of man, or man in a specific condition or situation. The cloud,
for example, is a recurring symbol of the human mind or soul,
a product of the moisture of mortal generation but existing above
the merely mortal and vivified by the light of the celestial bodies.
Or, a mimosa, the "sensitive plant," becomes the symbol of man,
with his unfulfilled longings for the Good, the True, and the

5. I have examined a photostat of the dertaking will not be feasible on a full

Pierpont Morgan MS
of "On Life," scale until the Pforzheimer papers have
which does not have the same punctua- been published.
tion as Clark's edition, but in this in- 6. "Lines Written among the Euganean
stance there is clearly a division between Hills," 1-26 {P.W., p. 554), and "Time"
the two types of terrestrial phenomena (P.W., p. 637).
such as that indicated by Clark's punc- 7. "Euganean Hills," 184 (P.W., p. 556),
tuation. Shelley scholars require a new and "Evening: Ponte al Mare, Pisa," 13-
critical edition of the prose based where 16 (P.W., p. 654).
possible on Shelley's MSS, but this un-
540 • Donald H. Reiman
Beautiful, as contrasted with the other transitory creatures, whose
natures seem fulfilled and satisfied within the realm of temporal
experience. 8
Occupying a unique position in Shelley's symbolic universe was
the wind, which in its wilder manifestations as "storm," "tempest,"
or "whirlwind" was Shelley's symbol of Necessity. As a follower of
Hume and Drummond, Shelley rejected the Aristotelian-Thomistic
theory of causation and believed that the mere conjunction of two
sensory impressions (even when they conjoined repeatedly) demon-
strated no necessary causation of the second by the first. Because
Shelley held that the causes for both sensorv "impressions" and
psychic "ideas" were unknown and unknowable, he used the wind,
which "blows where it wills" though nobody knows "whence it
comes or whither it goes," to symbolize the concept that philoso-
phers had postulated to explain the relations between series of
physical, historical, or psychological events. Because air is the
element symbolizing human concepts and ideas, the wind, a con-
nected movement of this element, proves an effective sceptical
symbol of the concept of Necessity that had played so large a part
in eighteenth-century thought. Among the celestial symbols the
moon, which "as Mother of the Months" 9 is associated with time
and mutability, is also "the planet of frost, so cold and bright"
that makes things "wan with her borrowed light" 1 and is usually
identifiable with reason, the analytic faculty, which in A Defence
of Poetry Shellev distinguishes from imagination, the vital, synthetic
faculty. In a proposed letter to Oilier answering Peacock's Four
Ages of Poetry, Shelley wrote: "He would extinguish Imagination
which is the Sun of life, and grope his way bv the cold and uncer-
tain and borrowed light of that moon which he calls Reason,
stumbling over the interlunar chasm of time where she deserts us,
and an owl, rather than an eagle, stare with dazzled eyes on the
waterv orb which is the Queen of his pale Heaven." 2 In Epipsy-
chidion he speaks of

The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven's bright isles,

Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,

That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame
Which ever is transformed, vet still the same,
And warms not but illumines.
281-285; P.W., pp. 41--41S

In a fragment "To the Moon" Shelley asked,

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth.
Wandering companionless
8. Wasserman, The Subtler Language, 373).
p. 257. 1. "To Constantia." 5-6 (P.W., p. 541).
9. "The Witch of Atlas." 73 (P.W., p. 2. ?March 1821. Julian, X, 246.
 —
The Purpose and Method of Shelley s Poetry • 541

Among the stars that have a different birth,

And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
P.W.,p. 621
The moon in Shelley's poetry is beautiful but cold, pale, and in-

constant, of a different order from the stars, giving one only the
borrowed, secondarv light of rational analysis, which is eternal but
not immutable and shines only upon certain aspects of our expe-
rience.
The Sun, on the other hand, is associated with the vivifying

creative imagination, a burning fountain of warmth and light out

of which flow the spiritual natures of created things. At the uni-
versal level the Sun signifies the Deity; in the world of human
experience it represents Imagination, the divine in man. Shelley
always distinguishes, however, between the light of the celestial
Sun and the same light as filtered through the earth's atmosphere.
In the first note to Queen Mab he wrote: "Beyond our atmosphere
the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black
concave. The equal diffusion ofon earth is owing to the
its light
refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and their reflection from
other bodies." 3 Thus, the earth is surrounded by a "veil of light,"
and the white radiance of pure sunlight is broken into the colors
of the visible spectrum. The rainbow, product solely of the distor-
tion of the white light of the One Reality into the multiple colors
of this earth, symbolizes the unreal appearances of earthly life, a
"painted veil" that hides from human vision the nature of things-
in-themselves, and, with the epistemological dilemma clearly in his
thoughts, Shelley speaks of the human mind as diffusing truth and
casting "rainbow hues" over the external world. 4 The cosmic Sun
thus plays what seems to be an ambiguous role in Shelley's sym-
bolism. In itself it vivifies and illuminates in the highest sense, but
because of the double distortion by the earth's atmosphere (the
conditions of limited, terrestrial existence) and by the cloudy human
mind, the light of the sun cannot be trusted; in "Letter to Maria
Gisborne" Shelley recalls
how we spun
. . .

A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun

Of this familiar life, which seems to be
—
But is not: or is but quaint mockerv
Of all we would believe, and sadly blame
The jarring and inexplicable frame
Of this wrong world. . . .

154-160; P.W., pp. 366-367

3. P.W., p. 800. assume symbolic overtones that relate
4. See "Fragment: To the Mind of Man" them both to the human mind {Hellas,
(P.W., pp. 634-635). Because water 215-217; "The Sunset," 1-4, P.W., p.
droplets act as light-refracting prisms, 528) and to the mind's distortion of
such phenomena as dew, mist, and cloud reality.
542 Donald H. Reiman
The sun as seen by men is deceptive, and in such later poems as
"The Sensitive Plant" and "To Night," Shelley praises the night
and its dreams as fountains of higher knowledge.
The immutable realm of Being that
"fixed stars" symbolize the
enjoys all the conditions for which men long but which are impos-
sible in this life under the rule of "Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance,
and Change." In the terrestrial realm of cyclical necessity, not only
do individuals prosper and suffer, live and die, without regard for
moral differences, but there is no discernible permanent progress
in history: If "the world's great age begins anew," it too shall pass
away to be succeeded by a return of "hate and death." 5 The stars,
shining with an unchanging light that does not obscure them in
their own bright veil (as does the Sun, deity itself), offer the hope
to mortals that they, too, can rise above the mutability of this
existence unchanging fulfillment of the highest human
into an
aspirations. In Adonais the stars symbolize the souls of great and
good men of the past, "the splendours of the firmament of time"
who "may be eclipsed, but are extinguished not." 6 Since the true
Sun is obscured by its veil of light, man depends upon the inner
sun of his own imagination (which partakes of the nature of the
Divine but is subject to the limitations of the terrestrial world) and
upon the example of those noble dead who, like stars, beacon "from
the abode where the Eternal are" (Adonais, 495).
Finally, the planet Venus receives considerable attention
throughout Shelley's poetry. Shelley believed strongly in two of
the "theological virtues," Hope and Love, though "Faith" was
always a term of opprobrium in his vocabulary because of what
he regarded as the black moral record of all fideisms, Pagan, Chris-
tian, or Moslem. 7 For him full use of human reason was a moral
responsibility, even though reason's ultimate success lay in defining
the narrow limits of its own competence. In the "Essay on Life"

he says of the "intellectual philosophy" (Humean scepticism): "It

establishes no new truth, it gives us no additional insight into our
hidden nature, neither in its actions nor itself. Philosophy, im-
patient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining as
pioneer for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this
object: it destroys error and the roots of error. It leaves, what is
too often the duty of the reformer in political and ethical ques-
tions to leave, a vacancy" (Prose, p. 173). But whereas "Faith"
was, in Shelley's eyes, a moral liability, "Love" and "Hope" were
the cornerstones of his ethical philosophy, Love its motivating

5. Final Chorus of Hellas (P.W., pp. "splendours" from Dante's Paradiso,

477^78). e.g., Canto XXI. 32.
6. Adonais, 388-389 (P.W., p. 441). 7. See Shelley's note (8) to Hellas, 1090-
Allan H. Gilbert has pointed out to me 91 (P.W., p. 480).
that Shelley probably derived his use of
 —
The Purpose and Method of Shelley s Poetry • 543

force, and Hope for the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil the
sustainer of its energy. Venus, as the morning star Lucifer (the light-
bearer), was the sign of man's regeneration within his earthly life
his awakening to spiritual Love; as Hesperus or Vesper, the evening
star, itpromised fulfillment of man's aspirations beyond the grave
and thus symbolized Hope; as Dante's "third sphere" 8 it also
symbolized Love in its highest manifestations.
The celestial symbols remain relatively consistent in their associa-
tions throughout Shelley's poetry, as do many of the terrestrial
symbols. Each individual poem, however, develops its particular
symbolic universe, drawing nuances and associations from specific
traditions (the pastoral elegiac tradition in Adonais), from literary
models (the Persae of ^schylus in Hellas), or from relevant his-
torical events (the Peterloo Massacre in The Mask of Anarchy),
and (since the symbolic force is primarily "philosophical") also
from the "scientific" and the "phenomenal" levels of meaning.
In explicating Shelley's individual poems, then, one cannot impose
his "symbolic universe" in a Procrustean fashion; one must read
each work on its own terms, keeping in mind the approximate
values of these symbols and observing how they interrelate within
the poem. The symbolism is consistent, but it evolves in forms as
individual as Shelley's poetry is different from the literary sources
he used.
# # #

The temptation for the critic of Shelley, friendly or hostile, is

immediately to give him or his individual poems a rank or niche

in the English poetic tradition. Unfortunately, the present state
of Shelley studies does not permit this, for until one knows what
the poet actually wrote and what
means, one can hardly deter-
it

mine whether his poetry is better or worse than that of other

poets (whose work may or may not be better understood). Until
all of Shelley's works are scrutinized anew, beginning with a recon-

sideration of the authority of their texts and concluding with a

line-by-line, word-by-word explication of literal, "scientific," and
symbolic-philosophical implications, every effort to determine Shel-
ley's place in the Romantic movement or to evaluate his poetic
achievement must remain perilously tentative and approximate.
. . . Some and practice and
criticisms of Shelley's poetic theory
been based upon misunderstanding
of his philosophical ideas have
of his works, but to point out that a group of critics may have
been mistaken about this or that aspect of his work does not,
obviously, prove that Shelley was a great poet or a profound
thinker; it means only that those who value the qualities that

8. Paradiso, VIII-IX; cf. also Shelley's Convito: "Ye who intelligent the Third
translation of the First Canzone of the Heaven move . .
." (P.W., p. 726).
544 • Donald H. Reiman
actually characterize Shelley's poetry will be able to appreciate it

more when they recognize these qualities in it. If, as I believe,

Shelley belongs to the great tradition of Western writers that in-
cludes Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, the proper explication of
hiswords ought to go far toward reestablishing his literary reputa-
tion;if not, then his witings deserve, perhaps, to remain less read

than abused.
 Studies of Individual Works

EVAN K. GIBSON
Alastor: A Reinterpretation

Few
of Shelley's poems have received a wider variety of explana-
tionsand interpretations than Alastor. Most critics would probably
admit that the poem is difficult, and some would even go so far as
to say that a clear understanding of it is impossible, agreeing with
Havens that "the reader of Alastor is confused because its author
was confused." 1 Hoffman attempts to explain it as largely auto-
biographical, 2 while Mueschke and Griggs come to the conclusion
that the prototype of the poet is Wordsworth. 3 The poet's vision
has also been interpreted in a number of ingenious ways. Wood-
berry calls it "Alastor or evil genius," which "drives him on in search
of its own phantasm till he dies." 4 Du Bois describes it as "a ma-
terialization of an ideal man, free, true, beautiful, loving poetry," 5
and Forman believes that it is the ideal of female perfection. 6 The
Preface has also given difficulty. Havens complains that the state-
ments of the Preface are at variance with the action of the poem, 7
Du Bois believes that there is no inconsistency, 8 and Stevens, Beck,
and Snow that the difference is only one of emphasis. 9 It is hoped
that the present discussion will add clarity rather than confusion
to the understanding of this early example of Shelley's deep-set
convictions and powers of imagery.
This paper will attempt, first, a reinterpretation of the poet's
vision, contending that past critics have erred chiefly in over-
personification of the word spirit; there is no certain indication that
Shelley intended any supernatural beings but the "Mother of this

t Reprinted by permission of the Modern 1901), p. 615.

Language Association of America from 5. Arthur E. Du Bois, "Alastor: The
PMLA, LXII (1947), pp. 1022-1042. Spirit of Solitude," JEGP, XXXV
1. Raymond D. Havens, "Shelley's (1936), 538-539.
•Alastor,'" PMLA, XLV(1930), 1108. 6. H. Buxton Forman, Complete Works
2. Harold L. Hoffman, An Odyssey of of Shelley (London: Reeves, 1880), I,
the Soul: Shelley's Alastor (New York: 26n.
Columbia University Press, 1933). 7. Op. cit., pp. 1108-1109.
3. Paul Mueschke and Earl L. Griggs, 8. Op. cit., p. 537.
"Wordsworth as Prototype of the Poet 9.J. Stevens, E. L. Beck, and R. H.
in Shelley's 'Alastor'," PMLA, XLIX Snow, English Romantic Poets (New
(1934), 229-245. York: American Book Company, 1933),
4. G. E. Woodberry, Shelley's Complete p. 886.
Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton,

545
546 • Evan K. Gibson
unfathomable world" (1. 18) as characters in the story. Second, it

will point out what appears to be a natural allegory of the approach

of death and the span of human life which takes up more than half
the poem and which, heretofore, appears to have been overlooked
by the Although the poem may lack in structural organiza-
critics.

tion, it does, we
believe, contain unity of thought throughout and
does not include, as Havens contends, "pictures of nature for their
own sake." 1

The Preface

In 1812 Shelley wrote to Godwin: "Though I begin a subject in

writing with no definite view, it presently assumes a definite form,
in consequence of the method that grows out of the induced train
of thought." 2 If this declaration
is an accurate self-criticism, it would

be logical to assume that in most cases the last statements in

connection with one of Shelley's artistic productions would be the
clearest and most perfectly formed. As the Preface was, presumably,
written after the poem was completed (December 14, 1815), it
should contain the most complete expression of the idea which
took form as Shelley developed the story. Although, as will be
shown later, the Preface does not discuss in detail the entire poem,
we must assume that Shelley intended it as an explanation of the
instructional elements in this picture "not barren of instruction to
actual men." Perhaps recognizing the difficulty of the poem for the
average reader, Shelley wrote the Preface as a clarification and ex-
pected the poem to be read in the light of the Preface rather
than, as too many have done, the Preface to be read in the light
of the poem. Therefore, a careful examination of this prose piece
should be fruitful.
The Preface is divided into two paragraphs, the first of which
deals with the story of the poem and the second with explanation
and general comment on the theme. The chief character of the
story is represented as a youth greatly to be admired "of un-
—
corrupted feelings and adventurous genius." He possesses "an
imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that
is excellent and majestic," and bv it is led to a contemplation of the
ultimate, the essence of the universe. He acquires a vast accumula-
tion of knowledge and develops great intellectual qualities —and his
appetite grows by what it feeds on. He
becomes, also, extremely
sensitive to the world of nature, the magnificence and beauty of

1. Op. cit., p. 1109. Shelley (New York: Scribner's, 1926).

2. Roger Ingpen and
Walter E. Peck, VII, 280.
The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe
 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 547
which enlarge and modify the conceptions of his mind to an infinite
extent. Thus, his goal, his aim in life, instead of being a definite
object, is an ever widening infinity in the realm of knowledge and
of natural beauty. And in this condition he is happy.
But a change comes over him. These objects of the natural world
and of the mind cease to minister to the need for companionship
in his nature. Shelley's fragment, On Love, . . . sheds considerable
light on the Preface at this point.

We are born into the world, and there is something within us

which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts
after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with this law
that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother; this
propensity develops itself with the development of our nature.
We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it
were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or
despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that
we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. 3

And so in the poet that "something within" "thirsts after its

own likeness" or, as the Preface states it, "His mind is at length
suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence
similar to itself." As
consequence of
a this thirst "he images to
himself the Being whom he loves." It important to note thatis

this is a creation of his own mind and not, as some writers have
stated, a vision sent to him by an outside agency. Because of his
vast mental development and familiarity with speculations approach-
ing the ideal, "the vision in which he embodies his own imagina-
tions" is a combination of the ideal of the poet, the philosopher,
—
and the lover a unity of the wonderful, the wise, and the beautiful.
In other human beings, says Shelley, either the intellectual
faculties or the imagination or the functions of sense call forth
sympathetic powers in the being loved. In the poet all these faculties
are supremely united, and therefore all are attached to the vision.
For such a vision, to refer again to the fragment, On Love, is

a miniature as it were of our entire self, ... a mirror whose

surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul

within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise,
which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. 4

The vision, then, according to the Preface, is an "epipsychidion"

— a soul out of his soul —and not something outside the poet's own
nature. As such an image of love is not to be found in this life,
for it is "the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends"
(On Love), the youth's search for a prototype of the vision is

3. Ibid., VI, 201-202. 4. Ibid.

548 • Evan K. Gibson
doomed to failure. Therefore, lie dies "blasted by his disap-
pointment."
Such, apparently, is Shelley's brief outline of the story as he
thought he had written it in the poem; not the story of a vouth
pursued by a supernatural spirit of solitude, Alastor, who, as an
avenger, "drives him on in search of its own phantasm till he dies"; 5
not "the plan that the invisible spirit of solitude should tempt the
poet to destroy himself"; not that Alastor or the gods, jealous of
(5

his knowledge of the thrilling secrets of the birth of time "sent

him a baneful dream"; 7 but, rather, the storv of a youth who, after
living a life of solitude, falls in love with a vision of his "soul
mate," a creation of his own mind, and perishes of disappointment,
apart from any other influence either human or divine. If other
interpretations of the poem are true, they must be established
elsewhere than in Shelley's own digest of the storv.
The second half of the Preface deals with the cause of the
poet's death but widens the discussion to explain the necessity
ofhuman sympathy in general and the evils of the solitary life.

The statement of Du Bois that "It is significant that 'solitude' is

a necessity, as Shelley's Preface has shown," 8 which is just the

opposite of Shelley's statement, is another illustration of the need
of a careful analysis of this apparently confusing piece of prose.
We all the lasting misery and loneliness of the world
are told that
are to be found among those who attempt to exist without human
sympathy. It is important to realize that, in this paragraph, Shelley
is not discussing all humanity, but only the loveless ones. Of these,

there are two classes. One, a vast multitude, are the selfish, blind,
and torpid, who love nothing on this earth and cherish no hope
beyond, who rejoice neither in human jov nor mourn with human
grief. These are morally dead and, living unfruitful lives, "prepare

for their old age a miserable grave."

Hie second group who attempt to live without human sympathy,
of whom the youth of the poem is one, are the pure and tender-
hearted who "perish through the intensity and passion of their
search" for the communities of human sympathy when, too late,
"the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt." These,
as contrasted with the selfish, blind, and torpid, are deluded by a

generous error, instigated by a sacred thirst for doubtful knowledge,

or duped bv an illustrious superstition.
Shelley appears fearful that the reader will misunderstand his
thought. He, therefore, attempts in this paragraph to make it clear
that there are others than "the luminaries of the world" who

5. Woodberry. loc. at. Again. " PMLA, XLVI (1931). VH>

6. Havens, op. <//.. p. 1102. 8. Op. cit.. p. 535n.
7. M. C. Wier. "Shelley's Alastor
 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 549
suffer from living without love, that the law he is illustrating is

universal. The poet, although deluded by a "generous error," is

not the worst example of the loveless life. The delinquency of

those "meaner spirits" is "more contemptible and pernicious."
They, with no excuse for keeping "aloof from sympathies with
their kind," are "morally dead." The universal power of love is
irresistible. All those who "dare to abjure its dominion" constitute
"the lasting misery and loneliness of the world," and either (if

pure and tenderhearted) "perish through the intensity and passion

of their search after its communities," or (if of the unforeseeing
multitude) doomed "to
are a slow and poisonous decay . . .

because none feel with them their common nature."

It is not the search for knowledge or the love of nature which
Shelley deplores but the fact that the youth tried to live without
human sympathy. As one of the pure and tenderhearted, he is

driven to speedy ruin by "the furies of an irresistible passion" created

by his own nature. He brings about his own destruction by a
conflict with one of the immutable laws of life; for, when, of
necessity, "that Power" of human sympathy suddenly awakens him
to "too exquisite a perception" of the influences of love, he is

consumed by despair in the attempt to fill the vacancy of his spirit,

not with flesh and blood companionship but with an impossibility
—that "too exquisite perception."
Thus, we -find that, contrary to Haven's assumption, 9 Shelley
does not say that the poet seeks for a copy of the vision in the
actual world. "He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception."
That he seeks for the pattern or original of the vision itself, the
is,

antitype. Although the Preface does not say where or how the
poet seeks, we certainly would not expect a philosopher of his
surpassing powers to make the blunder of expecting to find the
prototype, the original of his vision, in the realm of the physical.
Nor do the furies of an irresistible passion come from searching
in the actual world. (Indeed, such a search might have saved him.)
But they come from attempting to find the "communities of love"
without a personal bond or kinship with mankind. This was the
vacancy of spirit in which he perished.
This, it would appear, is what Shelley felt he had presented in
the poem when he wrote the Preface — a tragedy of misdirected
genius brought to inevitable defeat by the innocent neglect of one
of the most necessary elements in the human soul. It would be
indeed strange if Shelley, in writing this explanation, should so
completely miss the point of his own poem or forget the significant
details of its development, as much past criticism has inferred. One

9. Op. cit., pp. 1102-1103.

 —
550 • Evan K. Gibson
must reject the possibility of a contradiction in the two until all
attempts at reconciliation are exhausted.

The Solitary

After an invocation in which Shelley calls upon the "Mother

of this unfathomable world" (1. 18) to inspire him, the main body
of the poem begins with a lament. The story is to be a tragedy
the tragedy of a lovely youth, gentle, brave, and generous, who
lived, died, and sang in solitude. Andhad stirred
yet his songs
deeply in the hearts of those unknown to him strangers had wept —
and virgins pined, but he passed on unaware of them. Now his mute
music is locked in the rugged cell of Silence, who has also become
enamoured of his voice.
Then follows a careful description of his character and training.
From earliest youth every sight of earth and air had sent its
"choicest impulses," and of "divine philosophy" all the worth
which the sacred past presented "he felt and knew." That is, he
intuitively received the emanations of nature and the wisdom of
the ancients. But the values of human companionship were
unknown to him, even in his own home:
When early youth had passed, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home. (11. 75-76)
This love of the beauty and majesty of the phvsical world led him
to search in unknown and inaccessible regions to obtain the deepest
secrets of nature —the deep caves of priceless treasure; the fields of
snow and pinnacles of ice; the majestic dome of heaven; the green
earth, where in lonesome vales animal life accepted him into its

fellowship. Of this observation of the marvelous in nature he

never tired. It never "lost in his heart its claims to love and wonder"
(11. 97-98). His philosophy caused him to travel,
thirst for divine
also, to the sites of ancient learning, Athens, Babylon, Egypt, to

study the wisdom of men —

men in the youth of the world who
understood "the thrilling secrets of the birth of time." After visit-
ing these places of mystery and knowledge and opening his soul
to their influences, meaning "like strong inspiration" flashed upon
"his vacant mind" (a mind receptive to emanations of truth) until
he, too, saw those thrilling secrets (11. 125-128).
Shelley has thus far described a youth certainly to be admired
for his personal attractiveness, his high intellectual pursuits, and
his love and and wonder of nature. But
sensitiveness to the beauty
during this time he had lived a solitary life a life untouched bv —
human love. Finding in nature and "divine philosophy" an over-
whelming interest, he did not realize his need of anything else.
 Alastor: A Reinterpretation • 551

Shelley gives no indication that he deliberately refused to accept

human and sympathy. Rather, he was merely unaware of its
love
significance or personal value to him. So engrossed was he in his
pursuit of truth and beauty that he was not conscious of the virgins
who "pined and wasted for fond love of his wild eyes" (11. 62-63)
nor of the love of the Arab maid who watched his nightly sleep
and did not dare "for deep awe to speak her love" (11. 133-134).
The references to the strangers who wept, the virgins who pined,
and the Arab maid, are used to show not a deliberate, willful
rejection of human companionship but an innocent neglect of a
vital part of the human soul. This "generous error" (Preface)

arose from a desire which must be highly admired the desire —

to find truth, to find the meaning of life and of the universe. And
what heightens the tragedy of the poet's death is the fact that
it was caused by an exclusive emphasis upon this very quality

which was so commendable in his life.

The eleven lines (11. 129-139) referring to the Arab maid have
been given undue significance by some writers. Du Bois, for
instance, objects to the lack of conflict between the Arab maid
and the vision. 1 But Shelley did not intend nor desire such a
conflict. He appears to have included these lines merely to reiterate
and re-emphasize, just before the appearance of the vision, the fact
that the youth was unaware of his opportunities and of the impor-
tance of human companionship. He seems hardly conscious of
her presence, entirely taken up as he was with discovering "the
thrilling secrets of the birth of time," (1. 128) and, while she
returned to her father's tent "wildered and wan, and panting,"
and generous youth continued on in his explora-
this noble, brave,
tionsthrough Arabie and Persia with no indication that he realized
the pain and unhappiness he had caused.
But finally his human nature asserts itself in a desire for com-
panionship with one like himself. If we are to believe the Preface,
"he images to himself the Being whom he loves," a being who
unites in a single image the sympathetic demands in the poet of
"the intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense."
And is just what is found in the descrip-
such a three-fold division
tion of the vision 149-191). Havens, complaining of contra-
(11.

dictions between the Preface and the poem itself, says that "an
attentive reader may find some hints" in the poem of the Being
of the Preface. 2 But thirty lines of carefully organized detail is
certainly more than a hint to an inattentive reader. First she spoke
in "low solemn tones" to his inmost sense" like the voice of his
*

own soul and talked of those things which had been most dear
to him, intellectual pursuits: knowledge, truth, and virtue, divine

1. Op. cit., p. 545. 2. Op. cit., p. 1107.

 —
SS2 • Evan K. Gibson
liberty, and poetry —being herself a poet. Then her mood changed.
The contemplation of these thoughts most dear to him kindled
the imagination, and she raised "wild numbers," creating strangely
moving music from the harp in her hands. The voice stifled in
tremulous sobs, the beating heart heard in the pauses of the song,
the tumultuous breath, all contribute to show the influence of the
imagination upon the affectionate phase of the soul. But the
imagination does not deal entirely with concepts. It stimulates
the creation of sense perceptions. She ceased singing, and the poet
turned and beheld her for the first time. Before, she had been veiled
— "her fair hands were bare alone" (11. 165-166), and he had been
aware of her only as she communed with his intellectual and imagi-
native nature. But now "the functions of the sense" (Preface)
imaged the perceptive forms which made the vision complete.
Through "the sinuous veil of woven wind" he saw the bare arms,
the floating locks, the beamy, bending eyes, the trembling lips
a perfection of sense details.
The sensuousness of the vision has been objected to. Mrs. Camp-
bell says that she is "much too earthly and realistic; she who
should have been but a symbol of the soul's desire steps out of the
land of imagery like some scantily dressed beauty of a society ball." 3
But such an objection disregards the statement of the Preface. "The
Poet" says Shelley "is represented as uniting these requisitions,
and attaching them to a single image." Thus, we see that the
vision is a three-fold creation of "the intellectual faculties, the
imagination, the functions of sense." The omission of the sense
details would have left the image incomplete.
As explained by the passage previously quoted from On Love,
that "something within" which thirsts after its own likeness, and
which the poet had never been conscious of before, made itself
felt for the first time by awakening his mind to "thirst for inter-

course with an intelligence similar to itself" (Preface) This "dream .

of hopes that never yet had flushed his cheek" (11. 150-151) was
the imaging forth of the "epipsychidion" of the poet, that "minia-
ture as it were of our entire self" (On Love). One must under-
stand, however, that the vision is not the poet's own soul. He does
not fall in love with himself as Hoffman believes, who makes the
vision the poet's own inner self. "Shelley's poet is unable to
separate his ideas of a beloved woman from his consciousness of
himself except in the matter of physical form." 4 But there is no
basis for such a conclusion. The Preface states that all love is

sympathy with like qualities in others. The vision is a creation bv

his soul of an ideal "soul-mate," one who will respond to CTCT)
characteristic of his soul on all three planes.

3. O. W. Campbell. Shelley and the Un- 190.

romantics (London: Methuen, 1924), p. 4. Op. cit., p. 34.
 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 553

However, the objection which many would have to this inter-

pretation is that, while it may be in entire agreement with the

Preface and the rest of the poem, it is contradicted by lines 203-205,

which follow the description of the vision:

The spirit of sweet human love has sent

A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts.

Perhaps because of a misunderstanding of Peacock's explanation

of the title, many critics have regarded these lines as pivotal in

motivating the action of the story, interpreting "the spirit of

sweet human some supernatural being who punishes the
love" as
youth by sending an evil dream. But is not this interpretation an
overpersonification of what Shelley meant to be only slightly figura-
tive? Although spirit does mean "an intelligent but immaterial
being," it may also mean "the essential principle of some emotion
as governing action." Used in the latter sense it is in entire agree-
ment with the Preface and the rest of the poem. That is, the
dormant spirit of sweet human love in the poet's own nature,
sent the vision —
that spirit of human sympathy which, according
to the Preface, makes itself felt at some time in all those who are
not morally dead. Shelley does slightly personify the word by the
use of the feminine pronoun and the verb sent, but such momentary
personification is not uncommon, particularly as he regarded the
spirit of love as a universal feeling of human sympathy and, there-
fore, not improper for personification. Certainly there is little basis,
in the light of the rest of the poem, for regarding these lines as
the entrance of a supernatural character into the plot.
The title of the poem, as we know from Peacock's note, was
selected after the poem was completed. It contains, quite certainly,
a reference to a supernatural being. But Alastor is not one of the
characters of the poem. He is a personification of the theme of
the poem as the sub-title indicates. A spirit of solitude, the ruling
temper of the poet's life, causes his destruction. This is the theme

of the poem. Nor is there anything in Peacock's explanation to

indicate that he understood the title to mean any more than this:

He [Shelley] was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which

he adopted: Alastor; or the spirit of Solitude. The Greek word,
'A\daTu>p is an evil genius.
f
The poem treated the spirit of
. . .

solitude as a spirit of evil. I mention the true meaning of the

word because many have supposed Alastor to be the name of the
hero. 5

There is little reason for agreeing with Wier that, because the poet
had roamed too long in the ruins of antiquity and "saw the

5. Thomas Love Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley (London: Frowde, 1909), pp. 55-66.
554 . Evan K. Gibson
thrilling secrets of the birth of time," therefore the gods or Alastor,
jealous of his knowledge, sent him a baneful dream. 6 Such con-
clusions come from reading the poem with one eye on Prometheus
Unbound. The vision in no sense of the word is evil nor exerts an
evil influence on him. Shelley believes that all (or at least the
pure and tenderhearted) carry such an ideal in the soul (On Love) .

The imaging forth of this ideal was inevitable one of the laws —
of the universe. The evil which followed the vision was the result
of "the Poet's self-centered seclusion" (Preface).
The upon the poet, though tragic, is what
effect of the vision
should be expected. Awakening from his dream he suddenly
becomes aware of his loneliness in the midst of nature of his —
lack of companionship with a being like himself. The nature which
had so delighted him now only emphasizes the solitariness of his
own existence:

Whither have fled

. . . The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and majesty of Earth
The Joy, the exultation? His wan eyes
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
(11. 196-202)

It is it has an
not that the poet comes to hate nature but that
emptiness about which he had not realized before the appearance
it

of the vision. Later, as he sees the swan wing its way to its nest
(11. 275-280), he comments upon the companionship of like with

like and recognizes the gulf between himself and nature.

And what am I that I should linger here,

With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not my thoughts? (11. 285-290)

The desire for "a community with what we experience within

ourselves"(On Love) causes the poet to realize that there can
be no actual communion between the divine spirit of man and
the deaf, blind, and thoughtless physical world. There may be an
appreciation of nature's beauties and even a mystic sense or emo-
tional reaction to the majesty and mystery of nature, but these
will not substitute for companionship with thinking, imagining, sen-
tient beings. This was the fatal lesson the poet learned from the
vision. To Shelley this was such an important truth that he carries
it through to the end of the poem.

6. Op. cit., pp. 949-950.

 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 555
In lines 412-419, as the poet's boat drifts into the peaceful cove
after escaping the abyss, the influences of naturetouch him, and
he longs to deck his withered hair with the bright flowers on the
bank:

But on his heart its solitude returned

And he forbore.

The longing for the vision created by "the strong impulse" of

sweet human love had not yet performed its ministry. The influence
of "those flushed checks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame" hung
upon the poet's spirit till death, when the floods of night closed
over it.

Even later, in the most perfect natural surroundings, when the

very Spirit of Nature seemed to stand beside him and to speak
through the medium of

undulating woods, and silent well,

And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom
Now deepening the dark shades,
even here the "two starry eyes" of the vision, from the intense
pensiveness of his own "gloom of thought," beckoned him away
from this vale of nature to follow the light that shone within his soul
(11. 479-494). For the speech of nature in woods and rivulet and

evening gloom, however emotionally real and intuitively sensed,

that of the deaf air, the blind earth, and the thoughtless sky
is still

(11.289-290). It cannot substitute for the "two starry eyes" of

human companionship, even though an emotional kinship or
"mystic sympathy" (1. 652) with nature's movements may be
present till the very end of life.

And so, although the poet had felt companionship with nature
before the appearance of the vision, after he awakens he is a
solitary indeed, findingsympathy nowhere. His first thought is a
desire to be reunited with this maiden of the vision. Overleaping
the bounds between sleeping and waking, he pursues her into the
actual world, only to find that she is lost forever in the pathless
desert of dim 210). The thought of sleep immediately
sleep (1.

suggests a related concept, and the poet wonders if the vision may
be found in death. "Does the dark gate of death conduct to
thy mysterious paradise, O sleep?" (11. 211-213) But who knows
towhat realms death conducts? Perhaps our hopes for the fulfill-
ment of desires in a future state are but wishful thinking. Perhaps,
as Shelley says later when the poet gazes into the reflection in
the well,

the human heart,

Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there. (11. 472-474)
SS6 • Evan K. Gibson
And here the same image is used. The calm lake, reflecting the
arch of clouds and pendant mountains, leads only to blackness
and watery nothingness. May not our belief in life after death be
but a reflection of our hopes? And yet the loathsome vapors and
foul grave may hide something more beautiful than they perhaps, —
the delightful realms of sleep. If death is the opposite of life, may
not the images represent opposite results? The ebb and flow of these
thoughts, motivated by the poet's intense desire, stung his heart with
alternate hope and despair (11. 221-222).
Both Havens and Hoffman labor over this passage and come
to opposite conclusions as to whether the image means there is or
7
is not a life after death. But Shelley's intention was to leave the
question unanswered. "This doubt" flowed on his heart and hope-
stung like despair. In fact, the latter half of the poem was written
mainly to show that the question is unanswerable. We know not
the future; we must find what we can of our ideals here.
But the poet is driven on by "hope and despair, the torturers"
(1. 639) not in an attempt to find in a human maiden the likeness
of his vision but in a blind attempt to escape the torture of intense
desire controlled by alternate hope and despair. This is made clear
by the image of the eagle and the serpent:

As an eagle grasped
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast
Burn with the poison, and precipitates
Through night and day, tempest and calm, and cloud.
Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight
O'er the wide acrv wilderness: thus driven
By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,

He fled. (11. 227-237)

Here, certainly, is no search for an earthlv maiden. The question

of the poet's search in this world for a copy of the vision, which
has concerned several writers in recent years, must, of necessity,
be answered in the negative. If the poet at this point turned to
the world of mankind for love and companionship, the storv would
be without a theme, and the Preface would, indeed, be inconsistent
witli it. As we have already pointed out, the Preface states that

"He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception." Hoping in-

tensely that there is a prototype, an archetype, in the ideal world

for this "brightshadow" which his mind has conceived, he turns
immediately to the two avenues bv which man has hoped to reach
the ideal world —
sleep and death. The former is transitory. Through
it the vision came to him but is now lost. "For sleep, he knew.

7. Havens, op. cit., p. 1099; Hoffman, op. cit., pp. 36-37.

 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • SS7
kept most relentlessly its 292-293). Death is
precious charge" (11.

most uncertain, 294) and yet the

"faithless perhaps as sleep," (1.

only other possibility. It is in these two areas only that the youth
seeks for a prototype. The search is first an intellectual one and
is presented mainly in lines 205-222, dealing with the image of

the calm lake reflecting the world of the senses but leading to
nothing but watery blackness. Again the two possible domains
of the ideal are referred to in lines 290-295, partially quoted above.

A
gloomy smile
Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.
For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly
Its precious charge, and silent death exposed,
Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure,
With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms.

Finally, after the consuming flames of desire have brought him

to theedge of the grave, he decides to venture into this unknown
and doubtful area of the ideal, and so embarks in the little shallop
to "meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste" (1. 305). As we
hope to show later, Shelley carries the poet, from this section on
to the end of the poem, through a natural allegory of death and
the span of life as he continues his search for the vision beyond
this life. The youth's hopes are high while on the stormy sea, and,

as he sees the yawning cavern, he cries:

Vision and Love! ... I have beheld

The path of thy departure. Sleep and death
Shall not divide us long! (11. 366-369)

But such hopes of finding our ideals beyond this life are without
basis.As the Preface says, the search is a vain one. The passion
eventually burns itself out, until at the poet's death "hope and
despair, the torturers, slept" (11. 639-640). The "two starry eyes"
cease to beckon him, and his last moments are given "to images
of the majestic past" (1. 629).
Such is the search — a search for avenues to the ideal world. At
no point in the poem does Shelley indicate that the poet con-
siders any other realms but those of sleep and death as areas in
which to seek for the prototype of his vision. And, as Havens has
rightly said, it is the vision and the vision alone which the poet

seeks, not an earthly, partial copy. 8 This however, as we have

shown, is not inconsistent with the Preface, as Havens thinks; for
it does not state that the poet seeks for a physical maiden in the
physical world but for a prototype of an ideal vision, which must
certainly, be found only in the ideal world.

8. Op. cit., p. 1102.

 : K. Gibson

turn's wanderings am<v

BoT his poir, le
- "

ian kings ^ und

outhful maidens *man thmks the poet scrutinized

of the vision are presented, as was

Ht was fast as solita isuxi as

called him by false names of "brother" and "friend"

f his woe because they realized

won -
e universe, now he is scarcely aware of these cc r

f his spir
et knows he
cans ngs about his death The emotional
«-!-.-.r.r -:-. -';'. -.-.- m past ieasfaioi 1Mb m1 boat :', r *i^e
,e, unau actual human companion
re and completely des*
"lorasmian sh -: his body is a
very frail and leak t essence of life The effects of
"the brooding od in lin

,s were k
•

M hand
xd bone within its withered sk.

and the lustre that consumed it, shone

ecretly
i his dark eyes ak

There is little hope of the continuance

i hen the poet contemplates meeting death br
the leaky shallop, he is not contemplating suicide, as

but, re; «n end, is merely

 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 559
seeking his final resting place. The doubtful lure, perhaps faithless,
of meeting his ideal in death causes him to consider "the drear
ocean's waste" as the most favorable approach to that undiscovered
country:

For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves

The slimy caverns of the populous deep. (11. 306-307)
Havens he was a suicide" and that Shelley
believes that "morally
held, "vaguely and intermittently," the plan that Alastor "should
tempt the poet to destroy himself in order to enjoy the com-
panionship of the ideal being whom he had imaged as his love." 2
Du Bois, attacking the same problem, comes to the opposite con-
clusion. He says, "The theme of Alastor is the triumph of an
individual genius over the fear of death." 3 We fail to see that
Shelley was concerned with the problem of suicide or the fear
of death. As we have shown, death is upon the poet. In
a few
hours he actually expires in the quiet nook, nor due to is his death
his venture on the sea or any other subsequent action. His move-
ments are those of a dying man. The fear of death is not men-
tioned in the early portion of the poem, nor is there an indication
that the poet conquers that fear. He proceeds calmly to death
merely because it is a necessity and because he has no desire to
live any longer, as the vision has turned this world to ashes. His
attitude toward death is not a problem except as an avenue to
the ideal world.

The Allegories of Death and Life

When Shelley brings his poet to the shore of this vast sea and
to the contemplation of death, he, apparently, changes his method
of presentation. Before, he has introduced the youth and illustrated
his character and attitudes in the world of the actual or at least
the possible. While the events and descriptions as a whole may
be representative or in a sense didactic (this is inferred in the
Preface), the reader receives the impression that, thus far, the
happenings were a part of the actual life of the poet and not
merely figures of speech in an allegorical system. However, from
here on, the poem presents many physical impossibilities. It is hard
to believe, for instance, that Shelley expected the reader to accept
the poet's crossing of the sea in the boat as a literal experience.
This little shallop whose sides

Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints

Swayed with the undulations of the tide (11. 302-303)

2. Ibid., p. 1102. 3. Op. cit., p. 537.

S60 • Evan K. Gibson
carries him across a wide sea, through a raging storm of waves
and boiling torrents, down yawning cavern of winding depth, and
a
finally through a tremendous maelstrom into a quiet cove. And at
no time does the boat appear inadequate for the journey.
Such objects and events must have more significance than that
of an adventurous section of a surface narrative which, up to this
point, has been at least romantically plausible. Before venturing a
speculation as to their meaning one ought to consider Shelley's
general habits of imagery and allegorical presentation. An attentive
reading of Shelley's poetry will demonstrate the fact that repeti-
tion of imagery was a common characteristic of his writing. The
repetition occurs not merely from one poem to another but within
the same poem, the image often appearing later with a word of
explanation which shows the metaphor intended. This imaginative
tenacity is not, of course, an indication of paucity of thought but
of vividness and conviction as to the correct poetic figure.
Another question which should be examined here is the reason
for Shelley's change of method. If he has not used an allegorical
system thus far, why should he introduce one now? A considera-
tion of the problem of the search for the vision should provide
the answer. If death is the only possible area of union with the
vision, and if, as we hope to show, Shelley intends to conduct the
poet into the realms of death, how else but by allegorv may the
material be presented? From this point on, the problems treated
are not in the sentient world, but in that of death and immortality.
A system of figures is the only possible way to continue the story.
At this point, then, the poet, prematurely aged and ready for
the grave, stands on the shore, a wide waste of putrid marshes from
which a sluggish stream empties into the sea. May not this setting
represent the end of mortal existence when the stream of life enters
the ocean of eternity? Such an interpretation is given support by
the repetition of the image later in the poem with a definite
planation of meaning. The stream which rises in the well (11.
its

477-479) and empties in the immeasurable void (11. 567-569) is,

we are told, an image of life (1. 505). If this portion of the setting
represents the passage from this life, other details may also con-
tribute to the representation. The swan which rises as he approaches
the shore (1. 276) may represent the departure of the senses and
affections at death, the loss of consciousness of the world of phvsical
nature. Certainly the little boat with its gaping sides and frail joints

is Obeying the rest-

suggestive of the bodilv condition of the poet.
less impulse of his soul, he leaps into the boat, which is swept out

across the tranquil sea bv the wind which sweeps strongly from the
shore. The suggestive imagery of unconsciousness and approaching
death is strengthened bv the next lines:
 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 56 J
As one that in a silver vision floats
Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds
Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly
Along the dark and ruffled waters fled
The straining boat. (11. 316-320)

The "restless impulse," (1. 304) which urges him to embark and
meet lone Death, evidently comes from "his eager soul," (1. 311)
which he follows by leaping into the boat and which earlier held
"a strong impulse" (1. 274) that urged him toward the seashore.
These lines seem to represent the willingness and even eagerness
with which the poet's soul is ready to leave this life when death
approaches. They also suggest the fatal necessity of the forces of
life and death —the
"restless impulse" which drives the soul to
its appointed end. In the natural allegorv this idea of necessity is
continued bv the wind, which soon becomes a hurricane. At this
point there no chance of turning back into life, for,
appears
although "the day was fair and sunny" (1. 308) and life still had

its beauty and charm, yet "the wind swept strongly from the shore,

blackening the waves" (11. 309-310). The poet, following his eager
soul, and like one "obedient to the sweep of odorous winds," is
driven by these winds of necessitv across the blackened waves,
which earlier were described as leading only to a black and watery
depth (11. 215-216) and compared to death's blue vault. That
the winds represent the necessity of death —the irresistible laws
of disintegration in the universe — is strengthened by the use of the
same image near the end of the poem, where the poet actuallv dies:

O, storm of death!
Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night:
And thou, colossal Skeleton, that still
Guiding its irresistible career
In thv devastating omnipotence,
Art king of this frail world. (11. 609-614)

The winds which drive the boat first over a tranquil sea like
a cloud before a hurricane soon may be truly described as a "storm
of death." The experience of losing consciousness as in a silver
vision swept by odorous winds
is changed to a fierce conflict of

—
and scourging tempest the final struggle as life is
tossing waves
subdued by death. But through it all the soul, tvpified by the
poet himself, rides confident, safely carried in its fragile physical
receptacle until the fatal moment when the laws of life and death
give it release.
The storm continues for some time, but finally the struggle
ends as the boat is carried into a yawning cavern the jaws of —
death —
and on a calmer surface approaches the end of its journey.
S62 • Evan K. Gibson
That the cavern represents the jaws of death is made quite
probable by other uses of the same image. Shelley speaks of "the
dark gate of death" (1. 211) and of the "stony jaws" at the end
of the stream of life (1. 551). That the poet recognizes the cavern
as the dark gate of death is shown by his own words as it looms
before him:

Vision and Love! ... I have beheld

The path of thv departure. Sleep and death
Shall not divide us long! (11. 366-369)

The conflict is over. The storm of death has subsided. What lies

beyond? But Shelley is The theme

not prepared to give the answer.
of his poem deals with the here and now, not the hereafter. Nor
does he believe that man knows the answer. There may be a
happy existence beyond this life, and there mav be nothing but
oblivion awaiting the soul after death. Who knows? And so he
presents both possibilities in the allegory, choosing the more optimis-
tic for purposes of the storv.
At the end of the windings of the cavern is a vast whirlpool, and

V the midst was left,

Reflecting, yet distorting even- cloud,
A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm.
(11. 384-386)

The whirlpool suggests the possibility of complete oblivion, utter

annihilation of personality after death. The reflecting pool of
calm at theend of the maelstrom, tremendous and yet treacherous,
is a repetition of the same image used earlier and again later. As

was pointed out above, the reflections of this life seen on the surface
of water suggest the wishful thinking which mav be the only basis
for our belief in an individual existence after death. The surface
of the lake, reflecting the arch of rainbow clouds, but leading only
to watery blackness is compared to death's blue vault (11. 213-218) .

And, later, the reflections in the well are compared to the pos-
sibility that

the human heart

Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there. (11. 4-2-4-41

And so, here, the maelstrom leading to oblivion has at its center
a treacherous calm, reflecting and yet distorting the life of this
physical, sentient world. But it is only a reflection. Beyond is

black nothingness. Such, Shellev seems to say, is one possibility.

