"The Astronomer-Poet of Persia and Percy Bysshe Shelley"~ Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri.

“MY RESPECT TO MY AFGHAN MOM, A few
days I had spent with her……………., in Tea-
garden, a place of solemnity and soberness .I
still, remember some of quatrains that I had
learnt from The Mom, including Tantrums of
Lord Shiva’s Tandav and Dance…I had, where
made to know on The British Literature that I
should deal in future (with what now I am) and
on Persian Literature… (Later on I am writing
quatrains of Omar...): Bengali Language and
the Culture came to me later. ”
---Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri

“Omar , more desperate, or more careless of
any so complicated System as resulted in
nothing but hopeless Necessity, flung his own
Genius and Learning with a bitter or humorous
jest into the general Ruin which their
insufficient glimpses only served to reveal;
and, pretending sensual pleasure, as the
serious purpose of Life, only diverted himself
with speculative problems of Deity, Destiny,

Matter and Spirit, Good and Evil, and other
such questions, easier to start than to run
down, and the pursuit of which becomes a very
weary sport at last!”
My thanks to Bodleian Library…. (WEB)

“Omar, known to us as a poet, was also a
scientist and a learned man. In his own times
and country his bold and unconventional views
were often frowned upon. Having failed to find
any providence by destiny and not believing in
the next world, he turned to making the most
of this life. Consequently his verse is filled with
a live-for-today philosophy, a preference for
sensual pleasures and a glorification of love
that have made the Ruba` iyat delightful
reading for many generations of admirers.”

“The quatrains of Omar have more admirers
today than ever before. Lines form the
Ruba`iyat, are immortal, but behind the mere
beauty of Omar’s quatrains lie a wisdom, a
philosophy of life and a controversial but
intriguing code of ethics that have contributed
at least equally to the enduring quality of these
masterpieces.”

“His Takhallus or poetical name (Khayya` m)
signifies a Tent-maker, and he is said to have
at one time exercised that trade, perhaps
before Niza` m-ul-Mulk’s generousity raised
him to independence. For whatever Reason,
however, Omar, as before said, has never been
popular in his own Country, and therefore has
been but scantily transmitted abroad.
The MSS of his Poems, mutilated beyond the
average Casualties of Oriental Transcription,
are so rare in the East as scarce to have
reached Westward at all, in spite of all the
acquisitions of Arms and Science. There is no
copy at the India House, none at the Bibliothe`
que Nationale of Paris.

We know but one in England: No. 140 of the
Ouseley MSS. At the Bodleian, written at Shira`
z, A.D. 1460. This contains but 158 Ruba` iya` t.
One in the Asiatic Society’s Library at Calcutta
(of which we have a copy) contains (and yet
incomplete) 516, though swelled to that by all
kinds of Repetition and Corruption. So Von
Hammer speaks of his Copy as containing
about 200, while Dr. Sprenger catalogues the
Lucknow MSS at double that number. The
Scribes, too, of the Oxford and Calcutta MSS
seem to do their Work under a sort of Protest;
each beginning with a Tetrastich (whether
genuine or not) taken out of its alphabetical
order; the Oxford with one Apology; the
Calcutta with one of Expostulation, supposed
(says a Notice prefixed to the MS.) to have
arisen from a Dream, in which Omar’s mother
asked about his future fate. It may be rendered
thus:

~~~~~
“Oh Thou who burn’st in Heart for those