But it is not the only one. The belief in the retention of per-
sonality may be more than wishful thinking. There may be a
 Alastor: A Reinterpretation • 563

quiet cove in eternity where the wise and the good will continue
their existence. As the boat is about to be drawn down into the
vortex, "a wandering stream of wind breathed from the west"
(11.397-398), perhaps again the winds of necessity, gently forces
the boat into a smooth spot and blows it down a placid opening

into a quiet cove whose meeting banks, drooping flowers, and

murmuring breeze are in startling contrast to the roar of the falling
stream and the dizzy speed of the whirlpool just escaped.
The meaning of these images is again reinforced by repetition.
At the end of the poem the same two possibilities are presented.
The stream of life scatters its waters to the passing winds as it
loses its identity in the "immeasurable void" of oblivion (11. 569-

570), and yet on the edge of the precipice, overlooking the earth,
is a tranquil nook where the poet finally comes to rest a spot that —
seems to smile even in the lap of horror (11. 571-578). This quiet
cove or tranquil nook as a haven for the soul appears to represent
Shelley's hope for the retention of personality after death, for in
his essay On Life, ... he says of man:

Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit

withinhim at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. 4

But the uncertainty of that hope, as shown in the two images of

oblivion, is expressed in his Journal on July 28, 1814. Meditating
—
on death he writes, "I hope but my hopes are not unmixed with
fear for what will befall this inestimable spirit when we die." 5
That he recognized the possibility of loss of individual being is
also established by a prose fragment, On the Punishment of Death,
probably written in 1814 or 1815:

The opinion that the vital principle within us, in whatever mode
it may continue to exist, must lose that consciousness of definite

and individual being which now characterizes it, and become a

unit in the vast sum of action and of thought which disposes and
animates the universe, and is called God, seems to belong to that
class of opinion which has been designated as indifferent. 6

So the allegory of death comes to an end, and we might expect

the poet actually to expire on the banks of the cove.
The reason the poem does not end at this point is, perhaps, not
at first apparent. The poet has reached his quiet cove in eternity.
What more is there to say? But the last words of the poet ("Vision
and Love..." 11. 366-369) had suggested the likelihood of his
reuniting with the vision after death. That had been his hope, and
if he died in the cove with the vision still strong on his mind, we

4. Ingpen and Peck, op. cit., VI, 194. 6. Ibid., VI, 186.
5. Ibid.,VI, 361.
564 • Evan K. Gibson
would be left with the feeling that he probably was united with
her after death. However, that was not Shelley's intention as was
shown in the Preface. The danger
of neglecting love and svmpathv
with one's fellow-man in this was to be the theme of the poem.
life

And so the story continues until the passion subsides from the
impulse in the cove (11. 415-419) to the fainter impulse by
the well in the two starry eyes (11. 488-492)* and finally dies away
when hope and despair sleep (11. 639-640) and the poet gives his
thoughts up to images of the majestic past, his last moments being
in complete harmony with his surroundings.
Shelley also wishes to drive home the thought that such a hope
of expecting to find one's ideals beyond this life is without any
certain foundation. It is as if nature stretched out a vast allegory
for the poet to observe to show the futility of his quest. Behold our
life! What do we know of it, rising we know not whence and ending
we know not whither? And so he presents these images of all that
we know of our existence, beginning and ending with hollow caves
giving forth a thousand confused voices. We must capture what we
can of our ideals in this world. The future is unknown.
In dealing with the second allegory we can begin our analysis
with more confidence. There can be little doubt that this section
represents the span of human life, for the poet himself recognizes
that the various aspects of the setting are types of his mortal
existence and appears to draw from it resignation as to the loss of
the vision. His words might be regarded as the answer to his
"Vision and Love" speech:

stream! O
Whose source is inaccessibly profound,
Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?
Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness,
Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs,
Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course
Have each their type in me; and the wide skv.
And measureless ocean may declare as soon
What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud
Contains thy waters, as the universe
Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched
Upon thy flowers mv bloodless limbs shall waste
I' the passing wind! (11. $02-^14)

With such a positive statement as this it is strange that no one,

heretofore, has of metaphors by
worked out the detailed svstem
which Shellev pictures our mortal span. Certainly we cannot agree
with Havens that "in Alastor we have pictures of nature for their
own sake." 7 Rather, we are inclined to believe Shelley's own state-

7. Op. cit., p. 1109.

 Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 565
ment in a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener dated June 5, 1811:
"My opinion is that all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate
to the inculcated moral." 8
Leaving the boat in the cove the poet walks through a narrov
shaded vale (1. 420) where huge caves "respond and roar for ever."
These caves at the beginning of the setting find a counterpart at
the end of the stream where "black gulfs and yawning caves . . .

gave ten thousand various tongues" 548-549). As these "loud (11.

and hollow gulfs" are mentioned by the poet in the passage quoted
above, we can be sure that they have typical significance. Coming
as they do at the beginning and end of the allegory, they apparently
represent the thousands of questions and answers of philosophy
and religion as to man's origin before birth and his destination
after death. That Shelley had considered many of these questions
himself is common knowledge, but it is significant to note his
attitude toward them in the fragment, On Life . . . :

How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of

our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to
ourselves, and this is much. For what are we? Is birth the com-
mencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth
and death? 9

And so the poet wanders through this dark yet beautiful forest
vale, "as led by love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death" (11. 427-
428). These lines are further indications of uncertainty. What is

the controlling force of our mortality? Are we motivated by some-

thing within — love or dream (aspirations)? Or is it by something
beyond ourselves — the fatal pattern of some god or of mighty,
impersonal Death, the necessary workings of the laws of dissolu-
tion in the universe?
Leaving, then, these uncertainties, Shelley deals with what we
do know of the beginnings of life in the union of male and female
and the development of the family. Using the symbolism of trees
and vines and flowers, he pictures the scene in which "the oak,
expanding its immense and knotty arms, embraces the light beech"
(11. 431-433). The tall cedars overarch and protect the tremulous

and pale ash and acacia (11. 433-438). Around their trunks the
parasitic vines flow, and

as gamesome infants' eyes,

With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs
Uniting their close union. (11. 441-445)

8. Ingpen and Peck, op. cit., VIII, 100. 9. Ibid., VI, 194.
 :

S66 - Evan K. Gibson

It is by such phrases as "the wedded boughs uniting their close

union" and "as gamesome infants' eyes" that Shelley makes certain
the intended symbolism throughout the allegory.
Among these symbols of wedded union and gamesome infants,
in one dark, lovely, and mysterious glen, a well of most translucent
wave

Images all the woven boughs above,

And each depending leaf, and every speck

Of azure sky, darting between their chasms.
(11. 459-461)

This well, which represents the mysterious source of life and from
which flows the stream (11. 477-479), reflects on its surface the
woven boughs of hereditary influence and the impressions that this
sentient life receives from the world of nature. As we have pointed
out, it is from these impressions that man builds his hope for
sentient existence after death (11. 469-474). After pausing for a
moment in this lovely glen beside the well, the poet continues on,
for the influence of the vision, those "two starry eyes, hung in
the gloom of thought," (1. 490) still causes a separation from
nature. The thought him that companionship must
of her reminds
be in like with like. The rivulet which he follows from the well
and which represents the span of mortal life begins wanton and
wild "like childhood laughing as it went" (1. 499). But soon the
scene changes. Grey rocks, thin spires of drv grass, and "gnarled
roots of ancient pines" indicate the influences of age upon life.

And yet in old age, man, "branchless and blasted," still clenches
this life "with grasping roots" (11. 527-532)

A gradual change was here,

Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away,
The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin
And white, and where irradiate dewv eyes
—
Had shone, gleam stony orbs: so from his steps
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade
Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds
And musical motions. (11. 532-539)

As the stream approaches the end of its existence, it is sur-

rounded by the caves mentioned above, which "gave ten thousand
l

various tongues" (1. 549) concerning the life beyond. Finally it

reaches the end of its course as "the pass expands its stony jaws"
and an "immeasurable void" is revealed into which the stream
scatters "its waters to the passing winds" (11. 550-570). Beyond
the stonv jaws of death and across the immeasurable void where
lies oblivion, are
 .

Alas tor: A Reinterpretation • 567

Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams,
Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom
Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills
Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge
Of the remote horizon. (11. 555-559)

Beyond seem to
this mortality stretch unknown lands, but of their
significance no man can tell.
However, again Shelley points out the alternative. These grim
aspects "were not all; —
one silent nook was there" (11. 571—573)
As was illustrated in the figure of the cove beside the maelstrom
(11. 397-408), there may be more than wishful thinking in the
hope of individual existence after death. There may be a tranquil
nook where at least such surpassing spirits as this youth will rest
eternally.
It is in this spot that the poet draws his last breath, expiring
just at the instant that the crescent moon, which had filled the
foggy air with yellow mist, disappears below the horizon. The moon
and its yellow mist apparently represent in the natural allegory
that which the vision has represented in the poet's life mankind's —
ideal aspirations. This interpretation gains its main support from
the fact that, as the moon sinks out of sight, its two horns are
the last to be seen, diminishing until "two lessening points of light
alone gleamed through the darkness" (11. 654-655). These two
points of light are so similar to the "two starry eyes" (1. 490) that
both Kessel 1 and Moore 2 have assumed that they actually refer
to the eyes of the vision, but a careful reading will show that they
are the two points of "the divided frame of the vast meteor."
(11. 650-651). However, the similarity does make it appear that

the moon has such a place in the allegorical system and that when
man dies his ideals die with him. At least, there is no assurance
that they will be found in death.
The conclusion to the poem is a lament that such a surpassing
spirit is lost forever to the world. Mueschke and Griggs find in

this section a reference to Wordworth and believe that he is the

prototype of the poet throughout the poem. But they suppose

that the "one living man" the "vessel of deathless wrath" (11. 677-
678) refers to Shelley's older contemporary. 3 A careful reading of
this passage with its allusions to "Medea's wondrous alchemy"

which restored old ^Eson to youth (11. 672-675) and to "the

dream of dark magician" searching for the elixir of eternal life
(11. 681-686), will show that Shelley is speaking here of someone

having the gift of everlasting life, that gift being a curse. Quite

1. Marcel Kessel, "The Poet in Shelley's an Introduction to the Study of Char-

Alastor, a Criticism," PMLA, LI (1936), acter (Princeton: Psychological Review
308n. Company, 1922), p. 17.
2. T. V. Moore, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 3. Op. cit., p. 230.
568 • Evan K. Gibson
obviously thisis a reference to the wandering Jew, a figure hf
used more than once in his poetry. Nor does the theme of the
poem apply to Shelley's criticism of Wordsworth, which was con-
cerned with his desertion of the liberal cause.
A more popular interpretation is that the entire poem is auto-
biographical — that "the over-idealistic poet as described in both
the Preface and the poem is undoubtedly Shdley." 4 Now, it cannot
be denied that the youth of the poem has a number of charac-
teristics in common with his creator. Attempting to exhibit a

character greatly to be admired, possessing but one tragic flaw,

Shelley draws largely upon the ideals by which he attempted to
pattern his own life and in so doing shows great sympathy and
perhaps, at times, even identification with his creation. In this
sensewe might say that there are autobiographical elements in the
poem. But to say that the portrait of this solitary, whose one
weakness was a neglect of human sympathy, is a self-criticism of
the man who, from the early Queen Mab to the mature Philo-
sophical View of Reform, waged war against social injustice, and
who confessed to have "a passion for reforming the world," 5 such
an attitude is to lose sight of either the character of the author
or the theme of the poem. Certainly, if Epipsychidion is autobio-
graphical, cannot be said that Shelley searched for love only
it

in the ideal worlds of sleep and death! must conclude that We

the poem deals largely with a problem rather than an actual
person —the temptation of the idealist to live a solitary life rather
than find partial ideals of love and human companionship in this
present world.
The fact that the poem ends on a despairing note rather than
with some hint of the theme, which in a cooler moment Shelley
discusses in the Preface, would suggest that in the white heat of
poetic creation his sympathies with the youth forced him to stress
the tragic loss of such a surpassing spirit rather than the central
thought of the poem. He may have recognized this weakness when
he wrote the Preface.
In conclusion, we cannot agree with Havens that "The poem
is not a unity, it it was not
does not produce a single impression,
the offspring of adominating purpose." 6 Although the
single,
poem does not have the balance which some might wish, it is
a unity and does have structure, the loose structure of a progressive
development of a central theme. And from this theme he does
not deviate throughout the poem.

4. N. I. White, Shelley, I, 419. Professor a number ofrecent critical works, e.g..

White has recently informed me, how- Hoffman, op. cit., or Carl H. Grabo,
ever, that he did not intend this state- The Magic Plant; the Growth of Shel-
ment to be understood as a complete ley's Thought (Chapel Hill: University
interpretation of the poem. It should, of North Carolina Press, 1936).
therefore, be regarded only as a concise 5. Preface to Prometheus Unbound.
statement of the opinion to be found in 6. Op. cit., p. 1109.
 —
The One "Mont Blanc" 569
Apparently, however certain Shelley was in 1821 of his words
on idealism:

. . . Die,
Ifthou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled (Adonais, 11. 464-466)

in 1815 when he wrote Alastor he was not at all sure that . . . ,

man's ideals had any returnable value beyond the very important
ones of love and sympathy in this present life. It is better to
"arrest the faintest shadow" of that love here 7 than to try to
find it in a future life which may not exist.

CHARLES H. VIVIAN

The One "Mont Blanc"*

The fullest published analysis of Shelley's "Mont Blanc" is a study
by J.
Kapstein which appeared in 1947. Professor Kapstein finds
I.

in the poem equivocations and ambiguities not of the functional, —

Empsonian but rather inadvertent ambiguities, reflecting a
variety,
conflict or uncertainty in Shelley's own mind. This uncertainty
Professor Kapstein identifies with Shelley's wavering between
Liberty and Necessity, or between a conception of the human
mind as a free, creative thingand the doctrine of radical empiricism
that the mind is nothing but the sum of its sensations. 1 I believe
that a different reading is possible: that the element of conflict or
struggle in the poem may be interpreted in different terms, and
that the poem itself can be shown to be self-consistent.
According to my reading, the conflict between the two concep-
tions of the mind is not a real problem in the poem. On this issue,
at the time when he wrote "Mont Blanc," Shelley had taken a
position. It was different from his earlier position, the thorough-
going empiricism of Queen Mab; and it was different from his
later position, the thoroughgoing idealism of Prometheus Unbound;
but within the limits of this one poem, "Mont Blanc," it was
fixed and definite. It was, in fact, a perfect mid-point between
the other two positions. I shall come back to this matter in a
moment, when I turn to the text of the poem and try to prove
my contentions. Meanwhile, what kind of conflict or struggle is a
real problem in the poem?
I believe that what Shelley did in "Mont Blanc" —whether his

7. On Love, loc. cit. Association of America, Inc.

t From theKeats-Shelley Journal, IV 1. "The Meaning of Shelley's 'Mont
(1955), pp. 55-65. Reprinted by permis- Blanc,' " PMLA, LXII (1947), 1046-
sion of the publisher, The Keats-Shelley 1060.
570 • Charles H. Vivian

intention to do it was fully or only partly conscious —was give an

account of a twofold struggle in his own experience. One element
in was an almost agonizing effort to understand the
this struggle
real The question of empiricism versus idealism,
nature of the mind.
I have posited, was answered to his temporary satisfaction. But this

one answer was like one of Newton's pebbles on the shore; the
whole sea of truth still stretched out virtually unexplored. In this
poem Shelley records an attempt to do some charting of those
waters for himself; he tells how deep they are, and how difficult
to sound.
The other element in this twofold struggle was an effort to
understand something else. Here again I diverge sharply from
Professor Kapstein's interpretation. In his view the chief symbol
in the poem, the mountain peak itself, represents Necessity. Now,
of course the doctrine of Necessity had been central in Shelley's
thought in previous years; and it would be reasonable on a priori
grounds to presume that this doctrine is the referent in the poem —
four times called "power" — of the Mont Blanc symbol. In the
poem itself, however, there is nothing which clearly establishes
this relationship. I believe that the mountain represents something
else — that something else which Shellev was struggling to under-
stand.
Precisely what this something else was, is difficult to say in
unfigurative prosaic language; but perhaps a tentative explanation
may be given as follows. Shelley's theory of knowledge at this time
was a compromise between empiricism and idealism; he was, so
to speak, half an empiricist and half an idealist. He was enough
of an empiricist so that in trying to get his questions answered
he looked ordinarily to sense experience. But he was enough of
an idealist so that a problem posed in a non-empirical way might
be for him a real problem. A particular problem was posed in such
a way: he had an intuitive awareness of something permanent,
something apart from the flux of sense experience. Now, this kind
of awareness is difficult to refine. Intuition, though it may carry
strong conviction, is an elusive thing. One may wish fervently to
get more of the kind of light which it has given; one may try by
his own will to turn it on —
but, for the most part anyway, it
simply shineth where it listeth. And the other, the ordinary source
of knowledge is of little help here: it is difficult or virtually impos-
sible to learn from common experience about that which is apart
from common experience. With this particular intuition this —
awareness that Shellev had of something permanent the effect of —
transitory experience was rather more to obscure it than to cast
further light Here, then, was the problem: to conic to
upon it.

any real understanding of the permanent and the single, with

nothing to go on but elusive intuition on the one hand and fleeting,
 —
The One "Mont Blanc 7
• 571

multifarious experience on the other. It is this problem that the

mountain represents in the poem; or, to speak more precisely,
Mont Blanc symbolizes this principle of permanence of which
Shelley has awareness and which he is trying to understand. I

believe that this phrase, Principle of Permanence, is the best

definition that we can give for the referent of the symbol. A short
phrase like this will be convenient, in any case —and perhaps its

meaning will become clearer — in the following examination of

the poem.

Shelley divides the poem I and II

into five sections. Sections
are devoted chiefly to the first element in his twofold struggle:
here he describes his attempt to understand his own mind. At the
very outset he gives expression to his compromise theory of knowl-
edge. First comes a brief suggestion of how experience functions
in the doctrine of empiricism
—"The everlasting universe of things/
Flows through the mind" (lines 1,2) and then a statement that —
the mind makes its own independent contribution to consciousness:

from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, with a sound but half its own. (4-6)

I italicize the last phrase because it succinctly characterizes Shelley's

epistemological position. The mind neither gives nor takes exclu-
sively; it does both in equal degree —and the product of these
operations, consciousness, is quite literally "half its own." What-
ever the validity of this position, it is the one which Shelley not
only takes at the beginning but maintains throughout the poem.
The other passages in which he touches on the same issue, as
we shall see later, are consistent with this first one.
It should be noted here that the word "secret" in line 4 introduces
a suggestion that the mind, the "source of human thought," is
mysterious and difficult of access. The theme of the difficulty of
introspection is to be expressed more fully a little farther along
in the poem. Meanwhile, the remainder of Section I simply expands
by a simile the statement of the epistemological compromise —the
mind's having "a sound but half its own." 2

2. It has been suggested to me that the imposing combination of other sounds is

image presented in this simile implies a not greater than what is really necessary
compromise somewhat less than fair and to support the idea that the brook itself
equal: "The source of human thought," contributes as little as "only half" to its
or the mind, is represented only by a own sound. The simile is apt: either the
feeblebrook; the environment, by a whole brook in the wilderness or the mind in
combination of waterfalls, woods, winds, its environment is in one sense almost
and a vast river. I believe, however, that infinitesimal; and yet, in terms of the
this implication need not be taken. The auditory image here presented, the corn-
role of the mind is represented by the promise between the brook and its sur-
sound of the brook. Ordinarily we should roundings remains fair and equal. The
consider the sound of a brook as being same is true, then, of the mind and its
entirely "its own"; in this context, the environment.
572 • Charles H. Vivian

A simile is which is no real problem anyway.

sufficient for this,
To express what is a real —
problem the struggle to understand
something further, something about the ultimate nature of the
—
mind Shelley uses a more elaborate figure: a full-scale svmbol
Section I has served another purpose in addition to what we have
noted already: it has set the stage for the establishment of this
symbol in Section II. The universe of thin'gs flows through the
mind, and the river Arve flows through its Ravine. In Section I
there were "secret springs" of thought, mysterious and obscure; in
Section II there is a "dark, deep Ravine" (line 12) This Ravine is a .

many-colored, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams. (13-15)

The Ravine is the mind, its "caverns echoing to the Arve's com-
motion" (line 30) —and so of course the principal svmbol of
sensation or experience is the river; the shifting lights and shadows
in line 15 are minor and supplementary symbols for the ever-
changing play of sensations. The "pines, and crags, and caverns" are
another group of supplementary symbols; these represent the mind
itself or the thoughts in the mind. And once again there is mutual

give-and-take between the mind and its environment. Not only

do the caverns echo to the sound of the river; not only is the
Ravine "pervaded with that ceaseless motion" and "the path of
that unresting sound" (lines 32, 33); but also the pines are

Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging
—
To hear an old and solemn harmony. (21-24)

That is to say, under the figure of scent and sound, that the mind

gives something to its environment in return.

Just as in Section I the stage was set for the establishment of
the Ravine symbol in Section II, so in this latter section comes the
first mention of Power, and the preparation for the later develop-

ment of the Mont Blanc symbol. The Ravine is an

awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne. (15-17)

Now, it might seem that here is a confusion in the symbolism. The

river Arve stands for sense experience; why then should we have
"Power in likeness of the Arve"? The reason is as follows. True,
this Power is to appear later in a Symbolic likeness, the mountain
peak; but, strictly speaking —and without this symbolism, which
 —
The One "Mont Blanc' • 573

has not yet been established —

cannot appear in its own likeness.
it

The Principle of Permanence

not manifested to mortal man, is

in the midst of his ever-changing sensations, except by intuition.

All he can actually contemplate is experience; if he is able to intuit
anything about the Principle, the latter can appear to him only
as 'Tower in likeness of the Arve." The next two lines carry on
the same idea: the river comes

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest. (^ic))
The only real illumination that experience brings into the mind,
the only help toward this elusive intuition, is like lightning in a
storm. Flashes of insight there are, but they are fitful, and of
only an instant's duration; by their light we can see only in
momentary glimpses. A similar suggestion is made once more, a

few lines farther on. The Ravine has its

earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep

Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image. (25-27)

The waterfall —made up, of course, of the waters of experience

robes something behind it as with a veil. Under these circumstances,
for anyone actually to perceive what lies behind would perhaps
not be impossible, but it would be extremely difficult. Here is
the problem: to understand the Permanent behind the transitory.
The second major problem in the poem has been briefly registered
in Section II; its full expression will come later.

Meanwhile, in the remainder of the section, Shelley returns to

his first problem and completes its development. Here once more
I differ with Professor Kapstein. In this latter part of Section II,

if do not misunderstand him, he regards the Ravine as just a

I

ravine: ". the poet's mind," he says, ".

. . wandering over the . .

landscape of the Ravine finally settles down to re-creation of the

scene in poetry." 3 But the Ravine must be more than just a
ravine, on two counts. First, the Ravine has already been clearly
established as a symbol of the mind; and, second, at this very
juncture the connection is established again:

Dizzy Ravine! . . . when I gaze on thee,

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind. ( 34—37)
When Shelley looks at the Ravine, he thinks of his own mind:
here is association of ideas by similarity, which keys in once more

3. P. 1051.
 —
574 Charles H. Vivian

the symbolic identity. Now, this reinforced identification is not

important in the next few lines, for Shelley simply goes on to talk
about the mind, without employing the symbol. Incidentally, he
expresses once again the idea of mutual give-and-take between the
external world and the mind:

my human mind, which passively 4

Now renders and receives fast infliiencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around. (37-40)
But the symbolic relationship becomes essential in what follows.
By a kind of distributive metonymy the mind now appears as

One legion of wild thoughts,whose wandering wings

Now floatabove thy darkness [i.e., the Ravine's], and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy. (41-44)
The mind, the "legion of wild thoughts," mav sometimes dwell
upon things which are not so mysterious and obscure ("now float
above thy darkness"); but sometimes it plunges into a realm of
deeper speculation ("the still cave of the witch Poesy") of —
speculation which may ultimately be recorded in poetry, even in
just such a poem as this one, "Mont Blanc." What kind of specula-
tion is this? It is a realm "Where that or thou art no unbidden
guest." And what are "that" and "thou"? They are "thy darkness" 5
and "thou [Ravine]" respectively: in terms of the clearly established
symbolism, the mind and its mystery. In other words, sometimes
the mind contemplates the mind itself.

And this kind of contemplation is peculiarlv difficult, because

its object is so elusive. In this pursuit the mind must be struggling
and groping,

Seeking among the shadows that pass by

Ghosts of all things that are —some shade of thee
[thou Ravine, thou human
mind],
Some phantom, some faint image. (4^-4-)^

4.For Professor Kapstein (p. 1050) the 5. Here again I differ with Professor
word "passively" makes an epistemo- Kapstein (p. 1051), who believes the
logical ambiguity: unless its force is antecedent of "that" to be Shelley's
taken to be sharply limited by the word mind, the "legion of wild thoughts."
"Now," it implies that the whole "un- 6. Here, it seems to me, is indisputable
remitting interchange" in line 39 is proof that in this passage the Ravine
always entirely involuntary on the part must still be regarded as standing for
—
of the mind that the entire content of the mind (as object of the mind's con-
the mind is derivative. In my reading templation). Otherwise, how can these
of the passage, a passive rendering is lines make sense? Why should it be
still a rendering, still an independent necessary for the contemplating mind to
contribution to consciousness. The pines struggle and grope for a shade, a phan-
were passive as the wind swept over torn, a faint image, if its object is only
them, but the odor which they gave was a landscape or a scene?
their own.
 —
The One "Mont Blanc" • 575
There need be nothing cryptic or ambiguous in the words which
follow immediately, "till the breast/From which they fled recalls

them, thou art there!" (lines 47-48). The antecedent of "they"

is the shadows and ghosts of lines 45 and 46. These are the elusive

traces of the mind's mysterious operations: shadows of subliminal

—
mental activity, and ghosts i.e., reflections or Lockean "ideas"
of "all things that are" in the objective external world. "Till the
breast from which theyfled recalls them" —
that is, as long as
the introspectingmind keeps them before itself as objects of active
contemplation, and until it allows them to slip back into its own
mysterious depths
—
"thou [Ravine] art there": the mind is there,
accessible to examination, or as accessible as it ever can be. B ':

shadowy and ghostly the evidence is; and it is the only evidence
available to the mind, the only thing it has to go on, in this
examination of itself. The elusive and tenuous nature of the
material is what makes introspection so difficult.
On this note Section II ends. Shelley has not arrived at any
conclusion about the ultimate nature of the mind. But "Mont
Blanc" is not a poem in which the problems are solved. Rather,
it is a poem about the very experience of coming to grapple with

the problems, and about the nature of the evidence available for
dealing with them. If the analogy is not too grotesque, one might
compare the poem to a preliminary bibliographical study not a —
substantive study —
of certain problems in introspective psychology
and metaphysics. Perhaps the chief conclusion at which Shelley
arrives is that the attempt to solve these problems is necessarily a

struggle.

On this same note Section III begins. Now Shelley is about to

describe his experience in a different —although a related —realm
of speculation; and at the beginning of this account he tells how
unsure the footing will seem to be. He looks up at Mont Blanc.
Is the intuition represented by this symbol a valid insight into the
nature of things, or is his whole experience nothing but adream?
Engrossed in such speculation, the mind feels as helpless and con-
fused as in a dream:

I look on high;

Has some unknown Omnipotence unfurled

The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? for the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales! (52-59)
 — —
S76 - Charles H. Vivian

The mountain is there, the Principle of Permanence

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy and serene. (60,61)

But what lies between the mountain and the observer looking up
That is, what lies between the Principle and the mind groping
at it?
toward some understanding of it? All the chaotic welter of experi-
ence. Such is the symbolic meaning of the description in lines

62-75, ending with the fanciful questions to which "None can

reply."
Now follows the passage in which are made explicit the implica-
tions of this relationshipbetween the Permanent and the transi-
tory. "The wilderness has a mysterious tongue" and the wilder- —
ness is the total scene which has just been presented, the single
peak above and the chaos all around below it

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with Nature reconciled. (76-79)

How will be determined which of the two lessons, doubt or

it

faith, the wilderness willteach to a particular observer? Where he

focuses his attention and what he sees is what will make the differ-
ence. If he looks at the chaos and not at the peak if he cannot —
see past the distracting welter of experience and intuit the Principle
beyond — then he
will fall into skepticism about the meaning of life
on the other hand, while of course perceiving the flow of
itself. If,

experience, he can discern the Principle and recognize its signifi-

cance, then he will see all things sub specie aeternitatis? The wil-
derness can teach either faith or doubt, but the mountain can
teach only faith:

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe. (80,81)

These codes are evil institutions, tyrannies and injustices based

upon a short-run view, upon skepticism about those eternal values
which "the wise, and great, and good" (line 82) can understand.
Section IV develops further Shelley's account of his groping
toward an understanding of this Principle, this One among the
Many, this Permanent amidst the Mutable. There are in fact two
further stages in the development, one lying within Section IV

7. I am reading the phrase "But for faith" of the Boscombe MS. It is more
such faith" in line 79 to mean not "ex- reasonable to presume that Shelley made
cept for such faith" but "by means of the revision to sharpen the emphasis
such faith alone." This interpretation is than to think that he wished to change
supported by the variant "In such a the meaning diametrically.
 The One "Mont Blanc" - 577
and the other running over for its climax into Section V. The first

of these two begins with a general description of the cycle of

nature —
a description not confined to this particular scene in the
Vale of Chamouni, but extended to include "all the living things
that dwell/Within the daedal earth" (lines 85,86). This passage
concludes with the summary lines

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die, revolve, subside and swell. (94>95)
All these things indeed are flux; but

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,

Remote, serene, and inaccessible. (96,97)
The significance of this juxtaposition is clear. In what has immedi-
ately preceded, the emphasis was upon cyclical change. In these
last two lines, then, that aspect of the Principle which is tacitly
emphasized by contrast is its unchangeableness, its permanence. 8
Another important note is struck in the epithet "inaccessible";
this, we shall see, will be picked up in the final section of the poem.

Now comes the second further stage in the development. By

contrast once again, Shelley implies,

this, the naked countenance of earth

On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains,
Teach the adverting mind. (98-100)
The force of Shelley's italics in the pronoun is to indicate that now
he is focusing once more on the foreground, the welter of chaos.
He is looking not at that single peak beyond but at this naked
countenance of earth and these primeval mountains, or foothills
(called "subject mountains" in line 62 above). And what do these
things "teach the adverting mind"? The lesson of Mutability. The
most vivid description in the poem, and symbolically the most
effective, is the passage which continues all through the remainder
of Section IV (lines 100-126). Here, change is not something
cyclical and evolutionary; rather, it is a titanic force aptly symbolized
by the slow but utterly irresistible movement of a glacier. Before
this "flood of ruin" (line 107) vast pines and rocks are swept,
and even

The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
And their place is not known. ( 1 17-1 20)

8. Professor Kapstein believes, consist- gest a different interpretation. That

ently with his whole analysis of the which is not born and does not die, and
poem, that the fundamental aspect here which neither revolves, subsides, nor
is Necessity (pp. 1056, 1057). But, once swells, is thereby virtually defined as
again, the context seems to me to sug- the permanent.
 —

578 • Charles H. Vivian

Following immediately after this descriptive passage — in a juxta-

position which is even more dramatic than the one we noted a
moment and which therefore emphasizes the implicit contrast
ago,
—
even more strongly the mountain appears again:

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights
And many sounds, and much of life and death. ( 1 27-1 29)
Yes, Shelley assures himself, the Principle does have being. Despite
the chaos of experience, despite the constant change in the cycle
of nature, despite the flood of ruin that is mutability, "the power
is there" —the power of or the Principle behind the sights and
sounds and all the sensations of transitorv human life. The intui-
tion represented by the Mont Blanc symbol is a valid insight.
But this Principle is like the human mind, in one way: real
understanding of it is virtuallv impossible to gain. In Section IV
it was called "inaccessible"; now in Section V the same idea is

registered more fully. The Principle does have being, but the mode
of that being is mysterious to man. The snows fall on the moun-

tain,but "none beholds them there" (line 132); the winds blow,
but in effect they are silent, for no one perceives them either. The
springs that fed the source of human thought, the mind, were
secret; the Principle too is secret, "the secret strength of things"
(line 1 39) .° Here again is the central theme of difficulty in these
speculations.
But the difficulty must be faced. Here is the force of the last

three lines of the poem: 1

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy? (142-144)
If the human mind did not, in silence and solitude, plunge into
these realms of speculation, and pursue its way until finally it

came upon these and intuitions then, in effect, the

insights —
Principle itself ("thou") would have no significance. Neither would

9. Here I may perhaps anticipate the only real significance they can have; only
strongest criticism of my interpretation. when they are conceived under its aspect
The phraseology here and in the next do they have ultimate meaning. The
two lines Principle may, then, not inappropriately
The secret strength of things, be called "the secret strength of things".
Which governs thought, and to the in- as an ordering and synthesizing principle
finite dome it is like eternal law. And conversely.
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! since an intuitive recognition of it is a
(139-141) necessary basis for all correct interpre-
may seem to suggest that Necessity is a tation of experience, since only "the * isc.
better referent for the Mont Blanc sym- and great, and good" who apprehend it
bol than my Principle of Permanence. can properly understand all other things.
But I believe that the suggestion is not it governs the only true thought in the
irresistible. The Principle is above ex- world.
perience; it is apart from all the things 1. It will be sufficiently apparent that 1

of which we have ordinary knowledge, disagree with Professor Kapstein's belief

including even the heavens themselves. that these lines are anticlimatic (pp.
But it alone imparts to these things the 1057, 1058).
 t —
Structure, Symbol, and Theme • 579
any of our ordinary experience, with the common objects of knowl-
edge ("earth, and stars, and sea"). If no human imaginings ever
went this far, there would be no apprehension of the Principle; and
without this apprehension no ultimate meaning would be perceived
in anything. Faith would never be learned, and the codes of fraud
and woe would never be repealed. Like the quest for understand-
ing of the human mind, the quest for understanding of the Principle
is necessarily a struggle. The goal is virtually inaccessible; and the

means that we ordinarily depend on to help us toward knowledge

—
our sense experience can help us little here. Still, Shelley says,
—
he has had a glimpse of the goal and he gives an account of some
of his gropings toward it.
Shelley himself called "Mont Blanc" "an undisciplined over-
flowing of the soul." Perhaps he was somewhat unkind to his own
poem. It is satire by Donne, but
not so tightly knit in form as a
neither is by any means completely amorphous. Shelley discusses
it

—
two problems or rather, strictly speaking, he discusses his own
experience in grappling with them. The problems are related by
their both lying in the realms of abstruse speculation by the —
common theme of difficulty or struggle. The poem as an organic
structure is further integrated bv its imagery and its organization.
The two central symbols, the mountain peak above and the Ravine
below, are carefully established and systematically employed. The
five sections of the poem have various unifying cross-relationships.

Sections I and II, which develop the first problem, are interlocked
by the preparation for and establishment of the Ravine symbol.
Section II includes an anticipatory registration of the second prob-
lem. Sections III, IV, and V, which are concerned chiefly with this
problem, are tied together by the successive stages in its develop-
ment. I have tried to show that the different statements which deal
with the same issue —
the relationship between the mind and its
—
environment are mutually consistent. "Mont Blanc" is one more
illustration that the Romantic poets were sometimes more scrupu-
lous artists than we have believed them to be.

DONALD H. REIMAN
Structure, Symbol, and Theme in
"Lines written among the Euganean Hills"
Over forty years ago Oliver Elton wrote of "Lines written among
the Euganean Hills": "This poem is perfectly put together, and it
is an intellectual pleasure to see its firm development, even apart

tReprinted by permission of the Modern PMLA, 11 (Sept. 1962), pp. 404-413.

Language Association of America from
580 • Donald H. Reiman
from the rapid, impassioned, shimmering brilliancy of the imagery,
which resolves itself into the emotions of the poet." One need not
assent to the unqualified absolute of this declaration to recognize
the poem as one worthy of serious study, yet during the last half
century of intensive Shelley scholarship and criticism there has
appeared little to advance our understanding of "Lines written
among the Euganean Hills" beyond Professor Elton's own percep-
tive, but necessarily brief appreciation. 1 examination of Shcl- An
lcyana will suggest a number of reasons for this neglect by scholars
of a poem that is often anthologized and frequently taught. First,
Shelley criticism is a literature filled with polemicism, and "Lines
written among the Euganean Hills" has never been controversial:
critics and admirers of Shelley alike have conceded or declared,
when they mentioned it at all, that it is a good poem. Second,
its tetrameter couplets appear "uncharacteristic" of Shelley under
the generalizations which govern most discussions of his poetry,
thus making the poem "peripheral" to both attackers and defenders
of Shelley's poetic achievement. Closely related to the problem of
metrics are those of the poem's length and its date of composition:
it is too long to be discussed with the lyrics, too short to qualifv
as a major effort, and written too earlv for intensive studv with
Shelley's late poetry. Finally, biographers have been less successful
than usual in casting light on those passages especiallv lines —
45-65 —
seem to require additional illumination before
that a critic
can integrate the whole composition. 2
In this paper I shall attempt to give substance to Oliver Elton's

1. A
Survey of English Literature: 1780- tion about the composition of "Lines
1830 (Second Edition, London, 1920), written among the Euganean Hills," we
II, 194—195. Although there exists no know that it was begun at Este early in
complete explication of "Lines written October 1818 and completed at Naples
among the Euganean Hills," useful in- sometime before 20 December 1818.
formation and incidental criticism can be during most of which period Shelley
found in notes to the complete editions was occupied either in society (with
of Shelley's poetry (especially that by Byron and the Hoppners in Venice, 11-
C. D. Locock); in selections edited by 31 October), in travel (from Este to
Newman Ivey White (The Best of Shel- Rome, 5-20 November and from Rome
New
ley, York, 1932), Ellsworth Barnard to Naples, 27-29 November), or in
(Shelley: Selected Poems, Essays, and sight-seeing. Mary Shelley tells us that
Letters, New York, 1944), Frederick L. "'Rosalind and Helen,' and "Lines writ-
Jones (Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected tenamong the Euganean Hills,' found I

Poems, New York, 1956); in biographies among his papers by chance; and with
by Carl Grabo (The Magic Plant, Chapel some difficulty urged him to complete
Hill, 1936), Newman Ivey White
N.C., them" (Poetical Works, ed. Mrs. Shellc>.
(Shelley,London, 1947), Edmund Blun- London, 1839, I. xi). Shelley himself
den (Shelley: A Life Story, London, alludes to the poem only in the "Ad-
1946); and in critical studies by Carlos vertisement" to the Rosalind and Helen
Baker (Shelley's Major Poetry, Prince- volume and in two letters: to Peacock,
ton, 1948), Peter Butter (Shelley's Idols April 1819, and to Oilier, postmarked in
of the Cave, Edinburgh, 1954), Milton England 3 August 1819 (The Complete
Wilson (Shelley's Later Poetry, New Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian
York, 1959), and Desmond King-Hele Edition, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E.
(Shelley: His Thought and Work, Lon- Peck, London and New York. 1926-30.
don, 1960). X. 48, 63).
2. Although we have very scant informa-
 Structure, Symbol, and Theme • 581

claim for "Lines written among the Euganean Hills." I shall first
outline the symmetry of the poem's structure and then overlay this
x-ray with the flesh and blood of the poem, its allusions, images,
and figures, relating these and showing how theme or meaning
grows naturally out of texture, architecture, and even prosody.
"Lines written among the Euganean Hills" falls into three well-
defined movements, with the middle one of these again divisible
into three. The opening three verse-paragraphs or strophes (11. 1-89)
depict first the predicament of human
and then the poet's life

temporary release from its painful contemplation one morning in

the Euganean Hills. In the seven paragraphs of the second move-
ment the prophet-bard, who in his own imaginative release from
the limitations of common humanity is able to view clearly and
perceptively the destinies of other men, gazes on Venice, both
home and symbol of men sunk into moral depravity (11. 90-166),
and on Padua, symbol of the inevitable destruction that follows
moral decay to prepare the way for healthy rebirth (11. 206-284).
The fourth verse-paragraph of this movement —the central para-
graph of the poem (11. 167-205) — idealizes Byron as the Poet, the
man of imagination, who alone is able to save Venice (and thus
mankind) from its fate. The
three strophes (11. 285-373)
final
record, with the return of night, the end of the poet's brief respite
from the darkness of human suffering and announce his hope for
the renewal in himself and extension to all men of the calm and
order that his soul has known this day. When we divide the second
movement into its three subdivisions, the five parts of the poem
exhibit almost pyramidal symmetry: part one, 89 lines; part two,
77 lines; part three, 39 lines; part four, 79 lines; part five, 89 lines.

The poem opens with the metaphor — a favorite one with Shelley
— of life as a voyage over a dangerous sea of time-mortality. 3 But
the traditional metaphor is here extended and explored to reveal
more about the human condition than its uncertainty: the human
mariner has control over neither his past —which closes immediately
and irrevocably behind him (11. 7-8) — nor
his future. Above him
heavy clouds keep out the sun, symbol of divine energy and illu-
mination, while behind him winds of Necessity drive him violently,

3. Cf. Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler discussion to the particular manifesta-

Language (Baltimore, 1959), pp. 314— tions of the boat-sea-voyage-island com-
315. Seealso Shelley's lyric "Time," plex of symbols in "Lines written among
which begins, "Unfathomable Sea! whose the Euganean Hills" and their appro-
waves are years" (Complete Poetical priateness as vehicles of the poem's
Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. theme. For the persistence of this sym-
Thomas Hutchinson, London, 1934, p. bolic complex throughout Shelley's po-
637. All quotations and references to etry, see Carl Grabo, The Magic Plant,
Shelley's poetry are to this edition and Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work
[Poetical Works}.) I shall confine my (Oxford, 1956).
 —
582 • Donald H. Reiman
almost immersing him in the purely mortal world until his ship
"sinks down, down, like that sleep/When the dreamer seems to
be/Weltering through eternity" (11. 16-18). The simile compares
this symbolic drowning in the merely temporal to that ordinary,
though unpleasant, psychological phenomenon in which a sleeper
dreams of falling endlessly through space. The unpleasant connota-
tions of "weltering" suggest that even a life, beyond some of the
more obvious limitations of temporal existence mav not bring the
peace for which man's heart yearns. The simile thus prepares us for
the "divided will" which leaves man uncertain whether he is to seek
or shun the grave.
academic scepticism clearlv operative, does not specu-
Shelley, his
late whether or not there is personal immortality but asks whether,
given the unsatisfactory conditions of human life, it makes any
difference if in the grave "no heart will meet/His with love's
impatient beat" (11. 28-29). If man cannot hope to find in this
life escape from his misery "in friendship's smile, in love's caress,"

then " 'twill wreak him little woe" whether or not these comforts
await him after death; at least his suffering will be at an end (11.
30-44). Thus, when it has been compared with the dark alter-
native of temporal life, death has assumed a relatively positive
aspect. From the phrase "haven of the grave" (1. 26) onward the
implication is clear that, were it not for "many a green isle," death
and oblivion would be preferable to mortal existence. 4
All the evidence advanced in the first verse-paragraph is a neces-
sary elaboration and defense of its first four lines:

Manv a green isle needs must be

In the deep wide sea of Misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could vovage on

The human worn by his struggles to keep above the waves

voyager,
that seek to engulf him and "wan" because separated from the
vivifying sunlight, must find moments of respite from his struggle,
green isles where he can see the sun and chart his course unhindered
by earlier mistakes and regrets, whose cold winds otherwise make
death and oblivion the better choice.
The second paragraph describes a death that wcis better than
life, the death of Shelley's immediate past. For one trying to inter-
pret lines 45-65, three elements of the opening description require
special attention: the "northern sea"; the "seven dry bones"; the
absence of any lament for "him . . . Who once clothed with life

and thought" the heap of bones. If the dry bones were those of
Fanny Godwin, Harriet, or Shelley's infant daughter Clara, it

4. Cf. "Julian and Maddalo," 11. 315-319, 494-499.

 Structure, Symbol, and Theme • 583

would hardly be accurate to describe this person's fate as un-

lamented, inasmuch as Shelley would, in the very act of describing
the tragic death of such a loved one, be lamenting that fate. The
spirit of the dead person is, moreover, clearly masculine (11. 62-65 ), 5

although study of the biographical evidence has yielded no man

whose literal death Shelley might at this time have mourned. As
White points out, "the only death that Shelley commonly spoke
of as unlamented was his own." 6 Again, it seems unlikely that
Shelley would describe the Adriatic even in its northernmost ex-
tremity as a "northern sea." If an actual locale was intended, he
probably referred to a beach at least as far north as the British
Isles; but a "northern sea," distant from the direct rays of the sun,

could symbolize a state of human existence like that described

in the first paragraph of the poem —dark and unrelated to the
cosmic inspiration that alone can make human life meaningful.
The passage becomes clear and integral to the poem only, I

think, when we view it as primarily symbolic. Shelley is not alluding

to a literal heap of unburied dry bones, as the otherwise inexpli-
cable number seven should warn us. He is instead figuratively
describing the end of the behind him in England. The
life he left

seven bones symbolize the seven years between his expulsion from
Oxford (March 1811) and his final departure from England
(March 1818). Every biographer of Shelley will agree that, how-
ever valuable these years and their experiences were in educating
him and laying the foundation of his future greatness, they were
in themselves extremely painful, both to Shelley and to those he
loved. One has only to catalogue the successive mistakes, frustra-
tions, and disappointments of this period to realize how regrettable
they must have appeared to the poet in retrospect, whether he
regarded himself as an innocent victim or as a guilty agent. Such
a catalogue will at the same time rescue from the charge of senti-
mentality the pessimistic view of human life found in the poem's
first forty-four lines. 7 The symbolic death of Shelley's past was

necessary before the poet could hope to reach one of those green
isles.

Thus, Shelley describes his old self as lying dead on a tempest-

torn beach. This dead life is "unburied" (1. 60) because its effects

5. Newman Ivey White apparently be- Editors (I, October 1942, 5), who
follow
lieves (Shelley, II, 41) that 11. 62-65 White's Best of Shelley, and by Louise
apply to Shelley but that 11. 47-49 do Schutz Boas (III, November 1944, 14),
not. This leaves as a problem the ante- who thinks that the "wretch" who is the
cedent of "what" in 1. 65. "What now subject of the lines is Frankenstein's
moves nor murmurs not" must b«- the creation, dead and abandoned in the
"unburied bones" of 1. 60 and thus those Arctic wastes,
of 11. 47-49. For White's earlier view, 6. Shelley, II, 41.
which more nearly corresponds to mine, 7. Cf. "Julian and Maddalo," 11. 320—
see The Best of Shelley, p. 478. Other 337, where a less restrained recounting
suggestions for interpreting the passage of griefs is prepared for by the dramatic
can be found in The Explicator: by the character of the speaker.
584 • Donald H. Reiman
still haunt the poet; the whirlwind that howls around it like the
voices from a "slaughtered town" points backward to the tempests
that drive the human mariner across the temporal sea and points
forward to the poem's second movement, where moral Necessitv as
it is operative in human society will become the primarv theme.

At this point the wind symbolizes the chains of cause and effect
that emanate from the past life of the poet- producing "mam a
mournful sound" about those yet unforgotten years. The spirit
that "once clothed with life and thought" this dead existence is,
however, unmourned because in the developmental pattern of
the poem that spirit is neither dead nor living. The poet, after
passing through the "everlasting no" of the first paragraph, has
reached a "center of indifference" through the death of his regret-
table past. His spirit is drifting with the tide of consciousness in
the pre-dawn darkness.
The third and final first movement confirms what
strophe of the
was posited at the poem as a necessarv condition
beginning of the
for continuation of human life: "Ay, many flowering islands lie/In
the waters of wide Agony" (11. 66-67). The sunrise pictured in
the ensuing description, like all the finest passages in Shelley, is

made an external scene and, analogically,

to exist simultaneously in
in the symbolic world of the poem. At the literal surface a flock
of rooks sing a paean to the rising sun even as they take flight
and disappear, following the sun-dispersed morning mist into the
distance where their cawing is inaudible. The symbolic significance
of the birds themselves is clear from Shelley's only other poetic
use of the word "rooks":

Like a flock of rooks at a farmer's gun

Night's dreams and terrors, every one,
Fled from the brains which are their prey
From the lamp's death to the morning ray.
("The Boat on the Serchio," 11. 26-29)

Thus on this morning the sun, symbol of divine energy on the

cosmic level and the imagination on the human level, 8 disperses
both the light-distorting mists that darken men's minds and the
"dreams and terrors" that afflict men during their periods of
separation from divine illumination; yet these very birds of ill-omen
hail the rising of the divinity that is their ultimate source. Aloft

8. Cf. Shelley's "Proposed Letter to the moon which he calls Reason, stumbling
Editor of the Literary Miscellany" in over the interlunar chasm of time where
answer to Peacock's "The Four Ages of she deserts us. and an owl. rather than
Poetry" (March 1821): "He would ex- an eagle, stare with dazzled eyes on the
tinguish Imagination which is the Sun watery orb which is the Queen of his
of life, and grope his way by the cold pale Heaven" (Julian Edition. X, 246).
and uncertain and borrowed light of that
 Structure, Symbol, and Theme •
58S
with their black wings appearing "all hoar" in the mist (black
seems white in the distorted realm of merely human knowledge),
they fly "like gray shades" until the sun bursts over the eastern
horizon. Then, as evening clouds borrow colors ("fire and azure")
from the sun's last rays, the purple plumage of the birds gleams
"with drops of golden rain" as they pass out of hearing, till "all is

bright, and and still,/Round the solitary hill" (11. 88-89).

clear,
The poet, released in part from the meaningless clamor and false
colors of his own limited and divided mind, is ready to experience,
in the silence and clarity of a moment of imaginative insight, a
universe in which his private and social moral endeavors find their
unified significance.
To recapitulate the progression of the poem's first movement: the
initial paragraph articulated the problem of human life: what is

it that sustains men and sorrows of this temporal

through the trials

existence when death promises an end to their sufferings?

at least
The second and third strophes answered that, when one can banish
bitter memories of the past, there can come upon the spirit with
a fine suddenness moments of brightness, clarity, and calm silence.
The remainder of the poem will demonstrate how, within these
best and happiest moments, the poet's more-than-human powers
of imagination make him the prophet and legislator of the world.

II

The Euganean Hills become, in the second movement of the

poem, a metaphorical island amid the green sea of the Lombard
plain (11. 90-9 3 ). 9 The first sight that claims the poet's attention
as he gazes toward the east is Venice, described successively as
"ocean's nursling," "a peopled labyrinth," and "Amphitrite's
destined halls." The first and third of these phrases allude to the
relationship of Venice to the sea in the past ("Ocean's child, and
then his queen," 1. 116) and in the future ("And thou soon must
be his prey," 1. 118); Venice, which has been the child of the
sea and, metaphorically, his bride (as was once annually celebrated
in the ceremony of the Sposalizio del Mare), is destined to perish
beneath the waves, to become a home for the creatures that obey
Amphitrite and her lord. The phrase "peopled labyrinth" depicts
the present state of Venice and her relationship to the sea. Because
Minos failed to sacrifice the bull that Poseidon had given him,
the sea-god caused Pasiphae, wife of Minos, to fall in love with
the bull, from which union was born the Minotaur, half-man and
half-bull. It was to house this creature that Minos directed Daedalus
to construct the Cretan Labyrinth. Venice, like Minos, misused

9. Cf. "Julian and Maddalo," 11. 76-79.

586 • Donald H. Reiman
the gifts of the sea, and, as a result, her people, too, have
degenerated to the level of animals. 1
The Venice with the sea are sharply contrasted
associations of
to those of Venice with the burning sun that, rising behind it,
silhouettes the city. Its buildings seem to "shine like obelisks of
fire" within "a furnace bright." Moving beyond the obvious implica-

tions of the purification of gold by fire, the poet describes the spires
of the city flickering "from the altar of dark ocean" toward the
sky, as flames of sacrifice rose from the marble shrines of the
Delphic oracle: "as [if] to pierce the dome of gold/Where Apollo
spoke of old" (11.113-114). Apollo, the god of poetrv as well as
lord of the sun and all light, is about to speak through his present-
day oracle, the poet, who watches Venice tested by the fires of
truthand sees the dross purged away.
There is, in fact, little except dross left within the city, as both
the "peopled labyrinth" and the symbolic combustibilitv of even
"column, tower, and dome, and spire" (11. 104-110) would
indicate. Paradoxically, the "sun-girt City" has now come to a
darker day; Venice, which rose from the water, to the water must
return, "if the power that raised thee here/Hallow so thy watery
bier." For Venice, in the second paragraph of this movement, as
for the old Shelley himself in the same position of the first move-
ment, death has come, and all that remains is burial. If the cosmic
power (the Sun) is merciful, he will allow the citv to hide its
shame forever beneath the waves of its native element. That would
be better than the sad irony of the Spouse of the Sea stooping
from its island throne to the slave (Austria) of slaves (the reac-
tionary tyrants of the Holy Alliance, slaves to their own self-will). 2
At this point occurs a word that Shelley used onlv twice, the
other time earlier in this same poem. Venice will be "a less drear
ruin" when "the sea-mew/Flies, as once before it flew,/G'er thine
isles depopulate" 125-127). Shelley borrows the "sea-
(11. 121,
mew" from Milton's Paradise Lost, where Michael, after showing
the fallen Adam the destruction of corrupt civilization in the flood,
explains the extent of the deluge's ravages:

then shall this Mount

Of Paradise by might of Waves be mov'd
Out of his place, push'd by the horned flood,
1. Cf. Shelley's letter to Peacock, 8 Oc- one sees people employed in agricultural
tober 1818: "I had no conception of the labours, and the plough, the harrow or
excess to which avarice, cowardice, su- the cart drawn by long teams of milk
perstition, ignorance, passionless lust, white or dove-coloured oxen of immense
and all the inexpressible brutalities size and exquisite beauty. This indeed
which degrade human nature, could be might be the country of Pasiphacs" (Ju-
carried, until I had lived a few days lian Edition, IX, 338).
among the Venetians" (Julian Edition, 2. Cf. Prometheus Unbound Il.iv.l 10:
IX, 335). Cf. also Shelley to Peacock, 6 "All spirits are enslaved which serve
November 1818, on the country between things evil."
Este and Ferrara: "Every here and there
 Structure, Symbol, and Theme • 587
With his verdure spoil'd, and Trees adrift
all

Down the great River to the op'ning Gulf,

And there take root an Island salt and bare,
The haunt of Seals and Ores, and Sea-mews' clang.
To teach thee that God attributes to place
No sanctity, if none be thither brought
By Men who there frequent, or therein dwell. 3

Although the implications of this allusion for Venice are obvious,

the significance of the earlier reference (1. 54) is, perhaps, less so.

The crying of gulls and howling of the whirlwind provided the

mournful sound on the beach of that northern sea; England, once
Eden, had for Shelley become "an Island salt and bare/The haunt
of Seals and Ores, and Sea-mews' clang," and this, too, because
men (himself included?) had brought to it no sanctity. As Milton
implied in his lines that England stood under judgment at the
hour he wrote, Shellev implicates both England and Venice in
the tale of the lost paradise become the haunt of gulls. Although
Venice's ruin will be less drear when she has returned to the sea
whence she sprung and when her palace gates, overgrown with
sea-flowers, are like other rocks of the Ocean, the site of the ruined
city will still arouse dread in the simple fisherman, who "will spread
his sail and he pass the gloomy shore" (11. 136-
seize his oar/Till

137), for the moral actions of men live after them, hallowing or
corrupting the scenes of their victories or their falls.

The third strophe in this movement recapitulates the moral

degradation of Venice but suggests that her fate and that of her
sister-cities might be changed "if Freedom should awake" and
cast off "the Celtic Anarch's hold," a phrase incorporating the
concepts of the barbarian and of the tyrant in rebellion against
the moral laws of reason and love. 4 If the regeneration occurs,

3. Paradise Lost XI. 829-838. Although uses it to designate non-Graeco-Roman

Byron used "sea-mew" in "Childe peoples to the north of the Mediterranean
Harold's Good Night" (Childe Harold's basin. That is, Celts were barbarians be-
Pilgrimage, Canto I), there seems to be yond the pale of the classical culture that
no connection between his and Shelley's wasShelley's ideal.
use of the term beyond what is probably Cf. Shelley's other three poetic uses
a common debt to Milton. of "Celt" or "Celtic": "Ode to Naples,"
4. By "anarch" Shelley designated, as 1. 173, where the "Celtic [Austrian]
Ellsworth Barnard says, those rulers wolves" will flee from the "Ausonian
who "desecrated and trampled under [Italian] shepherds"; Prometheus Un-
foot the laws of that spiritual world to bound II.iv.94, where the Celt and the
which man's higher self aspires" (Shel- Indian represent the farthest poles of
ley's Religion, Minneapolis, 1937, p. 243). humanity, both geographically and cul-
By "Celtic" Shelley did not mean what turally; and "Euganean Hills," 1. 223,
Matthew Arnold meant or what we mean where "Celt" refers to "the Austrian
by the word. The OED records a sharp A Lexical Concordance to
soldiery" (See
distinction between the classical and mod- . Shelley, compiled by F. S. Ellis,
. .

em meanings of "Celt": in earlier Greek pp. 94—95). Cf. also Shelley to Peacock,
writers the term was "applied to the 8 October 1818: "A horde of German
ancient peoples' of Western Europe." soldiers, as vicious and more disgusting
Whether or not "Celt" had by his time than the Venetians themselves, insult
achieved wide currency in its modern, these miserable people" (Julian Edition,
ethno-linguistic sense, Shelley clearly IX, 335).
S88 • Donald H. Reiman
then these cities "might adorn this sunny land," combining remem-
bered glories of the past "with new virtues more sublime;/If not,
perish thou and they!" (11. 156-160). The cities of Italy, of which
Venice but the example, are, in their present state of degrada-
is

tion, "clouds which stain truth's rising day," to be consumed bv

the sun as were the morning mists around Shelley's mountain-
island (11. 84-89). Thus the dawn, which -at the personal level
scattered the vapors and the rooks that symbolized Shelley's miseries,
from a social perspective represents the dawn of a new age of
truth that will dissipate the clouds of ignorance and drive away
the birds of vice. Out of the dust of a dead Italy will spring like-

flowers new nations to usher in "the world's great age."

Ill
We on Byron (11. 167-205) was "inter-
are told that the strophe
polated after the completion of the poem." 5 In the not-so-distant
past, when it was believed that Shelley's poetrv flowed from him
without thought or plan, echoing everv throb of his sensitive soul,
the insertion of these lines might have been explained this way:
Shelley, overbrimming with admiration and affection for Byron,
wrote an enthusiastic tribute to his friend and then inserted it
at this point in the poem because he had last seen Byron at Venice.
Fortunately, we now understand enough of the artistic technique
of Shellev to realize that these lines have really less to do with
his feelings toward Byron than with his attitude toward poetry
and the poet. On 22 December 1818 he wrote to Peacock of his
mixed feelings on Lord Bvron: "I entirelv agree with what you
say about Childe Harold. The spirit in which it is written is,
if insane, the most wicked and mischievous insanity that ever was

given forth. It is a kind of obstinate and self-willed follv, in which

he hardens himself. But that he is a great poet. I think
. . .

the address to ocean proves." 6

The significance of Shelley's tribute in "Lines written among
the Euganean Hills" must be sought not in biographical considera-
tions but in the artistic demands of the poem. These lines, occupy-
ing the central position in the poem's construction, integrate the
various themes of the middle movement and the symbolism of the
entire composition. In Shelley's symbolic universe water is em-
blematic of the mortal world, fire of divine, spiritual energy, dust
of inert matter, and air, occupying a middle region between the

5. See the headnote to the poem, Poeti- Library, New Haven. 1959. p. 382).
cal Works, p. 554. The manuscript of 6. Julian Edition. X, 12. Cf. Shelley's
these lines (which were, of course, al- other remarks to and on Byron during
ready an integral part of the completed the months before and during the corn-
version that Shelley sent to Oilier for position of "Euganean Hills": Julian
publication) is now in the Yale Univer- Edition IX. 299. 301-305. 325-328.
sity Library, as part of the collection of X, 8, 10-11. 12-13; "Julian and Mad-
Professor C. B. Tinker (see The Tinker dalo," Preface and 11. 4^
 Structure, Symbol, and Theme • 589
fires of heaven and the merely mortal realms, is a symbol of the
intellectual and spiritual abstractions attached
the temporal to
world that both reveal and distort the divinity beyond. Thus, when
Shelley refers to perished Venice as a "hearthless sea" (1. 168), he
says that although the city may exist as a physical site, the spiritual
fires that raise men above the level of beasts have all been extin-
guished. Let there remain, says Shelley, over this wreck, a memory
(a thought, immaterial as the sky) greater in its power to hide the
evil recollection of Venice than is the passing of time itself: that
Byron (metaphorically represented as a swift, aspiring, beautiful
bird of mournful song) "driven from his ancestral streams/By the
might of evil dreams,/Found a nest in thee" (11. 176-178). The
next lines, which at the literal level refer to Byron's apostrophe to
the ocean in Childe Harold, at the symbolic level indicate that the
joy Byron experienced at Venice was of a mortal rather than a
divine character: Ocean's "joy grew his" (11. 178-183). The stream

of English unending but ever mutable, lashes "many a

poetry,
sacred Poet's grave" (11. 184-187), for the ongoing tradition is not
always gentle to the remains of its earlier sons. (Pope at this period
felt the "lashing" of many a "melodious wave.") Once again the

limitations inherent in every manifestation of water are implicit,

though they are not, of course, paramount here. We can para-
phrase the rhetorical questions thus: what though the stream of
English poetry, whichis not always kind to dead poets, still mourns

the exile of Byron?what though Venice, even with its great past,
can now add nothing to Byron's fame as he adds to hers? what
though, rather, Venice's "sins and slaveries foul/Overcloud a
sunlike soul?" Venice, in its current state of degradation, has not
only failed to add to the stature of Byron, but it has actually ob-
scured and corrupted his creative genius. Even with all these
reservations, Venice will still be remembered for giving refuge to
the English poet. "The ghost of Homer clings/Round Scamander's
wasting springs"; Homer's art has long outlived his biography, and
the merely mutable waters that he immortalized shall waste away
before their fame dies; "Divinest Shakespeare," like the omniscient
power (symbolized in the sun) that he mirrored, "fills Avon and
the world with light" (11. 196-199); the love of Petrarch, on the
other hand, is a "quenchless lamp by which the heart/Sees things
unearthly" (11. 200-203). Shelley's use of the "mirror" and the
"lamp" accords exactly with the theory of Professor Abrams' book.
Shelley, to fulfill the rhetorical purpose of his poem, here praises
Petrarch above Shakespeare (as the order is climactic rather than
chronological); whereas Shakespeare filled the world with the re-
flection of cosmic light, Petrarch himself burned with the fire of
love that both warms and illumines. Reflected light is reason, but
590 - Donald H. Reiman
the illuminating fire of love represents the highest employment of
human imagination. Like Homer Byron will remain immortal
through his poetry; like Shakespeare he will illuminate the world;
like Petrarch he will vivify the world with love; and like all three
he will bring fame to the places with which his memory is associated.
This verse-paragraph portrays not the actual Byron but rather
the ideal Byron, emancipated from all bondage to sin; Shelley mav

have hoped, perhaps, through the idealized portrait to bring Byron

to his senses, causing the noble poet to reject his sordid companions
and pastimes. 7 But it is as a symbol of poetic genius in all its mani-
festations that Byron shows how even the city whose destruction
has been foretold by a prophet of Apollo can in part redeem its
memory through hospitality to another of the divine oracles.
IV
The key image of the sections on Venice and Byron was that of
fire, befitting the red blaze of sunrise. Now, when "the sun floats
up the sky/Like thought-winged 206-207), theLiberty" (11.

imagery shifts from "fire" to "light." As the portrayal of Venice

centered on wilful perversion and misuse of the Creator's gifts, so
that of Padua will focus on the darkness of tyranny that is the
wages of such sin.
In a transitional passage (11. 206-213) the morning advances
"till the universal light/Seems to level plain and height"; this
essential equality of all things beneath the sun, the sense of brother-
hood engendered by the light of"thought-winged Liberty," is the
standard against which will be measured the social conditions of the
Po Valley. Venice, meanwhile, has been swallowed up bv a mist
from the sea even her reflected glory from the sun has been
until •

lost in "that gray cloud." Near the edge of the mist stands Padua,
"a peopled solitude," as Venice was "a peopled labyrinth" (11. 216,
96) . In the tableau before him Shellev had used Venice to represent |

the citv of sin; now he uses Padua to represent the city upon which
retribution has alreadv fallen, the bestial labyrinth become a desert.
Before turning to the city itself, however, Shelley describes the
"harvest-shining plain" that surrounds it. Amid the great wealth of

the land, what most concerns the poet is the social injustice: that •

"the peasant heaps his grain/In the garner of his foe" (11. 218-

7. Preface to "Julian and Maddalo": towards his friends by a maxim which I

"He [Maddalo-Byron] is a person of the found afterwards in the pages of Goethe
most consummate genius, and capable. — 'When we take people merely as they
if he would direct his energies to such are. we make them worse; when we treat
an end, of becoming the redeemer of his them as if they were what they should
degraded country [Venice]. But it is his be, we improve them as far as the
weakness to be proud." Mary Shelley be improved' " (Essays, Letters from
later wrote of Shelley: "He had never Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. •

read 'Wilhelm Meister,' but I have heard Mrs. Shelley, London. 1840. \>
him say that he regulated his conduct
 Structure Symbol,
, and Theme • 591

219). The harvest imagery is brilliantly sustained throughout the

remainder of the verse-paragraph. The creaking wagon symbolizes
the unstable social structure, weighted down by the oppressions of
"purple pride" (cf. 11. 221, 284). Even the "milk-white" color of
the oxen that draw the wain (1. 220) may be both fact 8 and symbol,
suggesting the pure white truth that plods inexorably toward the
rectification of injustice. The sickle that cuts the grain will soon,
the prophet of Apollo predicts, be changed into another sharp
instrument for the reaping of "many a lord/. Sheaves of whom
. .

are ripe to come/To destruction's harvest-home" (11. 226-230).

For, says the poet,

Men must reap the things they sow,

Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. (11. 231-235)
There is no exultation here, only sadness at the knowledge brought
by imaginative insight: what the poet, with the ordered soul repre-
sented by his mountain-island vantage point, can clearly envision is
unseen by both the tyrant and the slave, blinded by self-will and
ignorance and thus captives of Necessity.
The second paragraph on Padua (11. 236-255) gives us a historical
perspective upon her present plight. During the thirteenth-century
wars between the Popes and the Emperors, Ezzelino da Romano,
vicar of theEmperor Frederick II, became the master of Verona,
Vicenza, and Padua (in 1237). For nearly twentv years Ezzelino's
tyranny maintained the ascendancy of the Ghibellines, although at
the same time his atrocities made Frederick's cause odious through-
out Italy. After the emperor's death Ezzelino reaped the harvest
he was hunted down and killed in 1259. Thus Death
of his actions;
finally won Ezzelin from Sin
(11. 2 36-240 ).
9 Padua, which during

the rule of Ezzelino and the brief period of prosperity following

his death had played the tyrant and enslaved its neighbors, also felt
the hand of retribution. First the Scalas of Verona conquered the
city (1311) and then, after almost a century of independence
under the Carrara family, Padua passed permanently under the
rule of Venice in 1405. Thus, for more than four hundred years
the city had been subject to foreign powers, with Sin acting as
Death's "Vice-Emperor" (note the pun) under the Austrian
tyranny:

8. See n. 1 above. Cf. also Shelley to 9. As has often been pointed out, Shelley
Mary, 20 August 1818: "You everywhere borrows Sin and Death from Paradise
meet those teams of beautiful white oxen, Lost and the game at dice for a man's
which are now labouring the little vine- soul from "The Rime of the Ancient
divided fields with their Virgilian ploughs Mariner."
and carts" (Julian Edition, IX, 323).
 —
592 • Donald H. Reiman
And since that time, ay, long before,
Both have ruled from shore to shore,
That incestuous pair, who follow
Tyrants as the sun the swallow,
As Repentance follows Crime,
And as changes follow Time. (11. 250-255)
The swallow is the fourth and final symbolic bird introduced in
the poem. Rooks, emblematic of the poet's "passion, pain, and
guilt," had been followed by the sea-mew, symbol of divine retribu-
tion; now the swallow serves, as did the reaping and sowing imagery
of the previous strophe, to symbolize the necessary consequences
of tyranny. Only the man of imagination, a "tempest-cleaving
Swan" 174), can successfully struggle against the winds of
(1.

Necessity; only love and reason could, if they were widespread, stay
"the despot's rage, the slave's revenge." As it is, changes must
follow time, and those overlords who have sown the wind must
surely reap the whirlwind.
The seventh and last strophe of the poem's middle movement,
which parallels the third verse-paragraph of the first movement (11.

66-89), Reuses on the hope for a social redemption equal to the

personal release felt by the poet at dawn. Padua's university, once
the pride of Italy, is no longer a light to the nations, but like an
illusory "meteor" (optical phenomenon) "it gleams betrayed and
to betray" (1. 260). Newer lamps of knowledge, kindled from
Padua's sacred flame, are illuminating the world, "but their spark
lies dead in thee, /Tram pled out by Tyranny" (11. 267-268).
1
It

is clear now that "light" and "fire" cannot be regarded as separate

or distinct. As the flame of the "lamp of learning" both warms

and illumines "this cold and gloomy earth," so can there be no
separation of the fire of love from the light of reason. 2 Shelley
never regards moral action as a necessary consequence of knowl-
edge, but neither will he recognize ignorant goodwill as a virtuous
quality. His recurrent use of the sun and the lamp to symbolize
cosmic and human creative energy (imagination) precludes a split
between reason, will, and emotions.
The final simile, which compares Tyrannv engulfed by the light
and flames originallv sprung from Padua's lamp to a Norwegian

1. Although textual emendation without some few errors, which are so much the
manuscript authority is a dangerous prac- worse because they are errors in the
tice, I am inclined to accept C. D. sense. If there should be any danger of
Locock's conjectural emendation of a second Edition. I will correct them"
.

"might" to "night" at the end of 1. 266. (Julian Edition, X. 79).

Shelley was plagued throughout his stay 2. Cf. Preface to "Julian and Maddalo":
in Italy by inaccuracies in his published "His passions and his powers are in-
poetry that resulted from his being un- comparably greater than those of other
able to read the proof sheets. That the men; and. instead of the latter having
Rosalind and Helen volume was no ex- been employed in curbing the former,
ception we can gather from his letter to they have mutually lent each other
the Olliers, 6 September 1819: "In the strength."
'Rosalind and Helen,' I see there are
 —
Structure, Symbol, and Theme • 593
woodsman surrounded by the raging forest fire, the source of which
he had extinguished, ties together the imagery of the second move-
ment. The power of Necessity is clearly recognized in the spreading
flames, and the fire reiterates the sun-hearth-lamp imagery central
to the movement; moreover, the scene of the simile is as appropriate
to landlocked Padua as was the image of the fisherman (11. 134-
141) that concluded the passage on Venice's watery death.
The first movement portrayed the release of one individual, the
poet, from the power of Necessity; it showed how an infusion of
divine energy, symbolized in the sunrise, had broken the power of
the poet's unhappy past and had freed him from his feelings of
guilt and regret. The second movement demonstrated that the
same kind of regeneration is possible at the social level. If "Free-
dom" 150), the "thought-winged Liberty" (1. 207) that can
(1.

spring from a renaissance among the individuals of a society,

"should awake," then the resulting love and reason could free men
from "the despot's rage, the slave's revenge" (1. 235). Byron, the
example of poetic genius, represents the kind of man who, once
freed from his own sins and slaveries, will be a "tempest-cleaving
Swan," rebuffing the big wind of circumstance and leading others
to the light of the new morn of truth. Byron (as symbol rather than
as individual) thus forms the link both between personal and social
regeneration and between the destructive swing of the cycle of
Necessity imagined in the fate of Venice and the rebirth predicted
with the downfall of Padua's tyrants.

V
The third movement of "Lines written among the Euganean
Hills" begins with the advent of noon. Because at this hour the
and refracted by the earth's atmosphere,
sun's rays are least diffused
noontime was Shelley's symbol of the nearest conjunction between
the divine and the mortal, the eternal and the temporal. At noon
a new mist of autumn envelops the scene, but one no longer the
symbol of evanescent mortality; rather, it has become a "purple
mist," a general diffusion of the "purple pride" that had earlier (1.

284) marked the sinful self-will of the tyrants but that now casts a
general effluence of value over all things. It seems like a rare gem
vaporized or "an air-dissolved star" that "fills the overflowing sky"
(11. 287-293). Here the planet Venus, emblem of love, melts into
the earth's region of air, that realm of mortal thought, and enriches
all things with mingled "light and fragrance" (1. 290). 3 Under the
dual influence of the noontide sun of cosmic creativity and the
morning-evening star of human love and aspiration, all creation

3. Cf. The Triumph of

Life, 11. 416-423. especially in the mornings and evenings.
Shelley wrote to Peacock, 16 August . . . We
see here Jupiter in the east; and
1818: "The weather has been brilliantly Venus, I believe, as the evening star,
fine; and now, among these mountains, directly after sunset" (Julian Edition, IX,
the autumnal air is becoming less hot, 321).
594 • Donald H. Reiman
plains, leaves, vines, flower, Apennine, Alps, "and of living things
each one;/And my spirit" —merge in a mystical unity, "interpene-
trated" by "the glory of the sky" 294-314). 4 What caused this
(11.

memorable feeling of oneness between the once-isolated human

soul and the natural creation around him? Shellev, true to his
sceptical epistemology, does not answer categorically but rather
names the alternative possibilities (11. 315^319): the experience
may have been generated by a purely physical stimulus (light or
odor), by an external metaphysical reality (love, harmony, or the
"soul of all"), or by the poet's own active creative spirit, which
peoples an empty universe.
to be replaced bv the moon and
At evening the sun disappears
the evening symbols of the reason and love that had both
star,

been present in the symbolic sun. Both the unitv within the poet's
soul and the union between him and the surrounding universe have
been disrupted. Although the moon of reason (see note 8 above)
borrows also "from the sunset's radiant springs," the evening star
seems to minister to the moon half of that "crimson light." In
other words, even the cold, borrowed, uncertain light that the
moon of reason affords us seems to be partlv dependent upon the
guiding star of love. With the setting of the sun, the "soft dreams
of the morn" pass to others, and Pain, the "ancient pilot" of the
poet's bark, returns to the helm. 5 "The dav is gone, and all its
sweets are gone!"
Gone, but not forgotten, for the poet, recalling the joy that
surprised him that day among the Euganean Hills, can declare that
"other flowering isles must be/In the sea of Life and Agony" (11.

335-336) and that there must be other spirits, daemon intermedi-

aries between the divine and the human; perhaps even now, dove-
like, "with folded wings thev waiting sit/For mv bark, to pilot it"
(11. 340-341). It may be that they will guide the poet to a cove
where, for him and those he loves, will be built a "windless bower,"
free from the bondage to Necessity, "far from passion, pain, and
guilt" (11. 342-351).
The island-paradise described in these lines is, like the island-
havens in other Shelley poems, a figurative and symbolic one. The
island of calm lies within the minds of those who live there. Like

4. Cf. Shelley to Hunt, April 1818: "no England again after the daily contempla-
sooner had we arrived at Italy than the tion of the sublimest objects of antient
loveliness of the earth and the serenity art, and the sensations inspired by the
of the sky made the greatest difference enchanting atmosphere which envelopes
in my sensations I —
depend on these these tranquil seas and majestic moun-
tings for life; for in the smoke of cities tains in its radiance" (Julian Edition,
and the tumult of human kind and the X. K).
chilling fogs and rain of our own coun- 5. In 1822 Shelley recorded the death of
try I can hardly be said to live" (Julian another brief moment of peace and calm.
Edition. IX, 293-294), and Shelley to See "Lines written in the Bay of Lerici"
Hogg, 21 December 1818: "It will be (Poetical Works, pp. 673-674). especially
difficult however to live contentedly in 11. 22-29.
 Structure, Symbol, and Theme • 595
hell or heaven, it is not a place but rather a condition of the soul.
Let me live, Shelley asks, freed from the stormy passions and
me from treating others with complete
feelings of guilt that prevent
love and understanding. If such a state of soul can be achieved by
Shelley and his immediate circle (and the establishment of a
harmonious intellectual coterie was one of his most persistent
dreams), the Spirits of the Air, those atmospheric limitations of
mortality that interpose themselves between the human and the
divine, will undoubtedly bring about encounters between this ideal
human and the outside world where the penalties of Neces-
society
sity continue to be exacted. Perhaps, suggests the poet, the calm

and kindness with which we encounter the multitude will affect

them more than their passion will us; perhaps we can, through the
exercise of love and reason, bring about a regeneration of other
individuals; perhaps, under the mild influence of

the love which heals all strife

Circling, like the breath of life,

All things in that sweet abode

With its own mild brotherhood:

They, not it, would change; and soon

Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again. (11. 366-373)
Thus the final movement of the poem, even as it records the
sad message of the evanescence of those bright moments when the
human world seems interpenetrated by the divine, also expresses
hope for the return of such experiences and, through their nurture
and cultivation by a dedicated community, to the amelioration of
all humanity. Venus, which as the evening star bears the promise

of the day's return, becomes the key symbol of the third movement;
it is both the symbol of creation's unity amid the diffused glare

that is caused by the terrestrial atmosphere's refraction of the white

radiance of eternity and the symbol of man's hope amid the dark
hours of the soul's complete separation from that divine warmth
and illumination.

Shelley has created a symbolic universe that skillfully embodies

and reverberates his theme: although it is ordinarily man's fate to
be the slave and victim of forces beyond his conscious control (a
situation so intolerable that death and oblivion are preferable to it),
there come to the man of imagination moments in which his soul
becomes one with the universe, in which he is able to see, not
through a glass darkly but clearly and vitally, the values and end
of human
existence; such moments, in which a divine infusion of
loveand reason breaks through the clouds of mortality, have their
own kind of inevitability but one that gives their recipient true
596 • M. H. Abrams
moral freedom; such moments, if cultivated and trusted, might
break the harsh chain of provocation and retribution.
Shelley supports the thematic development of "Lines written
among the Euganean Hills" through its prosody. Enid Hamer, who
finds in the poem a "heavilv stressed line" that "has a monotonous
tramp through the major part of the poem," believes that "when
Shelley breaks free of the drowsing beat of the endstopped sevens,
he can produceeffects of extraordinary richness and expressiveness."
Of 275-284 she declares: "Never have more magnificent
lines
harmonies been achieved in the four-foot measure." 6 The truth
is that Shelley carefully modulates his versification according to the
meaning of the lines. Throughout most of the poem he utilizes the
sharply recurrent rhythms and rhymes of the tetrameter couplet to
underline his central concern with the power of Necessity; he even
increases and punctuates repetitive sounds through the employment
of fifteen triplet rhymes and the skillful use of assonance. In the
opening lines, for instance, the vowel sounds of the second line
echo those of the first almost exactlv: "deep" is assonant with
"green," "wide" with "isle," and "sea" with "needs," while there
are close parallels between "In the" and "Many a," "of" and
"must," and "misery" and "be." Whereas the first three lines con-
tain eight, nine, and eight svllables respectively, once the poet
begins in the fourth line to describe man's relentless voyage toward
the grave, the meter settles into stronglv accented, four-beat, seven-
syllable lines. Thereafter the seven-syllable norm is varied with un-
truncated initial iambs or trisyllabic feet in passages where the poet
describes or invokes a break in the inexorable inarch of Necessity
(e.g., 66-79, 134-137, 151, 233-235, 275-282, 295-30-, 335-
11.

340). But the concluding lines, which describe the island-paradise

and the regeneration of mankind, return to the seven-syllable
pattern in order to lend to the healing powers of love and reason a
strength and inevitability equal to that bondage portrayed earlier
in the poem.

M. H. ABRAMS
[Shelley's Prometheus Unbound}*
* * * None of Shellev's longer poems is irrelevant to his theme
of the human need for love to fulfill what is incomplete and to
reintegrate what has been divided, both in the individual psyche

6. The Metres of English Poetry (Lon- W. W. Norton & Company. Inc., 1971),
don, 1930), pp. 39-40. pp. 299-307. Published by W
W. Norton
t From Natural Supernaturalism: Tradi- & Company, and Oxford Univ<
Inc.
tion and Revolution in Romantic Litera- Press, London. Reprinted by permission
ture, by M. H. Abrams (New York: of the publishers.
 [Shelley s Prometheus Unbound] • 597
and in the social order; but I shall discuss only his most detailed and
successful rendering of this theme, Prometheus Unbound. Like
Keats in his exactly contemporary Hyperion, Shelley in this poem
explored the problem of and suffering in terms of the classical
evil

myth of the loss of the Golden Age when Saturn was displaced by
Jupiter (see II, iv. 32 ff.). And like many other contemporaries
Shelley fused the pagan myth of a lost Golden Age with the Biblical
design of a fall, redemption, and millennial return to a lost felicity,

and gave prominence to the associated Biblical figure of the

special
exile, return, and marriage of the bride. In his Preface Shelley also

tells us that he chose the Titan Prometheus for his protagonist over

Satan, ''the hero of Paradise Lost," because Prometheus has Satan's

heroic virtues of courage and firm "opposition to omnipotent force,"
but without the moral defects which, in Milton's "magnificent fic-
tion," engender "in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us
to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former be-
cause the latter exceed all measure." 1 Prometheus Unbound, then,
like Wordsworth's Prelude and Home at Grasmere, Blake's Milton,
and Keats's Hyperion, can be looked upon as a deliberate attempt
—
by a Romantic Miltonist in his Preface Shelley called his prede-
cessor "the sacred Milton" —
to revise Milton's great but no longer
adequate imaginative conception of the nature, justification, and
mitigation of the evils and agonies of human experience.
Many critics of Shelley's poem assert that Prometheus is an alle-
gorical figure, but they disagree as to what he allegorizes. Earl
Wasserman, for example, in a recent and often enlightening mono-
graph, has argued that "Prometheus is the personification of Shel-
ley's concept of the One Mind," as this concept is represented in

Shelley's system of metaphysics, and that "the drama is the history

of the One Mind's evolution into perfection." 2 In his Preface, how-
ever, Shelley himself asserts that Prometheus "is, as it were, the
type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature."
Shelley's hero, then, is close kin to the agent called "Man" or
"Mankind" who is the protagonist in the popular eighteenth-cen-
tury genre of universal history — a genre which, in its French and
English versions, ranked high in Shelley's favorite reading matter.
In universal history "Man" is the collective representative (in
Shelley's word, "the type") of the intellectual and moral vanguard
among human beings, who develops through history toward his
perfected human condition. In Prometheus Unbound Shelley ren-
ders the universal history of man in the dramatic form of visualizable
agents and their actions, and he represents man's accession to an
earthly paradise not (in the usual eighteenth-century pattern) as
the terminus of a long and gradual progress but (by a reversion to

1. Shelley's Prose, p. 327. 2. Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound,"

pp. 195, 30-i.
598 . M. H. Abrams
the Biblical design of history) as a sudden, right-angled break-
through from misery to felicity.
Within the frame of Shelley's dramatic fiction Prometheus, like
Blake's Albion, is also a descendant of a familiar mythical figure:
the one man who was once
whole, has fallen into division, and
proceeds to redeem his lost integrity. Throughout the work, how-
ever, Shelley sustains the bodily separateneSS of Prometheus and
Asia, his divided feminine complement, so that their reunion is not
represented as a reintegration of the primal man, but as a culminat-
ing marriage. In his drama, furthermore, Shelley clearly distinguishes
—
between his dramatis personae proper Prometheus and the other
"Giant Forms" (as Blake would call them) who act out the mythi-
cal plot —
and the world that these mythical personages and actions
figure forth: the real world of ordinary men and women, who are
never directly presented in the action of the dramatic poem but
whose experiences are reported to us by the Spirit of the Earth
and the Spirit of the Hour in the third act, and whose spiritual
alteration and accession to an earthly paradise are correlative with
the conversion of Prometheus and his reunion with Asia.
When the play begins, Prometheus has alreadv fallen into dis-
unity and conflict as a consequence of his moral error in having
succumbed, in response to tyranny and injustice, to the divisive
passion of hate; the result is that Asia has been exiled from him.
Asia is the soul's counterpart which, in his "Essay on Love," Shelley
calls the "anti-type." 3 In the play she is characterized as an Aphro-
dite figure who embodies the universallv integrative and life-restoring
power which Shellev called "love." "Most vain all hope but love;

—
and thou art far, Asia!" in "that far Indian vale," as Panthea
explains,

The scene of her sad exile; rugged once

And desolate and frozen, like this ravine;
But now invested with fair flowers and herbs
from the aether
. . .

Of her transforming presence, which would fade

If it were mingled not with thine. (I, 808-9, 826-33)

Her separation has left Prometheus as the male remnant who mani-
fests the power of the will in the highest masculine virtues of
resistance and endurance, but remains "eyeless in hate," an isolated
and immobilized Samson, in a natural setting which has become
alien and lifeless to him:

Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,

Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. (I, Q-22)
3. Shelley's Prose, p. 170.
 —
[Shelley s Prometheus Unbound] • 599
Prometheus is represented as having been chained and tortured
by Jupiter. We
soon learn, however, that all of Jupiter's power has
been vested in him by his victim. The implication is that Jupiter is
—
mankind's own worst potentiality the corruption of affiliative love
into self-love, with its concomitant lust for dominion and tyranny
which has been projected by the mind of man in the fantasy of a
cruel tyrant-god who dwells aloof in his distant heaven. But if

Jupiter is a pseudo-person, he is not the less psychologicallv real and

effective: "Igave all/He has; and in return he chains me here" (I,
381-2). Various clues in the text, moreover, invite us to regard all
the dramatis personae, except one, as externalized correlatives of
the powers, aspects, and activities of Prometheus' own divided and
conflicting self, and to regard even the altering natural setting as
The one clear exception
projections of Prometheus' mental states. 4
is Demogorgon, the "mighty darkness" and shapeless form (II, iv.
2-7) who is the principle, or power, behind allprocess. This ulti-
mate reason for things not only lies outside of man's mind and its
activities but also, Shelley skeptically insists, lies irretrievably out-
side the limits of man's knowledge, by virtue of the fact that it

exceeds the bounds of possible human experience. Accordingly,

Demogorgon is simply postulated — like the cognitively inaccessible
"Power Arve" in Shelley's great lyric, Mont Blanc
in likeness of the
— as the course of events which is in itself purposeless and amoral,
but carries out the ineluctable consequences of man's decisions or
acts; whether for good or ill depends on the condition of the human

will which makes neutral process the instrument of its own moral
purposes. Read in this way Prometheus Unbound, like Blake's
prophetic poems, is a psycho-drama of the reintegration of the split
personality by that annihilation of selfhood which converts divisive
hate into affiliative love, in which the action is equally relevant to
the mind of each and all of us. And by any valid reading of Shelley's
myth, it is plain that man is ultimately the agent of his own fall,
the tyrant over himself, his own avenger, and his own potential
redeemer; as H. N. Fairchild has described Shelley's intention,
justly though disapprovingly, "the mind of man is liberated from
5
its dark delusions solely by the mind of man."

The plot of Prometheus Unbound has no precedent in the drastic

asymmetry of its construction. It begins not in medias res but at
the end, for the reversal occurs in the opening soliloquy when
Prometheus, his arrogance suddenly dissipating after his long disci-
pline of suffering, substitutes a unifying sentiment for the separative

4. See Harold Bloom's insightful discus- events of the dramas are "the symbolic
sion of the divided Prometheus in The externalizing of mental acts and powers";
Visionary Company, pp. 298iT. Wasser- see, e.g., pp. 2-3.
man in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" 5. Religious Trends in English Poetry (4
also suggests that various characters and vols.; New York, 1939-57), III, 350.
 —
600 • M. H. Abrams
sentiment: pity for hate. (As Blake had put it, "They have divided
themselves by Wrath, they must be united by/ Pity ... in terrors
of self annihilation." 6 )
Prometheus at once proceeds to "recall"
in the double sense of bringing into the full light of consciousness,
—
and by that very fact revoking the implications of the curse he
had called down upon Jupiter, which serves in the play as the central
emblem of his moral flaw. These feet, he cfies to Jupiter, might
trample thee,

If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.

Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. . . .

I speak in grief,

Not exultation, for I hate no more,

As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. . . .

Though I am changed so that aught evil wish

Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate. ... (I, 51-72)

This is all Prometheus, by the reversal of his unaided masculine

will,can do, except to remain indomitable against Jupiter's con-

tinuing demands for submission. But by substituting compassion
for hate Prometheus, although unknowingly, has released his femi-
nine complement, the full power of love, from her long exile.

From the end of the first act on, the plot consists almost entirelv
of Asia's journey to her reunion with Prometheus. She and Panthea
(her sister and lesser self, through whom she has retained some re-
lation to Prometheus in exile) obey the reiterative "Follow! Follow!"
which expresses the sweet and irresistible compulsion that has been
put in process by Prometheus' change of heart; this is Shellev's
version of the yearning toward the apocalyptic bridal union in
Revelation: "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him
that heareth say, Come." Asia's movement toward reunion is a
spiritual journey which, in consonance with the great Romantic
trope, is specifically a Bildungsreise, in the course of which she
acquires essential knowledge that leaves her radically altered. Prome-
theus' change from hate to pity had been unpremeditated and
instinctive, and, before his reformation can be complete and stable,
the principle implicit in this moral act must be brought out as
conscious knowledge. But since, by the conditions of Shelley's
inherited story, Prometheus must remain fixed to his precipice, the
function of the self-educative journey is given over to his alter ego,
Asia. In obedience to her inner compulsion Asia descends to Demo-
gorgon's underworld at the dark bases of existence and puts to him
the ultimate questions about the "why" of the way things are — the
6 Jerusalem, VII. 57-61.
 [Shelley's Prometheus Unbound] • 601
rationale of all human history and experience. In the Induction to
Keats's The Fall of Hyperion, as the poet ascends the stairs his
evolving awareness educed from him by the progressive alteration
is

of Moneta's charges and comments. Asia's developing insight is

similarly projected and dramatized in the form of a colloquy; for
Demogorgon, who simply acts as he must without knowing why,
responds to her queries with riddling utterances that merely stimu-
late her to answer her own questions, by specifying as knowledge
what she had already possessed as obscure presentiment.
Accordingly it is not Demogorgon but Asia who tells us the pre-
history of the drama Golden Age under Saturn
in which, during the
men had lived in felicity, but a of ignorance, then had
felicity
suffered under the tyranny of Jupiter, but had been relieved by
Prometheus, who brought men science, culture, and the arts. Yet
for this act of benevolence Prometheus hangs bound and tortured,
and civilized man is become 'The wreck of his own will, the scorn
of earth/The outcast, the abandoned, the alone." At this point
Asia raises the question central to the Romantic, as to the earlier
Christian spiritual journey: unde malum? "But who rains down/
Evil, the immedicable plague?" To Shelley's skeptical empiricism,
this question oversteps the limits of possible human experience.
Demogorgon does not know the answer, nor does Asia, nor can any
man, for as Demogorgon says, "the deep truth is imageless." He
can give her only as much knowledge as she already possesses, below
the level of distinct awareness; but this knowledge turns out to be
allwe need to know — that to "Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and
Change . . ./All things are subject but eternal Love." To which
Asia replies

So much I asked before, and my heart gave

The response thou hast given; and of such truths
Each to itself must be the oracle. (II, iv. 32-123)

Asia's educational journey, then, like Wordsworth's in The Prelude,

terminates in the lesson that love first and chief, as the only
is

available solution to the problem of the good and evil of our mortal
state. At the instant of this discovery by Asia, Demogorgon becomes

capable of answering the sole question to which he can give a

decisive and unambiguous reply, and that merely by a gesture:
"When shall the destined hour arrive?" "Behold!" For the destined
hour has at that instant arrived.
Taking up her journey back to Prometheus in the car driven by
the Spirit of the Hour, Asia in a great lyric describes the correlative
inner journey in which her soul, like an enchanted boat, moves up
and back through age, manhood, youth, infancy, and "Through
Death and Birth, to a diviner day;/A paradise of vaulted bowers"
602 • M. H. Abrams
(II, v. 72-110). This spiritual dying to be reborn is equated, on the
mythical level, with her visible outer change back to the pristine
form she had manifested when she had risen as Aphrodite from
the sea, while "love . . . filling the living world,/Burst from thee";
her transfiguration matches that of Prometheus back to his primal
form at the moment when, suspended on the cliff, he had repealed
his hate (II, i. 56ff.). Jupiter is hurled by Demogorgon into "the
dark void" (III, ii. 10); that is, the projection of man's self-isolating
and domineering hate reverts to its original state of potentiality in
the human psyche, whence it will reconsolidate and reemerge if
man ceases to sustain his integrity by the cohesive force of love.
The condition of a reintegrated humanity is signified by the reunion
of Prometheus and Asia, which is exactly simultaneous with the
annihilation of Jupiter. Mary Shelley's interpretation of the event is

too exclusive to be adequate, but makes salient the parallel be-

it

tween the conclusion of Shelley's myth and the figure of the

culminating marriage in Wordsworth and other Romantic writers.
Asia, says Mrs. Shelley, in some mythological interpretations was

the same as Venus and Nature. When the benefactor of man-

kind is liberated, Nature resumes the beautv of her prime, and
is united to her husband, the emblem of the human race, in

perfect and happy union. 7

This marital reunion coincides with the sounding of the conch

shell by the Spirit of the Hour (Shelley's version of the last trump
in the Book of Revelation), at which "All things . . . put their
evil nature off" and man, having become what he might always
have been, "made earth like heaven" and, "equal, unclassed, tribe-
less,and nationless," takes up residence in his achieved paradise.
—
Unlike Grasmere Vale Wordsworth's "earthlv counterpart" of
heaven, whose inhabitants differ "but little from the Man else-
—
where" in their guilt and suffering Shelley's envisioned state is
one in which man will be "free from guilt or pain ... for his will
made or suffered them." Like Wordsworth's, however, Shelley's is
a paradise of this earth, in which man remains inescapablv condi-
tioned bv passion and by "chance, and death, and mutability";
otherwise he would not be earthly man but a disembodied idea in
a Platonic heaven: these mortal conditions are

The clogs of that which else might oversoar

The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (Ill, iv. 54-204)

Shelley added to Prometheus Unbound a fourth act in the tradi-

tional form of a nuptial masque. The act constitutes an immense
7. Complete Poetical Works of P. B. don, 1939), p. 272.
Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Lon-
 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 603
epithalamion in which the elements of the human mind and of the
outer cosmos celebrate the triumph of love and participate, in song,
dance, and ritual mimicry, in the union of Prometheus and Asia
The thematic word is "Unite!" and
taking place behind the scenes.
this concept
enacted in the fantastic, yet beautiful, episode of the
is

wooing and love union between the masculine earth and the
feminine moon — possibly, Shelley's adaptation of the alchemical
marriage between the male and female contraries (symbolically
represented as sun and moon, as well as king and queen) which
consummates the Hermetic quest for the principle that will trans-
mute all elements to gold and all mankind to the age of gold. Held
in its circular course by the embrace of the earth, the cold and
sterile moon bursts into restored life and fertility, as the earth's

enhanced energy manifests itself in a heightening of its electro-

magnetic forces and its radiated heat and light those attributes —
which in Shelley's spiritual physics are material correlates of the
attractive and life-giving powers of universal love. Such dramatic
episodes are merely emblematic, however, of the primary union,
in which all men are assimilated by love into a unitary mankind.
This fulfillment Shelley describes in a statement which is his meta-
phorical equivalent to the myth of the reintegration of the Universal
Man:
Man, oh, not men! A chain of linked thought,
Of love and might to be divided not. . . .

Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,

Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.
(IV, 394-402)

D. J.
HUGHES
Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound*
Harold Bloom writes of the passages describing the chariot of the
moon and the sphere of the earth in the fourth act, "These visions
are the mythic culminations of Prometheus Unbound." 1 Not all
commentators would agree, but most have found these passages
worthy of comment, Locock remarking that "the blank verse marks
the highest level attained by Shelley." 2 TheBiblical and Miltonic
sources and analogues of f hese passages have been studied by

t From Studies in Romanticism, II 1959), p. 140.

(1963), pp. 107-126. Reprinted by per- 2. The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
mission of the Trustees of Boston Uni- ed. C. D. Locock, 2 vols. (London 1911),
versity. I, 624.
1. Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven,
604 • D. /. Hughes
Wiltrude L. Smith 3 and Ants Oras, 4 the nature of the imagery by
R. H. Fogle, 5 while perhaps the best pages yet written on the
thematic significance of these two visions remain those of G. Wil-
son Knight in The Starlit Dome, 6 who reads these extraordinary
lines (180-318) against the background of the unfolding vision of
the total poem. Without such sense of Prometheus as a whole,
these passages, however brilliant and portentous in themselves,
tend to appear more exotic than they are. And, while the examina-
tion of Ezekiel and Milton throws some light on how these pas-
sages came to be written, the fact remains that the tone of these
visions differs widely from Biblical prophecy and the vengeful deity
of Milton's chariot. Nothing in Shelley is more characteristic than
these visions, and nothing in Shelley brings to better focus the par-
ticular and unusual by which he created poems. These
strategies
two drama are
visions in the celebrations of the fourth act of the
best read in relation to the poem as a whole and in relation to
Shelley's characteristic poetic method.
This method, as it reveals in the most significant poems, is best
understood on the analogy of the famous "fading coal" which
Shelley uses as a metaphor for the mind in creation. 7 The parts of
Shelley's longer poems can be understood as a series of such fading
coals, sometimes beginning in full hypostasis, sometimes gathering
strength and coherence as the self-discovering image perfects itself,
sometimes starting in collapse and ending there, but, whatever the
process, the imagistic progression is whollv organic and under some
kind of overarching control, even when the particular passage seems
to complete itself in a thematic or emotional (not formal) collapse.
I think this process is everywhere at work in Prometheus Unbound,

although the vast interwoven complexity of the poem makes it

difficult to plot. Such a process is dramatic in a different sense than
we normally think of the term, but much of the continuing argu-
ment about Prometheus as drama might be resolved if we thought
of the drama enacted in the poem, not in the Aristotelian sense of
character in action, but in the terms Shelley himself set for his
poem (often quoted, but seldom understood), "imagery drawn . . .

from the operations of the human mind." 8 The poem contains two
such large dramatic operations, 1. the events leading to the un-
chaining of Prometheus, and 2. the building of another process by

3. "An Overlooked Source for Prome- 7. See my "Coherence and Collapse in

theus Unbound," Studies in Philology, Shelley, with particular reference to Epi-
XLVIII (1951), 783-792. psychidionr ELH, XXVIII (Sept. 1961),
4. "The Multitudinous Orb: Some Mil- 260-283, for a reading of that poem
tonic Elements in Shelley," Modern Lan- from the point of view of the Shelleyan
guage Quarterly, XVI (1955), 247-257. fading coal.
5. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley 8. The Complete Poetical Works of
(Chapel Hill, 1949), pp. 49-54. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutch-
6. The Starlit Dome (Oxford, 1941, inson (Oxford, 1933), p. 205.
1959), pp. 219-224.
 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 60S
which Prometheus, in his symbolic role, can find a fresh hypostasis,
not in the actuality which Shelley anxious to spiritualize in the
is

poem, but in the Potentiality where the poem finally leaves us.
Paul Valery speaks of the poet as cleansing the verbal situation. 9
Shelley, in his most ambitious poem, can be seen as cleansing the
ontological situation, restoring our sense of the potential, turning,
through a series of verbal strategies, the actual back upon itself. The
world at the end of the poem with the seeds of
is a virtual one,
decline checked, themselves remaining in potency.
If this general statement about Prometheus Unbound has any
validity, each part of the poem must bear, microcosmically, some of
the pattern of the fading coal, a structure of coherence and collapse.
The widest ranging structure in the poem, indeed in Shelley's poetrv
as a whole, is Act IV describing the visions of the
this section of
Oceanides. Through these visions we experience the birth and death
of a cosmos, beginning with the "thinnest boat" of the potential
and ending in the cataclysmic collapse of as much of the actual
as the human mind can conceive or bear, indeed, even more than
deity wishes to sustain: "some God/Whose throne was in a comet,
passed and cried/'Be not!' " (IV.316-318) These 138 lines present .

in small the process of the poem as a whole, a process which, here,

save for the symbolic infants themselves, dispenses with the im-
portant dramatis personae of the drama. The subsequent cosmic
dance of the masculine earth and feminine moon has been pre-
pared for by the fullest imaginative reach of the Shelleyan strategy.
In Bloom's witty view, "In effect, the infants give away the mythic
planets in marriage.' 1 The potential, then, arises out of the actual
to new forms and dominates it. It is important to keep in mind
that these visions occur in the fourth act, after the freeing of Pro-
metheus. The "intoxication . . . the complicated and uncontrollable
splendour" which C. S. Lewis finds in Act IV 2 express not so much
the liberation of suffering mankind from and psychological political
repression as from the ontological tyranny of the phenomenal, a task
given to the verv medium with which the poet works:

Language is a perpetual Orphic song,

Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
(IV. 415-417)

These visions begin in a characteristic Shelleyan absence, the

memory of music fled:

9. "Poetry and Abstract Thought," The 1. Bloom, p. 142.

Art of Poetry, Bollingen Series XLIV 2. Rehabilitations (London, 1939), p. 33.
(New York, 1958), p. 54.
 a

606 • D. /. Hughes
Panthea. Ha! they are gone!
lone. Yet feel you no delight
From the past sweetness?
Panthea. As the bare green hill
When some soft cloud vanishes into rain,
Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water
To the unpavilioned sky! (IV. 180-184)

This "unpavilioning" is important here because the first three acts

of the poem have succeeded in destroying the actualitv with which
the drama opens: Prometheus chained to his rock. Now, the struc-
turing of further forms in the poem can take place in the ambience
of liberatedman, who, himself, must be placed against the cosmic,
suprahuman content of these visions for the poem to have its
widest range. It should be noted, also, that the two visions have
dramatic propriety: it is proper that the lesser of the Oceanides,
lone, should, as Bloom points out, 3 have the less terrific vision, a
vision of a Potentiality which stays perfectlv poised in itself, and
that Panthea, the stronger, should be able to bear the larger ex-
perience, in which the potential of her vision, the earth-infant,
should lead to the fullest actualization and collapse in Shelley —
collapse, of course, perfectly contained within the formal structure
of the poem.
The new music encountered by the Oceanides is heard "Kindling
within the strings of the waved air/ Aeolian modulations" (IV. 187-
188). Kindle is a highly significant word in Shelley, often signifying
the beginning of the Shelleyan process, the awakening of the fading
coal. The stasis expressed at the very beginning of these visions re-

calls and contrasts with the opening stasis of the poem. Compare:

The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears

Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones. (I. 31-33)

awakening tones,
Clear, silver, icy, keen,
Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul,
As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air
And gaze upon themselves within the sea. (IV. 190-193)

But this happy narcissism, usually signifying points of desired rest in

Shelley's work, now gives way to movement as "Two visions of
strange radiance" float into view above the runnels of a rivulet

which, "like sisters/Who part with sighs that they may meet in
smiles," can be identified with Panthea and lone themselves as they
await their major revelations. In Ione's subsequent vision, the
moon-chariot is likened to "that thinnest boat,/In which the
Mother of Months is borne/By ebbing light into her western c;i\c"

3. Bloom, p. 140.
 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 607
(IV. 206-208). Many commentators have pointed to this image as
a picture of the old moon in the new moon's arms, 4 certainly a
clear representation of the emergence of the potential from the
actual, and the boat imagery, of course, is very familiar in Shellev, 5
best illuminated here, perhaps, by a passage in a letter to Peacock:
"rivers are not like roads, the work of the hands of man; they
imitate mind, which wanders at will over pathless deserts, and flow
through nature's loveliest recesses, which are inaccessible to any-
thing besides." 6 The mind that rivers imitate is general or collective
mind; the boat is the vehicle or container of the individual mind
or consciousness which enables us to participate in, without being
overwhelmed by, the Universal. Moreover, the boat-image often
arises in Shelley's work from the structural need to keep his poem
moving. In this passage, the boat as imitative of thought in the
manner suggested, and the boat as a technical device to stir the
poem to movement, combine to inaugurate the great visions of
Act IV. We should also keep in mind that the boat image has a
female significance in these lines. The moon, which will finally be
fully hypostatized as female and impregnated by the earth, is seen
at this point in the poem in its fragile beginnings —the thinnest
boat. The movement of Ione's vision must be distinguished, how-
ever, from the wild Shelleyan journeys of Alastor, Epipsychidion,
—
and The Witch of Atlas and even from Asia's ride at the end of
Act II of Prometheus. Here Shelley manages to suggest movement
within stasis, a "progress" that, paradoxically, creates an image of
stillness. The mingling of the solid and the vaporous, which Fogle

and others have noticed as characteristic of Shelley's technique,

not only enables him to grasp the very difficult material he is
dealing with, but helps him to express here, as nowhere else in his
work, his sense of the potential of thought as it seeks its form.
The infant asleep in the moon-chariot symbolizes the perfection
of the potential, a potential which, in its stasis, need not seek com-
pleted form. The six repetitions of white in as many lines (IV. 2 19-

224) emphasize this magnificently unresolved possibility — the con-

dition of being before the "staining" process of existence takes
over, as the famous lines in Adonais describe the condition of
human life.

4. Both Mr. Bloom and Mr. Richard time sequence of the passage.
Harter Fogle seem to me to misread this 5. Perhaps the best discussion of Shel-
passage slightly. Bloom speaks of "the ley's boat imagery can be found in
new moon in the old moon's arms" when Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (Ox-
the image is meant to be the opposite, I ~"
ford, 1956), pp. 91-105.
think, as in Coleridge and elsewhere. The 6. From a letter to Peacock, July 17,
sequence is important for the develop- 1816. The Complete Works of Percy
ment of Shelley's imagery of this passage. Bysshe Shelley, Julian edition (New
And Mr. Fogle, using the less acceptable York, 1926), IX, 180. The italics are
reading cf night for light in "By ebbing mine.
night into her western cave," distorts the
 :

608 • D. /. Hughes
The infant, however, stands for more than this. Harold Bloom's
identification of this figure with the Divine Man of Ezekiel does not
seem very useful, but Wilson Knight comes closer, I think, to the
full significance of the infant figures in this act. He writes (of the
second infant, but I think his remarks are applicable to both )
"Here the active and central agent is again the Child, the Earth-
Spirit, yet son of man. Shelley is to this extent a humanist: the
child is the final fact." 7 This "final fact," of course, cuts deep
through English Romanticism, whether we think of the child in
terms of Blakean Innocence or of the Wordsworthian prophet-blest.
But there are important distinctions to be made between the two
infants of Shelley's vision. The first, the infant in the moon-chariot,
is akin to Blake's Thel and the chariot is to be associated with the
state of Beulah. The second, the infant of the earth-sphere, is

more the Child of Apocalypse and the vision of the higher inno-
cence. The infant of the moon-chariot stays prematurelv in the
potential, and the Shelleyan process cannot complete itself. Hie
solid clouds of the chariot's wheels "as they roll/Over the grass,
and and waves, wake sounds,/Sweet as a singing rain of
flowers,
silver dew" (IV. 233-235) This is not the "deep music of the
.

rolling world" heard by Panthea in line 186, but is more like the
"under-notes" caught by lone in line 189. We still need the full,

self-destroying cosmic music.

Panthea's remarkable vision of the sphere of the earth sets the
poetic process going to its inevitable completion. This sphere
which, among a dozen other possibilities, can be taken as a de-
scription of Shelley's poetry at its best, "Solid as crystal, yet
through all its through empty space, music and
mass/Flow, as
light" (IV. 2 39-240), offers us the full world the moon-chariot
was not capable of kindling. Color is awakened: "Purple and azure,
white, and green, and golden,/" and sufficient plenitude expressed
in one of Shelley's most daring conceits, "and every space between/
Peopled with unimaginable shapes,/Such as ghosts dream dwell in
the lampless deep,/Yet each inter-transpicuous." The combination
here is so remote as to be hardly graspable, yet the syntax is firm

and the language exact (inter-transpicuous strikes me as incredibly

cunning). Moreover, the movement of this vision is one of a "self-
destroying swiftness" (the true Shelleyan mode) which will ulti-
matelv end in the illumination of a cosmic cataclysm, capable of
grinding and kneading the actual back into the potential: "With
mightv whirl the multitudinous orb/Grinds the bright brook into
an azure mist/Of elemental subtlety, like light." William Empson's
criticism of these lines, that Shellev "not being able to think of a

7. Knight, p. 222.
 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 609
comparison fast enough . . . compares the thing to a vaguer or
more abstract notion of itself, or points out that it is its own nature,
or that it by supporting itself," 8 is an accurate descrip-
sustains itself
tion of Shelley's technique, but his implication that this is somehow
inadequate misapprehends the function of Shelley's mode. These
materials are notoriously elusive, whether they are emerging into
full realization or again passing from realization into a new po-

tential, but this is precisely the area Shelley wishes to grasp: his
whole poem centers there. The same technique can be seen at
work in the description of the sleeping infant in the sphere who is
likened to "a child o'erwearied with sweet toil." The child is a demi-
urge who has done work and must do more; he is the child of the
higher innocence who must illuminate and then transcend the
natural processes of experience.
The progress of this orb, leading as it must to the inevitable Shel-
leyan collapse, disturbs lone, who, in her ironic comment at line
269, attempts to slow the terrific movement, as she interprets the
smiles of the sleeping child, " 'Tis only mocking the orb's har-
mony." Bloom 9 and Knight 1 have commented well on this line,
emphasizing itshumanistic irony, the necessity for the human to
intrude itself at this point lest the orb turn into something like
the crushing chariot ofThe Triumph of Life. I would like to see
the function of this line in relation to Shelley's evolving form.
Ione's vision of the moon-chariot was read as a premature suspen-
sion, a stasis The deeper
that failed to complete Shelley's form.
music of Panthea's vision of the earth-sphere, with its powerful
grinding and kneading, the grinding of the bright brook of the
actual into the mist which is the new potential, will, in R. P.
Blackmur's Yeatsian verse, "Keep the great gong going" until his-
tory and even prehistory are overcome, laid open to the transforma-
tive movement of the poem as a whole. Knight is correct when he
points out that "these hammers of flame and fierce gyrations . . .

are used to show Keats's 'supreme of power' now piercing, reveal-

ing, redeeming, and annihilating all past agonies of Man and
Earth." 2 In order for this to happen, the sphere must complete its

revelations, and Ione's vision of the child in Beulah must be tran-

scended by the fierce insight of the apocalyptic child asleep in the
earth -sphere. The technique here is essentially ironic, but not in the
usual sense. Earl Wasserman, writing on Adonais, frames an ex-
cellent definition of the ironic mode in that poem which, I think,
can be extended to Shelley's work in general: "The evolution of
the poem gains its inevitability from ambivalences and inversions

8. Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1. Knight, p. 222.

rev. ed. 7947), pp. 160-161. 2. Knight, p. 223.
9. Bloom, p. 145.
610 •
D.J.Hughes
of such a nature that, while the materials nearly tolerate a coherent
interpretation from false perspectives, they are weighted to compel
their true ordering and interpretation." 3 Ione's comment is an
excellent example of such a false perspective; however beautiful
and satisfying in a humanistic sense Ione's slight ironv is, it is not
—
enough it takes us back to the condition of the earlier passage,
"Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew." In order for the actual to
be overcome by the potential, the process must continue.
Without denying that the scientific allegorizers of the next pas-
sage, such as Professor Grabo, may have validity in their readings,
I am not so much interested in what these lines (270-318) refer to
as in how they advance the action of the poem. The function of
this passage is to bring to full reality as much as the mind of an
already liberated mankind can conceive. The beams of the flashing
star on the forehead of the infant can be identified with the very
process of thought, the birth of thought in the brain, which is in
Shellev also the beginning of poetry, "swifter than thought." The
"sun-like lightenings," the creative mind aflame, fill the abyss of
uncreated things, and bv revealing them, create them. Notice how
this passage moves characteristically from the static to the kinetic,
beginning with "Infinite mines of adamant and gold" (IV. 280)
and moving to "earth's mountaintops" clothed "With kingly,
ermine snow" (IV. 287) This contains its own collapse because this
.

snow recalls the "sun-awakened avalanche" of Act II, scene iii,

whose mass

Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there

Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
(II. iii. 38-42)

The great truth freed in the second and third acts had social, politi-
cal, humanistic implications. Here, in Act IV, it is the very structure
of things Shelley would dissolve through the action of mind upon
matter. This reminiscence sets the process going again and brings
to light "the melancholy ruins/Of cancelled cvcles." The subse-
quent vision 289-318), extraordinary in its harsh diction and
(11.

recalling the Ozymandias mood but now transcending any mere

moral pointing, presents "ruin within ruin" to be overcome by the
mind; then it moves to the wrecks of cities whose population "was
mortal, but not human," and back beyond them to "prodigious
shapes/Huddled in grav annihilation," and thence to creatures of
the deep, and finally to the behemoths themselves who "Increased

3. The Subtler Language (Baltimore. 1959), p. 361.

 1

Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 61

and multiplied like summer worms/On an abandoned corpse." At

this point, we witness the most extraordinary completion in Shel-
ley's poetry. The "earth-convulsing behemoth" is the most terrific
phenomenon that the Shelleyan method can annihilate, and the
apocalyptic deluge that overcomes this suddenly monstrous vision,
in which the poetic mind itself seems overborne, is the terrible but
necessary "quenching" Shelley has been seeking since this par-
ticular process was kindled at Yet Shelley offers an alterna-
line 180.
tive, and more hopeful, cancellation. The image of the deluge gives

way to this: "or some God/Whose throne was in a comet, passed,

and cried./'Be not!' And like my words they were no more" (IV.
316-318).
This startling image brings together the strategic devices of the
entire section we have been examining. This God can be identified
with the enthroned infants of the moon-chariot and the earth-
sphere, now grown to full demiurgic stature; moreover, the image
serves as a literal deus ex machina, outside, paradoxically, the world
Shelley's process has been destroying, and, therefore, while that
world is power of continuity is maintained.
destroyed, the creative
Above all, we one thrust of the Shelleyan
see here the completion of
logos. The command "Be not!", which can be taken as the poetic
motivation of the entire scene (11. 180-318)., cancels not only the
phenomenal world, but also the Word that Shelley has been build-
ing throughout. We return to Panthea, "And like my words they
were no more." With the ending of Panthea's words, the phe-
nomenal, and the logos behind it, collapse; but a creative, saving
power above this world has been revealed. This device compares
interestingly with two uses of such an image in Epipsychidion. In
the second part of the poem Shelley describes the fading of the
Emily-figure he has been seeking:

But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame,

Passed, like a God throned on a winged planet,
Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it,

Into the dreary cone of our life's shade. (224-228)

But the God of Prometheus Unbound has destroyed this very cone,
and the poem need not return to the world. The deity of Panthea's
vision is more akin to the Comet of Epipsychidion, who, brought
into the poem at line 368, "Thou too, O Comet beautiful and
fierce," serves to stabilize the Shelleyan process and make possible
the invitation to the voyage of the last third of the poem.
With the destruction complete, the exaltation of the marriage
rites of the earth and moon has been prepared for, "The joy, the
triumph, the delight, the madness!" have been made possible by
an ontological reversal unparalleled in English poetry. have We
612 •
D.J.Hughes
taken the greatest of Shelley's boat rides, in the frailest of all his
vehicles, the "thinnest boat," and we have ended in cataclysm, but
have emerged safely. The Potential has overcome the Actual.
II

To speak of Prometheus Unbound in terms of ontological trans-

formation, we should be able to see such a mode operating at every
significant juncture of the poem. I will limit my further examina-
tion in paper to three passages that come immediately to
this
mind when the poem is viewed in this light: Act II, scenes ii and
iii, the approach to Demogorgon's cave by Asia and Panthea, and

scene v, the end of the second act, the voyage taken by Asia in
the enchanted boat.
The first of these passages (Il.ii), the approach to Demogorgon's
cave by the unseen Oceanides, is a brilliant rendering of Mallarmean
absence, the gradual emptying-out of the phenomenal and the sug-
gested and gradual presence of the noumenal. The first Semichorus
of Spirits introduces us to what I think is the main purpose of the
scene: todraw us toward the potential and away from sense per-
ception, both of sightand hearing. The path taken by Asia and
Panthea is "curtained out from Heaven's wide blue," but the
Shelleyan beatitudes of transformation are operative: the cloud of
dew that "hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers/Of the green
laurel,blown anew," and the star that cleaves through those inter-
woven bowers to let its beams fall, serve as guides to mark the way,
while the mind itself becomes like the "frail and fair anemone"
that "bends, and then fades silently" (Il.ii. 12). The close of this
first semichorus completes the pattern of withdrawal, both in its

sound and in its change from visual to tactile sensation:

effects
"And the gloom divine is all around,/And underneath is the mossv
ground" (Il.ii. 22-23) Semichorus II, praised by some and damned
.

by others, keeps the scene moving bv describing the continuitv of

the sound that itself must fade into the larger harmonies of
"Demogorgon's mighty law." The sexual sense of this lyric about
the nightingales is important and has been noted before, but I think
Leone Vivante has best described the function of this scene, "in
which thought is distinctly represented in its ever-originating char-
acter. The new moment takes wing, as it were, out of the infinite
in which the preceding one dissolves —and in tune with it." 4 The
song of the nightingales then moves to a transcending intensity
until "Sounds overflow the listener's brain/So sweet, that joy is
almost pain" (Il.ii. 39-40) Each of these first two semichoruscs
.

ends in a mild Shelleyan collapse, preparing the way for the largest

4. English Poetry and Its Contribution to the Knowledge of a Creative Principle

(London, 1950), p. 148.
 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 613
development in this scene, the third lyric in which, in small com-
pass, the familiar soul-history of Shelley's poetry (cf. Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty, Epipsychidion, etc.) is presented as a mani-
festation of the withdrawal from the existent. I take "Demogor-
gon's mighty law," much and guessed at, to be the very
allegorized
process of transformation Shelley is describing, the restoration of
the potential to itself. The boat imagery is familiar, as is the call to
prophetic vocation. Of more interest, perhaps, is the nice balance
between the willed and the necessary (like the poetic process itself)
described in lines 53-57, and the completion of the first half of
this scene with the appearance of the fatal mountain of Demogor-
gon. The movement of mind has ranged widely in these passages
from the "frail and fair anemone" of the beginning to the fatal
mountain that this particular fading coal has sought as its termina-
tion.
The conversation between the two fauns that follows is best un-
derstood, I think, in its dramatic function. Shelley is nowhere near
ready to bring Asia's transformation to completion. The fauns serve
as commentators and as quiet points of release, much as do Apollo
and Ocean after the fall of Jupiter. Curiously, considering the fan-
tastic nature of the whole, the fauns bring some realism and solidity
back into the scene, while at the same time they point to the possi-
bility of other transformations like the one just described. Shelley's

common technique of combining the evanescent and the solid, so

magnificently developed in Act IV, finds expression here in the de-
scription of the dwelling place of the spirits who have spoken. They
dwell in the bubbles (here limned as "pavilions") which are taken
back to the sea, and the cycle through which they pass is described
in familiar terms. When noontide has kindled the atmosphere,

these burst, and the thin fiery air

The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again. (II. ii. 77-82)

This image-cluster, descriptive of Shelley's poetic method and point-

ing to the comet-riding deity of Act IV, suggests a cyclic process
that must finally give way to completed stasis, but that develop-
ment is a long way off at this point in the poem. The last speech
of this scene points to the future, the freeing of Prometheus that
Silenus, a Shelleyan poet-prophet, will sing of, a song the fauns
wish to hear. In a sense, the fauns are lower beings, outside the
transforming developments of the second act, though they are
aware of the true prophetic note. At the end of this scene, we are
614 • D.J.Hughes
promised music still: "delightful strains which cheer/Our
a greater
solitary twilights, and which charm/To silence the unen vying night-
ingales" II.ii.95— 97 ) This is the silence towards which the whole
(
.

scene has been tending, where even the continuous sound of the
nightingales must yield to the prophetic voice of liberation.
Act II, scene iii, continues the unwinding process of the whole
act, but the reintroduction of Asia and Panthea returns us to those
still untransfigured beings who must be overcome. The best de-

scription of this scene, I think, is by G. M. Matthews: "the ob-

jective setting seems unchallengeable: the nymphs have been at-
tracted (impelled) cone of a colossal volcano." 5
to the terminal
The "oracular vapour" which the poet-prophets inhale can be re-
lated to the dew of the potential in scene ii, here become active.
The "voice which is contagion to the world" (II.iii.10) may be
the voice of political revolution, but revolution better understood
as metaphysical change, ontological transformation. Asia's Shelleyan
gesture, her willingness to fall down in worship before the spirit of

whom the scene is but

shadow, "weak, but beautiful," foreshadows
a
the incredible transmutations of the fourth act, where the earth-
spirit is encased in the complex machinerv alreadv discussed, beauti-

ful, yes, but overcoming all weakness. The much-lauded metaphor

that concludes the description here, almost the finest example of
Shelley's presentation of matter in terms of mind, sets the process
of descent going again, and, as I have already pointed out, recalls
the frozen world of the opening of the poem. The imperfectly
realized beings that now beckon Asia downward symbolize the
proliferation of the possible that waits, and the descent to the cave
is the climactic surrender of the actual in the first stages of the
poem, although the ultimate transfiguration of Asia will not, of
course, take place until the end of this act.
The brilliant lyric of descent that brings Asia and Panthea to
Demogorgon's cave takes us further from the actual; such falling
will be balanced later by the "horizontal" movement of the en-
chanted boat lyric, but, appropriately, the approach to Demogorgon
is seen as a terrifying fall. The Shelleyan boat ride, usually symboliz-
ing the process of mind seeking its fullest object (often seen as an
Elysian isle), would not be appropriate here, since Demogorgon is

not a point of hoped-for resolution but rather the beginning of

mystery. Asia and Panthea, bound by the spirits who take them to
the cave, pass through both death and life, thus breaking the natural
cycle, freed from the tragic vision of Blake's mental traveller. Shel-
ley's travellers let go both appearance and reality to come upon a
state that contains them both.
The images of this lyric are images of thought reaching for hvpos-

5. "A Volcano's Voice in Shelley," ELH, XXIV (1957), 211.

 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 615
tatization, figures suggestedand then denied. "As the fawn draws
the hound" by which Shelley
suggests the sadomasochistic pursuit
often expresses the nature of thought, the best example of which is
the Actaeon passage of Adonais: "And his own thoughts, along that
rugged way,/Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their
prey." 6 The reversal of the grammatical order in the second stanza
is part of Shelley's whole strategy of reversal in this act, while the
negatives of the third stanza continue this development until the
heavens and the cavern-crags are abolished, along with the darkness
of earth: "Nor the gloom to Earth given" (II.iii.79). The images
of the fourth stanza of this lyric are images of Potentiality, power
withheld, seeking a fresh actualization. Such images indicate that
this lyric is, in part, "about" the creative process itself, the Shel-
leyan fading coal. The "veiled lightning asleep" and the "spark
nursed in embers" point to the possibility of poetry; the "last look
loveremembers," as often in Shelley, signifies the creative absence
poem, while the last image, "Like a diamond, which
that starts the
shines/On the dark wealth of mines" (86-87), points to the secret
internality of the potential state, as well as to the hardness of its

possible form.
The concluding stanza of this lyric shifts the emphasis from the
dizzying, downward flight itself to the moral injunction of the spirit.

The "weakness" that Asia is urged not to resist is the final giving up
of the actual, the release of the merely phenomenal which the en-
tire second act is devoted to spiritualizing. She has already shown
herself in this scene willing to falldown and worship the spirit,
and her continued surrender is proof of her capacity to be the
vehicle of the transforming power of love in the poem. The "meek-
ness" in which she will find strength is the putting off of Blakean-
Shelleyan Selfhood, the abandonment of the narrowly-ordering ego
that finds forms completed, static, mechanical. If these are surren-
dered, Demogorgon will "unloose through life's portal" the Doom
of Jupiter, "snake-like" because the snake stands for the cyclical
development from father to child, that is, from Saturn to Jupiter to
Demogorgon, a cycle that comes to an end with the release of
Prometheus. 7 The concluding lines, with their hollow O's, and the
curious dimeter line that concludes the whole lyric set us down
firmly, deep within the world of Demogorgon, an echoing promise
of what is to come.
But the transformation of Asia into a potential state is not com-

6. For other images of the same kind in snake, the ouroboros, with its tail in its
Shelley see the antelopes of Alastor 103 mouth. This must be distinguished from
and Epipsychidion 75, and the deer of the amphisbaena of Prometheus, Ill.iv.
The Triumph of Life 407. 119, an image of the cycle overcome, an
7. I think it might be helpful to see image of open form, with a head at
Demogoigon's snake as the cyclical either end.
 —
616 • D.J.Hughes
plcte; is merely brought into its realm. The two concluding
she
lyrics ofAct II, "Life of Life" and "My soul is an enchanted boat,"
complete this process. These are, of course, very famous moments
in the poem and famous in themselves. Yet, for all the discussion .

these poems have occasioned, critics have been insufficiently aware

of their Tightness here at the end of the second act and the in-
evitable relationship they have to each other. After the attempt at
hypostasis in the first lyric, with its calculated collapse ("Dizzy, lost,
yet unbewailing!"), the impulse towards movement is necessary, }

and that this should take the form of the boat ride should surprise
—
no one we see the same development: stabilization, calculated
collapse, and then the voyage out in Epipsychidion and elsewhere.
The "Life of Life" lyric is Shelley's most delicately sustained hy-
postasis, with the last line of each stanza threatening to break down
the very image the stanza has sought to maintain. Then Asia's
answer in the enchanted boat lyric is the fully appropriate response,
and the inevitable one, as her soul seeks its final point of rest.
The last stanza is our main concern. Whatever its Platonic and '

Wordsworthian sources or analogues, this return to a pre-existent

state represents one of the climaxes of the return to Potentiality in
the poem, a journey we have been taking since the first scene of
this act. The higher innocence of Blake, the yearning for the
primordial waters in Wordsworth, the search for the unitive ground
in Coleridge, even the Keatsian ritualistic quest for the finer tone
all bear upon this one of the key moments, it seems to me,
lyric,
:

in English Romanticism. Asia, now transfigured by love, about to

rejoin the transformed Prometheus, like the Romantic poet must
seek out her origins in order that the present time be redeemed.
"Age's icy caves" reminds us again of the frozen world of the
poem's beginning, and while "Manhood's dark and tossing waves"
may be too much of a "public image," as Harold Bloom suggests, 8
the momentum is recaptured in "Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to
betray," the confident beginning of the Shelleyan quest that so
often gives way to despair. But here the "betrayal" is overcome by
the backward movement of Asia's boat. She passes beyond "shadow-
peopled Infancy,/Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day" (III.
v.104-105), and by so doing comes upon the Shelleyan lower
Paradise, the Great Good Place which Bloom, I think convincingly,
compares with the Blakean Beulah-land. 9 It is also worth noting
that this "paradise of vaulted bowers" is seen as a perfect internal-
ity, "Lit by downward-gazing flowers" suggesting a higher narcis-

sism, an achieved recover)' of a total and undivided state, "Peopled

by shapes too bright to see," which walk upon the water, singing
the potential in Shellev often signified bv this fortunate combina-

8. Bloom, p. 130. 9. Ibid.

 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound « 617
tion of light and music. It is also worth remarking that the con-
fused syntax here (I think the sense finds Asia and her pilot
"resting," i.e., coming to a stop, and the "thee" to whom she
speaks is her pilot, the voice in the air) brings the lyric to, as
Locock says, "a wretchedly weak conclusion." 1 This, I think, isnot
the calculated collapse that closes the "Life of Life" lyric, but a
simple failure to bring the voyage to an artistically satisfying con-
clusion. Shelley has not devised a strategy to keep this coal from
fading satisfactorily and, in fact, does not want to suggest finality
here. The next two acts of the drama must do this for him; so
Asia's trip ends lamely enough. Only in Adonais, perhaps, does this
kind of Shelleyan voyage reach triumphant port —and even there it

is at the cost of personal annihilation.

Ill
The sections of the poem we have studied, Act IV, lines 180-318,
and II, scenes ii, iii, and v, define the characteristic movement of
mind in the poem; the cleansing of the actual that a new potential
may emerge. The whole poem, I think, could be profitably analyzed
from concerned with reform in the poem,
this perspective. Shelley is
but the reform more metaphysical than political and more onto-
is

logical than social. The poem, in its movement from the tragic
stasis of the opening to the lyrical stasis of the close, proceeds
through a series of strategic maneuvers that spiritualize the physical
and make possible what has already hardened into fact. All this, of
course, is purely mental and manifests perhaps the most inspired
wish in English literature. Comparing The Triumph of Life with
Prometheus, Harold Bloom writes precisely:

The hope here in Prometheus is dialectical, but is still hope;

Shelley believes in his myth. In The Triumph of Life faith in the
myth is abandoned. This does not mean that Shelley rejects the
myth, thinks it false. The myth itself is aware of its necessary
defeat, but affirms human possibility. In Prometheus Shelley
dwells in possibility, with all its windows and doors. In The
Triumph the fairer house is deserted for the vision of human
. . .

probability. 2

This dwelling in possibility, have termed it, the return to

or, as I
Potentiality, takes we have discussed. The
two forms in the passages
second of these, Asia's descent to Demogorgon and her voyage out
in the enchanted boat, describes the process of this return in terms
of the individual soul; the other passage, the visions of the moon-
chariot and the sphere of the earth, has more to do with the return
to the potential of the very structure of created things. By this

1. Locock, p. 616. 2. Bloom, p. 117.

 :

618 • D.J.Hughes
time drama, the recognizably anthropomorphic figures have
in the
been put While Prometheus and Asia inhabit their cave, a
aside.
larger process takes over and completes Shelley's form.
The sources of Asia's enchanted boat ride have long been traced i

to several Platonic and Neopla tonic texts. Perhaps the most rele-
vant for our purposes is the following from the Phaedrus. Speaking
of pre-existence, Socrates says

And then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a
mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us
in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils
to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions inno-
cent and simple and calm and happy, which we beheld shining in
pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living
tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the
body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of
scenes which have passed away. 3

This is which Asia has returned at the end

clearly the situation to
of Act and the significance of her return rests in a state of re-
II,

covered innocence, the higher innocence which so dominates the

most characteristic Romantic poetry. The Platonic anamnesis, of
which Asia's voyage is a splendid example, is essentially a psycho-
logical phenomenon, and the cleansing of the human psyche in
Prometheus Unbound particularly as this is expressed in Act II,
points the way to an essentially humanistic concern. But the other
passage we have examined, IV, lines 180-318, has less to do with
human possibility as with the structure of Being itself as the mind,
and particularly the mind of the poet, is able to conceive it.
The extraordinary development from the thinnest boat of the
moon-chariot to the comet-enthroned deity who cancels creation is
movement of thought, precise in its detail and inevitable in
a single
its The passage seems to me, as does all of Prometheus
progress.
Unbound, an attempt to mirror the creative mind at full stretch,
and ultimately to be self-reflexive, about itself. All the admitted
failures and yet continuing attempts to allegorize the poem fail, I
think, because of the failure to recognize its organic development
in terms of the creative process and the wav Shellev apparently
wrote and conceived his poems. His remark in the Defence that
"the most glorious poetrv that has ever been communicated to the
world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of
the poet" may be a dubious point in the construction of a poetics,
but it illuminates the Shelleyan problem exactly. Shelley's poetry
seeks the form that will best recoverwhat that form, by actualizing
must necessarily lose. This concept of form is best explained
itself,

by Signor Leone Vivante, whose philosophv of indeterminism as

3. The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols. (London, 1892), I, 456-457.
 Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound • 619
expressed in A Philosophy of Potentiality and whose chapter on
Shelley in his English Poetry and Its Contribution to the Knowl-
edge of a Creative Principle have been of great value to the present
writer.Vivante views form in this way:

Form — in other words, actualization, consciousness taking shape,

presence —however
essential to value, does not entirely explain it.
What the element which we call image, expression, form, ac-
is

tualization, in comparison with the immensity of sorrow, of love,

of sacrifice? What is the pang —
the form —
of a desperate sorrow,
as compared with the infinite virtuality which, in that very
moment, seems to exceed our consciousness? Form, though it be
a primal force and an original motive-value, in which power itself
is inflamed, enriched and confirmed, exalted and appeased, can-

not be compared with such an infinite intimate urge which yet —

does not exist without an element of form and which craves for
form. Potentiality, however much it may have its raison d'etre in
actualization, nevertheless exceeds actualization and every existen-
tiality of its own. 4

Such a conception of the relation between form and that out of

which form emerges helps to explain some of the failures in Shelley's
poetry and some of those necessary collapses in which the form of
his thought itself runs its course to completion, but the poem itself
does not fail as an aesthetic structure. We
might say that in the
great passages of Act IV Potentiality indeed exceeds every existen-
tiality, the destructive progress of the beams from the earth-infant

returning us to the fullest Potentiality, an apocalyptic stasis in which

time and the cyclical process come to an end.
The Shelleyan form exists to mirror consciousness, not con-
sciousness of any particular object, but the fact of consciousness
itself. Again, Signor Vivante offers the best definition for our

purposes:

Consciousness is first of all an immediate value of actualization,

beyond any distinction between subject and object. And this not
only in germinal or vague, indefinite moments, but in the highest
forms of thought. The positing of the object belongs in tendency —
— to the processes of external construction and extrinsic causality,
where all deep and rich implication of value —
all originality, all
fecund spontaneity of intelligence is lost. So much so that crea-
tive positivity finds an obstacle not only in the object, but in its
very form, inasmuch as this tends to objectify itself. The garment
of the flame of the spirit falls to ashes as soon as looked at. 5

We recognize the Shelleyan image here, whether intentional or not,

for this account of consciousness is similar to Shelley's theory of the
fading coal. Moreover, viewing the Shelleyan process in this light,

4. A Philosophy of Potentiality (London, 5. Ibid., pp. 15—16.

1955), p. 46.
620 - Irene H. Chayes

we can work to transcend the ob-

see that the tendency in Shelley's
ject is been charged, a manifestation of a weak
not, as has long
grasp of the actual, but, put positively, should be seen as a demon-
stration of the poet's profound awareness of the processes of
thought and poetry. At its best, Shelley's poetry is of the profound-
est value in revealing to us the sources of consciousness and the
unity of its concerns.
Prometheus Unbound is the crucial example of this development
in Shelley's poetry because it is the most ambitious attempt in his
work to restore our sense of the beginning of things. The poem seeks
to establish a pure present, beyond time, by moving backward to the
pre-existent, for, while the whole appears to press towards futurity,
it does so not that a new existent may emerge, but that a new t

Potentiality may sustain itself; it mirrors the mind freed from the j

causal, purified, transformed. The passages I have examined, Asia's

descent to Demogorgon and her final transformation, and the great
visions of the fourth act, are vital instances of the true structure of
the poem. At first, their motives seem very different: Asia, as Eros,
moves backward to a prior state of being, recovering the potential >

through a reflexive act; the visions of the moon-chariot and the

earth-sphere move forward from the beginning of things, through
the destructive process of time, to annihilation. But the end is the
same; we Pure Being. Such a voyage must be distinguished
arrive at
from the transcendence of Adonais, which invokes death as the
solution to poetic and intellectual form. There is no symbolic dying (

of this kind in Prometheus. The dualism that finally overwhelms

Shelley in The Triumph of Life, and of which Adonais is merely
the opposite coin, is absent in Prometheus. There, Potentiality
reigns.

IRENE H. CHAYES
["Ode to the West Wind"]*
"Ode to the West Wind" (1819) is as distinctive among Shel-
ley's odes as "Dejection" is among Coleridge's, and the two poems,

separated by some seventeen vears, are remarkably similar to each

other. With the same traditional and Romantic associations as
Coleridge's storm-wind, Shelley's West Wind too is a dynamic,
destructive, universal force that is ultimately beneficial, both "de-
stroyer" and "preserver." As in "Dejection," the might of the wind
t Reprinted by permission of the Modern the Romantic Ode," PMLA, 79 (March
Language Association of America from 1964). pp. 71-74.
"Rhetoric as Drama: An Approach to
 ["Ode to the West Wind"] - 621

is human weakness the weakness of the speaker

in contrast to —
himself, who
poet contemplating the ideal poetic powers from
is a
a subjective situation the very opposite of ideal. 1 The extreme nega-
tive state that must be transcended here is not only spiritual death,
despair, but actual physical death as well. The West Wind is the
wind of autumn and death, and the ground metaphor of the ode,
introduced in stanza i, is one that is constant in Shelley's poetry,
so fundamental to his way of thinking that "metaphor" is an in-
adequate name for it: the working out of the seasonal cycle in
nature as a continuing process of universal death and regeneration.
The problem here is a more urgent version of that posed in Alastor
and Adonais, as well as in "Stanzas Written in Dejection": what
is the place of humanity in the grand cosmic order? If, as the

familiar Shelleyan imagery implies, there is an analogy between the

processes of nature and the life of man, how can the analogy be
completed to save man too from extinction at physical death? The
answer in "Ode to the West Wind," like Coleridge's approach to
a resolution of the situation in "Dejection," takes the form of a
dramatic recovery and reversal by way of a pattern of rhetoric.
The whole poem is a single, sustained apostrophe, which begins
abruptly, without preamble or descriptive frame, is spoken directly
by the poet, and throughout its interwoven tercets keeps the object
of address always in the foreground. The first three stanzas are de-
voted to a formal invocation, in which the wind is characterized,
and praised, in its role of destroyer and preserver in nature by its
effects on the land vegetation, the sky, and the sea. 2 In stanza iv,
the speaker begins what he himself calls a prayer (1. 52), and in
the course of this he uses a series of parallel imperatives that make
up a progression as significant and dramatically functional as the
epithets in stanza vn of "Dejection." Although each is a rhetorical
command, or appeal, to the wind, amplifying its power in relation
to the man addressing it, the speaker is also expressing his feelings
about himself as a human being facing extinction of identity and
as a Romantic poet-prophet facing frustration and defeat in his
heroically conceived vocation. At first, in the "sore need" out of
which he begins to speak, his wish is only to surrender to the wind's
superior force, like the nonhuman objects named in the invocation:
1. Shelley's own note describing the set- p. 434) that the famous odes by Words-
ting which the ode was "conceived
in worth, Shelley, and Keats "are not artis-
and chiefly written" (Prometheus Un- tic constructions designed to the end of
bound, With Other Poems, London,
. . . amplifying the wonders, respectively, of
1820, p. 188) includes wind and a sunset immortality, wind, and nightingales."
storm like those in "Dejection." On the Yet to say that "Ode to the West Wind,"
beginning state of mind, cf. "Stanzas like stanza vii of "Dejection," is first of
Written in Dejection, Near Naples" all an encomium of wind in the fulness
(1818), esp. 11. 19-27. of its natural and symbolic meanings is
2. Contrasting the Neoclassical and Ro- to make possible all else that may be
mantic odes with respect to their rhetoric, said about it.
Maclean observes (Critics and Criticism,
622 • Irene H. Chayes

"Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!" Confessing exhaustion,

pain, oppression, despair 54-56), he in effect accepts death in
(11.

this stanza, like the Poet at the edge of the precipice in Alastor

(11. 62 5ff.). The elegiac last line assimilates the man to the wind,

"One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud," but by way of
qualities which humanize the wind as well.
The second "Make me
thy lyre^ even as the forest is,"
imperative,
opens stanza v with a reminder of another archetypal image Shelley
shares with Coleridge, which for Shelley usually represents the mind
in its human life
passive, receptive functions, or the transience of
3
itself. The West Wind, like its counterpart in "Dejection," is
conceived now as a performer, transforming man and nature alike
into its own kind of art. Like the forest with its falling leaves, the
speaker dying is prepared to become part of the wind's "mighty
harmonies," adding "a deep, autumnal tone,/Sweet though in sad-
ness" to its "tumult" (11. 58-61). On the basis of these lines,
especially, some critics have too readily assumed that the remainder
of the ode merely intensifies an identification between the poet and
nature. For instance: "This identification represents, so to speak,
the unity which the poem is to win from variety. The individual
is be merged with the general; Shelley [sic] is to become the
to
instrument through which speaks the universal voice." 4 But such an
interpretation overlooks the abrupt change in tone and attitude in
the third imperative, which follows immediately (11. 61-62) and
for the first time is an outright command: "Be thou, Spirit fierce,/
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" This is by no means an
identification by the speaker with the wind in which he loses his
individual identity; he does not say "Let me be thee," as he would
be saying if the "individual" here were indeed being
necessarily
"merged with the general."
Like Coleridge in stanza vn of "Dejection," Shelley in the re-
mainder of stanza v draws together and fuses the two sides of the
analogy that has been developing in the invocation and the first
two imperatives to the wind. The image of the fallen leaves, re-
introduced in the reference to the forest (1. 58), has in Shelley a
continuing association with death, not only because the leaves mark
the end of a seasonal cycle but also because they can be picked up
5
and scattered to dissolution by the destroyer wind. In stanza 1 of
the ode the leaves are "pestilence-stricken multitudes," driven be-
fore the wind "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," and in the
fourth imperative of the later sequence (11. 63-64) "withered

3. Cf. "A Defence of Poetry," in Shel- 11. 42-44. 667-668.

ley's Prose, or, The Trumpet of a Proph- 4. R. H. Fogle, "The Imaginal Design of
ecy, ed. D. L. Clark (Albuquerque, Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind'," ELH,
N.M.. 1954), p. 277AB; "Essay on a XV (1948), 221.
Future State," ibid., p. 176B; Alastor, 5. Cf. Alastor, 1L 583-586.
 77
["Ode to the West Wind ]
• 623
leaves" becomes an explicit simile for the speaker's ''dead thoughts/'
which he commands the wind to "drive" over the universe. But the
whole line includes an additional idea: the "dead thoughts" are to
"quicken a new birth," and this brings them also into correspond-
ence with the "winged seeds" which in stanza i are carried by the
wind to "their dark wintry bed" (1. 6) to await the coming of
spring. The speaker's "words," which the wind next is commanded
to "scatter" 65-67), are compared in turn to "ashes and sparks"
(11.

— a new image
that is directly analogous to the dead leaves and
winged seeds, juxtaposing end and beginning, death and rebirth, in
a relation about to be affirmed for the speaker and mankind in
general as well as for physical nature.
In the closing lines of stanza v, the rhetorical and dramatic
patterns produce a new shift. The verbs in lines 63-67, "drive"
and "scatter," are still transitive, like the earlier "lift me," "make
me," of the speaker's stages of weakness. Both his "thoughts" and
his "words," like the lyre of the first tercet, are to be acted upon
by the wind, although with a different result. At the same time, the
wind is subtly reduced in power by the command that it "scatter"
the poet's words, for the medium is to be the poet's own art: "by
the incantation of this verse" (1. 65). In the sixth and last com-
mand of the sequence the intrusive construction of "Be thou me,"
which appeared between the "lyre" and "thoughts" passages, re-
turns to mark at once the rhetorical climax of the poem and the
dramatic Reversal. In stanza 1, a "clarion" was to be blown by the
wind of rebirth in springtime to rouse the buried seeds (11. 9-12).
At the conclusion of the last stanza, we find that the autumn wind
itself (not the poet) is to be the instrument of awakening, and the

speaker, the man who a few lines earlier sought to be a passive lyre,
is the one who will sound its call: "Be through my lips to un-
awakened earth/The trumpet of a prophecy!" He does not "be-
come the instrument through which speaks the universal voice,"
for his is the voice that speaks. 6
The rhetorical-dramatic progression in Shelley's ode, then, ends
in a total inversion of the original relation between the speaker and
the West Wind. As in "Dejection" but less equivocally, a downward
reversal of condition, or "fortune," in the past is followed by an
upward reversal in direction and intention, which negates the first.

The man rises from his state of prostrate surrender to join himself
to the force of the wind, master it— fulfilling his boyhood ambition

6. Here I am in disagreement also with tion of prophecy; cf. Aeneid VI.74-76,

the special interpretation of Bloom, Shel- in which Aeneas the Cumaean
prays
ley's Mythmaking, pp. 87, 89-90. The Sibyl to chant her verses instead of corn-
progression from leaves to seeds and mitting them to leaves which may be dis-
thoughts to words, concluding in a vocal ordered by the winds,
utterance, has a justification in the tradi-
624 • Irene H. Chayes

to "outstrip" it (11. 50-51) —

and turn it into an instrument of his
own. Passive becomes active and active, passive; agent and medium,
performer and performed upon, change places. The "destroyer" be-
comes the "preserver" by serving as the means to prophecy, and the
liberating prophecy itself is both made possible by and contained in
"the incantation of this verse," which is to say this verse, or "Ode
to the West Wind." 7 Here process and product are identical, as they
are not quite in "Dejection," and the composition of the ode is
necessary to the resolution of the speaker's situation, which is
completed with the formulation of the prophecy. The actual
prophecy, when it is finally given in the last line, sums up the
Discovery, which the poet has been demonstrating dramatically in
the course of the poem. Still addressed to the wind, which has now
become a human power as well, it confirms the analogy that has
been explored in the imagery of leaves and seeds, thoughts and
words, by turning from both man and nature to the seasonal cycle
that includes both: "O Wind,/If Winter comes, can Spring be far
behind?" If the force of the triumphant enthymeme is somewhat
weakened by its being cast in the form of a question, the only one
in the ode, 8 this too has a dramatic function, I think. By his un-
certainty at the moment he is affirming his victory over his own
weakness and despair, the speaker is indicating that he is about to
cross the metaphysical boundary line, represented in Alastor by the
precipice on which the Poet dies, between the individual and uni-
versal phases of existence as Shelley conceived it.

In "Dejection," the burden of act is placed on the ambiguous

power embodied in the storm-wind; in "Ode to the West Wind,"
it is assumed by the speaker himself, although he starts from an

even lower point than Coleridge's poet. If in "Dejection" the wind

descends, or is brought down, to the level of the human, in Shelley's
ode the man raises himself to a level above both the human and the
mundane natural. The redeeming energy that comes in vision to
Coleridge's poet is perhaps closest to the power of divine wrath,
momentarily transformed and transferred to the visionary and pav-
mg the way for the operation of the human imagination. For
Shelley, on the other hand, what is needed in the final extremity
9 the human becoming
is the force of the moral and creative will,

divine, to enable the products of the imagination to survive and do

their work, through which the poet himself will be reborn. In their
central addresses to the symbolic winds, both odes are prayers; but

7. As an "incantation," the poem itself and Roger Ingpen, priv. print., London,
replaces the "enchanter" wind saluted in 1934, p. 58.) Cf. The Revolt of Islam
the opening (1. 3). IX.xxv. 3685-3689.
8. In an early draft the line was declara- 9. Cf., in slightly different terms, M. T.
tive: "When Winter comes Spring lags Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry: A Study-
not far behind." (See Verse and Prose of His Prophetic Imagination (New
from the Manuscripts of Percy Bysshe York, 1959), p. 299.
Shelley, ed. Sir J. C. E. Shelley-Rolls
 :

[The Cenci] 625

rather than "secularized versions of an older devotional poetry, em-
ployed in the examination of the soul's condition as it approaches
and retreats from God/' 1 I find them passionate supplications for
deliverance, uttered out of the depths of spiritual crises that are not
the less profound because they are concerned directly with the
activity and functions of the artist. Like the petitioner in Donne's
Holy Sonnet, "Batter my heart, three person'd God," Coleridge's
poet requires salvation by assault; Shelley's in his own word "strives"
with his unequal antagonist, like Jacob of the Old Testament or like
the Victorian Jacob in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Carrion Comfort."
In both instances, the prayer becomes the occasion of an experience
very close to mystical, but only in "Ode to the West Wind" does it
have an outcome in its own terms —nothing less than a resurrection
of and through the poetic word.

CARLOS BAKER
[The CenciY
To group Shelley's historical tragedy, The Cenci, with such con-
versation-poems as Rosalind and Helen and Julian and Maddalo
may seem at first glance to involve a violation of the somewhat in-
elastic The Cenci is obviously
laws which govern literary genres, for
a stage-drama, composed
be acted. In other respects, however,
to
The Cenci resembles the two pieces which preceded it sufficiently
to justify its inclusion here. Like them it is made to serve as a
vehicle for Shelley's moral ideas. As in the conversation-poems,
Shelley projects his ideas through dramatic dialogue, his method
being to place two characters vis-a-vis and to develop opposed points
of view by means of impassioned conversational interchange. There
are accordingly reasonable grounds for considering The Cenci in
conjunction with the conversation pieces.
Of the three poems to which the present chapter is devoted, The
Cenci was by all odds Shelley's strongest bid for popular favor. . . .

He toned down the uglier aspects of the original story in order, as he

thought, to make it acceptable to a bourgeois theater-going public.
He chose a subject which for two centuries had continued to excite
wide interest among the Romans. He adopted a plainer style, ab-
juring high-flown images, and seeking to come as close as his sub-
ject allowed to the everyday language of men.

1. Abrams, English Romantic Poets, p. The Fabric of Vision (copyright 1948 by

48. Princeton University Press), pp. 138-153.
t From Chapter 5, "The Human Heart Reprinted by permission of Princeton
The Conversation-Poems of 1818-1819" University Press,
in Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry:
626 - Carlos Baker

Even more than the first two points, the last two seem to have
been part of a definite plan in Shelley's mind, both in the year of
the conversation-poems and as late as the year of his death. He now
sought story-structures which already existed in popular tradition,
and which might therefore be expected to exert a stronger grip on
the imaginations of the people. This search for "natural" subjects
appears to have had something to do with bis choice of the Pro-
methean myth. Like the Greek tragedians, he did not feel "bound
to adhere to the common interpretation, or to imitate in story as
in title" the great treatments which in the past had been accorded
this and other myths. In other words, he found precedent among
his peers for allowing himself to invent freely within the general
framework of a traditional story. At the same time, he could count
on his audience's acquaintance with the general shape of a given
myth or legend or historical event, and hence assume from the
start a certain sympathy between his auditors and his subject. The

Job legend, for example, fitted his plans admirably. In selecting the
story of the Cenci, he observed that "King Lear and the two plays
in which the tale of Oedipus is told were stories
which already
existed in tradition" before Shakespeare and Sophocles gave them
permanent literary form. In Rome, at least, he found that everyone
knew as much about the Cenci scandal as if it had occurred two
years instead of two centuries before. "This national and universal
interest" in the affair first suggested to him, he said, its fitness for
dramatic purposes.
He was also coming round, for the time being, to an almost
Wordsworthian view of poetic language. "I entirely agree with
those modern critics," said he, "who assert that in order to move
men to true svmpathy we must use the familiar language of men.
. But it must be the real language of men in general, and not
. .

that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to

belong." 1 He was plainly in search of what Coleridge, in the re-
cently published Biographic Literaria, had called the lingua com-
munis. Equally plain is the reason for his choice: he adopts this
language "in order to move men to true sympathy." About the
introductory and closing sections of Julian and Maddalo, he thought
in similar though somewhat more limited terms. Sending this poem
toHunt a week after he had finished The Cenci, he observed that
Hunt ought to like the manner in which it was written. "I have

employed," he said, "a certain familiar style of language to express

the actual way in which people talk with each other whom educa-
tion and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the
use of vulgar idioms." 2

1. Preface to The Cenci. 2. Julian Edition, X, 68. Aug. 15. 1819.

 [The Cenci] • 627
In the three years of life which remained, Shelley never wholly
abandoned the belief that one way to enlist popular sympathy was
to employ a selection of the language really used by men
of course, that the subject sanctioned
provided,
He
—
it. continued to write
certain poems designed only for the eyes of the esoteric few. He
felt that the familiar style was hardly feasible "in the treatment
of a subject wholly ideal, or in that part ofany subject which relates
to common where the passion, exceeding a certain limit, touches
life,

the boundaries of that which is ideal." 3 Otherwise he believed in,

and in such poems as The Masque of Anarchy carefully experi-
mented with, the lingua communis and the familiar style. 4
Besides a more or less systematic attempt to enlarge his circle
of listeners, Shelley obviously gave some thought in the year of the
conversation-poems to the nature of tragedy. Prometheus Un-
bound, though roughly modeled after the Aeschylean original, had
not turned out to be a tragedy in the Greek tradition, and cer-
tainly not a tragedy in the English sense of that word. Shelley had
shown Prometheus rejecting hatred, admitting love and pity, and
triumphing at last over the sufferings which beset the human mind
when it is not its own sovereign. Of such agony as Prometheus
endured he had presumably some personal knowledge, as he had
had, for example, personal knowledge of the mental state of the
Alastor poet. But in writing The Cenci, as he later remarked to
Trelawny, his object was to see how well he could succeed in de-
scribing passions he had never personally felt.
He was also, and again for the time being, focusing his attention
more on Elizabethan than on classical models. Wishing to show a
true picture of human beings in action instead of treating the kind
of subject he called "ideal," he turned from mythology to history,
and from his "beautiful idealisms of moral excellence" to the dark
realities of mortal turpitude and error. Up to this time, as he told

Hunt, his writing had consisted of "little else than visions" which
"impersonated" (that is, projected by means of intentionally sym-
bolic personages) his own "apprehensions of the beautiful and the
just: .dreams of what ought to be or may be." The published
. .

pieces (Queen Mab, Alastor, and The Revolt of Islam) showed

those "literary defects incidental to youth and impatience." Now
he laid aside "the presumptuous attitude of an instructor" and

3. Ibid., pp. 68-69. lesser political lyrics, the poem to Mary

4. Had The Cenci been phenomenally introducing The Witch of Atlas, The
successful, or had Julian and Maddalo Sensitive Plant, the Letter to Maria G's-
been published and popular in his life- borne, and some parts of the fragmentary
time, Shelley might have done more con- Charles I. The other poems of the period
versation-poems, or at least poems de- 1819-1822 move in the realm of the
signed for the people. Work done in the "ideal," as in The Witch of Atlas,
familiar style, besides the Masque of Adonais, Epipsychidion, Hellas, the frag-
Anarchy, would include Peter Bell the mentary Magic Plant, and the fragment-
Third, Oedipus Tyrannus, some of the ary Triumph of Life.
628 • Carlos Baker

turned to "sad reality." The Prometheus Unbound had depicted

the results in the human mind of moral reform; The Cenci showed
the results in human society of moral deformity.
For Shelley, tragedy consisted in moral deformity. At the same
time, he believed that no tragedy written for the stage should be
"subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose." He had
purposely laid aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor,
which meant that he had abrogated direct moral preachment. "It
is nothing," he told Peacock of The Cenci, "which by any courtesy

of language can be termed either moral or immoral." He felt that

had anything like the Promethean kind of moral or poetic justice
been employed in telling the story of Beatrice, the effectiveness of
the play as tragedy would have been diminished. "Undoubtedly,"
said he, perhaps with his recent experience of the Prometheus in
his mind's eye, "the fit return to make to the most enormous in-
juries is kindness and forbearance and a resolution to convert the
injurer from his dark passions bv peace and love." Undoubtedly,
also, revenge or retaliation or even atonement are "pernicious mis-
takes." Yet if Beatrice had acted with kindness and forbearance,
and if she had used the instruments of peace and love instead of
appealing to the hatred which the assassins Marzio and Olimpio
bore towards her father, she would not, in Shelley's opinion, have
been a tragic character.
In selecting the old Italian story as the subject of a tragedy, the
nineteenth-century meliorist became involved with a moral prob-
lem for which there was no easy solution. Shellev's dilemma in
composing The Cenci was that of a writer whose moral disapproval
of any act involving bloodshed was close to absolute, yet who was
compelled, bv the very circumstances of his source-story, to make
his heroine resort to bloodshed as the means of extirpating a ruth-
less and triumphant social and domestic evil which was itself close

to absolute. If Shelley were really to write a tragedy, it was un-

thinkable to invent a denouement in which Beatrice succeeded in
converting the injurer "from his dark passions" by the exercise of
peace and love. His admiration for Beatrice is evident, and it was
necessarv to engage the sympathies of the audience by painting
Beatrice as a fundamentals admirable character. One might be
led to conclude on the basis of Shelley's evident admiration that
in his view any act which stamps out evil on earth is not only ex-
cusable but also desirable. Such a conclusion would, however, be
quite in error. Shellcv never sanctioned bloodshed, even when the
blood was as black as Count Cenci's. To him Beatrice was ad-
mirable in spite of, not because of, her taking arms against a sea
of troubles, as Hamlet was admirable in spite of, not because of,
his act of vengeance. The words which he applies to Beatrice
—
"a
 [The Cenci] • 629
most gentle and amiable being . . . violently thwarted from her
nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion" —could no
doubt with equal justice be applied to Shelley's reading of Ham-
let's character. 5
contrast between Prometheus and The Cenci is the contrast
The
between what might be and what is. As in the Prometheus, Shelley
subjected his central figure to all the diabolical rapier-thrusts and
bludgeonings that mind and flesh could bear. But this time the
reaction was more complicated, as the individual human being is

always more complicated than any symbol which can be devised

for him. This time no ethical conversion renovated the world. In-
stead, under indignities of the most horrible kind, a gentle and inno-
cent girl was turned into an efficient machine of vengeance, coolly
planning, imperiously executing, denying her part in, and at last
calmly dying for the murder of her father. After it was over, history,
that "record of crimes and miseries" in human society, moved on as
before.
In the summer of 1819, while he was at work on The Cenci,
Shelley spoke feelingly of "that ever-present Malthus, Necessity,"
and the implication is, since Malthus was a thoroughgoing eco-
nomic determinist, that however much Shelley may have trusted in
the regenerative powers of the mind, he still regarded some form of
Necessity as a strong and perhaps ineluctable force in human social
organization. 6 Under the compulsion of such forces, even nom-
inally virtuous human beings might be driven from the paths of
righteousness. He had already anticipated this position during the
preceding year in his review of his wife's novel, Frankenstein,
where he observed that the crimes and malevolence of the monster
flowed "irresistibly from certain causes fully adequate to their pro-
duction." All these crimes, he urged, were the offspring "of Necessity
and Human Nature," and they served to emphasize, dramatically,
the direct preachment of Mrs. Shelley's novel: "Treat a person ill,
and he will become wicked." 7 Although Beatrice becomes "wicked"
only long enough to murder her father and to perjure herself at
the trial, the moral of The Cenci (despite Shelley's disavowal of a
moral purpose) is essentially that which Shelley found in Franken-
stein.

The point has often been made that The Cenci, like the Prome-
theus, is designed more for reading than for acting, mainly because
Shelley's interest in characterization is greater than his determina-
tion that the action shall move forward. As the play stands, the
point is well taken. Not only did Shelley think himself better

5. The Cenci, preface. fused with Shelley's preface to the novel,

6. Julian Edition, X, 57. which he wrote at Mary's behest.
7. Ibid., VI, 264. This is not to be con-
630 • Carlos Baker

minute and subtle distinctions of

qualified for the delineation of
feeling than forwhat might be called the kinetographic elements
of the drama, but he was also quite ready to admit that in The
Cenci he had laid considerable emphasis on character-analysis. At
one point, Orsino begins a long, self-analytic soliloquy with the
following remark:

same family
'Tis a trick of this
To analyze their own and other minds.
Such self-anatomy shall teach the will
Dangerous secrets; for it tempts our powers,
Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,
Into the depth of darkest purposes.

Such pauses for "self-anatomy" as Shelley allows to the count,

Beatrice, Giacomo, and Orsino serve to reveal their characters with
varying degrees of fullness, but there is no doubt that these pauses
act to the detriment of the play as a piece of action.
While it appears to have been generally agreed that if Shellev
succeeded as a playwright at he succeeded chiefly in the area
all,

of character analysis, there have been few attempts to take Shelley

at Orsino's word, and to discover precisely what his conception of
the leading characters was, or what constitutes the psychological
basis of the central struggle. Shelley's desire to anatomize and lay
bare the secrets of other minds led him quite literally "into the
depth of darkest purposes." To cast what light one can into these
depths is basic to a critical study of the play. 8
The count is a complex character. The widespread belief that
his is a motiveless malignity ignores Shelley's careful exposition
throughout the play; the father of the Cenci family has three major
reasons for his conduct. One basis of his motivation is explicitly a
perverted sexual drive. During his first-act conversation with Car-
dinal Camillo, allusion is made to the count's fiery youth, remorse-
lessmanhood, and unrepentant old age. Camillo wonders that
such a man is not miserable. But Cenci is miserable only in that
the onset of old age has left him less ready than formerly to
translate every thought into immediate action. He is con-
his
fessedly a "hardened" man. His youth was notorious for sexual
promiscuity. When the diet of what he calls "honey" palled, he
required stronger stimulants, which he found in the sight and sound
of physical suffering in others. But his sadistic appetites took in
the end a deeper turn. Now he is satisfied only when he is able to
afflict some new victim with extreme mental agony and be there —
to watch its outward manifestations. In this last refinement upon
his earlier methods of self-gratification, the count has simply habitu-

8. The excellent study of the play by 1908) seems least satisfactory in the
Ernest Sutherland Bates (New York, cnapter devoted to the characters.
 [The Cenci] - 631

ated himself to what Hawthorne was to exploit fictionally as the

unpardonable sin, that is, the desire to finger the soul of another
human being, and it appears that the hardening process in the
count is now from a groundwork of
virtually complete. In starting
sexual perversion, Shelley was closely following, though cleaning up
considerably, his manuscript source, "The Relation of the Death of
the Family of The Cenci," where it is stated that the historical
count was a thrice-convicted sodomist. 9
The second of the count's motives is avarice, a condition of mind
the less fortunate for his family in that it frequently comes into
conflict with his insatiable appetites. Both in the source and in
Shelley's play the count buys immunity for his deeds through the
payment of large fines to Pope Clement. The voracity of his de-
sires and the sly vigilance of the Pope's agents are such that his

fortune — which he values as a guarantee of future immunity from

prosecution — is rapidly diminishing. His wish to conserve it partly
explains his maltreatment of his sons, who
upon his
are a drain
resources and have lately received a judgment from the Pope which
requires the count to support them. Hence the father's delight
when the two boys suffer accidental deaths in Spain, and his reason
for stealing, by a legal trick, the dowry-money in the possession of
his eldest son, Giacomo.
But Shelley is both refining and enlarging upon his source-manu-
script, as his development of a third complicating motive shows.
The source explains the count's inhuman treatment of Beatrice as a
combination of avarice and sexual perversion. He imprisoned his
daughter to prevent her following the example of her sister, who
had fled the palace, married, and through the Pope's intercession
had extracted from the count a good-sized dowry. According to the
source, the count's attempts to debauch Beatrice were far more
frequent and ugly than Shelley's play indicates: he sought her
naked in bed, compelled her presence during his encounters with
sundry courtesans, and tried to persuade her "that children born
of the commerce of a father and his daughter were all saints."
Shelley either omits or merely hints at such horrors because he
wishes to make dramatic capital of a single sexual attack. Moreover
his portrait of the count subordinates avarice to a third motive,
vengeance.
This is not, as Shelley builds it, a simple block-like vengeance,
but a whole nervous complex of deeper drives, where the deepest
has no place, except by inference, in the source-account. It appears
that the count's desire for vengeance arose from his relations with
his first wife, who died, according to the source, "after she had
given birth to seven unfortunate children." The count had always

9.The source-manuscript in Shelley's Woodberry's edition of the play, Belles

own translation may be consulted in Lettres Series, Boston, 1909.
632 • Carlos Baker

been a domestic tyrant in extremis, and nothing enraged him so

much as defiance of his authority, whether as parent or (observe
his treatment of his second wife, Lucretia) as husband. Shelley is

following his source in saying that from their earliest days he abused
his children. 1 When they were too weak to help themselves, Lucretia
served them as protector; in recent years the maturing Beatrice has
assumed this office. As
daughter has been brought into
a result the
sporadic conflict with a domestic tyrant content only with absolute
power over the minds and bodies of his family.
Although the sourcebook is so vague about the vengeance motive
that it must be regarded as Shelley's own refinement, the play
leaves the impression that the count's hatred of his children and
his desire to dominate them stems ultimately from his hatred of
their mother. The first wife was "an exceedingly rich lady" who
married a complete profligate. If the count in those days was run-
ning true to form, he lost no time in establishing his dominance
over both her fortune and her person. The fact that she bore him
seven children would not in itself suggest a ruthless sexual cam-
paign were it not that the count even now displays his faith that
sexual domination is a trustworthy means to the subduing of
women. At the close of the banquet scene, the count dismisses his
nubile daughter with the boast that he knows a charm to make
her meek and mild. The charm he contemplates is sexual inter-
course. Why should he imagine that it would render her meek in-
stead of desperately resistant unless his importunate sexuality had
produced that very reaction in her mother? It is entirely in char-
acter for the count to suppose that through the persecution of his
dead wife's offspring he can continue to wreak vengeance upon her
memory.
In any event, he is not long in putting his "charm" to work.
During his visit to Beatrice's chamber some hours after the banquet
he manages, though without overt declaration, to make it clear to
Beatrice that he intends to rape her. At that point she is still able
to face him down with "a stern and an inquiring brow." But on the
following morning, his sudden appearance in a room where she is
talking with Lucretia and her younger brother catches her un-
prepared and opens the first seam in her defiant reserve. Seeing her
fear, the count gleefully capitalizes upon it.

Never again, I think, with fearless eye,

And brow superior, and unaltered cheek,
And that lip made for tenderness or scorn,
Shalt thou strike dumb the meanest of mankind;
Me least of all. Now get thee to thy chamber!

1. The source states that the abuse be- young to have given him any real cause
gan while the children "were yet too of displeasure."
 [The Cenci] • 633
That his joy comes from the
satisfaction of a long-postponed desire
to break her spirit enough. That he is even then thinking
is clear
of her mother becomes evident when he immediately turns to her
brother Bernardo with the words of dismissal:

Thou, too, loathed image of thy cursed mother,

Thy milky, meek face makes me sick with hate!

It is finally worth noting that as soon as Beatrice and Bernardo

have gone he immediately consolidates his feeling of complete

domestic mastery by cruelly brow-beating his second wife, Lucretia.
A strong desire for vengeance emanating from the conditions of
his first marriage would seem therefore to be a third element in
the motivation of Count Cenci. The isolation of these motives,
which collaborate in many ways to explain the count's actions, in-
dicates that his malignity is by no means motiveless, while if one
simply writes him off as a "devilish incarnation of the principle of
evil," one ignores Shelley's careful, though not always perfectly
explicit, presentation of the true bases of his character.
The usual reading of the character of Beatrice has also been
unsatisfactory. A frequent objection to Shelley's conduct of the fifth

act is She steadily

that Beatrice there appears as an ignoble liar.

denies any part in the murder of the count, even though her
associates are being tortured for information, and she displays no
compunction when she imperiously compels the hired assassin
Marzio to withdraw the confession which has implicated her in
the crime. Since this behavior appears to contradict the notion that
Beatrice embodies the spirit of good, the fifth act is held to be in-
consistent with the remainder of the play, and in reading criticisms
of the trial scene one sometimes gains the impression that it is not
so much Beatrice as the author himself who is up for judgment.
The critical discomfiture over Beatrice's conduct in the fifth act,
like the sneaking suspicion that Count Cenci is far too black to be
credible, rests upon a failure to appreciate the intricacies of Shel-
ley's intention. In brief that intention is to display the perhaps in-
evitable corruption of human saintliness by the conspiracy of social
circumstances and the continued operation of a vindictive tyranny.
At first may seem to refute the ethical con-
glance this intention
clusions of Prometheus Unbound. Actually it only brings those
conclusions down to earth and works them out in a specific human
situation. Where Prometheus, during several millenniums, falls short
of ideal standards of conduct, his conversion is at last accomplished

through his act of self-reform, and he emerges as "the type of the

highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature." In The Cenci
this order is reversed. 2 Beatrice begins in a state of almost saintly

2. Compare Shelley's review of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

634 • Carlos Baker

innocence. For long years she lives the Christian life: she is devout,
chaste, dutiful, forgiving, and altruistic, and she gains strength and
the power to endure through her conviction that she is clothed in
the armor of righteousness. Shelley some pains to show how,
is at
under blows repeated day after day and week after week for years,
this armor cracks, until Beatrice is ready to cast it off in favor of
the cloak of a murderess. As Prometheus in Act I rejects hatred and
vengeance, so Beatrice in Act III embraces both with a determination
born, like that of Prometheus, out of prolonged agony. Shelley still
believed in the course followed by Prometheus, and specifically
blamed Beatrice for not having done likewise. But he was not now
seeking to prove an ethical point —
he was writing a tragedy. The
tragic flaw in Beatrice, in Shelley's mind, was the crack in the
armor of her righteousness.
Something analogous to the hardening of soul which Count Cenci
describes as his most conspicuous trait now begins in Beatrice. As
in the Prometheus, the "conversion" when it comes is both sudden
and complete, but Shelley's exposition has carefully prepared the
way for it. In the past Beatrice has tried every device of moral
persuasion upon her father. At first she endured his malice through
an innocent belief in the Tightness of paternal judgment; then she
sought to bend him with love and tears; next she tried prayer; then
she petitioned the Pope; finally, at the banquet, she came desperately
into the open with a plea for aid from the assembled guests. All
these efforts came to nothing because Beatrice had the misfortune
to exist in a social milieu from which scruple was absent.
But this is not the only restraint upon Shelley's heroine: she is

also held back by her own conscience. When she asks herself the
crucial question
— "Where shall I turn?" —one wonders why she has
not turned to flight. She is, of course, a prisoner in the Cenci Palace
just as certainly as Tasso was a prisoner in Santa Anna; yet even
if this were not
she would have chosen to remain: her step-
so,

mother and her younger brother must have her assistance. This
sense of duty, as well as her religious fear of the consequences, have
prevented flight by suicide. Yet she is not defeatist, partly because
she believes her armor is strong. As late as the banquet scene she
retains her self-possession, and even offers to pray with her father
for the salvation of his soul.
Her evident fear of the count on the morning after the banquet
is the first sign that her will to endure is beginning to give way be-

fore her father's relentless pressure. Her appearance that morning

is so deeply altered that Lucretia at once observes it: an unseen
visitor's lifting of the doorlatch induces a hysterical response. When
the visitor turns out to be, not the count, but a messenger bearing
 [The Cenci] 635
the false report that the Pope has rejected her petition, she settles
into an utter depression of spirits, a dead center of indifference
best summarized in her statement, " 'Twere better not to struggle
any more." With the count's arrival, his new found mastery be-
comes evident. The formerly imperious girl cringes at sight of him,
and he is not long in following up his advantage. Sometime in the
course of that very night he completes his dominance with an overt
sexual attack.
It is the supreme irony of the drama that the means chosen by
the count to establish final mastery are the best means he could
have fixed on to harden Beatrice's soul to the point where she is

ready to do murder. Out of the darkest experience of her life, the

temporary derangement caused by her father's attack, Beatrice rises

with a resolution:

Ay, something must be done;

What, yet I know not.

Suicide is out of the question, and legal action is quickly rejected.

Murder, the bold redress of the insufferably wronged, remains.
In making herself the prime agent of her father's destruction,
Beatrice explicitly rejects the moral position to which she has
hitherto been devoted. There must be no forbearance, no remorse.
For the time being she enters that state of implacable hardness
which is necessary to the fulfillment of her purpose. She becomes,
in her own phrase, "the angel of [God's] wrath," and her only rule
of conduct, until just before her execution, is to play a ruthless
game to the top of her bent — intriguing, bribing, conniving, and
lying, without regret, without remorse, without pity. Only once,
as she hears her death-sentence (to which she responds almost in
the words of Shakespeare's Claudia in the comparable section of
Measure for Measure) does her hard demeanor show signs of
breaking down under the force of fear. Twice her buried life rises
to the surface. Once, with Lucretia's head on her shoulder, she
sings the equivalent of Desdemona's "Willow Song"; again, readv-
ing their necks for the executioner's axe, she and Lucretia bind up
each other's hair, quietly, tenderly, and finally. For the rest, neither
the trial judge, nor Marzio, nor any of the other culprits is able
to penetrate her self-possession. Lady Macbeth, summoning to her
breast the murdering ministers, is not more willfully callous to all
accepted moral codes than she. Nor is the comparison a mere
literary ornament. Every reader of The Cenci and Macbeth knows

how closely Shelley modeled the count's murder, and its aftermath,
upon the murder of Duncan. It is very probable that through most
636 - Carlos Baker

of Acts III, IV, and V, Shelley wrote of Beatrice with one eye on
Lady Macbeth. 3
If Shelley's conception of character is in some respects Shake-
spearean, his management of the action reveals influence from
classical tragedy. Bates believes that the conduct of the scenes,
which usually consist "in a dialogue between two persons, or of a
succession of such dialogues with changed speakers," is more Greek

than Elizabethan. 4 Although the idea deserves mention, it should

be pointed out that Shelley had handled in this way every major
scene in every major poem from Queen Mab to Prometheus Un-
bound, so that habit rather than classical influence probably fixed
his course in The Cenci.
A much clearer instance of classical influence appears in Shelley's
handling of the count's fourth-act hybris, which so closely resembles
that of Jupiter in the third act of Prometheus Unbound as to sug-
gest that Shelley was recalling his most recent verse-drama as he led
Count Cenci nearer and nearer the brink of disaster. Classical
hybris, as in the Hippolytus of Euripides, is always charged with
dramatic irony. Jupiter's fall from the ramparts of Olympus occurs
just after he has smugly supposed that Demogorgon's arrival will
confirm and perpetuate his nearly absolute dominion over the minds
of men. But the audience, which has already overheard Asia's inter-
view with Demogorgon, knows all along that Ate is about to de-
scend upon the master of Olympus. When Count Cenci takes his
family to Castle Petrella, high on a rock among the loneliest Apen-
nines, he believes himself as secure as Jupiter upon Olympus. There
he plans the final stroke in his attack on Beatrice the establish- —
ment of his supremacy not merely over her body (which he accom-
plished with the assault in Rome) but also over her mind. His single
aim at Petrella is to force Beatrice's agreement to his incestuous
suit, and thus "to poison and corrupt her soul," to break her

stubborn will

Which, bv its own consent, shall stoop as low

As that which drags it down.
3. That Beatrice resembles Lady Mac- Iago seems as good a parallel. He sug-
beth in her complete resolution and Des- gests that the trial scene may owe some-
demona in her few moments of tender- thing to the trial of Vittoria in Webster's
ness are points which seem to have The While Devil. He compares the prison
escaped Bates, whose treatment of Eliza- scenes in Act V to those in Milman's
bethan and particularly of Shakespearean Fazio, which Shelley saw performed,
parallels is otherwise excellent. In his with Miss O'Neill as Bianca, in 1818. A
study of The Cenci, Bates lists some 13 more recent consideration of Shake-
other passages where Shelley is follow- speare's influence on The Cenci is in D.
ing Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, L. Clark, "Shelley and Shakespeare,"
Measure for Measure, King John, Rich- PMLA 54 (1939). The Cenci is discussed
ard III, Twelfth Night, and The Mer- on pp. 278-286. See also S. R. Watson.
chant of Venice. Op. cit., pp. 54-55. "Othello and The Cenci." PMLA55
He observes also that Orsino's machina- (1940), 611-614.
tions resemble those of De Flores in 4. Bates, op. cit., p. 57.
Middleton's The Changeling, although
 The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 637
In this intention he is in effect seeking to attain a Jupiter-like
power, for it is Jupiter's dominion over the mind of man which has
kept Prometheus bound to the rock. The count's anticipation of
success is as firm as that of Jupiter. The real peak of his hybris is

reached in the midst of his curse upon Beatrice. When the awed
Lucretia reminds him that God punishes such prayers, the count
tempts Necessity with a supreme histrionic boast: "He does his
will, I mine!" Two scenes later he is dead.

In spite of its lengthening stage history, The Cenci has always

been treated more like an heirloom extracted from a glass case for
temporary exhibit than like a piece of serious stagecraft. 5
# # jje

By andlarge, The Cenci, like the other dialogue-poems, presented

Shelley's view of the human predicament as it could be found in
history. In Rosalind and Helen and the two stories drawn from the
Italian past he chose to work in the area of domestic tragedy, pro-
jecting on a lesser scale,and in essentially nonpolitical terms, the
same weak by
sort of unendurable, unrelenting oppression of the
the strong, and of the principled by the unscrupulous, which he
had writ large in The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound.
The impression to be gained from these poems is not that of an
untroubled world. Malicious intrigue, abuse of power, cruelty, be-
trayal, false witness, corruption, madness, lust, avarice, and murder:
these were the red letters upon the calendar of history as Shelley
viewed and he was to discover further corroboration for his
it,

views in the state of England during the years 1819-1820, even

to the extent of implying an ominous parallel between nineteenth-
century England and sixteenth-century Italy.

KENNETH NEILL CAMERON

The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion^

The action of the central autobiographical passage (lines 267-

383) of Epipsychidion runs roughly as follows. The poet, in his
search for love, first encountered several "mortal forms," some of
them "fair," others "wise," one of them "not true"; then, for some

5. For an excellent . . . account of the f Reprinted by permission of the author

stage history of The Cenci, see the and the Modern Language Association of
article of that title by K. N. Cameron America from PMLA, 63 (1948), pp.
and Horst Frenz in PMLA 60 (1945), 950-972. The author also supplied several
1080-1105. corrections.
638 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
unexplained reason he entered a period of emotional crisis
— "stood
at bay, wounded and weak and panting" (272-275) from which —
he was rescued by one whom he compares to his ideal of love as
the Moon to the Sun. At first, we gather, he was enchanted with
this moonlike love (276-280) but later began to realize that she
was "cold" (281-307):

And there I lay, within a chaste "cold bed;

Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead.

Shortly after his discovery of the coldness of the Moon he was

precipitated into a new crisis,much worse than the one he had
experienced just before his encounter with the Moon, a crisis that
tore his being apart as an earthquake tears the earth. The ruling
of this crisis were a a Tempest (308-320). and
deities
Some time later
— "at length"—Planet
met his ideal in human
he finally
form, "Soft as an incarnation of the Sun" (321-344). And now
he wishes that both the Moon and the Sun remain with him and
inspire him
—
"Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive earth";
but, further, he wishes that one more "mortal form" return and
share in this influence with the Sun and the Moon a "Comet —
beautiful and fierce." This Comet had formerly both attracted and
repulsed him, had been "wrecked" and had gone "astray"; but now
he fears no such disaster and seems sure that the Comet, Moon, and
Sun will exist in a harmonious relationship (345-383).
Although at first sight this passage may sound quite obscure,
much can readily be interpreted. 1 For instance we have a sure
of it

focal point in lines 276-280 describing the encounter with the

Moon; for the Moon we know is Mary Shelley. We know this not
only from the internal evidence of the poem but also because Mary
herself accepted the identification (in a letter to Byron and two

1. The first full attempt at an interpreta- Ackermann returned to his studies with
tion of Epipsychidion appeared in John his edition of Adonais and Epipsychidion
Todhunter, A Study of Shelley (London, (1900) and his Shelley, der Mann, der
1880), pp. 229-253. Todhunter received Dichter und seine Werke (Dortmund,
suggestions in some of his identifications 1906). The most complete of the German
from William Michael Rossetti (pp. 245, interpretations is a lengthy article by
248); and his work exercised consider- Armin Kroder, "Studien zu Shelley's
able influence on all subsequent studies. 'Epipsychidion'," Englische Studien,
... In the conclusion of "Shelley's XXVII (1900), 365-396. In 1911, C. D.
'Julian and Maddalo'," Gentleman's Locock in his edition of Shelley, II,
Magazine (Oct. 1887), pp. 329-342, 453-459, summarized part of this pre-
Arabella Shore made some valuable sug- vious scholarship and made a few sug-
gestions, some of which were followed gestions. More recent interpretations are
up in a brief article in Poet Lore in in Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life
1890, "The Story of Shelley's Life in and Work (New York, 1927), II, 189-
'Epipsychidion' " (pp. 252-233), by F. 196; Floyd H. Stovall, Desire and Re-
G. Fleay. In the same year Richard straint in Shelley (Durham, N.C., 1931),
Ackermann in Quellen, Vorbilder, Stoffe pp. 273-276; Carl Grabo, The Magic
zu Shelley's Poetischen Werken (Er- Plant (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1936), pp. 336-
langer, Leipzig), pp. 27-28, began his 345; John Harrington Smith, "Shelley
study of the characters of the poem, and Claire Clairmont," PMLA, LIV
and further suggestions were made in (1939), 788-797; Newman I. White,
Helene Richter's Shelley (Weimar, 1898). Shelley (New York, 1940), II, 255-269.
 —
The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 639
private journal entries). 2 These lines (276-280), therefore, must
refer to the early summer of 1814, when Shelley met Mary. Hence,
the previous lines must deal with events that took place prior to
the meeting with Mary and the succeeding lines with' events follow-
ing that meeting. The "mortal forms," then the "wise," the "fair,"—
—
and the one untrue must include women with whom Shelley was
acquainted before meeting Mary, and such women we know to
have been Harriet Grove, Elizabeth Hitchener, Harriet Shelley,
Mrs. Boinville, and Cornelia Turner. The most likely identifications
are: the "fair" —
Harriet Grove and Cornelia Turner; the "wise"
Mrs. Boinville and perhaps Elizabeth Hitchener; 3 and the one un-
true —Harriet Grove. 4

The events reflected in lines 271-285 must be those of Shelley's

by Harriet Grove,
rejection his unsatisfactory marriage to Harriet
Westbrook, and its breakup in the spring of 1814. When the next
event occurred, namely, the discovery by the poet of the coldness
of the Moon (Mary), we cannot exactly tell. Nor is there any

2. Letter to Byron [? Oct. 21, 1822], second daughter of Mrs. Boinville is

Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Freder- known to Shelley's biographers; so "Mrs.
ick L. Jones (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Taylor" is presumably Cornelia Boinville
1946), I, 198: "There might have been (Mrs. Turner) once again. That Shelley
something sunny about me then [i.e., was attracted to Cornelia is true but his
when Shelley was alive], now I am truly comments on her do not indicate that
cold moonshine." Journal entry, Oct. 5, he was ever "hopelessly in love" with her
1822, Shelley Memorials, ed. Lady Shel- or felt himself betrayed by her. . . .

ley (London, 1875), pp. 332-333: "Well, These views of Rossetti were widely ac-
I shall commence my task, commemorate cepted by subsequent scholars, even the
the virtues of the only creature worth non-existent Mrs. Taylor enjoying con-
loving or living for, and then, maybe I siderable popularity and appearing in
may join him. Moonshine may be united Kroder, p. 385; Ackermann, Quellen
to her planet, and wander no more, a Vorbilder Stoffe, p. 27, and Shelley, pp.
sad reflection of all she loved on earth." 297-298; Locock, II, 456; Peck, II, 192.
. .The third journal entry is that of
. Richter, p. 496, and Kroder, p. 385, add
Nov. 11, 1822, quoted in Mrs. Julian Elizabeth Hitchener to the "wise"; and
Marshall, Life and Letters of Mary Richter suggests Mrs. Boinville as the
Wollstonecraft Shelley (London, 1889), one "not true to me" on the grounds
II, 53: "A cold heart! Have I a cold that she became cool to Shelley after his
heart? God knows! But none need envy union with Mary. Fleay, p. 228, followed
the icy region this heart encircles; and at Rossetti's suggestion of Cornelia as the
least the tears are hot which the emo- one not true. Peck, II, 192, follows the
tions of this cold heart forces me to "Mrs. Boinville, Cornelia Turner, and
shed. A
cold heart! yes, it would be cold Mrs. Taylor" pattern for the "fair" and
enough if all were as I wished it cold, — "wise," but suggested Harriet Shelley
or burning in the flame for whose sake for the one not true. Stovall, p. 273, sees
I forgive this, and would forgive every Harriet Grove among the "fair" and
—
other imputation that flame in which Elizabeth Hitchener among the "wise,"
your heart, beloved, lay unconsumed." . . . and thinks the one not true may be
3. Rossetti suggested to Todhunter that Cornelia Turner. White, II, 262, sees
the "fair" and "wise" were probably Harriet Westbrook and Cornelia Turner
references to the Boinville family, but he in the "fair," Elizabeth Hitchener and
tangled up the relationships rather badly. Mrs. Boinville in the "wise," and Harriet
Thus, while he correctly believed Cornelia Grove as the one not true.
to be included among the "fair," he 4. Fleay (p. 226) pointed out that Shel-
mistakenly identified her as the wife of ley had used a line ("She whom I found
Shelley's vegetarian friend John Frank was dear but false to me") similar to
Newton. (Mrs. Boinville, Cornelia's the "not true to me" line in Epipsychi-
mother, was sister to Newton's wife.) dion with apparent reference to Harriet
The one who was "not true to me" he Grove in a canceled passage in the
identifiesas "Mrs. Taylor, a second Dedication to Laon and Cythna (The
daughter of Mrs. Boinville, with whom Revolt of Islam).
Shelley was hopelessly in love." No
640 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
sure indication of a date for the Planet-Tempest passage (308-320).
The next point of reference comes in lines 321-322:

At length into the obscure forest came

The Vision I had sought through grief and shame.
This, as Shelley himself tells us (line 344), refers to the meeting
with Emilia Viviani, and this meeting occurred
in December, 1820. 5
In the final section of the passage (345-383) we also have a certain
date, namely, the date of the composition of the poem (December,
1820, to February, 1821 6 for the
), poet is there speaking of the
present. The Comet asked to return, therefore, must be someone
who was not at that time in the vicinity but who could return; and
the reference, as John Harrington Smith and Newman I. White
(following a conjecture by Shore in 1887) have demonstrated be-
yond any reasonable doubt, must be to Claire Clairmont (who was
then at Florence), the "alternating attraction and repulsion" re-
ferring to a previous entanglement of Shelley and Claire, and the
"going astray" and wrecking of the Comet referring to Claire's later
affair with Byron. 7

Three of the five main symbols in this central autobiographical

passage, then— the Moon, the Sun, and the Comet— are identifiable,
and the events concerning them — the meeting with Mary following
the marital crisis in 1814, the meeting with Emilia in the winter of

1820-21, the appeal to Claire to return in the same period, the

previous entanglement with Claire (probably in 1815) are identi- —
fiable also. This leaves the Planet-Tempest passage, in challenging
isolation. Who are the Planet and the Tempest, and what are the
events surrounding them?
The most recent theories are those of John Harrington Smith

5. The exact date we do not know; Claire person or spirit, be conceived of as

firstvisited Emilia on Nov. 29; Mary "fierce." In 1887 Arabella Shore (pp.
and Claire together on Dec. 1;on Dec. 336-337) first conjectured the comet to
10 Emilia wrote Shelley a letter which be Claire, and was followed by Fleay,
indicates at least one visit from Shelley; 228-230; Richter, p. 498; Ackermann,
so the initial visit recorded by Medwin Epipsychidion, p. xix, and Shelley, p.
must fall within those dates. Dowden, 298; Stovall, pp. 275-276; J. H. Smith.
Shelley, II, 370-373. pp. 788-797; White, Shelley, II, 266-267.
6. Shelley sent the poem to Oilier on Peck, II, 193-194, proposes Sophia Stacy
Feb. 16, 1821 (Works, X, 236); hence as the Comet but gives no evidence to
it was written between the first visit in support his view and what we know of
early December and Feb. 16. Shelley's relations with Sophia makes the
7. Todhunter, pp. 244, 248, guessed the assumption ridiculous. Whether Richter
Comet to be Harriet Shelley, and was came to her conclusion independently or
followed by Kroder, p. 390, White in his knew of Shore's or Fleay's articles is not
notes in The Best of Shelley (New York, indicated. She simply states: "The comet
1932), pp. 503-504, and Grabo, p. 342. is Claire." No hint of this identification
Harriet, however, could not be asked to had appeared in previous German
"float into our azure heaven again" for scholarship (Druskowitz, Ackermann).
the simple reason that Harriet was dead; But as Shore's article had appeared
and the context indicates an actual and eleven years previously and Fleay's eight,
not an ectoplasmic return. Furthermore, I presume that she was indebted to one
Harriet, while certainly "beautiful," or the other.
could under no circumstances, either as
 The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 641

(1939) and Newman I. White (1940). Smith,

following up a
suggestion made by Fleay
contended that Claire Clairmont
in 1890,
was both the Planet and the Tempest; hence the passage reflected
the love affair already mentioned between Shelley and Claire (the
"quenching" of the Planet referring to Claire's ejection from the
household in the spring of 1815, and the "earthquakes" Shelley's
distraction at her "desertion" of him for Byron the following
year). 8 This explanation, however, is unsatisfactory on two grounds.
First, while it is true that Shelley and Claire were emotionally in-

volved in the winter and spring of 1814-15, what evidence we have

does not indicate that either that involvement or its possible dis-
solution resulted in a major catastrophe in Shelley's life such as
here depicted. Second, as Shelley refers to his entanglement with
Claire later in the poem, in the Comet passage, it is unlikly that
he would deal with it twice, each time under a different symbol. 9
White, rejecting the Fleay-Smith theory, proposed his own. 1
After quoting the passage (307-320) he commented as follows:

This is professedly autobiography, and professedly cryptic. The

period it describes must be subsequent to the summer of 1817,
when Shelley wrote his introductory poem to Laon and Cythnd,
his earlier spiritual autobiography. In that poem Mary was still

his perfect "deliverance" and he was still "asleep," without then

knowing it, to her inability to furnish the complete sympathy he

sought. When Shelley awoke to this deficiency we have already

seen in our discussion of "Julian and Maddalo." That poem, if
any poem ever did, records a spiritual storm, and a storm in which
Mary was "blotted." Also, like the present passage, it is auto-
biography that Shelley thought concealed. Shelley's life between
1817 and 1821 is too well known for the storms he described to
have been anything except those following Clara Shelley's death
and repeated possibly after the death of William Shelley. Under
these blows, it is a known fact that Mary's spirits "shrank as in
the sickness of eclipse," and Shelley's soul was often "as a lamp-
less sea."
The identity of the Tempest and the Planet is not so certain
because the lines in which they are mentioned do not absolutely

8. Fleay, Ackermann, Stovall (pp. 99- lowed him to Naples, a suggestion fol-
101, 275), and Smith consider that Claire lowed by Kroder, p. 389, and Peck, II,
is intended by both the Comet and the 192. White, however, has satisfactorily
Planet-Tempest. demonstrated the non-existence of this
9. White {Shelley, II, 608) points out lady (I, 436-^37). Richter (pp. 330, 498)
also that as Shelley's "astronomical suggested that the "Neapolitan child"
imagery throughout the poem is scien- might be the child of Shelley and the
tifically correct" he "could hardly have mysterious lady, and that this passage
made the ignorant blunder of railing reflected those events; but she attempted
Claire both a Planet and a Comet." no specific identifications. Ackermann,
1. In addition to the Fleay-Smith and Quellen, Vorbilder Stoffe, pp. 27-28,
White theories, several others have been suggested Fanny Godwin as the Planet
proposed. Todhunter, p. 248, thought the but in his later works retracted this
Planet might be the mysterious unknown suggestion in favor of Claire.
lady who, Shelley informed Medwin, fol-
642 Kenneth Neill Cameron
exclude any one of three possible meanings. The sentence is
phrased so vaguely that the Tempest and the Planet might be the
same, or the Planet might be Mary (for in Shelley's astronomy
the moon was a planet) or a person otherwise unknown. If we
from the known facts of Shelley's life
try to resolve this difficulty
in 1819 and 1820, Sophia Stacy must be considered a possibility,
though there is no indication that she was ever "quenched" or in
fact that Shelley ever idealized her to anything like the extent
implied in the passage. In an earlier chapter we have seen that not
even all of the few poems with which her name is associated were
inspired by her. Mary was never "quenched," for Shelley says the
"white Moon" continued smiling. Nor could Mary, for the same
reason, be a planet only "of that hour."
But Elena Adelaide Shelley, whose life was concealed just as
Shelley says the truth behind these allusions is concealed, might
well have been a Tempest in the life of Shelley and Mary. She
alone was definitely "quenched," and her influence could most
properly be limited to "that hour." The "frost" which at her death
afflicted Shelley's spirits may be inferred from Shelley's words at
the time: "It seems as if the destruction that is consuming me
were as an atmosphere which wrapt and infected everything con-
—
nected with me An ounce of civit good apothecary to sweeten
this dunghill of a world." Elena Adelaide fits into this pattern of
the passage and of Shelley's life far better than any other known
person, but she conforms rather badly to the pattern set by
Shelley's other Incarnate Sympathies. Against this may be set the
known fact that she entered his life at the precise moment when
the need of sympathy was most desperately felt.
The earthquakes that split the ice-pack of the poet's frozen
spirit are hard to explain because it is not clear whether they are
to be regarded as further catastrophes or a deliverance. If the
former, one thinks of the troubles in 1820 over Godwin and
Paolo Foggi; if the latter, one thinks of the appearance of Emilia.
On the whole it would seem that they were an agency of deliver-
ance. At any rate Emilia immediately appears, "Soft as an
Incarnation of the Sun," and Shelley hails her by name as

. .the Vision veiled from

. me
So many years. 2

The main weakness in this interpretation is that it provides no

symbols around which the
really satisfactorv identification for the
events of the passage revolve, the Planet and the Tempest. White's
speculations on Mary or Sophia Stacey3 are, as he recognizes, tenta-
tive; and most unlikely that Elena Adelaide Shelley could be
it is

intended by the Planet or the Tempest. Shelley would hardly

introduce, suddenly and incongruously, a baby in his listing of the

2. White, II, 264-266. Helen Rossetti Angeli, Shelley and His

3. See also Peck, II, 161-163, 193-194; Friends in Italy (London, 1911). pp. 95-
almost all we know of the relations of 105.
Shelley and Sophia will be found in
 The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 643
women who had influenced his life. He was upset by Elena Ade-
laide's death, it is true, but less so than by that of Clara or William.
A second weakness in this interpretation is that it posits a series of
unconnected events quite widely scattered in time: the "storms"
and Mary at the death of Clara (Sep-
represent the grief of Shelley
tember, and perhaps also of William (June, 1819); the
1818)
Planet and Tempest both represent the child Shelley and Mary
apparently adopted in Naples in December, 1818, and the "quench-
ing" its death in June, 1820; the earthquakes represent either diffi-
culties with Godwin and Foggi (summer of 1820) or a disturbance
over Emilia (December, 1820-February, 1821). There is no real
connection or sequencing of events here; yet the passage in the
poem gives the impression of a connected sequence of events hap-
pening within a relatively short period of time. The events depicted
one paragraph from the events preceding and follow-
are isolated in
ing them, and the punctuation and phrasing of the paragraph imply
unity.
There is, it seems to me, a fallacy in White's position from
which these weaknesses in his theory flow, namely his initial argu-
ment that the Planet-Tempest passage must be dated "subsequent
to the summer of 1817," or, as he elsewhere (p. 608) more definitely
states it, "in 1819 or 1820." Once the passage is dated so late as
that, it is impossible to be other than speculative, for we know
of no events in Shelley's life following that period which fit the
Planet-Tempest passage. Hence it is of importance, if we are to
arrive at a more reasonable explanation for the passage, to examine
the argument for late dating.
The argument rests essentially upon one point. In the summer of
1817, in the Dedication to Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam),
Shelley speaks of Mary as his "perfect 'deliverance.' " In the "chaste
cold bed" passage in Epipsychidion he speaks of her as cold. Hence
the events and moods reflected in the "chaste cold bed" passage
must be later than the summer of 1817. And if the events of the
"chaste cold bed" passage are of a later date than the summer of
1817, then the events of the Planet-Tempest passage must be still
later, for the Planet-Tempest passage follows the "chaste cold bed"

passage. 4 In order to perceive the weight of White's argument here

4. White uses also two subsidiary argu- This could clearly, in a creative, sym-
ments, the first based on an interpretation bolic treatment such as is Epipsychidion,
of internal evidence: "Shelley is plainly cover a considerable time sequence,
following a chronological series of events The Dedication argument White sup-
in which the episode of the Planet is the ports by the contention that Julian and
last Incarnate Sympathy before Emilia. Maddalo, written in the fall of 1818,
This could only place the Planet in 1819 reveals Shelley first becoming aware of
or 1820" (II, 608). But Shelley does not Mary's coldness. But even if one accepts
state that he met
Emilia immediately White's argument (which, it seems to me,
after the Planet;he states that after the he has proved beyond any reasonable
Planet was "quenched" he went through doubt) that the "death's dedicated bride"
a series of soul-shaking experiences "a
— of that poem is Mary, it does not follow
death of ice," "earthquakes" and that — that Shelley's words to her (in the guise
after this "at length" came upon Emilia. of the Madman) indicate a first awaken-
 —
644 - Kenneth Neill Cameron
let us compare the two passages. I quote first the key stanzas from
the Dedication and then the Moon passage from Epipsychidion:

Thou whose presence on my wintry heart

friend,
Spring upon some herbless plain;
Fell, like bright
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of Custom thou didst burst and rend'in twain,
And walked as free as light the clouds among,
Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain
From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung
To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long!

No more alone through the world's wilderness,

AlthoughI trod the paths of high intent,

I journeyed now: no more companionless,

Where solitude is like despair, I went.

There is the wisdom of a stern content
When Poverty can blight the just and good,
When Infamv dared mock the innocent,
And cherished friends turn with the multitude
To trample: this was ours, and we unshaken stood. . . .

And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak:

Time may interpret to his silent years.
Yet in the paleness of thy thoughtful cheek,
And in the light thine ample forehead wears,
And in thy sweetest smiles, and in thy tears,
And in thy gentle speech, a prophecv
Iswhispered, to subdue my fondest fears:
And through thine eyes, even in my soul I see
A lamp of vestal fire burning internally. 5
The Moon passage from Epipsychidion:

Onestood on my path who seemed

As the glorious shape which I had dreamed
like
As is the Moon, whose changes ever run

Into themselves, to the eternal Sun;

ing to her coldness. The Madman episode known but he is treating them in sym-
records a violent quarrel between the bolic fashion.
two which seems rather to indicate long- 5. Stanzas vii-viii, xi. For further senti-
standing marital strains than any newly ments of affection for Mary, see also
discovered incompatibilities. The castra- stanza i: "thou child of love and light";
tion fantasies of the woman (420-436), stanza ii: "But beside thee, where still
in fact, imply a frigidity extending back my heart has ever been"; stanza ix:
for several years of union. White is And from thy side two gentle babes
perhaps also somewhat influenced in his are born
dating by his interpretation of the word To fill our home with smiles, and thus
"conceal" (319): "Also, like the present are we
passage, it is autobiography that Shelley Most fortunate beneath life's beam-
thought concealed." Shelley, however, ing morn;
does not mean that the events he is And these delights, and thou, have been
reflecting in the poem were themselves to me
of a secret or "concealed" nature but The parents of the Song I consecrate to
simply that the words are concealing the thee,
events. The events may have been well
 —
The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 645
The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven's bright isles,
Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,
That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And warms not but illumines. Young and fair
As the descended Spirit of that sphere,
She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night
From its own darkness, until all was bright
Between the Heaven and Earth of my calm mind,
And, as a cloud charioted by the wind,
She led me to a cave in that wild place,
And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon
Waxing and waning o'er Endymion.
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb,
And all my being became bright or dim
As the Moon's image in the summer sea,
According she smiled or frowned on me;
as
And there I within a chaste cold bed:
lay,
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead:
For at her silver voice came Death and Life,
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew,
And cried 'Away, he is not of our crew.'
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.

A comparison of these two passages reveals that White is correct

between them. Shelley speaks in both of his
in positing a difference
early enthusiasm for Mary: "deliverance" "like a noonday dawn" in
Epipsychidion; "bright spring" in the Dedication; but in Epipsychi-
dion, though he pays tribute to her beauty and tenderness, he refers
to her coldness and chasteness, whereas in the Dedication he praises
her enthusiastically. It is not possible, however, to go further and
accept the assumption that because Shelley does not mention Mary's
coldness in the Dedication, he was, therefore, unaware of it at the
time. The fact that a man does not mention his wife's coldness in
a poem cannot, in any case, be taken as proof that he is unaware
of it. And in regard to Shelley and Mary we have the evidence of
another poem written in the same year as the Dedication (1817) to
show that Shelley was then aware of Mary's coldness. This is the
short lyric, To Constantia, in which Shelley complains to Claire
Clairmont that Mary is cold, and compares her, in precisely the
image he later used in Epipsychidion, to the moon, the "cold,"
"bright" moon, the "planet of frost" which "gazing" down on his
heart it wan." On this poem, White has commented else-
"makes
where book: "As early as 1817, in his unfinished poem To
in his
Constantia, Shelley employed the same symbolism of the moon to
646 Kenneth Neill Cameron
express a feeling of the incompleteness of Mary's love." 6 And the
evidence of this poem
supported by the indication of marital
is

strains as early as the winter and spring of 1814-15. Whatever the

Hogg-Mary-Shelley-Claire folie a quatre of that time ending in —
May with the ejection of Claire from the household amid "a turmoil
of passion and hatred" 7 —
signified, it certainlv did not signifv a
stable marital adjustment between Shelley and Mary. Nor is such
an adjustment reflected in the loneliness and despair of Alastor in
the fall of 1815.
The probability, then, is that Shelley was aware of Mary's cold-
ness in 1817 when he penned the Dedication. Nor is there reallv
anything in the Dedication itself to negate such a conclusion. True,
Shelley does not there specifically mention coldness; but, on the
other hand, there is nothing in his depiction of Man' to exclude
such a characteristic. Mary is not hailed as a young and passionate

6. II, 607. White believes that Shelley is sexual frustration behind the thinking.
speaking throughout in his comments on And this, it is important to note, is true
Mary of the purely spiritual aspects of of the poem as a whole. Epipsychidion,
love, e.g.: "Whatever the meaning of even in its most Platonic passages, is
this passage [the "chaste cold bed" pas- essentially a poem springing from deep
sage] in terms of Shelley's life with Mary, love starvation.
it is of all things least likely to be 7. Letter from Claire Clairmont to Fanny
physical, both because it was not true Godwin, May 28, 1815, quoted in Mrs.
physically and because Shelley has given Marshall, op. cit., I, 118. The argument
evidence again and again, both in the for an affair between Shelley and Claire
poem and out of it, that Epipsychidion was first developed by John Harrington
is the history of spiritual not physical Smith, op. cit. White (1.694 et passim)
love. . The chasteness and coldness
. . disagrees that an actual affair took place
was spiritual and was not at first per- but admits (II, 267) that at least "on
ceived because of the intense brightness Claire's part it was attended by distinct
of the intellectual light which Mary shed emotional disturbance." F. L. Jones in
upon him" (ibid., p. 263). But this in- "Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont,"
terpretation is clearly open to question. South Atlantic Quart., XLII (1943), 409-
There is no evidence, nor could there 412. also argued against Smith's conclu-
well be any evidence, to show that Shel- sions by attempting (unsuccessfully in
ley and Mary were sexually compatible. my opinion) to show from the letters of
On the contrary, their union was suffi- Mary that she was not jealous of Claire.
ciently filled with strains to make some While Smith's view that Claire was one
degree of sexual incompatibility probable. of the great loves of Shelley's life, affect-
Nor does Shelley say that Epipsychidion ing, in a major way, such poems as
is the "history of spiritual" love only; Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, and Epi-
he wrote to his friend Gisborne simply psychidion, is difficult to sustain, and
that it was "an idealized history of my leads him, in my judgment, to some mis-
life and feelings," i.e., a picture of actual interpretations of these poems, it is hard
events and emotions treated in a symbolic to believe that Shelley and Claire did
creative medium (letter, June 18, 1822, not have an affair sometime in the winter
Works, X, 401). Furthermore, in this and spring of 1814—15, an affair, one
particular passage the language itself has would gather, attended by a good deal of
unmistakable sexual overtones. Such rather immature super-emotionalizing.
phrases as "cold chaste moon," "soft yet The Hogg-Mary affair of the same time
icy flame," "chaste cold bed" (within was first revealed by White (I. 301-393).
which the poet "lies" "nor alive nor although he was not allowed to quote the
dead"), when applied by a man to his letters which were his source of informa-
wife give the impression of sexual rather tion. These letters were first printed in
than spiritual coldness. Whether Shelley Harriet and Mary, ed. Walter Sidney
intended this meaning to be clear to his Scott, pp. 42-56, and reprinted in Robert
reader or even whether he was himself Metcalf Smith. The Shelley Legend (New
conscious of it we cannot certainly tell; York, 1945), pp. 146-163. Smith mis-
but the mere choice of language reveals dates the final letter in the series (p.
the existence of sexual thinking at some 162) "January, 1818" for "April 26.
level of consciousness, and indicates a 1815" (see Scott, p. 45).
 The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 647
bride; she is praised for her moral courage and intelligence, her

"young wisdom," her companionableness, the "paleness" of her

"thoughtful cheek," her "ample forehead," her "gentle speech," the
"vestal fire" in her "soul." One gets the impression of a rather
quietly intellectual young woman who could well be "transformed
yet still the same," interested in ideas but never really shaken by
them or by her emotions in such a way as to change her whole being.
All we can say on the basis of the two passages is that the "cold
chaste bed" lines specifically mention a coldness which the Dedica-
tion does not mention but does not necessarily exclude, and perhaps,
by its very selection of qualities for praise, implies.
— —
Let us assume as is most probable that Shellev made the dis-
covery of coldness in the initial months of his union with Marv,
and that from early 1815 until the summer of 1817 he had felt this
deficiency in an otherwise not unhappy relationship. It does not
follow that he would write of that 1815-17 period in the same
terms in 1821, when he wrote Epipsychidion, as in 1817. In 1821
he and Mary had lived together for six vears, in 1817 but three.
In 1821 the bonds of marriage were being strained by Shelley's
excessive interest in Emilia Viviani; in 1817 those bonds had been
drawn closer by mutual suffering and by Mary's loyalty to Shelley
through a period of crisis. Between 1817 and 1821 had intervened
the violent quarrel recorded in Julian and Maddalo which had re-
sulted in the hurling of recriminations that once uttered would not
easily die. Furthermore, we must not forget that the 1817 picture
occurred in a public Dedication, where its meaning would be clear
to all, whereas the 1821 picture occurred in an obscure, symbolic
narrative published anonymously. A poet might obviously permit
himself greater frankness, under any circumstances, in the latter type
of poem than in the former.
To summarize: we have evidence of marital disruption in 1815,
and of dissatisfaction with Marv as cold in 1817 (To Constantia);
the differences between the Dedication and Epipsychidion are not
contradictions, and are explainable in terms of variance in treatment
in different periods and in different kinds of poems. While, there-
fore, it might at first appear that the variation between the two
passages provides a basis for dating the "chaste cold bed" episode
subsequent to 1817, further examination reveals that it provides no
really sound basis for such dating. And it is upon this point alone
of variation between the two poems that the argument for the late
dating rests. There is no other serious evidence, either internal or
external, to support it.

The internal evidence, on the contrary, follows the external evi-

dence in supporting the view of an early discovery of coldness: the
poet meets the moonlady and is enthralled by her (summer of
 —
648 - Kenneth Neill Cameron
1814); she leads him off to comfort him in his troubles and he
discovers that sheis cold. The passage gives no evidence of any

considerable lapse of time but rather of a close sequencing of events.

And this would fit with the external evidence of marital difficulties
in 1815.
Just how soon Planet-Tempest
after this discovery of coldness the
episode occurred we cannot but ihe "then" of "What
exactly tell,

storms then shook the ocean of my sleep," which opens the passage,
implies some but not a considerable lapse of time; and hence would
indicate a date approximately in the 1816-17 period. And this
general indication is supported by the "at length" of line 321,
which notes the meeting with Emilia in December, 1820. The
Planet-Tempest passage certainly comes within the general range
181 5-20 and in all probability towards the earlier and not the latter
part of that period. And this is all that we can say from the internal
evidence.
If we now turn to these years and look for an event or series of
events constituting a major crisis in Shelley's life of the kind evi-
dently reflected in the Planet-Tempest passage, we do not have to
look far, for within that period occurred what was undoubtedly the
life, namely the suicide of Harriet Shelley (De-
greatest crisis in his
cember 1816) followed by the painful litigation for the custody of
his children and ending with the actual loss of those children (Jan-
uary-March 1817). Even without any real analysis of the passage,
the indication that it refers to these events is very strong. Shelley,
in Epipsychidion, as he told Gisborne, is dealing with the history
of his "life and feelings." He could not, in such a history, leave out
the central tragedy of his life. And when we find that no other
passage in Epipsychidion fits these events and that this passage
occurs in approximately the chronological position in his recounting
of that life where these events occurred, the conclusion is almost
inescapable that the passage must reflect them. This conclusion
could only be seriouslv weakened if the symbolic language of the
passage could not possibly fit the events. But this is not so; for
while all aspects of the passage may not be capable of elucidation,
the central symbols and actions do very clearly correspond to the
events.
Let us look at the Planet-Tempest passage as a whole in the light
of this view:

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,

Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse;
And how my soul was as a lampless sea,
And who was then its Tempest; and when She,
The Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost
Crept o'er those waters, till from coast to coast
 —
The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 649
The moving billows of my being fell
Into a death of ice, immovable;
—
And then what earthquakes made it gape and split,
The white Moon smiling all the while on it.
These words conceal: — If not, each word would be
The key of staunchless tears. Weep not for me!

The first, rather obvious point of correspondence between the

events and the passage is the suicide of Harriet and Shelley's ex-
tremely disturbed state consequent upon it. The "quenching" of
the Planet corresponds to the suicide of Harriet even to the very
method used, drowning. That Shelley was shaken by that suicide
almost to the point of madness, until he may well have felt that
the frost of death itself was upon him, we have ample testimony:
his disturbed, almost distracted letter of December 16, 1816, with
its frantic rationalizations; the statements of Leigh Hunt and Pea-
cock, who were with him much of the time: "It was a heavy blow
to him and he never forgot it. For a time it tore his being to pieces"; 8
"Harriet's untimely fate occasioned him deep agony of mind, which
he felt the more because for a long time he kept the feeling to him-
self"; 9Thornton Hunt's comment: "I am well aware that he had
suffered severely, and that he continued to be haunted by certain
recollections, partly real and partly imaginative, which pursued him
likean Orestes"; 1 Trelawny's statement to Rossetti that even in
1822 "the impression of extreme pain which the end of Harriet
had caused the poet was still vividly present and operative." 2 The
evidence is unmistakable that Shelley went through a period of
extreme crisis following the suicide of Harriet which could cor-
respond to the "death of ice" state described here as following the
"quenching" of the Planet. 3

8. Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (Lon- as White, for example, puts it (II, 608).
don, 1885), p. 237. But Shelley means that the Planet was
9. Peacock, Life of Shelley, ed. Wolfe "of that hour" in the sense that her
(London, 1933), p. 347. actions, not his feeling for her, were con-
1. "Shelley," by One Who Knew Him, trolling the events of his life. In the
Atlantic Monthly, XI, (Feb., 1863), 188. concepts of astrology, which Shelley is
2. Rossetti, Memoir of Shelley, p. 69. here using, one need have no particular
3. So far as I have been able to ascer- feeling for the planet which by its in-
tain, it has not been previously suggested fluence is directing one's destinies. As a
that Harriet was the Planet. Why so result of this subjective interpretation the
obvious an identification has not been critics have perforce hunted for some
made it is rather difficult to say. One woman in Shelley's life with whom he
reason has certainly been the reluctance might at that time have been in love:
of critics to believe that Shelley could Fanny Godwin, Claire Clairmont, the
have been aware of a coldness in Mary mysterious and (non-existent) lady of
at a date so early as 1816 or 1817, a —
rank at Naples and thought of the
reluctance which existed even before eclipsing of the Moon as indicating
White developed his theory (see, e.g., Mary's being thrust from the poet's heart
Kroder, op. cit., p. 389 f.). Another by the new love and of the quenching as
reason has been the interpretation of the representing the end of the affair. (Since
influence of the Planet in a personal, completing this article I have found one
romantic sense; "the Planet of that hour" suggestion of Harriet as the Planet in —
has been generally taken to indicate a Stopford Brooke's selection of Shelley's
woman who by her personal attractions —
poems (1880) a suggestion apparently
was reigning in the poet's heart, the overlooked by subsequent critics.)
"last Incarnate Sympathy before Emilia,"
650 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
While the poet was still in this state a second blow, or rather
series of blows, struck him: "And then —what earthquakes made it

gape and split." If I am correct in my interpretation of the preced-

ing lines, this line can hardly refer to anything but the agony of
mind consequent upon the litigation to deprive Shelley of his
children, for this litigation is the only major crisis we know of in
Shelley's life in the period immediately following the suicide of
Harriet. And the evidence indicates that Shelley's disturbance during
this period was extreme a concept
sufficiently strong to warrant so
as a spiritual earthquake. Again we have the evidence of Shellev's
letters, that to Marv on January 11, 1817, and that to Byron on

January 17, the latter being especially revealing of Shelley's state of

mind during the whole period:
I write to you, my dear Lord Byron, after a series of the most

unexpected and overwhelming sorrows, and from the midst of a

situation of periland persecution. My late wife is dead. The
. . .

circumstances which attended this event are of a nature of such

awful and appalling horror, that I dare hardlv avert to them in
thought. The sister of whom you have heard me speak mav be
truly said (though not in law, yet in fact) to have murdered her
for the sake of her father's money. Thus did an event which I
believed quite indifferent to me, following the train of a far
severer anguish, communicate a shock to me which I know not
how I have survived. 4

Again we have the testimony of Leigh Hunt:

. .His children, a girl and a boy, were taken from him. They
.

were transferred to the care of a clergyman of the Church of

England. The circumstance deeplv affected Shelley: so much so,
that he never afterwards dared to trust himself with mentioning
their names in my hearing, though I had stood at his side through-
out the business; probablv for that reason. 5

And the revealing anecdote from Thornton Hunt's childhood recol-

lections :

Sometimes but much more rarely he teased me with exasperating

banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors a vindictive
temper, I once retaliated severely. We were in the sitting room
with my father and some others, while I was tortured. The
chancery suit was just then approaching its most critical point,
and, to inflict the cruellest stroke I could think of, I looked him
in the face, and expressed a hope that he would be beaten in the
trial and have his children taken from him. I was sitting on his
knee, and as I spoke, he let himself fall listlessly back in his chair,
without attempting to conceal the shock I had given him.
4. Works, IX, 218-219. speaks of Shelley's extreme "depressions"
5. Hunt, pp. 238-239. at the time and his need for "support
6. Page 187. See also p. 185, where Hunt and consolation."
 —
The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 651

We have the evidence, too, of Rosalind and Helen in the "agony"

of Rosalind when she is similarly deprived of her children, 7 and in
the bitter denunciation and deep disturbance of To The Lord
Chancellor and To William Shelley:

They have taken thy brother and sister dear,

They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear
Which should have been sacred to me.

The "earthquakes," then, could well correspond to Shelley's state

during this period of litigation and the final decree of the Lord
Chancellor taking the children from him.
That Shelley was being tormented by thoughts of Harriet and his
children may be indicated also in the lines immediately preceding
this Planet-Tempest passage:

And I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

there
Alas, then was nor alive nor dead:
I

For at her silver voice came Death and Life,

Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew,
And cried 'Away, he is not of our crew.'
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep. . . .

The parallel here between the "abandoned mother" and Harriet,

and between the "wandering" children, "a sister and a brother,"
and Ianthe and Charles can hardly be coincidental. Mary's soothing
rationalizations, Shelley seems to be telling us, serve only to bring
up the conscience-stabbing images of his abandoned wife and chil-
dren which drive him even further into his state of semi-being be-
tween life and death; and while in this condition he is hurled into
the "storms" of suicide and litigation. And that Shelley had indeed
been in a state of considerable uneasiness in the weeks preceding
Harriet's suicide is shown by his letter to Hookham in November
1816 asking him to discover Harriet's whereabouts. 8
A third problem of identification is that of the Tempest:
And how my soul was as a lampless sea,
And who was then its Tempest; and when She,
The Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost
Crept o'er those waters. . . .

7. Lines 484-535; see also the "trial" of 8. Dowden, II, 67.

Lionel fur "blasphemy," 11. 857-901.
 —
652 - Kenneth Neill Cameron
The syntax of the passage allows us to take the Planet and the
Tempest either as identical or separate entities. If they are identical,
then the Tempest is also Harriet and she is a tempest in the sense
that not she herself but her death caused the "storms" that so
shook the poet. This explanation, however, is not too satisfying. In
the first place the interpretation strains the sense of the concept
tempest, which gives the impression of an. active, not a passive
force. In the second place a reference to one character under two
such different symbols in such close proximitv creates a jarring con-
fusion of metaphor which is not paralleled in the treatment of
symbols in the rest of the poem.
If we and presume the two symbols to
take the alternative course
drama of Shelley's life, we do
represent different characters in the
not have to look far in the period under discussion for a person
whom Shelley regarded as a Tempest responsible for the "storms"
which turned his soul into a "lampless sea." Eliza Westbrook is
clearly such a person. Shelley not only hated Eliza with an almost
pathological hatred but held her responsible for all the "storms"

which then shook his life, for the suicide of Harriet equallv with
the litigation over the children. That he held her responsible for
the suicide of Harriet is clear from Byron quoted above
his letter to
— "The sister . . . may be truly said ... to have murdered her"
and that to Mary on December 16, 1816: "There can be no question
that the beastly viper her sister, unable to gain profit from her
connexion with —has secured
me to herself the fortune of the old
man —who is now dying—by the murder of this poor creature." 9
That he also believed her— and this time probably correctly — to
be the guiding genius of the litigation over the children is clear
from his letter to Byron:

The sister has now instituted a Chancery process against me, the
intended effect of which is to deprive me of my unfortunate
children, now more than ever dear to me; of my inheritance, and
to throw me into prison, and expose me in the pillory, on the
ground of my being a revolutionist, and an Atheist. It seems
whilst she lived in my house she possessed herself of such papers
as go to establish these allegations. The opinion of Counsel is,
that she will certainly succeed to a considerable extent, but that
I may probably escape entire ruin, in the worldlv sense of it.
1

9. Works, IX, 212. and in this particular letter he had a

1. Ibid., 219. Shelley's letter to Eliza
p. special motive for restraint. His object
on Dec. 18, 1816 (Shelley's Lost Letters in writing was to attempt to get his
to Harriet, ed. Leslie Hotson [London, children back without a lawsuit. That he
1930], pp. 54—56), in which he assures was guilty of some hypocrisy is undeni-
her that he bears her "no malice," does able but under such circumstances his
not contravene the evidence of the two conduct is neither inexcusable nor un-
letters quoted above. In a letter to Eliza. common. We might note. too. that when
he would naturally not speak in the same he wrote to Eliza, her role as persecutor-
terms as in a letter about her to others; in-chief had not become clear; but when
 —
The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 6S3
Eliza, then, clearly fits the role of the Tempest; and such an iden-
tification is preferable to regarding the Tempest as identical with
the Planet (Harriet) . Eliza is and
a real tempest in the active sense
a regarding of the two symbols both avoids straining
as separate
the syntax or violating the usual distinction of symbols which
Shelley elsewhere preserves (the Moon as Mary, the Sun as Emilia,
and the Comet as Claire).
The final problem of the passage is that of the "storms" of the
initial lines and the role of the Moon during these storms:

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,

Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse;

And —
then what earthquakes made it gape and split,
The white Moon smiling all the while on it.

The "storms," it seems to me, are not intended to be separate ex-

periences to the "sea of ice" or the "earthquakes," but represent
a general introductory metaphor for the poet's disturbances through-
out the period. It is, however, probable, as Rossetti suggested, that
among the storms Shelley had in mind also a previous event which
had greatlv shaken him, the suicide of Fanny Godwin (October
1816). 2
Even before considering anv on the
possible parallels to the lines
Moon it is what one would imagine to
clear that they could well fit

have been Mary's role during this whole period (October 1816-
March 1817) 3 and Shelley's reaction to her: Shelley's mind was
in such turmoil that she was, as it were, "blotted" from his con-

sciousness, and she in her anxiety for him "shrank" in body and

he wrote to Byron, a month later (Jan. later dropped this identification in favor
17), it had. (The Bill of Complaint of Claire. The conjecture receives some
against Shelley was filed Jan. 8). Eliza, support from Shelley's statement in his
we may note, appears once more as the Jan. 17, 1817, letter to Byron that the
Avenging Demon in a letter from Mary death of Fanny was "a far severer
to Amelia Curran, Sept. 18, 1819, in anguish" than that of Harriet. It is
which, speaking of the importance of possible that Shelley believed this, but
keeping the authorship of The Cenci more likely that he wished to hide the
anonymous, she commented: "With depth of his feeling about Harriet in a
S[helley]'s public and private enemies it letter to Byron. In any event, time was
would certainly fall if known
to be his to show that while Fanny's suicide was
— his sister in law alone would hire a severe shock, it did not become a major
enough people to damn it" {Letters of tragedy in his life, one to haunt him to
Mary W. Shelley, ed. Jones, I, 79). the end of his days, as did that of Har-
Mary was doubtless also echoing Shelley's riet. It is unlikely, therefore, that Fanny
sentiments in her postscript to her Dec. occupies the main role in this key pas-
17, 1816 letter: "How it would please me sage, but very probable that Shelley was
if old Westbrook were to repent in his thinking of her death as among the
last moments and leave all his fortune "storms."
away from that miserable and odious 3. I do not mean that Shelley's disturb-
Eliza" {ibid., p. 17); and see, too, her ance over the trial for and the loss of
letter of Nov. 22, 1822 to Maria Gis- the children ceased on the day of the
borne (p. 206). verdict. Here, as elsewhere, I use dates
2. Todhunter, op. cit., p. 248. Ackermann as approximations,
once thought Fanny was the Planet but
654 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
spirit;but she persisted in her loving care and as his mind became
normal again he found that she had been "smiling" lovingly on him
"all the while." That Mary was eager to help him, even generously
urging him to bring his children by Harriet back to her, and yet
was extremely worried and disturbed herself we can tell from her
letter of December 17, 1816, written in the early stages of the crisis:
"You me to write a long letter and I would but that my ideas
tell

wander and my hand trembles come back to reassure me my Shelley

& bring with you your darling Ianthe & Charles." 4
If we now turn to Rosalind and Helen we find a rather striking
parallel between a section of it and both the Planet-Tempest and
the Moon passages. This section of the poem was almost certainly
among those written at Marlow in 1817 or the early winter of 1818, 5
is autobiographical, written as a token of their marriage to Mary
(who refers to it with a kind of pleased possessiveness as "my pretty
eclogue"), 6 and clearly reflects the events and emotions of the
period under discussion. The central character of the poem is

Lionel, who has long been one of Shelley's self

recognized as
portraits. Lionel is a young revolutionarv and sceptic who battles
against political oppression and religious tyranny. He is, however,
driven from his native land by some unfortunate love experience:

'Twas said that he had refuge sought

In love from his unquiet thought
In distant lands, and been deceived
By some strange show. (756-7 $9)
As "he was striken deep with some
a result of these experiences
disease of mind," and became despondent:

'How am I changed! mv hopes were once like fire:

I loved, and I believed that life was love.
How am I lost! . . .

I wake to weep
And sit the long day gnawing the core
Of my bitter heart.'. .
.'
(-64-777)

Then he meets Helen (Mary); Helen nurses him back to mental

health but his physical health begins to decline and she herself
grows ill with worry:

Our was sad and sweet,

talk
Till slowlvfrom his mien there passed
The desolation which it spoke. . . .

4. Jones, op. cit., I, 17. in the main by that time. R. D. Havens

5. Shelley's letters to Peacock in April argues plausibly that only the first 218
1818 {Works, IX, 295) and on Aug. 16, and last 79 lines were added in Italy in.
1818 {ibid., pp. 319-320) show that he August. 1818— "Rosalind and Helen,"
had begun to send the poem to the JEGP, XXX
(1931 ), 218-222.
printers before he left England (March, 6. Letter to Shelley, Sept. 26, 1817
1818). Hence, it was probably completed (Jones. I, 31).
 The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 655
And so, his mind
Was healed, while mine grew sick with fear:
For ever now his health declined. . . .

The blood in his translucent veins

Beat, not like animal life, but love
Seemed now its sullen springs to move,
When life had failed, and all its pains:
And sudden sleep would seize him oft
Like death, so calm, but that a tear,
His pointed eyelashes between,
Would gather in the light serene
Of smiles, whose lustre bright and soft
Beneath lay undulating there.
His breath was like inconstant flame,
So eagerly it went and came;
And I hung o'er him in his sleep,
Till, like an image in the lake
Which rains disturb, my tears would break
The shadow of that slumber deep:
And say with flattery false, yet sweet,
That death and he could never meet,
If I would never part with him.
And so we loved, and did unite
All that in us was yet divided. (784-845)

Hardly has be begun to recover, however, than he arrested and

put on trial
—"a trial, I think, men
"keen blasphemy."
call it" — for
is

Following the trial he is released and he and Helen are drawn more
strongly together. Lionel, however, is again ill and Helen fears for
him:

You might see his colour come and go,

And the softest strain of music made
Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade
Amid the dew of his tender eyes; . . .

And then I fell on a life which was sick with fear

Of allthe woe that now I bear. (1020-1048)

This time her loving care is to no avail, and Lionel dies.

The between this passage, on the one hand, and the

parallels
events in Shelley's life and Epipsychidion, on the other, are un-
mistakable. Not that the parallels are exact or that there are no
differences; but the general correspondence is clear. One gets the
impression from Rosalind and Helen of three crises: the mental
derangement, the physical illness, and the decline following the
trial. The first unfortunate love experience of Lionel, which un-
balanced his mind, would clearly correspond to Shelley's last months
with Harriet Westbrook and the breakup of their marriage; in
 —
656 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
Epipsychidion it parallels the "hunted deer" passage (271-275);
in the Dedication to The Revolt of Islam, stanza six:

Alas, that love should be a blight and snare

To those who
sympathies in one!
seek all

Such once I sought in vain; then black despair,

The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the world in which I moved'alone.

His recovery, under Helen's gentle care, corresponds to his reaction

to Mary's love in the early months of their union; to the "noon-
day dawn" in Epipsychidion, to the "spring" in the Dedica-
tion. Following this, we have two periods of crisis, that of the
physical decline and that following the trial, during both of which
Helen stood loyally by Lionel and watched over him. That the
second of these represents Shelley's state following the trial for the
custody of the children is reasonably sure for the parallel between
the trial inpoem and that in his life cannot be mistaken. Lionel
the
is blasphemy; Shelley told Byron that he was being tried
tried for
because he was an avowed "atheist" and "revolutionist"; 7 the speech
which Lionel makes following his trial "Fear not the tyrants shall
—
rule for ever" — Shelley included in To William Shelley, which, as
we have seen, centers around the loss of his children: "They have
taken thy brother and sister dear." We have here a fairly certain
focal point. If, then, I am correct in my interpretation of Epipsy-
chidion, this incident must correspond to that of the Moon in the
Planet-Tempest episode. 8 And the spirit of the two is similar: in
Rosalind and Helen the woman works with love and kindness to
revive the man's spirits even though she is herself greatly upset:

And I fell on a life which was sick with fear

Of all the woe that now I bear.

In Epipsychidion, the woman shrinks as in "the sickness of eclipse,"

but when the man recovers he finds that she has been "smiling all
the while" over him.
Wecan, then, be reasonably certain of these two episodes and
their parallels in Rosalind and Helen and Epipsychidion: the revival
of Shelley by Mary (summer
following the misfortunes with Harriet
of 1814); the tender nursing of him after the trial (spring of 1817).
The identification of the intermediary crisis —the physical illness
of the man and the nursing by the woman — is less certain, but the
most likely explanation is that it refers to the physical illness of
Shelley in the summer of 1815: "He had been advised by a phy-

7. Letter, Jan. 17, 1817 (Works, IX, indicated a parallel between Rosalind
219). and Helen and Epipsychidion.
8. Kroder, op. cit., pp. 388-389, first
 The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion • 657
sician to live as much as possible in the open air . . . He had just
recovered from a severe pulmonary attack." 9 I am inclined to think
between the two passages, it refers
also, that, in spite of differences
to the same period as the "cold chaste bed" crisis in Epipsychidion.
The Rosalind and Helen passage does not depict the coldness of
the woman, but it does hint at some degree of previous estrange-
ment in the statement that Lionel's troubles brought the two to-
gether in such a way as to "unite All that in us was yet divided."
There are two rather striking parallels between the two passages:
(a) the half-alive condition of the man: "nor alive nor dead" in
Epipsychidion; the slow beat of the blood, the sudden sleeps "like
death," the faint breath in Rosalind and Helen; (b) the woman
hovering anxiously over the sick man: "sate beside me, with her
downward face Illumining my slumbers" in Epipsychidion; "And
I hung o'er him in his sleep," in Rosalind and Helen. Neither

Epipsychidion nor Rosalind and Helen gives the impression of any

great lapse of time between these two crises; in Rosalind and Helen
the physical crisis immediately succeeds the mental crisis; in Epi-
psychidion the "deliverance" seems almost to blend into the "chaste
cold bed" crisis. 1

The indication is that Shelley, following the marital upsets of

the spring of 1815, entered a period of physical and psychological
crisis, the psychological aspect of the situation being due in part
to his growing awareness of the incompleteness of the marriage.
In Rosalind and Helen — a poem written for Mary and with Mary
(Helen) as narrator —he stresses the physical illness; in Epipsychi-
dion he stresses the psychological aspect; in Alastor, written in the
fall of 1815, we find both: physical illness and love starvation.
These passages in Rosalind and Helen, then, occurring as they do,
in a poem almost as directly autobiographical as Epipsychidion
itself, provide confirmation of the view that the events reflected in
the Moon and Planet-Tempest passages are those from the meeting
with Mary in the summer of 1814 to the litigation over the children.
In particular they throw light upon the roles of both Shelley and
Mary during those crises. We get a more complete picture of the
loving tenderness of Mary to supplement the impression from
Epipsychidion and we learn that part of the coldness complained
of in the "chaste cold bed" passage was due to the emotional

9. Mary Shelley, "Note on the Early to the Moon shrinking "as in the sickness
Poems," Works, III, 120. of eclipse" in the Planet-Tempest pas-
1. In one respect the feeling of the sage. This does not, however, warrant
woman in this intermediate crisis is the conclusion that one should parallel
closer to the Planet-Tempest
passage these episodes but probably indicates
than to the Moon passage. In Rosalind only that both crises had elements in
and Helen the woman says that her mind common in the nursing of the man and
"grew sick with fear," which is similar the anxiety of the woman.
 —
6S8 • Kenneth Neill Cameron
paralysis of the man resulting from physical illness and psycho-
logical crises. That this latter phenomenon was an important aspect
of the picture as it occurred in life there can be little doubt.
The foregoing interpretation of the Planet-Tempest passage, re-

gardless of whether one accepts it in all its details or not, is, it

seems to me, preferable to those so far advanced. The passage not
only fits the events but fits them in detail and in sequence: the
—
quenching of the Planet Harriet's suicide; the frost of despair
the poet's state following that death; the harassing of the sea of
his lifeby the Tempest— persecution by
his Westbrook; the Eliza
earthquakes — the over the
litigation the continued smiling
children;
of the Moon — Mary's tender him. Further, we can produce
care of
supplementary evidence from letters and Rosalind and Helen and
the observations of others to show that Shelley's and Man's emo-
tional states and reactions during this crisis were similar to those
portrayed in the poem. This conclusion could be seriouslv weakened
only by a demonstration that the passage could not represent events
crisis, but White's arguments to this effect are,
of the period of this
as have attempted to demonstrate, inconclusive. On the contra rv,
I

the weight of the evidence, both from external sources and from
the poem itself, indicates that the events of the passage do fall

within the same period as that of the crisis. This will, perhaps,
become clearer if we parallel our initial description of the sym-
bolism of the autobiographical passage as a whole (265-383) with
an attempted reconstruction of the events and characters there re-
flected: in the vears 1812-14, Shelley tells us, he knew and admired
a number of women who influenced his life, some of them "wise,"
some of them "fair," the wise probably including Elizabeth Hitch-
ener and Mrs. Boinville, the fair, Harriet Grove and Cornelia Turner
(267-270); his marriage with Harriet Westbrook (the one who
was "not true") and he consequently endured a
disintegrated
severe emotional crisis (March-May, 1814; lines 271-275); he was
"delivered" from this crisis by Mary (the Moon summer of 1814), —
but later (1815-16) discovered that although she was intelligent
and affectionate she was "cold" (276-307); he was shortly there-
after precipitated into an even greater crisis in the suicide of Harriet
(the Planet)and the vindictive pursuit of him by her sister Eliza
(theTempest), culminating in the loss of his children (December
1816 to March 1817; lines 307-320); "at length" he met Emilia
(the —
Sun December 1820; 321-344); now (January- February,
1821) he hopes to live happily under the joint influence of Emilia
and Mary with Claire Clairmont (the Comet), with whom he
hints a previous but now concluded affair, back at home with them

(m5-?8 3 ).
 Adonais • 659

ROSS WOODMAN
Adonais^

As an Orphic poet, Shelley could never come to rest in the epic

vision of art with its conception of the poet as the unacknowledged
legislator of the world. The Orphic apocalypse is intended to free
man from the relentless revolutions of the wheel of life by releasing
the buried divinity within him. The anagogical vision in the con-
cluding stanzas of Adonais presents this final transcendence and, as
such, brings to completion Shelley's apocalyptic career.

* # *

The anagogical dimension of Adonais provides the focus of the

entire poem. It is the energizing principle which compels the poet
to press on towards the object of knowledge as distinct from the
mythical account which defines the limits of his art. Shelley's goal
is the "deep truth" which is "imageless." The dialectic of sacred

passion drives the poet, as it drives Dante in the Paradiso, beyond

imagery to its primal source.
If Plato's Symposium provides the model for Shelley's ascent in
Adonais, then Dante's Convivio provides the commentary of ascent
in terms of which Shelley was able to structure his vision into what
he himself described as a "highly wrought piece of art." 1 Specifically,
in his description of his elegy, Shelley had in mind Dante's discus-
sion of the four levels of meaning in the second tractate of the
Convivio, which he studied in 1821, translating the last canzone of

the fourth tractate and including it in his Advertisement to Epipsy-

chidion. It is with reference to Dante's discussion of the four levels
that Adonais will be examined.
Dante in the Convivio distinguishes between the literal, allegori-
cal, moral, and anagogical levels of his own vision. His discussion is
neatly summarized in his letter to Can Grande Delia Scala, and for
this reason it is worth quoting. "For the clarity of what is to be said,"
he writes,

one must realize that the meaning of this work [The Divine
Comedy] not simple, but rather
is is to be called polysemous,
that is, having many meanings. The first meaning is the one ob-

tained through the letter; the second is the one obtained through

the thing signified by the letter. The first is called literal, the
second allegorical or moral or anagogical. In order that this man-

t Reprinted from The Apocalyptic Vision versity of Toronto Press, 1964.

in the Poetry of Shelley by Ross Wood- 1. Julian Edition, X, 270 (letter to John
man by permission of University of and Maria Gisborne, June 5, 1821).
Toronto Press, pp. 159-178. © Uni-
660 • Ross Woodman
ner of treatment may appear more clearly, it may be applied to
the following verses: "When Israel went out of Egypt, the house
of Jacob from a people of strange language, Judah was his sanc-
tuary and Israel his dominion." For if we look to the letter alone,
the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of
Moses is indicated to us; if to the allegory, our redemption ac-
complished by Christ is indicated to us; if to the moral sense, the
conversion of the soul from the woe and misery of sin to a state
of grace is indicated to us; if to the anagogical sense, the depar-
ture of the consecrated soul from the slaverv of this corruption to
the liberty of eternal glory is indicated. And though these mystic
senses may be called b\ various names, they can generally be
spoken of as allegorical, since they are diverse from the literal or
the historical. 2

On the literal or historical level, Adonais concerns the death of

John Keats as a result of the vicious attack made upon his Endymion
in the Quarterly Review; on the allegorical level, the poem con-
cerns the plight of the visionary in a society controlled by tvrannical
forces; on the moral level, it concerns the release of the soul from
the corruptions of earthly existence; on the anagogical level, it

concerns, to use Dante's words, "the departure of the consecrated

soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal
glory." The first two levels, the literal and allegorical, are presented
within the framework of the myth
and rising vegeta-
of the dying
two levels, the moral and anagogical,
tion god, Adonis; the last
move beyond the myth of Adonis and find their archetype in
Adonai, the Hebrew Lord revealed in, though transcending, His
creation. Professor Wasserman has pointed out the significance of
the amalgamation of the two words in the title of the poem, and
Professor Foakes has noted the dropping of the Adonis myth in the
last section of the elegy (stanzas 38-55). 3
Unlike Dante, Shelley in Adonais radically opposes the literal and
allegorical to themoral and anagogical dimensions of his poem.
Following the characteristic late mediaeval Aristotelian approach to
Christianitv, Dante places great emphasis upon the literal meaning
of his own art. He argues that the literal level is "that sense in
the expression of which the others are all included, and without
which it would be impossible and irrational to give attention to the
other meanings, and most of all to the allegorical." 4 Drawing an
analogy from Aristotle's Physics, he argues that the literal level
mav be considered as the matter, while the other levels may be
2. As quoted Allan H. Gilbert, Liter-
in pp. 31 1—13; R. A. Foakes. The Romantic
ary Criticism: Plato to Dry den (New Assertion: A Study of the Language of
York: American Book Co., 1940), pp. Nineteenth Century Poetry (London:
202-3. Methuen & Co., 1958), p. 102.
3. Earl R. Wasserman, "Adonais" in 4.Dante Alighieri, Convivio. trans. W.
The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The W. Jackson (Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 1909), p. 74.
 .

Adonais • 661

considered as the form. Unless the matter is property set forth, it

will be impossible either to impose a form upon it or to interpret

its meaning. Dante, in other words, does not oppose matter and

form; rather he sees form arising out of matter, rendering explicit

the potential inherent in it. At the end of the Paradiso, therefore,
he is not left suspended in an "intense inane"; on the contrary, he
is able to return to this world, his sense purified and sanctified, and
see in earthly love the emblem of God's Grace.
As an Orphic poet, Shelley in Adonais opposes flesh to spirit by
asserting that the annihilation of flesh is necessary to the release of
spirit. Viewed within the framework of spirit, man on earth con-
fronts "invulnerable nothings" (348). The literal level of Adonais,
therefore, is a vision of the death of Keats seen as the cessation
of matter in a state of motion. The literal level finds its source in
D'Holbach's materialism, which Shelley with his anagogical focus
in mind rejects as sensory delusion.
On the literal level, therefore, Shelley presents a picture similar
in many daemonic vision of Alastor. In that poem he
respects to the
relates his own fear of sudden extinction to what he considers the
slow and withering decay of Wordsworth's powers. Confronted with
the dismal spectacle of Wordsworth's ruin as he sees it revealed in
The Excursion, Shelley is partially consoled: sudden death is pref-
erable to the fate of those who, as he says in his Preface (p. 15)
"prepare for their old age a miserable grave." This same consolation
is offered to Keats in Adonais (356-60), and in images that echo

the earlier Alastor:

From
the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is and now can never mourn
secure,
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

In Alastor, the entire daemonic vision comes to a climax in the

poet's passive submission to that "colossal Skeleton" that rules "this
frailworld" with "devastating omnipotence" (611-14). And this
same imagistic focus defines the literal level of Adonais. Keats has
been led to "that high Capital, where kingly Death/Keeps his pale
court in beautv and decay" (55-6). He is the victim of that "in-
visible Corruption" (67) drawn over the curtain of flesh. Shelley
describes him as he describes the dead poet in Alastor: the "silent,
cold, and motionless" (661) form of one "yet safe from the worm's
outrage" (702)
Within the materialistic framework of the first seventeen stanzas
of Adonais, Shelley accepts the fact that there nothing to mourn
is

in the death of Keats. He is the victim of "the law/Of change"

662 • Ross Woodman
(71-2); "Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair"
(27). And here again, his fate is similar to that of the poet in
Alastor over whose death "no lorn bard/Breathed one me- . . .

lodious sigh" (58-9). Yet Keats, unlike the poet in Alastor, has
"moulded into thought" (118) his own desires and aspirations.
They have, therefore, a legitimate cause for grief; cut off from their
source in the physical activity of the brain, they must perish like
sheep deserted by the shepherd. And Nature also can mourn the
passing of that beauty with which Keats has invested her. Unlike
Keats's "Desires and Adorations" (108), however, Nature can sur-
vive his passing. Thus Shelley, in the opening stanzas of the second
section of his elegy (stanzas 18-37) ironically sets the rebirth of
Nature over against the death of Keats. Nature's lament becomes a
mock despair. Shelley suggests this by comparing Keats's "fading
melodies" to "flowers that mock the corse beneath" (16-17).
When Shelley turns from his contemplation of Keats's annihila-
tion to his attack upon the critics whom he considered responsible,
he is forced by the logic of his first hypothesis to recognize that
they acted according to the law of Necessity. To condemn them
for their murderous action in the Quarterly Review is futile. Shelley
can no more condemn the critics who murdered Keats than mourn
his death. Although their "wings rain contagion" (248), the poison
is not something alien to life; rather it is the "contagion of the

world's slow stain" (356) to which all men, including critics, must
succumb. In the final section of the poem, the critics become an
emblem of life itself, a svmbol of the human condition to which all
men are bound as bv a curse.
On the literal level Shelley recreates in Adonais his own earlier

materialism derived primarily from D'Holbach. From this literal

level,he moves on to the allegorical in which he makes use of the

myth of a dving and rising god. While the allegorical dimension
allows him to view Keats less as a mortal and more as a poet,
Shelley is still bound by the very character of his myth to the eternal
evele of Nature. The second movement of the elegy focuses on re-
birth, just as the first movement focuses upon death. Both death
and rebirth, however, belong within the fallen order of Nature,
within the framework of Necessity. For this reason, the second
movement is set within the pattern of the first and provides no
real is as vet no principle of transcendence in opera-
advance; there
tion. The two movements of Adonais, which partially recreate
first

the vision of Alastor, simplv serve to purge "from our inward sight
the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our
being." 5 The third movement reveals that wonder, which is the
"divinity in Man" released from the law of Neccssitv.

5. A Defence of Poetry, Julian, VII, 137.

 Adonais • 663
On the allegorical level Keats is identified with Adonis, the
dying and rising vegetation god of Greek mythology. In the Greek
myth, Adonis is a comely youth beloved by Aphrodite. In his in-
fancy, Aphrodite hides him from Ares, his jealous rival, in a chest
which she entrusts to Proserpine, Queen of Hades. When Proser-
pine opens the chest and gazes upon the infant, she is so enamoured
of his beauty that she refuses to return him to Aphrodite. The dis-
pute between the two goddesses over who should possess the child
is finally decided by Zeus, who decrees that he will dwell with
Proserpine for one part of the year and with Aphrodite for the other
part.
The joint possession of Adonis by Proserpine and Aphrodite is

dramatized in the myth by presenting Adonis as a youthful and

eager hunter. Aphrodite, fearing that he will be killed, attempts to
persuade him to give up hunting. One day, however, when Aphro-
dite is absent, presiding over ceremonies in her honour, Adonis
returns to the hunt and is mortally wounded by his jealous rival,
Ares, who Aphrodite is
has disguised himself as a wild boar. When
informed of what has happened, she hastens to his side in a futile
effort to revive him. Her tears mix with his blood and from that
mixture the rich profusion of vegetable life emerges. Thus, the
return of Adonis to Proserpine contains in the rebirth of Nature
the promise of his resurrection and reunion with Aphrodite.
In Bion's Lament for Adonis, 6 which was Shelley's immediate
source, all myth are present. At the death of
the elements of the
Adonis, Aphrodite laments that he must return to Proserpine (or
Persephone) "Take thou my husband, Persephone, for thou art
:

mightier far than I, and all that is fair comes down to thee; while
I am hapless utterly, a prey to sorrow unassuaged, and weep for my

Adonis who is dead, and I fear thee" tears mixed

(52-6) . From her
with Adonis' blood flowers comefrom the Paphian
forth: "As fast
flow tears as from Adonis blood, and both on the ground are turned
to flowers; of the blood are roses born, and of the tears anemones"

(63-5). Finally, the cyclic recurrence of death and resurrection is

implied in the last lines: "Cease thy laments to-day, Cytherea; stay
thy dirges. Again must thou lament, again must thou weep another
year" (97-8).
On the allegorical level, Shelley
makes use of Bion's poem. After
upon Urania (Bion's Aphrodite) to leave her Paradise and
calling
weep for Adonais who is dead, he then tells her to quench her
"fiery tears" (22). Adonais has returned to Proserpine ("the
amorous Deep") "where all things wise and fair/Descend" (24-5).
Nevertheless, Urania leaves her "secret Paradise" and laments over
the corpse of Adonais (235-43). . . .

6. The quotations that follow are taken with notes, by A. S. P. Gow (Cambridge:
from The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans., Cambridge University Press, 1933).
 :

664 • Ross Woodman

At this point, however, the allegory breaks off. Shelley does not
go on to describe the resurrection of Adonais in terms of his re-
union with Urania. And the reason is evident in Urania's lament
(232-4):

"I would give

All that I am to thou now art!
be as
But I am chained to Time, and cannot* thence depart!"

Bion's Adonis has become Shelley's Adonais, the "divinity in Man"

released from the cyclic pattern of Nature.
Within the allegorical framework of the Adonis myth, Shelley
describes the fate of the visionary in a hostile society. In the lament
of Urania, he argues that had Keats been strong enough to survive
the review in the Quarterly Review, he might have completed his
cycle and filled his "crescent sphere" (242). The cyclic imagery,
however, contains within it the suggestion of futility. Shellev argues

that Keats's survival depended upon his ability to arm himself with
the shield of wisdom and the spear of scorn and join forces with the
enemies of tyranny. He would have to "dare the unpastured dragon
in his den." Implicit in this battle is the fear that the poet who
fights back, as Prometheus fought back, may himself become the
victim of his own wrath. This was Prometheus' fate in the first act
of Prometheus Unbound, and Shelley was unable adequately to
resolve it in the third. The
central incongruitv in the drama lies in
on the one hand, and the awful judgment
Shelley's vision of love,
upon Jupiter, on the other. Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound is not
redeemed, and, to that extent at least, Promethus' recreative power
is limited. The most obvious evidence of that limitation is the fact

that Prometheus' imaginative achievement belongs within the cycle

of Nature. Necessity must reassert itself. Eternity, "Mother of many
acts and hours," has an "infirm hand" (IV, 565-6); Jupiter must
inevitably rise again.
In Urania's dubious hope that Adonais, had he lived, might have
armed himself to deal with society, Shelley had Byron in mind.
Byron is the "Pythian of the age" (250) from whom the critics fled
when he loosed in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers one spear
of scorn upon them. Shelley wrote to Byron after receiving the
news of Keats's death telling him of the devastating effect of the
criticism of Endymion upon Keats's mind. On April 26, 1821, Byron
replied

I am
very sorry to hear what you say of Keats is it actually —
true? did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I
I

differ from vou essentiallv in your estimate of his performances,

I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had

been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished

 Adonais • 665
in such a manner. ... I read the review of "Endymion" in the
Quarterly. It was severe, —
but surely not so severe as many reviews
in that and other journals upon others.
I recollect the effect upon me of the Edinburgh on my first
poem; it was rage, and resistance, —
and redress but not despond-
ency nor despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but,
in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of
writing, a man should calculate his powers of resistance before he
goes into the arena. 7

Shelley could not whole-heartedly accept this attitude. While it

allowed Byron the strength to deal with a corrupt society, he had

paid severely for it in the sacrifice of his own idealism.
* * *

optimism
Shelley's finds its counterpart in his hopes for
. . .

November, 1820 (Julian Edition, X, 218), several

Keats's future. In
months after the event, he described Keats's reception of the
criticism of Endymion in a letter to the Editor of the Quarterly
Review: "The first me to have resembled
effects are described to
insanity, and was by assiduous watching that he was restrained
it

from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at

length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the
usual process of consumption appears to have begun." At the time
this news reached Shelley, he believed that if he could see Keats he
would be able to help him. He had himself been driven close to
insanity in 1814 and during the crisis over Mary Godwin had been
driven to attempt suicide. More than that, in 1815 he had been told
by his physician that he had not long to live. Out of that despair
had emerged Alastor, in which the wretched wanderings of the poet
parallel in a very real sense the wanderings of Keats's poet in Endy-
mion. Moved by the memory of these experiences, Shelley wrote to
Keats on July 27, 1820, asking him to come and stay near him in
Pisa. After issuing his invitation, he continued:
I have lately read your "Endymion" again and ever with a new

sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures

poured forth with indistinct profusion. This, people in general
willnot endure, and that is the cause of the comparatively few
copies which have been sold. I feel persuaded that you are

to send you copies of my books.

—
capable of the greatest things, so you but will. I always tell Oilier
"Prometheus Unbound" I
imagine vou will receive nearly at the same time with this letter.
[Julian, X, 194]

But the death of Keats defeated Shelley's hopes, and in that defeat
the words which he had attributed to Byron in Julian and Maddalo
(120-30) must have come home to him with peculiar impact.
7. As quoted in Julian, X, 254n.
 —
666 • Ross Woodman
Maddalo is moralizing upon the vesper bells ringing from the tower
of an asylum:

—
"And such," he cried, "is our mortality,
And this must be the emblem and the sign
Of what should be eternal and divine!
And like that black and dreary bell, the soul,
Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll
Our thoughts and our desires to meet below
—
Round the rent heart and pray as madmen do
—
For what? they know not, till the night of death
As sunset that strange vision, severeth
Our memory from itself, and us from all
We sought, and yet were baffled."
The impact of Keats's death upon Shelley is explained by his
close identification with Keats as a poet. He believed that only
Keats and himself among all the Romantics had remained faithful
to the pursuit of the ideal. In sending Keats copies of his own poems
and in inviting him he hoped that they might support each
to Pisa,
other in their arduous task. Shelley had attempted to follow in the
path of Byron, but he found it temperamentally impossible to de-
velop within himself a defensive satirical scorn for society. He re-

mained, in some sense, as vulnerable as he believed Keats to be.

Thus, in his self-portrait in Adonais, there is no evidence of the
Promethean poet. Instead, there is a vision of the poet "who in
another's fate now wept his own" (300). Shellev describes Keats
as "a pale flower" (48), its "petals nipped before they blew" (52),
and he uses the same image to describe himself: "the withering
flower" on which "the killing sun smiles brightly" (286-7). His
"power, like Keats's, is "girt round with weakness" (281-2). Instead
of the spear of scorn, he carries, again like Keats, "a light spear
topped with a cypress cone" (291). As an Orphic poet, he carries
the Dionysian thyrsus, thus finding his archetype in the peace-
loving Orpheus whose music had the power to tame the wildest
beasts. Nevertheless, Shelley remains, as Keats had remained, the
victim of "the herded wolves" and "the obscene ravens" (244-5).
He believes that his Promethean power has failed him. And for

this reason, Shelley returns (274-9) to that early daemonic image

of himself which he presented in Alastor:

he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actaeon-like,and now he fled astrav
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prev.
 Adonais • 667
At glance it appears impossible that the Urania of Adonais
first

who "chained to Time" (234) is Shelley's "mistress Urania" in

is

whose honour he told Peacock he wrote A Defence of Poetry. 8 Pro-

fessor Wasserman in his analysis of the elegy argues that she is not.
Carefully distinguishing between the "quickening life" which springs
out of matter (stanza 19) and the "plastic stress" of the one Spirit
which descends into matter (stanza 43), Wasserman goes on to
separate Urania and the poet by identifying Urania with the former
and the poet with the latter. 9 This distinction is reinforced when
Shelley in the third section of his elegy describes Keats as having
returned to that power "which wields the world with never-wearied
love,/Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above" (377-8).
Keats has returned to the power which kindles life "above"; Urania
remains sustaining it "from beneath." Urania, in other words, is
the poet's shaping spirit of imagination which, like the "quickening
life," must spring out of the world of the senses and shape it into

an image of the "divinity in Man." Urania creates the vision of

apocalypse, but not the apocalypse itself. She is the myth-making
power in the poet which constructs the "probable account" of the
poet's object. Shelley, therefore, accurately identifies her with Bion's
Aphrodite who must share her beloved Adonis with Proserpine,
the goddess of Hades. To pursue Urania is to be half in love with
death, as Keats recognizes in his Ode to a Nightingale.
Because Shelley is preoccupied with the Promethean vision of art
Defence of Poetry, he does not bring into focus the anagogical
in his
dimension of his vision. He describes the poet in terms of Urania,
which is to say, in terms of his earthlv mission as a recreator of the
universe. At the same time, however, he clearly anticipates the anago-
gic when he draws a careful distinction between the poet's "original
conceptions" and his actual productions. "But when composition
begins," he writes, "inspiration is alreadv on the decline, and the
most glorious poetrv that has ever been communicated to the world
is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the Poet"

(Julian Edition, VII, 135). Urania is not the poet's conception;

she is the poet's fading creativitv which, out of that conception,
constructs a "feeble shadow." She is, in other words, the "awful
shadow of some unseen power" which waxes and wanes in accord-
ance with Nature's mutability. She exists only within the myth of
Adonis, and when Shelley abandons the myth, Urania disappears.
One possible reason, therefore, for Shelley's failure to compose
the second part of his Defence is that he had watched in his own
lifetime the waning of creative power among his favourite living

8. In a letter dated Feb. 15, 1821, Julian, 9. The Subtler Language, p. 331.
X, 234.
668 - Ross Woodman
poets. He could not, as a result, put to the test his faith in the
apocalyptic power of his contemporaries. The best he could do,
when confronted by the actual texts, was to recreate the vision of
Alastor to include not only Wordsworth, but Coleridge and Southev
as well. And this, of course, is precisely what Shelley does do in the
first two sections of Adonais. Urania is deserted; in Keats, her
"youngest, dearest one, has perished" (46), > and there is no one
leftto invoke her. All that is left to her is to curse those who
robbed her of her prize.
It may therefore be concluded that the Urania of A Defence of

Poetry is the same Urania who laments the death of Keats in

Adonais. The change is not in Urania; it is in Shellev, who, in
Adonais, views her within an anagogical perspective. Shelley, it mav
be said, abandoned Urania for Proserpine believing that in and
through her the object of his quest was to be found. To move from
the vision of apocalypse to the apocalypse itself, it is necessary to
descend daemonic. The path which Shellev follows in
first to the
Adonais is the path of Dante in The Divine Comedy; he descends

into the Hell of material annihilation that he may truly rise into the
"white radiance of Eternity" (463) Those who remain with Urania,
.

playing with lovely images, ultimately delude themselves.

The moral dimension of Shellev's elegy, therefore, concerns itself
with the release of the soul from the "contagion of the world's slow
stain" (356). Shelley has anticipated this moral level from the out-
His allusions to Urania have all been ironic. In calling upon her
set.

toweep for Adonais, he points out the futility of her tears. In calling
upon her to weep again as she had earlier wept for Milton, he points
out that Milton "went, unterrified,/Into the gulf of death" (34-5).
As for those who vet live, thev tread "the thorny road" of "toil and
hate" (44-5), even as Urania treads it. At the same time, however,
those poets who, like Milton, are willing to follow this path find
their reward in "Fame's serene abode" (45). Urania, on the other
hand, within her "secret Paradise" (208) sits with "veiled eyes"
rekindling "fading melodies" surrounded by "listening Echoes" |
1 2-
1
^ ) . Like a mistress grown old with time, her onlv consolation is

the memoir of her former glory (226-30). . . .

The real crisis, which defines the transition from the allegorical
to the moral dimension of the elegy, comes when Shelley in his self-

portrait exposes his branded brow which, he says, is "like Cain's or

Christ's" (306). The radical ambiguitv evident in placing Christ
and Cain side bv side as prototvpes of himself as poet reveals
Shelley's increasing misgivings about the nature of his own poetic
power. These misgivings mav have been further clarified by his
reading of Byron's Cain, A Mystery, conceived partlv under Shelley's
 Adonais • 669
influence, and executed during the summer shortly after Shelley
1

completed Adonais. Shelley considered the poem "a revelation not

before communicated to man"; 2 it is therefore worth examining for
the possible light which it casts upon Shelley's somewhat Byronic
identification with Cain in Adonais.
In Byron's vision, Cain, like Shelley's Prometheus, rebels against
the Jehovah-Jupiter conception of God. Guided by Lucifer (Shelley's
archetypal hero) he journeys into a pre-Adamite underworld and
into an empvrean beyond the sun and moon. As the journey unfolds,
Lucifer suggests to Cain that death may hold the key to the deepest
mysteries which perplex man in his earthly state. Instead, however,
of leading Cain to smash the "dome of many-coloured glass" to find
the "white radiance of Eternity," Lucifer's suggestion leads him to
return to the world and murder his brother, Abel. The murder of
Abel vividly (and ironically) dramatizes the rejection of the familiar
world in favour of an ideal world beyond the limits of man's mor-
tality.

While Shellev in his letter to Gisborne did not define the pre-
cise nature of the "revelation" which the poem offered (beyond
describing it as "apocalyptic"), he probably recognized, asindeed
Byron likely intended that he should, some mark of identity with
Cain and gained from it a richer insight into the daemonic aspect of
his own apocalyptic vision which was destined to bear fruit in The
Triumph of Life. The release of Prometheus required the destruc-
tion of Jupiter, even as Cain's vision in Byron's poem required the
murder of Abel. The underside of Shelley's apocalyptic vision was
the complete destruction of human society in its present form as
exemplified in the passive submission of Byron's Abel to the venge-
ful Jehovah. Byron, unwilling, for example, to expose his natural

I. a letter to Horace Smith (April

In venna. How happy should I not be to
II, 1822) Shelley writes (Julian, X, 377- attribute to myself, however indirectly,
8): "Amongst other things, however, any participation in that immortal work!"
Moore, after giving Lord B. much good In spite of Shelley's assertion that he
advice about public opinion, etc., seems had no influence upon Byron, it is evi-
to deprecate my influence on his mind, dent that it is Shelley's view of Christi-
on the subject of religion, and to at- anity that governs many of the speeches
tribute the tone assumed in 'Cain' to my of Byron's Cain. Shelley admits to a
suggestions. Moore cautions him against knowledge of the conception of the poerr.
my influence on this particular, with the "many years ago" and, in admitting that
most friendly zeal; and it is plain that he would be happy not to be in any
his motive springs from a desire of sense identified with it, he may be re-
benefiting Lord B., without degrading ferring to the daemonic light which
me. I think you know Moore. Pray Byron's poem casts upon his own Pro-
assure him that I have not the smallest methean vision. Such an interpretation
influence over Lord Byron, in this par- of the last sentence in the above passage
ticular,and if I had, I certainly should would certainly help to explain the sig-
employ it to eradicate from his great nificance of the extraordinary juxta-
mind the delusions of Christianity, which, position of Christ and Cain as proto-
in spite of his reason, seem perpetually types of himself as a Dionysian poet in
to recur, and to lay in ambush for the Adonais.
hours of sickness and distress. 'Cain' 2. In a letter to John Gisborne, Jan. 26,
was conceived many years ago, and be- 1822, Julian, X, 354.
gun before I saw him last year at Ra-
670 • Ross Woodman
child to the influence of the Shelley household, was keenly aware
of the danger of Shelley's "atheism," especially when it was lost to
sight in the clouds of his soaring idealism. In Adonais Shelley ques-
tions whether he bears the wounds of the suffering Christ or the
mark of the accursed Cain. By rounding his first two movements
with the curse of Cain which leads him directly to the question,
Shelley, consciously or unconsciously, arrives -at the impasse which
he faced with Prometheus in the third act of his drama. In Prome-
theus Unbound he was unable to resolve it; he allowed Prometheus
both to repent his curse and see it fulfilled.
In Adonais, however, Shelley is concerned neither to repent the
curse society as embodied in Urania and the critics nor to enjoy
the imaginative benefits of seeing it fulfilled. So far as any earthly
redemption is concerned he seems to have succumbed to Prome-
theus' tempter and affirmed that good and the means to good are
incompatible. He turns what in Byron's vision amounts to a
metaphysical explanation of murder into a metaphysical defence of
self-murder. The moral dimension of the elegy resides in a meta-
physical defence of suicide (415-23):

Oh, come forth,

Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
In Adonais, Shelley has been lured "to the brink" first by his re-

jection of materialism, which conducts to annihilation, and then

by his rejection of mutability, which traps the poet within the limits
of Nature. Beyond both is the "void circumference," which is the
realm of pure mind revolving in its own divinity. It is the poet's
"ideal prototype" partiallv discovered in the creation of its "anti-
type." The "antitype," however, is nothing more than an image
shaped by the imagination out of the sensory data offered to the
mind. It is the distorting mirror in which the "divinity in Man"
first recognizes itself; it cannot, however, truly know itself by gazing

upon its own mirror image. Thus, in the stanza quoted above, the
divinity within Shelley calls upon the poet to "come forth" from
the mirror world of images and know himself "aright." He must
dart his spirit bevond the range of his own shaping power, which
isthe range of Urania, until "its spacious might/Satiate the void
circumference." Confronted by this vast abyss, which to the physical
eye is nothingness, the heart, so long dependent upon the senses
 — —
Adonais • 671

to guide its promptings, must remain detached, lest it sink back

into that "pendulous earth" which now called upon to abandon.
it is

Shelley is describing the suicidal moment seen, not as defeat, but

as victory. Death is the awakening to life, to that ultimate self-
knowledge which is the goal of Eros and the purpose of the
Orphic purification rites. In his own moral defence, Shelley could
argue that in his apocalyptic vision he reveals his own "metaphysical
anatomy." 3 Within the womb of Urania, which is the womb of
time, it takes shape. He is now ready to leave the womb of his
"melancholy Mother" (20), sever the umbilical cord that attaches
him to the mythological vision of Necessity, and find his proper
abode in the kingdom of pure mind. Viewed from within the womb
of Urania, the reality of death, which is the awakening to life,

cannot be perceived. So long as Shelley functions within that illu-

sory world, his theme in Adonais is despair. Once, however, he rids

himself of that illusion, he is able completely to reverse his per-
spective and see not only himself but the universe aright (343-8).

Peace, peace! heis not dead, he doth not sleep

He hath awakened from the dream of life

Tis we, who lost in stormv visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.

It is the absence of this apocalyptic awakening from "the dream

of life" that largely limits the earlier vision of Alastor to the first

two movements of Adonais. Alastor presents, however ambiguously,

the triumph of Necessity; Adonais presents, however ambiguously,
the triumph over Necessity. Viewed within the anagogical per-
spective of Adonais, the poet's vision of the ideal in Alastor is

indeed a "mad trance" in which the poet struggles with what

D'Holbach himself declared to be mere "phantoms," mere "in-
vulnerable nothings." Shelley, striving in Alastor to break free of
the rational grip of the mechanistic philosophv by exploring the
realm of his imagination, presents an image of the poet whose
vision, like Rousseau's vision of Iris in The Triumph of Life, has
turned into a nightmare. Thus, the passion quickened by the poet's
vision of the "veiled maid" (151) is "like the fierce fiend of a
distempered dream" (225). The passion burns in his breast like
the poison of a "green serpent" (228). It is to this image of the
poet that Shelley returns at the end of his career. Indeed, Shelley's
portrayal of himself in Adon nis as one crushed and repelled by that
which attracts him is precisely the image which he constructs of
the poet in Alastor. With this difference, however: Shelley in

3. Mrs. Shelley's Preface to 1839 edition of Shelley's poems {Poetical Works, p. x).
 :

672 - Ross Woodman

Adonais views the poet in Alastor with the ironic detachment of
one who has worked out an affirmative answer to the question that
obsesses the poet who found an "untimely tomb" (50)

Does the dark gate of death

Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
Oh Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds,
sleep?
And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake,
Lead only to a black and watery depth,
While death's blue vault, with loathiest vapours hung,
Where every shade which the foul grave exhales
Hides its dead eye from the detested day,
Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms? 4
Attached to the power which "kindles from above" (378), Shel-
ley is able in the last section of Adonais to view with new under-

standing its modification in that which "sustains it from beneath."

So long as "the many" which "change and pass" can be viewed in
the anagogical focus of "the One" which "remains" (460), Shelley
can rejoice in the evidence of his own and Keats's spirit in the
infinite variety of Nature's music. Both poets have for a time
coalesced with Nature's "plastic stress" (381), though neither poet
when thus immersed can properly grasp the divine reality, the
"ideal prototype," behind what was being shaped.
In his Defence of Poetry (Julian, VII, 136), Shelley writes: "This
instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable
in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under
the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the
very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of
accounting to itself for the origin, the graduations, or the media of
the process." What is being shaped by the artist is the image of
his own divinity, of which, until he confronts that image, he re-

mains unaware. But once he is aware, the image as such no longer

attracts him, for he has awakened to the reality within him that it
both conceals and reveals. For this reason, Shelley suggests, the
poet leaves his image behind where it may dwell with and in Nature.
The divinity in the poet, like God in the great creation myths,
creates out of matter His own image and then withdraws into
Himself, leaving behind His own visionary form which is the
reality both of Nature and of art. In this sense, Keats "is made one
with Nature," and his voice is heard "in all her music" (370-1).
Beyond that, however, like the God without creation alone in the
omnipotence of His own mind, the divinity within Keats resides.
This ultimate dimension of Shelley's vision is the anagogic.
From the outset of his early training in the occult, Shelley in-

4. Alastor (211-19). Shelley in this ele- poem is perhaps best understood when
giac poem reveals a dissatisfaction with read in the light of Adonais, the first two
a mechanistic philosophy for which he movements of which recreate its vision,
had not as yet found a substitute. The
 Adonais • 673
stinctively sought for some hidden meaning in whatever he read.
On the surface, often expressing the poet's conscious intention, he
saw "a thin disguise of circumstance" behind which the poet's real
intention lay buried. Those who could penetrate below that surface
and discover what lay hidden were the elect, whom Shelley defines
as "the more select classes of poetical readers." 5 Like so many
aristocrats who reject the social hierarchy on the grounds that it is
unjust, Shelley found an outlet for his inherited sense of class in
the occult, where he was able to recreate on the inner levels of
consciousness what he had rejected on the outer. Shelley was
perfectly at home in the psychic hierarchy of the occult in which
all men
were judged not according to the accidents of family or
more fundamental
school or economic position, but according to the
criterion of psychic penetration. While, in theory, Shelley was
committed to universal love and brotherhood, in fact he lived and
wrote by a rigid code in terms of which men were accepted or
rejected according to their degree of spiritual sensibility. Thus
Shelley was actively repelled by the gross insensitivity of the
familiar world; so acute, in fact, was his repulsion that he spent
most of his life as a poet attempting to destroy that world. Of
course, like most prophets functioning outside the established order,
Shelley hoped that, if he annihilated the world of custom and habit,
all men would find their way into his own kingdom of the elect.

He was subject to the Romantic illusion that all men were po-
tentially poets, prophets and visionaries. It is not surprising, there-
fore, that in Shellev's Heaven only the poets are to be found.
Shelley's Heaven is an exclusive club to which belong only the
aristocrats of the imagination.
Boris Pasternak has vividly described this peculiar character of
the Romantic genius, which is at the same time the Romantic
failure. "In the poet who imagines himself the measure of life and
pays for this with his life," he writes,

the Romantic conception manifests itself brilliantly and irre-

futably in his symbolism, that is in everything which touches
upon Orphism and Christianity imaginatively. But outside . . .

the legend, the Romantic scheme is false. The poet who is its
foundation is inconceivable without the nonpoets who must bring
him into relief. . Romanticism always needs philistinism and
. .

with the disappearance of the petty bourgeosie loses half its

poetical content. 6

So long as Shelley stands in need of the familiar world as some-

thing both to oppose and recreate, he has a background in terms of

5. A Defence of Poetry, Julian, VII, 121; Lindsay Drummond, 1945), pp. 115-16.
Preface to Prometheus Unbound, p. 207. Boris Pasternak is discussing Mayakov-
6. Boris Pasternak, "The Safe Conduct" sky's art in the passage quoted,
in The Collected Prose Works (London:
 :

674 • Ross Woodman

which his dialectic of vision can be seen. He has his materials.
When, however, as in the closing stanzas of Adonais, his background
dissolves and he is left with the "intense inane" (P.U., III, iv, 204),
he moves, as he himself realizes, beyond the reach of art. And it is
precisely in this anagogical sphere that the contrast between Dante
and Shelley comes into sharp relief. While Dante can be blinded by
the radiance of his empyrean, he lived in the. midst of a tradition
which seeks at every turn to reveal the invisible world to the out-
ward sense. For this reason, he can argue that the literal level con-
tains the anagogical. His art is supported bv his belief in a God
who incarnated Himself in flesh without at the same time losing His
divinity. For all his overwhelming sense of mystery and wonder as
he scales with Beatrice the circles of Heaven, Dante also knows that
he is moving over familiar theological ground at every point open
to the intellect. His ascent to the tenth Heaven is a training in
revealed theology under the direction of Beatrice issuing ultimately
in the intellectual love of God. Shelley, in contrast, is forced to
abandon all and rational supports, and find his sole
his sensible
support in that divine madness which Plato ironically describes in
the Ion. Writing within an esoteric tradition both alien and isolated
from the European traditions of thought which surrounded him,
he is forced ultimately to look into himself and find his divinity
there. He has somehow to make his poetic faith, which in the end
he recognizes as a "willing suspension of disbelief," a matter of
religious faith, which is to say, a matter of absolute truth. While,
on one level of anagogy, Shelley can declare that Keats has been
absorbed into the "white radiance of Eternity," on another level he
can see himself, in setting out to join Keats, "borne darkly, fear-
fully, afar" (492). There is some slight, lingering suggestion of the

daemonic in this closing stanza of Adonais. Again, as in Alastor, he

makes use of the image of the little boat hurled upon the tempest
to describe his own spirit setting out on its final journey (488-91)

my spirit's bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

What emerges in Shelley's vision of death in the closing section

of Adonais is a revelation of the poet's effort to drive his will towards
an anagogical focus. By 1821, the realm of mythopoeic literature
had become Shelley's familiar world; in his Defence of Poetry- he
had demonstrated to himself his mastery of it. But now he is
forced to admit, as Plato admits in his seventh Epistle, that he
has not composed, nor ever can compose, a work which deals with
the actual object of his quest. "Acquaintance with it," Plato writes,
"must come rather after a long period of attendance or instruction
 :

[Hellas] - 615
in the subject itself and of close acquaintance when suddenly like
a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at
once becomes self-sustaining" (341D). In the concluding stanzas
of Adonais, Shelley must upon that self-sustaining fire
rely entirely
within his own had gradually been generated through his
soul which
period of instruction in the occult. "The fire for which all thirst,"
he writes, "now beams on me,/Consuming the last clouds of cold
mortality" (485-6).
It is, however, those "last clouds" that in some sense hold him
back. Thus, he struggles to persuade himself (469-77)

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

Thy hopes gone before: from all things here
are
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is passed from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, —the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais oh, hasten thither,
calls!
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

And moves restlessly, like some caged

yet he does linger. His spirit
animal, from Nature where he catches the echoes of Adonais
beckoning him, to a vision of Keats assuming his position on the
vacant throne among the immortals, to the ruins of Rome and
Keats's grave where he seeks "shelter in the shadow of the tomb"
(458) Finally, however, he moves beyond all these images of death;
.

the breath of Adonais, suggested in the "low wind," descends upon

him. The "soul of Adonais" burns "through the inmost veil of
Heaven" (493-4) and, as in the closing lines of Epipsychidion,
Shelley feels himself consumed in that fire. Setting forth, he sees
"Earth's shadows fly" (461) as the "massy earth and sphered skies
are riven" (491). He has smashed the "dome of many-coloured
glass." Before him is spread "the white radiance of Eternity" which,
in a combination of dread and ecstasy, he images (one final support)
as the beacon star of Adonais.

CARL WOODRING
[Hellas^
For his last dramatic poem Shelley returned to a vision of the
beautiful but a vision grounded in the actual and the
and the just,

contemporaneous. At the age of twenty-nine, he had an oppor-

tunity to construct a myth around an actual revolution in progress.

t Reprinted by permission of the pub- Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copy-

lishers from Carl Woodring, Politics in right 1970, by the President and Fellows
English Romantic Poetry, Cambridge, of Harvard College, pp. 313-319.
676 - Carl Woodring
Hellas: A Drama, planned and executed almost as rapidly
Lyrical
as Coleridge and Southey had composed and published The Fall
of Robespierre, had a degree of daring beyond the hot topicality
that it shared with their ephemeral play. 1 Robespierre, however
recently dead, was safely so. The French Revolution continued, but
the cycle of events reported in the play by Coleridge and Southey
had come to an end with the execution of Robespierre. The uprising
by Shelley's Greeks, still in its early stages, was chaotic and seem-
ingly ineffectual. As fervently as he hoped for a Greek victory, he
could not prophesy it as a military event of the near future. Never-
theless, he had practical aims in the rapidity of composition. His
play was a kind of spiritual benefit for the combatant Greeks. As
I hope to show from its references to Britain, it also possessed the

material aim of an actor's benefit: to raise funds in a worthy cause.

For his declared model Shelley looked back to The Persians.
Aeschylus had celebrated the defeat of Xerxes' fleet at Salamis, in
the historic present of drama, eight vears after the event. As part
of the feigned contemporaneity, the Ghost of Darius foretells
further defeat at Plataea, which in history follows a few months
after Salamis. Without feigning, Hellas gives heightened details of
current skirmishes between Greek and Turk while the future of the
revolution is in strong doubt.
For performance before Greeks as victors, Aeschylus' setting of
The Persians in a remote hamlet of the suffering enemy is deco-
rously humble. Action reported in Hellas scatters geographically
from Bucharest to the Sea of Crete, but the performed action occurs
in Constantinople, at the seat of the Sultan's power. The immediate
need for hope and aspiration, as the converse of a victor's need
for humility, explains Shelley's shift from Aeschylus' peripheral
place of suffering to the focal place of decisions. Setting supports
theme: fear sits on the tyrant's throne.
Shellev followed The
Persians in awarding the chief roles to the
enemy. Although Hellas does not stir the audience to pitv for the
whining but dangerous enslavers of Greece, Shelley refrains from
making a monster of Mahmud II. Generously, Aeschylus' chorus
also is Persian; Shelley, in contrast, provides his Turks with a chorus
of enslaved Greek women. Without Greeks in the cast, no lyrics
of affirmation would have been possible.
Amid other parallels, there are further departures from Aeschylus,
equally pointed. Aeschylus' Atossa, widow of Darius and mother of
Xerxes, recounts her dream of Xerxes' defeat. When Shelley's
Mahmud enters with Ahasuerus (Shelley's old friend the Wander-
ing Jew), Mahmud has already told his dream offstage and learned
that Ahasuerus has no more power of divination than sages who

1. See Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge, pp. 194-198.

 —
[Hellas] • 677
lack his longevity. (So much for religion; as Manfred puts it to
the old abbot, "I say to thee —Retire!")
The effective echo of
Atossa had occurred earlier in Hellas, when Mahmud, in his dark
despair, called Hassan's attention to the clouded crescent moon
beneath a single insolent star, "Wan emblem of an empire fading
now!" So memorably does the Ghost of Darius condemn Xerxes'
hybris that Shelley can afford to make Mahmud the essence of
despair; a mere allusion to Aeschylus' memorable lines suggests the
evil of tyrannic pride. And the availability of The Persians — in fact
the very existence of Aeschylus' historical subject — invites such
allusion throughout Hellas. A semichorus sings in Mahmud's ear of
how Persia was followed by "Discord, Macedon, and Rome" and
"lastly thou," where thou can be construed interchangeably as
Mahmud II or "Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime." Hellas
traces the law by which the Turks must be driven out as the
Persians were driven out.
Four messengers, in addition to Hassan, bring word of reversals
that Shelley knew about from newspapers, from Prince
Italian
Alexander Mavrocordatos, and from insurgents allowed passage
through Pisa. Mavrocordatos taught Mary Shelley Greek in return
for English until 26 June 1821, when he sailed to join the battle
(and later to become the first President of Greece). After he left,
one of his cousins kept the Shelleys abreast of news and rumors.
With such informants between us and the record, it is pointless
to raise questions of historical accuracy in the messengers' reports
to Mahmud. More to the point than historical accuracy, the drama
bore the clear intent to celebrate the rising of the Greeks in such
a way as to arouse English interest, English funds, and patriotic
shame at the roles of such diplomats as the English ambassador
at Constantinople — tools, to Shelley, of Metternich — in keeping the
rest of Europe neutral:

And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble

When ye desert the free (1000-1001)

Naturally Hellas does not describe the barbaric slaughter then prac-
ticed at every opportunity by the Greeks. In this work Shelley tries

to persuade.
When he began to write in October 1821, Byron had awakened
much of the Continent, as Harold Nicolson noted in Byron, the
Last Journey, but had not awakened London. The policy of Castle-
reagh, out through Lord Strangford, the ambassador at
carried
Constantinople, was to inhabit the Greeks in order to discourage a
Russian war against Turkev. When Hellas appeared in February
1822, the London supporters of the Greeks were still a small band.
A general change of sentiment was yet to come.
One would expect in Hellas allusions to other struggles for inde-
678 • CarlWoodring
pendence as a way of heightening the theme, and one finds them;
but the knowing Second Messenger condemns British "oaths broke
in Genoa and in Norway" for a strictly practical purpose. Castle-
reagh's opponents had protested for six years the ceding of Genoa to
Piedmont and of Norway to Bernadotte of Sweden, both by treaties
initially secret. Hellas argues that abandonment of Greece to the
Turks will constitute a betrayal similar to these. In such defenses
of independence one notices, incidentally, the shading of cosmopoli-
tanism into nationalism. Freedom for every man becomes freedom
for weak countries.
Leigh Hunt, in the "Political Examiner" of 7 October 1821, calls
upon English students to raise money for the Greeks. In parallel
with the argument of Hellas, he bases his plea chiefly on the revival
of high respect for Greek literature and sculpture; he quotes The
Revolt of Islam; he conveys news of the Greeks received through
the Shelleys; and he refers scornfully to the rape of Norway. That
rape was one of only two previous occasions, says Hunt, when a
desire to join the battle overcame his objection to "wars and fight-
ings" as means of solving public differences. Hellas, which shares
several other specific details with this editorial and obviously has
some of the same purposes, was written by a would-be pacifist who
has now chosen to praise "wars and fightings." Pacifism turns out
to have been a limiting rule of reason.
Assigned the problem of defending a rebellion, Hellas starts right
offby recognizing the "Spirit of God" in Thermopylae, Marathon,
and Philippi as well as in the continued progress of freedom through
Milan, Florence, Albion, Switzerland, "far Atlantis," France, Ger-
many, Spain, and now again in Greece. At Philippi, Freedom was
like "an eagle on a promontory"; at the right hand of Destiny sits
"eagle-winged victory." Elsewhere in the drama, too, Russia, al-

though condemned as an eagle hovering over an entangled kite and

crane, and furthermore equated with a tiger gloating over the stag
at bay, is forced to share the eagle of glory with more attractive

states.Given the theory that volcanic eruptions relieve the pressure

and thus prevent greater ruin bv earthquakes, and given its meta-
phoric meaning that revolution stops anarchy, then the report of
the Third Messenger that Crete and Cyprus catch "from each
other's veins" (a pun) both "volcano-fire and earthquake-spasm"
serves as an admission, or at least as a recognition, of anarchic
devastation by the Greeks. 2

2. Lines 588-589. Part of this acceptance play to assure the future shelter of a
of violence is simply the theory that Greek semichorus. But the Voice speaks
"Revenge and Wrong bring forth their for the self-destructive pride of empire,
kind .
." (729). In his edition of the
. Health for the Greeks must wait on the
poems (London, 1911, II, 471) C. D. Lo- other side of the self-inflicted ruin. Not
cock found it strange that a "Voice with- only Hellas, but also Prometheus Un-
out," obviously hostile to the Greeks, bound, is much concerned with the prin-
should be invoked in later stages of the ciple of imperial self-destruction.
 [Hellas] 679
Shelley's letters show that, like the Examiner, he did not wish
a Greek victory beholden to Russian strength, but Hellas condemns
Russia not only for the exercise of power but also for her failure
to use it against the infidel, when the Patriarch of Constantinople
was hanged in retribution for the slaughter of Turks in the Morea.
England should take no lessons from Russia, and should exchange
no declarations of common concern (lines 307-311, 536-545).
Hellas also shares with Hunt's editorial an unexpectedly favorable
treatment of "the philosophical part of Christianity, as distinguished
from the dogmas that have hitherto been confounded with and per-
verted it." As often as Shelley had condemned the union of armed
force and religion, the inclination of his presumed readers to support
a Christian thrall against a Moslem master was too tempting to
ignore. Russia's failure to avenge the archpriest in Constantinople,
which Shelley would normally approve, becomes an evil in Hellas.
Internally, too, the drama generated a more elevated role for Chris-
tianity than the author in repose could endorse. Christian truth
killed Greek myth, sings the Chorus, although the author interrupts
with a note to say that the truth is relative. The Chorus puts it

with less offense: "Worlds on worlds ever/From creation

are rolling
to decay." Again, in the final prophetic lyric, although the Chorus
predicts a reawakening of Saturn and Love "more bright and
good . than One who rose," the author takes the precaution
. .

of elucidating: the "sublime human character of Jesus Christ" was

deformed among men by identification with Jehovah, whose fol-
lowers have in fact tortured and murdered the true followers of
Christ. Partly Shelley was clarifying the position he had always held;
partly he had greatly increased his esteem for Jesus; and partly he
had learned to live with His disciples. This change goes hand in
glove with his acceptance of violence as the means of securing
independence.
The most is its concept
persuasive excuse for violence in Hellas
of Hellenism. The from the cage of opportune rheto-
play frees itself

ric in its celebration of the Hellenic Spirit. The Chorus offers a

cyclic view of history. Time, as sometimes depicted in the hand

of Saturn, is the ouroboros, the snake with its tail in its mouth.
In a Humean version of Descartes, Ahasuerus disposes of the future
along with the past: "Nought is but that which feels itself to be."
Thought is Empire is the collective error of perceiving man
eternal.
as a part of time, place, circumstance, blood, and matter. Cities,
"on which Empire sleeps enthroned," all bow "their towered crests
to mutability." Empire and all else that mutability rules must pass.
Hellenism, which is freedom of the human spirit, breaks out of this
cycle of time, space, and material nothingness. Freedom belongs
to Thought, with its "quick elements" Will, Passion, Reason, and
Imagination. Thought cannot die; freedom therefore is immortal.
680 • CarlWoodring
As thought cannot die, eternal Necessity works through it rather
than through matter. 3
Hellenism lives on, as in "young Atlantis" (the United States),
which also shows promise of reviving the material strength of
ancient Rome (SP, 475:992-995). Yet the final chorus, "The
world's great age begins anew," is no more limited to the United
States than Hellenism is limited to Troy, Ulysses, and the Argo-
nauts. Hellenism is the freedom to improve on Hellenic history
and legend. The fourth stanza of the final chorus ("Oh, write no
more the tale of Troy,/If earth Death's scroll must be!") and the
last stanza ("Oh, cease! must hate and death return?") do not

represent a cancellation of hope that the "world's great age begins

anew." If the Greeks win independence or if the spirit of Hellenism
prevails anywhere, then the new Athens, wherever it may be geo-
graphically, will be free of the blood that marked the fall of Troy
and the history of Athens to date. The final chorus puts some of
this in the future, some in the conditional, and some in the present
tense, because the renovation of Greece is part of a shining idea
universally valid, but Shelley expresses wryly, in a note, the limits
of this idea when expressed as hope: "Prophecies of wars, and
rumours of wars, etc., may safely be made by poet or prophet in
any age, but to anticipate however darkly a period of regeneration
and happiness is a more hazardous exercise of the faculty which
bards possess or feign." The bard sees in the uprising of the Greeks,
where it was unlooked for but is uniquely appropriate, a symptom

of what may be the ultimate realization of man's continuing hope

for peace. In words that conclude "The Sensitive Plant," it is a
"modest creed," yet pleasant "if one considers it." Given favorable
signs, the bard need not drain the urn of "bitter prophecy" to its
dregs.
The two major choral hymns embodv speculative hope. The work
as a whole, a "mere improvise" according to Shelley's Preface, em-
bodies a lyrical expression of his "intense sympathy" with the Greek
cause, which he offers as a replacement for the prevailing policy,

3. Lines 763-806. For a time I was in- the fading of a "radiant mirage" (p.
clined to take Mahmud's expressions of 165). But I now conclude, first, that
fatalism, as at 642—647, and a Semi- Mahmud's repeated expressions concern-
chorus' assignment of ruin and renova- ing "the omnipotent hour to which are
tion to Destiny, the world's "eyeless yoked" all men and things (189) belong
charioteer" (711), as signs of a break in to his own character, and second, that
Shelley's doctrine of Necessity. Necessity the choruses, who protest too much in
is taken as equivalent in this poem to their search to excuse the expediency of
"oriental fatalism" by Douglas Bush, resistance, offer aspects, however incon-
Mythology and the Romantic Tradition sistent, of the Shelleyan insistence that
in English Poetry (Harvard University apparent retribution is actually inevitable
Press, 1937), p. 163. On such matters self-destruction: "Revenge and Wrong
Bush is seldom wrong, and he goes on bring forth their kind .
." (729).
.

to read the conclusion of the poem as

 Shelley s Lyrics • 681

whereby the English "permit their own oppressors to act according

to their natural sympathy with the Turkish tyrant" (SP, 446, 447).
With Hellas Shelley published "Lines Written on Hearing the
News of the Death of Napoleon," expressing mock surprise that
the earth still moves. Mother Earth declares that this life and death,
like others, warms her: "I feed on whom I fed." The new revolu-
tions will be better.

'Still alive and still bold,' shouted Earth,

'I grow bolder and still more bold.'
(SP, 641:25-26)

Earth requires for hope only the endless renewal of the seasons.
It is true that she once invested hope in Bonaparte, but she has

nothing to lament in the fading of glory that was "terror and blood
and gold." The energy of his spirit will pass into glories yet to come.

G. M. MATTHEWS
Shelley's Lyrics t

It is easy to slip into the assumption that 'self-expression' was

among the objectives of the early English Romantics. T. S. Eliot
may unwittingly have made it easier, by combining a distaste for
Romanticism with is not a turning loose
his principle that 'Poetry
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality'; if so, this would be
ironical, for it is from the Romantics that his principle derives.
When Eliot says: 'the more more completely
perfect the artist, the
separate in him will be the man who
and the mind which
suffers
creates', he is developing Shelley's view that 'The poet and the
man are two different natures'; 1 when he affirms, of the poet, that
'emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well
as those familiar to him', he is generalizing from Shelley's endeavour
in The Cenci 'to produce a delineation of passions which I had
never participated in'. 2 The word 'self-expression' dates from the
nineties, and the idea that an artist wants to express his own
'individuality' in art is alien to the early Romantic poets, all of
whom would have repudiated, or did explicitly rule out, any such
notion. Shelley would have had difficulty in even making sense of it.
Every great poet, he agreed left the imprint of an individual mind

t Matthews' essay is here reprinted in permission of the publisher.

its entirety from The Morality of Art: 1. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight, ed. F. L. Jones, Oxford (1964), II. 310.
ed. D. W. Jefferson (London: Routledge 2. Letters, II. 189.
& Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 195-209, by
 a

682 • G. M Matthews
on all his works, but that imprint was the brand of his limitation
as much was a by-product of his real aims.
as of his greatness; it
For an artist to seek, or a critic to praise, 'self-expression' would
have seemed absolutely meaningless to him.
This has never deterred critics from assuming not only that the
lyrical heart-cry is Shelley's typical utterance, but that he is liable to

utter this cry at virtually any moment. Charles" Kingsley and F. R.

Leavis have recognized even the Catholic murderess Beatrice Cenci
as Percy B. Shelley. Turn but a petticoat and start a luminous wing.
David Masson decided in 1875 that Shelley's poetry was 'nothing
else than an effluence from his personality', 3 and in 1965 the medical
psychologist Dr. Eustace Chesser declared that Shelley 'does not
even notice the existence of the hard, external world which pays no
attention to his wishes. His gaze is directed all the time on his own
emotional states'. 4 The present essay tries to remove a major obstacle
in the way of a more intelligent discussion; and it is first necessary
to see in plain figures what Shelley's contribution as a lyrical poet
really was.
From Original Poetry (1810) to Hellas (1822) Shelley published
twelve volumes of verse. Seven of these contain no separate lyrics.

Original Poetry had four 'personal' lyrics, 5 all bearing on Shelley's

attachment to Harriet Grove. Posthumous Fragments of Margaret
Nicholson was artfully-packaged propaganda, and its concluding
poem is the only personal one it contains. Alastor has ten shorter
poems: three addressed to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Napoleon
respectively; two translations; and again one 'personal' lyric, the
'Stanzas. —
April 1814', which concern the Boinville-Turncr en-
tanglement. Rosalind and Helen (1819) has three shorter poems,
'Lines written in the Euganean Hills', 'Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty', and 'Ozymandias', the second of which contains a striking
autobiographical passage. The 'Euganean Hills' I believe to have
even less reference to Shelley himself than Donald Reiman has
already ably argued. 6 Prometheus Unbound contains nine shorter
poems, including the allegorical 'Sensitive Plant'; 7 once again, the
only lyric with unequivocal personal application is the 'Ode to the
West Wind'. A total of seven or eight 'personal' lyrics in twelve
volumes of verse, only half of these in the last eleven volumes —
3. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and other Hills",' PMLA, 11. September 1962. 404-
Essays, p. 129. 13.
4. Shelley and Zastrozzi: self-revelation 7. 'There is no justification for the fre-
of a neurotic, p. 29. quent definition of the Sensitive Plant as
5. By 'personal' lyrics, I intend (a) short Shelley saw himself or as a special cate-
poems that name names ('What would gory of man, such as the Poet The. . .

cure, that would kill me, Jane*), and (b) Garden ... is the total animate uni-
poems that seem recognizably biographi- verse as it is experienced by man, the
cal ('Her voice did quiver as we parted'). Sensitive Plant.' (E. R. Wasserman, The
(b) is, however, a very unsafe category. Subtler Language, Baltimore (1959), pp.
6. 'Structure, Symbol, and Theme in 257-8).
"Lines written among the Euganean
 Shelley s Lyrics • 683

modest one might think, for a monotonously self-regarding

ration,
narcissist whose genius was essentially lyrical. This is not quite the
full story, of course. Two volumes had 'personal' dedications; Shel-

ley himself called Epipsychidion 'an idealized history of my life and

feelings' 8 (though nobody can explain the history it records, and it
is not a lyric) Two other proposed volumes would have affected the
.

statistics: the early 'Esdaile' collection (at least 57 poems, of which

about 23 have direct personal significance), and Julian and Maddalo,

intended to contain, Shelley said, 'all my saddest verses raked up
into one heap'. 9 But these were not published, and after a few un-
answered inquiries Shelley seems to have lost interest. Epipsychi-
dion, in an anonymous edition of 100 copies, was suppressed by its
author within twelve months. 1 Shelley also cancelled a passage in-
tended for the Adonais preface 'relating to my private wrongs'. 2
Medwin's story that the poet's self-portrait in Adonais was also
'afterwards expunged from it'
3 may be a muddle, but it is a fact that
Shelley had enjoined his publisher to make an 'omission' in the
second edition, 4 while the draft proves that the 'frail Form' who

comes to mourn Adonais was almost certainly not, in

in stanza 31
conception, Shelley himself but some idealized figure born not later
than Buonaparte and contrasted with him perhaps Rousseau. 5 —
From Alastor onwards, then, Shelley actually published in book
form (excluding dedications) four personal or semi-personal poems:
'Stanzas. —
April 1814', 'The Euganean Hills', 'Intellectual Beauty',
and the 'West Wind'. His ten poems in periodicals were all offered
anonymously; of these only 'On a Faded Violet' and possibly 'The
Question' might be called 'personal' ('Sunset' and 'Grief appeared
with all the personal parts omitted). Epipsychidion was repudiated
and suppressed. Four of Adonais' s 55 stanzas are personal, but
allegorized. Some of Rosalind and Helen was suggested by a family
friendship. This is all. It now seems necessary to ask: how is it that
so reticent a poet has gained a reputation for emotional exhibition-
ism? Shelley's evolution into a lyricist was accidental. Like most
poets, he bestowed, over the years, a few 6 complimentary or occa-
sional verses on his intimates, less in the manner of a celebrity dis-
pensing autographs than of an uncle covertly fishing out tips. They
were private gifts, and Shelley often kept no copy. 'For Jane &
8. Letters, II. 434. 42-3 of Verse and Prose from the MSS,
9. Letters, II. 246. ed. Shelley-Rolls and Ingpen, 1934.
1. Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine II, 6. Cold statistics are again helpful. From
February 1822, p. 238; Oilier to Mary 1816, Shelley is known to have given one
Shelley, 17 November 1823, Shelley and poem to Claire Clairmont, and (prob-
Mary IV. 990-1. ably) to Emilia Viviani; two to the
2. Letters, II. 306. Hunts; three to the Gisbornes; four to
3. Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), his wife; six to Sophia Stacey; and ten
p. 314n. to the Williamses —twenty-seven alto-
4. Letters, II. 396. gether, in six years. Two of these were
5. Some of the relevant stanzas are nos. not lyrics, and five others were commis-
I— III, XII-XIV, printed on pp. 37-8, sioned contributions to plays.
 —
684 • G. M. Matthews
Williams alone to see', he directed on the manuscript of The Mag-

netic Lady', and 'Do not say it is mine to any one', on that of
'Remembrance'; 'The enclosed must on no account be published'
('Letter to Maria Gisbome'); —
if you will tell no one whose thev
'

are' ('Lines on a Dead Violet'). Later, his widow tried to retrieve

everything possible from his worksheets and acquaintances, and was
able to publish about no short poems and fragments by 1840, when
her second edition of the Poetical Works appeared. Many of Shel-
ley's best-known lyrics now first emerged: the 'Stanzas in Dejection',
'O world! O life! O time!', 'I fear thy kisses', 'When the lamp is

shattered', 'Music when soft voices die', 'With a Guitar, to Jane'.

Mary Shelley was right to print all she could find, but it meant
salvaging the equivalents of doodles on the telephone-pad, such as
'O Mary dear, that you were here', as well as drafts whose illegibility
made them half-incomprehensible, such as 'Rough wind, that moan-
est loud'. This has not worried the critics much, who have rarely
questioned a poem's origins or purpose, being content merely to
find it exquisite or shoddy; some, indeed, outdoing Coleridge,
profess to be given most pleasure by Shelley when he is not per-
fectly understandable. Swinburne hailed one half-completed line as
'a thing to thrill the veins and draw tears to the eyes of all men

whose ears were not closed against all harmony', 7 and Donald Davie
has found another nonsensical fragment manly and wholesome. 8
So Mary Shelley's conscience is partly responsible for the dogma that
besides being trivial and self-obsessed, Shelley was negligent of
grammar, syntax, and logical structure, with an incapicity to punc-
tuate verging on feeblemindedness. 9
Yet although Shelley's negligence is axiomatic, it would not be
easv to illustrate by anvone prepared to look into the transmission
of his examples. As for self-obsession, Shellev withheld his lyrics
from publication for the same reason that Samuel Johnson wrote
his private poems in Latin: to keep them private. To treat these
intimate verses ('you may read them to Jane, but to no one else,
and yet on second thoughts I had rather you would not') as if they
were manifestoes is rather like breaking into a man's bathroom in
order to censure his habit of indecent exposure. Still, the reminder
that certain poems were printed without Shelley's consent is no
defence of their quality. It did not help poor Midas that the secret

7. Essays and Studies, 1876, pp. 229-30. ley's punctuation corrupts the sense. The
8. 'Shelley's Urbanity' (1953), rptd. in reader is given no chance to judge the
English Romantic Poets, ed. M. H. MS. punctuation for himself (Bod. MS.
Abrams, New York (1960), p. 318. Shelley e.3, f.2Iv), which in my view is
9. One experienced modern editor still careful, intelligible, and better than
maintains (Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulle- Hutchinson's. Bridges's punctilious tinker-
tin 17, (1966), pp. 20-30) that in a fully ings make good sense too, but not quite
representative passage (essentially Pro- Shelley's.
metheus Unbound III. iii. 49-62) Shel-
 :

Shcllex s I

)f his ears was only whispered into a hole in I \\. Whit tlt.it

eminder should do is inhibit an tent on a given poem's

qualities until the nature and function of the poem lu\e been in

]uired into. A straightforward example, n one, is the

Bridal Song' or 'Epithalamium' i

Here the reader must first decide w^iich of th.. us' eon
titutesthe poem. Close consideration will show that neithei o! the
irst two versions makes sense; fa vt is Shcllcv. it is
perhaps begging the question to suggest that this throws doubt on
their integrity. The 'third version' (Hutchinson tells us) derives
from Shellev's holograph, and its nsi KS makes the conjee
ture a pretty safe one that Versions One and Two represent the
foul papers and a Bad Quarto respectivelv of the authentic Version

Three. Nevertheless, one critic has thought it

admirable in its first version. In this first:

O joy! O fear! what will be done

In the absence of the sun!

— is as manly and wholesome as Suckling's 'Ballad of a Wedding'.

In the last version

O joy! O fear! there is not one

Of us can guess what may be done

In the absence of the sun . . .

— is just not true. And the familiar tone of 'Come along!' which
securely anchors the first version, is merely silly in the others. 2

The First Version begins by calling down sleep on the lovers in the
middle of begetting a child, and goes on to advocate, among other
things,what Lionel Trilling once memorably criticized in the Sexual
Behaviour of the American Male ('Haste, swift Hour, and thy flight
Oft renew'). Professor Davie's stricture on the Third Version bears
hardly on Catullus, whose Epithalamium (62) was Shelley's model.
Here is the text of the Third Version:

Boys Sing.
Night! with all thine eyes look down!
Darkness! weep thy holiest dew!
Never smiled the inconstant moon
On a pair so true.
Haste, coy hour! and quench all light,
Lest eyes see their own delight!
Haste, swift hour! and thy loved flight
Oft renew!
1. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Statesman 27 November 1964, p. 840).
Hutchinson, Oxford (1945), pp. 646-7. But the dyslogistic passages, I take it,
2. 'Shelley's Urbanity', loc. cit. part of his faith.
Professor are still
Davie has repudiated this essay (New
 —
686 • G. M. Matthews
Girls Sing.

Fairies, sprites, and

angels, keep her!
Holy stars! permit no wrong!
And return, to wake the sleeper,
Dawn, be long!
ere it

O joy! O fear! there is not one

Of us can guess what may be done
In the absence of the sun:
Come along!

Boys.
Oh! linger long, thou envious eastern lamp
In the damp
Caves of the deep!

Girls.

Nay, return, Vesper! urge thy lazy car!

Swift unbar
The gates of Sleep!

Chorus.
The golden gates of Sleep unbar,
When Strength and Beauty, met together,
Kindle their image, like a star
In a sea of glassy weather.
May the purple mist of love
Round them rise, and with them move,
Nourishing each tender gem
Which, like flowers, will burst from them.
As the fruit is to the tree
May their children ever be! 3
In a conventional Epithalamium, the desire and misgiving which
both partners feel are polarized on to a reluctant bride, with her
mock-modest virgin attendants, and an avid groom, incited by his
troop of wanton boys. Catullus's girls ask, 'Hespere, qui caelo fertur
crudelior ignis?', to which the boys retort, 'Hespere, qui caelo lucet
jucundior ignis?' 4 and later (still addressing Hesperus) comment:

at libet innuptis ficto te carpcre questu.

quid turn si carpunt tacita quern mente requirunt? (36-7)

which Peter Whigham has rendered:

for maidens' acts belie their mock complaints,

affecting aversion
for what they most desire 5

3. Text from Hutchinson, p. 723, with the "Hesperus, what flame shines more re-
singular gate corrected in line 23. splendently in heaven?" [Editors' note.]
4.The girls: "Hesperus, what flame glows 5. The Poems of Catullus, Penguin
more cruelly in heaven?" The boys: Classics 1966, p. 133.
 Shelley s Lyrics • 687
Mock-trepidation, 'tender-whimpring-maids', 6 were essential to the
ceremony. But the girls' feigned ignorance of what the lovers will do
in bed is stressed here for an important reason. This was com-
missioned work, written for the climactic scene of a play, a wedding-
banquet in a 'magnificent apartment' where wealth literally rivals
nobility. To compare it with Suckling's mock-turnip 'Ballad of a
Wedding' is like comparing a State funeral with Finnegan's wake.
The plot is that of Novel IX from the tenth day of the Decameron,
and concerns a Pavian wife's promise to wait a year, a month, and
a day after her husband's departure to the Crusade before remarry-
ing. The time having expired, she unwillingly consents to marry a
former suitor; but after the ceremony her consort reappears, the new
bridegroom renounces his claim, and the play ends in amity. The
girls' declaration, therefore, that not one of them can guess what

may be done in the absence of the sun just is true: contrary to every
expectation, nothing will be done —
not, at any rate, by those newly
licensed to do it. How the 'tone' of a poem can be so confidently
criticized without the slightest interest in that poem's provenance
or purpose is a mystery darker than Hymen's.
The first line presents in one immediate image the antiphonal
unity which structures the poem: the sociable stars are invited to
watch the lovers with the voyeur relish of the males who are singing,
but also with the bashful, downcast gaze of the bride. The lovers
are to be seen and unseen at once, hidden in darkness under the
eyes of stars, moon, and one another; for this is a supremely social
and an intensely private occasion. The weeping of 'holiest dew'
suggests both the modest sanctity of the encounter and its fruitful
sensuality; 7 and although the darkness weeps, the moon smiles.
These opposites re-echo in the two invocations to the hour of union,
a coy hour from one viewpoint, moonless 'lest eyes see their own
delight' (i.e. lest eachis abashed to see his own pleasure mirrored

on the other's eyes: a variant of Blake), a swift hour from the other
viewpoint, transient yet renewable like the moon and an hour —
which, after all, both sides want to hasten on. The girls' opening
appeal, made jointly to fairies and angels, indicates (like Shelley's
word phryghte written playfully above the text) just how serious it
all really is.

As in Catullus, the verbal dance now brings boys and girls into
direct opposition. The planet Venus, whose setting as Hesperus and
rising as Phosphorus symbolizes the bedding and rising of a married
couple, is besought by the boys to stay hidden so as to lengthen the

6. Herrick, 'A Nuptiall Song on Sir O! give them [the lovers] active heat
Clipseby Crew and his Lady', line 91. And moisture, both compleat:
7. Compare Herrick: ('An Epithalamie to Sir Thomas
These precious-pearly-purling tears Southwell and his Ladle').
But spring from ceremonious fears ...
688 • G. M. Matthews
night, by the girls to return quickly and allow the bride to sleep.
—
Unbarring the gates of sleep admitting the lovers to their ultimate
—
peace deftly completes the ceremony whose public end was the
shutting of the bedroom door. Finally, both sides drop their feigned
postures to join in the traditional invocation for fruitfulness in the
marriage: the lovers are to sleep only after duplicating their qualities
in a child, as the 'wished starre' of love itself fs mirrored in a calm

sea. The sea image enters in because it is from across the Mediter-
ranean that 'glassy weather' is even now returning in the person of
Adalette's true husband; while the meeting of 'Strength and Beauty'
reminds us ironically of the unauthorized union of Mars and Venus,
caught in the act by Venus's true husband and exposed to the
laughter of the assembled gods. Golden gates of sleep and purple
mist of love sound like poeticisms, but even the make-up matches:
these were the colours of the god Hymen, croceo velatus amictu,
and 'purple' was used atmospherically, in both classical and English
epithalamia, of the bliss environing a bridal. 8 The poem is concise,
shapely, preciselymindful of its lineage yet perfectly
pointed;
attuned to its own dramatic purpose. No one would call it an
important poem, least of all its author, yet it is almost faultless of
its kind, a first-rate piece of craftsmanship.
The kind is not easy to define. It might be called a dramatic
imitation into the spirit of which the poet enters with such decep-
tive wholeness that the pretence —
the gap between the playfulness
and the absorbed gravity of the manner constitutes an
of the role —
uncommon sort of poetic wit. A splendid example of this wit is the
maligned 'Indian Serenade'. Shelley did not publish this poem
either,but the titles of all the existing versions stress that it is

Indian and for singing. was in fact composed to be sung by

It

Sophia Stacey, 9 and it is a dramatic imitation of an Oriental love-

song, not just in atmosphere, the potency of which has always been
recognized, but in its entirety. A proper imitation of the mode
represented by the following lines required emotional abandonment:

My cries pierce the heavens!

My eyes are without sleep!
Turn to me, Sultana — let me gaze on thy beauty.

Adieu! I go down to the grave.

If you call me I return.
My heart is hot as sulphur; — sigh, and it will flame.

Crown of my life! fair light of my eyes!

My Sultana! my princess!

8. E.g. at the official wedding of Cupid 9.C. S. Catty, 'Shelley's "I arise from
and Psyche in Apuleius, Met. VI. xxiv, dreams of thee" and Miss Sophia Stacey*.
'Horae rosis et ceteris floribus purpura- Athenaeum, 18 April 1908, p. 478.
bant omnia'.
 — .

Shelley s Lyrics • 689

I rub my face against the earth; — I am drown'd in scalding tears
I rave!
Have you no compassion? Will you not turn to look upon me? 1

It is a very physical as well as a very evocative poem (five parts of

the body are named); its subject is a passionate assignation in

which a dream is about to be made flesh and the languishing
bodily senses are to be revived by physical love as rain revives the
grass. By a hyperbole familiar also in Elizabethan poetry, wind,
magnolia-blossom, and birdsong, faint, fail, and die respectively in
contiguity with the beloved; then the singer herself capitulates with
them I must die on thine'). Her own person embodies the
('As
sensesby which she perceives these lesser delights: touch (the wind
on the stream), smell (the champaca), hearing (the nightingale);
but her senses are ungratified, she is a songless nightingale, a per-
fume without scent, a wind without motion ('I die! I faint! J fail!')
Her recent love-dream is melting like the champaca's odour, with
nothing substantial to take its place. Only the beloved's response
will save her, as the effect of rain on grass lifts the cloying languor
of the night; from the end the loud, anticipatory
and three lines
heartbeats of the lover echo and replace the low breathing of the
sleeping winds three lines from the beginning.
The lover in the Turkish poem quoted was a male; Shelley's song
could fit either sex, but the draft of line n, 'the odours of my
chaplet fail', shows that his singer is a girl. 2 The title on a manu-
script auctioned in i960, The Indian girl's song', confirms what
should have been obvious.
This, too, is perfect of its kind. Its imaginative structure is taut
and sound, its atmospheric versatility astonishing. Its loving exag-
geration, its total absorption in a dramatic pretence, give it some of

the qualities of brilliant parody, yet it is no parody. Craftsmanship

is again the only single word to fit it. As an expression of its author's
personality and feelings it is of about the same order as 'Gerontion',
or 'Gretchen am Spinnrade'.
A
companion piece is 'From the Arabic: An Imitation' (again
unpublished) which according to Medwin was 'almost a translation
from a translation', 3 in Terrick Hamilton's Arab romance Antar
(1819-20). But Antar is male-orientated, with a hero as stupend-
ously virile as Kilhwch in the Mabinogion, whereas Shelley's poem
takes the Arab woman's point of view, and amounts to a critique

1. Turkish lines translated lite-ally in ance on the black hair of the Indian
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letter of women mentioned by RUMPHIUS;
is
1 April 1717. and both have supplied the Sanscrit
facts
2. Bod. MS. Shelley adds, e.7, f.153. poets with elegant allusions.' (Sir Wil-
The strong aromatic scent of the gold- Ham Jones, Works, 1807, V. 129).
coloured Champac is thought offensive 3. Life of Shelley, ed. H. B. Forman,
to the bees ... but their elegant appear- Oxford (1913), p. 351,
 — — —
690 • G. M. Matthews
of that novel's values. Such a capacity for adopting the female view-
point, uncommon
in male lyric poets, suggests that others among
Shelley's might repay re-examination. The final stanza of
lyrics

'Remembrance' ('Swifter far than summer's flight') begins

Lilies for a bridal bed

Roses for a matron's head
Violets for a maiden dead—
Pansies let my flowers be:
(Hutchinson p. 718)

Mary Shelley's remorseful letter after Shelley's death has helped to

put readers on the wrong track. 'In a little poem of his are these
words pansies let my flowers be ... so I would make myself a
locket to wear in eternal memory with the representation of his
flower .
4
But in the poem the three flowers, seasons, and birds
.
.'

correspond to three conditions of female life, bride, wife, and spin-

ster; the series, therefore, cannot culminate in a male poet. Pansies,

plainly, are the symbol-flowers of a deserted mistress. One possible

way round is to assert that in that case the deserted mistress must
be Shelley, in the manner of the character in Alice who argued that
little girls must be a kind of serpent; alternatively, that although his
personae are distinct from their creator, their attitudes and verbal
Both arguments are unpromising. For instance, the
habits are not.
lyricposthumously entitled 'Mutability' ('The flower that smiles
today Tomorrow dies') has seemed a typical expression of Shelley's
disillusioned idealism:

Whilst skies are blue and bright,

Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
—
Dream thou and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep. (Hutchinson pp. 640-1)

'Earthly pleasures are delusive —

like me, Shelley, you will have a
bitter awakening.' But the poem was evidently written for the
opening of Hellas, 5 to be sung by a favourite slave, who loves him,
to the literally sleeping Mahmud before he awakens to find his
imperial pleasures slipping from his grasp. This puts the naivety of
the sentiment in an unexpected light. Far from voicing a self-pitying
bitterness, the poem is really an ironical endorsement, with qualifi-

cations, of Mahmud's reversal of fortune. The qualifications arise

4. The Letters of Mary W . Shelley, ed. '. . . could my prayers avail,

F. L. Jones, Norman (1944), I. 176—7. All my joy should be
5. Bod. MS. Shelley adds.e.7, cover ff.l- Dead, and I would live to weep,
2, 154. Compare the song actually So thou mightst win one hour of quiet
adopted in the play: sleep.' (22-6)
 Shelley s Lyrics • 691

from the personal loyalty of the slave to her tyrant master, which
complicates the irony of the lament and tempers our gladness at his
downfall. Something similar was attempted in Laon and Cythna,
where the only being who showed any love for the deposed Othman
was his child by the slave he had violated (V. xxi-xxx).
The dramatic impulse was at least as strong in Shelley as the
lyrical, and the two were often inseparable. An especially interesting

puzzle is set by yet another posthumous lyric, 'When the lamp is

shattered'. Besides a draft, there are two known manuscripts, in-
cluding one given to Jane Williams (now in the University Library,
Glasgow) This is the only one of the nine poems given to her
.

which is without title or dedication at any known stage of its exist-

ence, and her copy has one other curious feature. Between the first
pair of stanzas and what would have been (if the final stanza were
not missing) 6 the second pair, the words second part appear, in
Shelley's hand. What can this mean?
The draft throws some light. 'When the lamp is shattered' was
undoubtedly written for the 'Unfinished Drama' of early 1822, and
is closely related to the lyric printed at the opening of that play,

in modern editions. In these editions 7 the drama opens 'before the

Cavern of the Indian Enchantress', who sings:

He came like a dream in the dawn of life,

He fled like a shadow before its noon;
He is gone, and my peace is turned to strife,
And I wander and wane like the weary moon.
O sweet Echo, wake,
And for my sake
Make answer the while my heart shall break!

But my heart has a music which Echo's lips,

Though tender and true, yet can answer not,
And the shadow that moves in the soul's eclipse
Can return not the kiss by his now forgot;
Sweet lips! he who hath
On my desolate path
Cast the darkness of absence, worse than death!
(Hutchinson, pp. 482-3)

All that is known about the 'Unfinished Drama' comes from Mrs.
Shelley's headnotes.Undertaken, she says, 'for the amusement of
the individuals who composed our intimate society', its plot con-
cerned an Enchantress on an Indian island who lures a Pirate, 'a
man of savage but noble nature', away from his mortal lover. 'A
6. The final stanza must have existed (1839), IV. 168. The Posthumous Poems
once, as this text was the source of text has no stage-direction or notes
Med win's memorial piracy in his Aha- (neither has the draft from which all
suerus, the Wanderer (1823). texts of the play are derived).
7. Beginning with The Poetical Works
 .

692 • G. M. Matthews
good Spirit, who watches over the Pirate's fate, leads, in a mysteri-

ous manner, the lady of his love to the Enchanted She is

Isle.

accompanied by a Youth, who loves the but whose passion

lady,
she returns only with a sisterly affection.' The text, some of which
is unpublished, does imply a kind of lovers' chain, similar to that
in Moschus's Idyl VI, or in Andromaque. Diagrammatically it
seems to go: Indian girl A, deserted by Pirate lever (or husband) B,
leaves admirer E and on a magic island meets (not accompanies)
boy C, who himself has been deserted by girl D (the Enchantress?)
Presumably B and D began this merry-go-round for the sake of
each other, and presumably all would have returned in the end to
the original truce-lines. 8 Despite the bittersweet atmosphere of
Faust and The Tempest that haunts the context of 'When the
lamp is shattered', and may originate in the poet's own situation,
it is ludicrous to treat a song written for private theatricals as if it

were the cry of Shelley to his own soul. Not the major love-poets
but the minor dramatists, Lyly, Fletcher, and the masque-writers,
are in its line of descent.
The notation second part could have been intended in a semi-
musical sense, of a dialogue in which a second voice takes up and
answers the first. The imagery changes abruptly in the 'second part',
though both pairs of stanzas share a basic idea: in part one, lamp,
cloud, lute, and lips with their 'contents', the hollow heart, the
empty cell, the lifeless corpse; in part two, the nest with its winged
occupant, the heart as cradle, home, and bier, the raftered eyrie, the
naked refuge. Because of the idea common to all these, Professor
Pottle's attractive defence of The light in the dust lies dead, as
meaning that the from the physical environment (the
light reflected
'light-in-the-dust') stops shining when the source goes out, 9 seems
narrowly to miss the mark. Rather, the light is inseparable from the
'dust' of which the physical lamp is composed, and perishes with it;
the glorv of the rainbow is the cloud, and is 'shed' with the cloud's
waterdrops; music and the lute are annihilated together. 1 The heart
— —
cannot sing respond emotionally when the signal to which it
resonates, the spirit of love, is 'mute'; it can onlv echo, passively, and
hollowly the noises of wind and water. All these light-and-dust

8. Therehearsals of Lover's Vows should pp. 302-3.

warn us that the proposed casting is un- 1. 'The common observer . . . contends
likely to have reflected real alignments, in vain against the persuasion of the
wished or existing. Working backwards grave, that the dead indeed cease to be
from the most tactful final combination . .The organs of sense are destroyed,
.

we might get: A -Jane Williams, B= and the intellectual operations dependent

Trelawny, C=Edward Williams, D=Mary on them have perished with their sources
Shelley, E=Shelley. Shelley, unattached, . When you can discover where the
. .

could thus take the part of the Spirit, fresh colours of the fading flower abide,
fitting in with the role he gave himself or the music of the broken lyre, seek
in 'With a Guitar. To Jane'. life among the dead.' ('Essay on a Fu-
9. 'The Case of Shelley' (1952). rptd. in ture State*. Essays. Letters from Abroad.
English Romantic Poets, op. cit., etc. ed. Mrs. Shelley, 1840, I. 234-5).
 —

Shelley s Lyrics • 693

images are analogues of the 'good Spirit's' lodgement at the earth's
centre.He is contained in the reality he energizes, as radiance in
the lamp, as music in the lute, as words between the lips:

Within the silent centre of the earth

My mansion is; where I have lived insphered
From the beginning, and around my sleep
Have woven all the wondrous imagery
Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world; (15-19)

A cancelled stage-direction hesitates whether to call this Spirit

'Love', but he was evidently to be the Prospero of the island, moving
its affairs to their kindliest end.
The whole poem is about the loss of love, and if part one laments
that when the physical embodiment is lacking, the essence dis-
appears, part two seems to retort that if the essence is lacking, the
physical embodiment disintegrates. It is tempting to guess that the
two halves of the poem were intended for the Enchantress and the
Lady respectively. This would account for the domestic imagery of
the second part, while the ruined cell and the knell for the dead
seaman are proper 'currency values' for an Indian Lampedusa on
whose shores a pirate-lover has probably been wrecked.
The first word of part two is not When but Where, so these two
lines are a simple inversion: Love leaves the nest where hearts once
mingled. It has been asked, In what form are we to imagine Love
doing this? To answer, In the form of Love, seems irreverent, but
the episode of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius's Metamorphoses,
which Shelley much admired, had clearly some influence on this
poem. 2 By first leaving the nest, the winged form of Love suggests
also a fledgling (genuine love is a result as well as a cause of
'mingling'). This stresses the contrasting images of raven and eagle,
because the raven was supposed to evict its young from the nest
and abandon them, whereas the eagle is famous for the care it
takes of its own young. Golden eagles, as Shelley would know, mate
for life, and their nest is permanent, literally cradle, home, and bier.
'The weak one is singled' of course has nothing to do with the
sad lot of woman; 'the weak one' is the weak heart, and applies to
either sex. The paradoxes (one is singled, the weak one must en-
dure), and the pun (singled, 'picked on', 'divorced'), lead to the
ambiguities of 'To endure what it once possessed', which could

2. Cupid and Psyche are happily married, falls the fatal lamp'); he leaves Psyche's
mingling nightly in a love-nest built by bed as a feathered god every morning,
Cupid himself, with ivory rafters; Psyche and at last deserts it for good; Psyche is
entertains her treacherous sisters with lute then exposed, half-naked, to Venus's
and song; a spilt lamp is the cause of mocking laughter and is tormented by
Cupid's flight (in Mrs. Tighe's well- the passions of Anxiety and Sorrow;
known version the lamp shattered: '. . . but in the end the lovers are reunited
from her trembling hand extinguished as no doubt they were in Shelley's play.
694 • G. M. Matthews
have secondary meanings of 'to make indifferent that which it once
fascinated', and 'to imprison what it once owned by right', and to
the major paradox that 'Love' is now confronted with: why does
one who laments 'frailty', transience, choose to nest in 'the frailest
of all things', the human heart?
The change of pronoun in the final stanza implies that the
speaker has turned to address a human, or superhuman, rival. 'Its

passions' (the passions of the heart) will rock thee, she says, and
reason will only give you clarity without comfort, like the sun in
winter. And the epithet naked returns to the hint of the fledgling,
the product of love's union, not now in voluntary flight but evicted,
defenceless, and —perhaps deservedly—laughable.
The parent play is so sketchy that any detailed account of 'When
the lamp is shattered' can only be very conjectural. What is essential
is to begin with the right questions: what is poem, what was it
this
for? Once the dramatic function is recognized, tone, imagery, emo-
tional mode take on appropriate significances; even if the poem is

moving it is not self-expression but artifice, creative play. Shelley's

lyrics deserve a fresh —and a more responsible — critical look.

 Selected Bibliography

Included below are the studies we consider most valuable for advanced
undergraduate and graduate students of Shelley, as well as a few widely
disseminated books that require a cautionary word. Bibliographies and
footnotes in the recent critical studies will, together with section I below,
provide guidance for further study.

I. BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND REFERENCE BOOKS

Ellis, F. S. A
Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe
Shelley. London: Quaritch, 1892. The first concordance to the works of a
Romantic poet, this labor of love by an amateur has been outdated by recent
additions to the Shelley canon (notably The Esdaile Notebook).
Forman, Harry Buxton. The Shelley Library, An Essay in Bibliography.
London: Reeves and Turner, 1886.
Wise, Thomas James. A Shelley Library. London: Privately printed, 1924. This
work supplements Forman's Shelley Library for information on first editions
and other early printings of Shelley's works.
Keats-Shelley Journal, "Current Bibliography" (1951 to date). The first twelve
annual bibliographies were collected and edited by David Bonnell Green
and Edwin Graves Wilson, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hunt, and Their Circles,
A Bibliography: July 1, 1950-June 30, 1962. Lincoln: University of Nebraska,
1964.
[Matthews, G. M.] "Percy Bysshe Shelley" in New Cambridge Bibliography of
English Literature, III (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 309-343.
Reiman, Donald H. English Romantic Poetry, 1800-1835: A Guide to Infor-
mation Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1979.
Weaver, Bennett, and Donald H. Reiman. "Shelley" in Frank Jordan, Jr., ed.,
The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism, 3rd. ed.
New York: Modern Language Association, 1972.

II. FIRST PUBLICATIONS IN BOOKS OF SHELLEY'S MAJOR

POETRY AND PROSE
Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes. London [no publisher], 1813.
[anonymous].
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems. London: Baldwin, Cra-
dock, and Joy; and Carpenter and Son, 1816.
History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany,
and Holland .... London: T. Hookham, Jr., and C. and J. Oilier, 1817.
[anonymous, by Shelley and Mary; contains the first printing of "Mont
Blanc"].
Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City; A Vision of the
Nineteenth Century. London: Sherwood, Neely, & Jones; and C. and J.
Oilier, 1818. [suppressed, emended, and reissued as:] The Revolt of Islam;
A Poem, in Twelve Cantos. London: C. and J. Oilier, 1818.
Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems. London: C. & J.
Oilier, 1819.
The Cenci: A Tragedy, in Five Acts. Italy: for C. and J. Oilier, London, 1819.
Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems.
London: C. and J. Oilier, 1820.
(Edipus Tyrannus: or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. A Tragedy in Two Acts. London:
The Author, 1820. [anonymous].
Epipsychidion: Verses Addressed to the Noble and Unfortunate Lady Emilia
V Now Imprisoned in the Convent of London: C. and J.
.

Oilier,1821. [anonymous].
Adonau: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hy-
perion etc. Pisa, 1821.

695
696 • Selected Bibliography
Hellas:A Lyrical Drama. London: Charles and James Oilier, 1822.
Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley [ed. Mary Shelley]. London: John
and Henry L. Hunt, 1824.
The Masque of Anarchy. A Poem. Ed. Leigh Hunt. London: Edward Moxon,
1832.
The Shelley Papers. Ed. Thomas Medwin. London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co.,
1833.
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Mrs. Shelley. 4 vols. London:
Edward Moxon, 1839.
Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. Ed. Mrs. Shelley.
2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1840.
A Philosophical View of Reform, Now Printed for the First Time. Ed. T. W.
Rolleston. London: Oxford University Press, 1920.
The Esdaile Notebook: A Volume of Early Poems. Ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

III. CRITICAL EDITIONS AND TEXTUAL STUDIES

Cameron, Kenneth Neill, and Donald H. Reiman, eds. Shelley and his Circle:
1773-1822. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University; vols. 1— II, 1961, vols.
Ill— IV, 1970, vols. V-VI, 1973. A catalogue-edition, with extensive commen-
taries, of the manuscripts of the Shelleys, Byron, Godwin, Mary Wollstone-
craft, Leigh Hunt, Peacock, et al. in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library.
Chernaik, Judith. The Lyrics of Shelley. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Uni-
versity, 1972. Contains valuable texts of Shelley's major lyrics newly edited
from the primary sources, in addition to sensitive interpretations.
Clark, David Lee, ed. Shelley's Prose; or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico, 1954. The most easily obtainable edition
of Shelley's prose, but very unreliable in both text and annotation. Clark's
dating of Shelley's posthumously published prose is, for the most part,
fanciful.
Forman, Harry Buxton, ed. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
4 vols. London: Reeves and Turner, 1876 (Prose Works, 4 vols., 1880;
corrected texts, without notes, 2 vols., 1882, and 5 vols., 1892). An excellent
edition by the leading English bibliographer of the later nineteenth century.
Hutchinson, Thomas, ed. The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1904 (reset as Oxford Standard Authors edition, 1905
and 1934; corrected by G. M. Matthews, 1970). Once the best one-volume
edition of Shelley's poetry, it is now seriously outdated by newly available
evidence.
Ingpen, Roger, and Walter E. Peck, eds. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe
Shelley. 10 vols. London: Ernest Benn, 1926-1930 (Julian Edition). The
closest thing available to a complete edition of Shelley's works; the four
volumes of poetry (I-IV) and three volumes of letters (VIII-X) have been
superseded, but the prose volumes (V-VI I) are still valuable.
Jordan, John E., ed. A Defence of Poetry [Shelley], The Four Ages of Poetry
[Peacock]. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Excellent texts and notes.
Locock, C. D., ed. The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with an Introduction
by A, Clutton-Brock. 2 vols. London: Methuen, 1911. Useful for its notes
but unreliable in textual details.
Notopoulos, James A. The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the
Poetic Mind. Durham: Duke University, 1949. Includes the best texts of
Shelley's translations from Plato (supplemented by Notopoulos in "New
Texts of Shelley's Plato," K-SJ, 15:99-115 [1966]).
Reiman, Donald H. Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": A Critical Study, Based
on a Text Newly Edited from the Bodleian Manuscript. Urbana: University
of Illinois, 1965.
Rogers, Neville, ed. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. This, the first of four projected
volumes in an Oxford English Text edition of Shelley, is an editorial disaster,
being deficient and unreliable in canon, text, collations, and critical notes.
Rossetti, William Michael, ed. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
2 vols. London: Moxon, 1870 (revised in 3 vols., 1878). Rossetti's strength
is poetic sensitivity; his weakness is lack of both specific textual information
and sound bibliographical and editorial principles.
Zillman, Lawrence John, ed. Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound": A Variorum
Edition. Seattle: University of Washington, 1959 (text reedited by Zillman
in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound": The Text and the Drafts. New Haven:
Yale University, 1969). Both Zillman's editions are valuable for their notes
and comments but the texts are based on unsound editorial theories.
 Selected Bibliography • 697
IV. BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS
A. Primary Materials

Clairmont, Mary Jane Clara. The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion
Kingston Stocking. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1968.
Gisborne, Maria, and Edward E. Williams. Maria Gisborne & Edward E.
Williams, Shelley's Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L.
Jones. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1951.
Hunt, [James Henry] Leigh. Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries ....
London: Henry Colburn, 1828. The material on Shelley appears, in revised
form, in Hunt's Autobiography (1850).
Medwin, Thomas. Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. London: Thomas
Cautley Newby, 1847 (revised text, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, 1913). Strong
on Shelley's literary interests during his school days and his last years.
Shelley, Mary W. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Volume 1: "A
part of the Elect," ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity, 1980. This first of three volumes covers the years 1814-1827.
.Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones. Norman: University of
Oklahoma, 1947. The text of the journal in Shelley and Mary, from which
Jones worked here, is incomplete and occasionally garbled.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L.
Jones. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Additional letters and cor-
rected texts of some letters appear in Shelley and his Circle (section III
above).
Shelley and Mary. 3 vols, (occasionally 4 vols.). Privately printed [ca. 1880].
Transcriptions (sometimes censored) of letters, journals, and documents then
owned by Shelley's son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley.
Wolfe, Humbert, ed. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, as Comprised in The
Life of Shelley by Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Recollections of Shelley &
Byron by Edward John Trelawny, Memoirs of Shelley by Thomas Love
Peacock. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1933. Conveniently collects three of the five
valuable firsthand biographies (the others being those by Hunt and Medwin
cited above).

B. Critical Biographies

Cameron, Kenneth Neill. The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. New York:
Macmillan, 1950. The standard book on Shelley's youth and early intellectual
development (through Queen Mab).
Dowden, Edward. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. London: Kegan
Paul, Trench & Co., 1886 (revised in one volume, 1896). This "official"
biography, sponsored by Shelley's family, suffers from Victorian reticence,
but it is carefully written by one of the greatest scholars ever to interest
himself in Shelley.
Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. A stim-
ulating, if slightly misleading, popular biography.
Ingpen, Roger. Shelley in England. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner &
Co., 1917 (sometimes bound as 2 vols.). Important on Shelley's relations
with his father and other members of his family.
Peck, Walter E. Shelley: His Life and Work. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1927. Though inaccurate in many details and somewhat distorted by Peck's
own personal enthusiasms, this life is a storehouse of valuable information
and documents.
White, Newman Ivey. Shelley. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940 (one-
volume Portrait of Shelley, 1945). The standard biography. Some individual
points are corrected in later works, notably in Shelley and his Circle (section
III above).

V. MAJOR BOOKS ON SHELLEY'S THOUGHT AND ART

In addition to the books listed below, consult those listed in section III by
Notopoulos, Reiman, and Chernaik and in section IV .B by Cameron and
White.

Baker, Carlos. Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision. Princeton:

Princeton , University, 1948. A
milestone in its treatment of Shelley as
primarily an artist in the English poetic tradition, rather than as chiefly a
thinker or personality.
698 • Selected Bibliography

Barrell, Joseph. Shelley and the Thought of His Time: A

Study in the History
of Ideas. New Haven: Yale University, 1947. Though superseded in much
of its factual content and literary explication, Barrell's analysis of the
Godwinian and the Platonic elements in Shelley's thought is a useful correc-
tive to later studies that have overemphasized one or the other.
Bloom, Harold. Shelley's Mythmaking. New Haven: Yale University, 1959.
Very uneven and based on a false analogy between Shelley and Martin
Buber, this book rises to individual insights through Bloom's poetic sensi-
tivity and in spite of the irrelevant systems he feels compelled to impose on
his poetic analyses.
Brown, Nathaniel. Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley. Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1979. A mature, probing study of this important topic.
Butter, Peter H. Shelley's Idols of the Cave. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University,
1954. Drawing upon Yeats's view of Shelley, Butter explores recurring
symbols and ideas in Shelley's writings.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1974. This sequel to The Young Shelley (Section 1V.B above) is
a detailed study of Shelley's mature ideas and poetry.
Curran, Stuart. Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision.
San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1975. An important study of the
poems of 1819-1820.
. Shelley's "Cenci": Scorpions Ringed with Fire. Princeton: Princeton
University, 1970. A major study, only slightly flawed by overemphasis on
Shelley's moral pessimism.
Dawson, P. M. S. The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1980. This study joins books by Cameron and Wood-
ring as one of the primary authorities on Shelley's political thought.
Grabo, Carl. The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley's Thought. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1936. A
sensitive, appreciative study, slightly
overemphasizing neo-Platonic elements in Shelley's thought.
Pulos, C. E. The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism. Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska, 1954. This approach to the center of Shelley's thought
has been widely influential in recent criticism, especially in the work of
Reiman and Wasserman.
Reiman, Donald H. Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: Twayne, 1969. A con-
cise survey of Shelley's entire thought and work, based on primary materials
as well as the writings of other scholars.
Wasserman, Earl R. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University, 1971. A book of such weight (in erudition and prose) and
importance that no summary is useful; this book incorporates earlier studies
of Shelley from The Subtler Language (1959) and Shelley's "Prometheus
Unbound" (1965). Wasserman's interpretations of many poems are, even
when fully understood, controversial.
Webb, Timothy. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:
Humanities Press, 1977. A very profound yet clearly written introduction to
Shelley's thought and art.
Wilson, Milton. Shelley's Later Poetry: A Study of His Prophetic Imagination.
New York: Columbia University, 1959. A sound study of the poems and
poetic techniques Shelley created during his years in Italy.
Woodman, Ross Greig. The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley.
Toronto: University of Toronto, 1964. More valuable for sensitive individual
readings than for its thesis.
Woodring, Carl. Politics in English Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1970. Woodring devotes 100 pages to analysis of the contem-
porary political impulse (as distinct from philosophical and purely artistic
concerns) in Shelley's poems.
 1

Index of Titles and First Lines

Adonais, 388
A glorious people vibrated again, 229
Alas tor, 70
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King, 311
Ariel to Miranda; — Take, 449
A Sensitive-plant in a garden grew, 210
As I lay asleep in Italy, 301
Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon, 87
Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth, 350
Best and brightest, come away, 443
Bright ball of flame that through the gloom of even, 12
Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, 452
Cenci, The, 236
Cloud, The, 223
Coward Chiefs! who while the fight, 12
Defence of Poetry, A, 478
Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood, 70
Epipsychidion, 371
Esdaile Notebook, The, selections, 3
Flower That Smiles Today, The, 44
From the forests and highlands, 368
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit, 226
Hellas, 406
How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten, 348
How wonderful is Death, 15
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, 93
I arise from dreams of thee, 369

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, 223

I met a traveller from an antique land, 103

Indian Girl's Song, The, 369

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo, 113

I weep for Adonais — he is dead, 392

Julian and Maddalo, 112
Laon and Cythna, selections, 96
Letter to Maria Gisborne, 313
Lift not the painted veil which those who live, 312
Lines written among the Euganean Hills, 103
Lines written in the Bay of Lerici, 452
Many a green isle needs must be, 103
Mask of Anarchy, The, 301
Memory, 442
Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits, 136
Mont Blanc, 89
Music, when soft voices die, 442
Mutability, 88
Nor happiness nor majesty nor fame, 311
Now the last day of many days, 444
Ode to Heaven, 219
Ode to Liberty, 229
Ode to the West Wind, 22 t
One Word Is Too Often Profaned, 446
On Life, 474
On Love, 473
O Thou who plumed with strong desire, 128
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, ^22:
Ozymandias, 103

699
 1 2

700 • Index of Titles and First Lines

Palace-roof of cloudless nights, 219
Peter Bells, one, two and three, 325
Peter Bell the Third, 321
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know, 88
Prometheus Unbound, 130
Queen Mab, 14
Rarely, rarely comest thou, 370
Retrospect, The, 8
Revolt of Islam, The, selections, 96
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, 442
Sensitive-Plant, The, 210
Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise, The, 447
Song ("Rarely, rarely comest thou"), 370
Song of Apollo, 367
Song of Pan, 368
Sonnet ("Lift not the painted veil"), 312
Sonnet ("Ye hasten to the grave"), 312
Sonnet: England in 1819, 311
Sonnet: To a balloon, laden with Knowledge, 12
Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento, 311
So now my summer task is ended, Mary, 96
Stanzas. — April, 1814, 87
—
Stanzas written in Dejection December 18 18, Near Naples, 1 27
Sweet Spirit! Sister of that orphan one, 374
Swift as a spirit hastening to his task, 455
That matter of the murder is hushed up, 243
The awful shadow of some unseen Power, 93
The everlasting universe of things, 89
The flower that smiles today, 441
The keen stars were twinkling, 451
The serpent is shut out from Paradise, 447
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie, 367
The spider spreads her webs, whether she be, 313
The Sun is warm, the sky is clear, 127
Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers, 10
To ("Music, when soft voices die"), 442
To a Sky -Lark, 226
To Const antia, 101
To Jane ("The keen stars were twinkling"), 451
To Jane. The Invitation, 443
To Jane. The Recollection, 444
To the Em perms of Russia and Austria .12 . .,

To trace Duration's lone career, 8

To Wordsworth, 88
Triumph of Life, The, 453
—
Two Spirits, The An Allegory, 128
Upon the lonely beach Kathema lay, 3
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon, 88
—
"We know not what will come yet Laon, dearest, 99
We strew these opiate flowers, 410
What! alive and so bold, oh Earth, 440
When Passion's Trance Is Overpast, 442
Whose is the love that, gleaming through the world, 14
Witch of Atlas, The, 347
With a Guitar. To Jane, 449
Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon, 440
Ye hasten to the grave! What seek ye there, 3 1

Zeinab and Kathema, t,

 9
Shelley s Poetry and Prose
This volume contains one of the fullest, and certainly the most accurately edited,
collections of Shelley's poetry and prose currently available. All the texts have been
re-edited from primary sources especially for this edition.
Included in the selection are four early poems from The Esdaile Notebook; Queen
Mab, Alastor, "Mont Blanc," and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"; "Lines Written
among the Euganean Hills," Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, "The
Sensitive-Plant," The Cenci, Peter Bell the Third, "Letter to Maria Gisborne," "The
Witch of Atlas," Epipsychidion, Adonais, Hellas, and "The Triumph of Life" (all
complete), as well as such important shorter poems as "Ozymandias," "Ode to

Liberty," "Ode West Wind," "The Cloud," "To a Sky-Lark," and the late
to the
lyrics to Jane Williams. There are also selections from Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of
Islam). Prose pieces included are "A Defence of Poetry," "On Life," and "On Love."
All the poems and prose pieces have been thoroughly annotated, with unusual diction
defined and with all biographical, historical, topographical, and literary allusions
identified (many of them for the first time anywhere).
Further assisting the student and teacher are fifteen essays, representing the best of
recent scholarship and criticism on Shelley's poetry. Among them are several general
studies that illuminate the historical, philosophical, symbolic, and mythic approaches to
the poet's work. A number of other essays assist the reader's entry into important
specific poems. The critics represented are Kenneth Neill Cameron, C. E. Pulos, Earl R.
Wasserman, Donald H. Reiman, Evan K. Gibson, Charles H. Vivian, M. H. Abrams,
D. J. Hughes, Irene H. Chayes, Carlos Baker, Ross Woodman, Carl Woodring, and
G. M. Matthews.
THE EDITORS
Donald H. Reiman is editor of Shelley and His Circle at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library
(the largest collection in this country of materials relating to Shelley and his circle). He
received his graduate education at the University of Illinois, where he has also taught;
other teaching posts he has held have been at Duke University, the University of
Wisconsin, the City University of New York, Columbia University, and St. John's

University. He is the author of books and articles on Shelley and on his period.

Sharon B. Powers received her graduate education at the University of Cambridge

(Darwin College) and the University of Minnesota «h* Wo*^*."
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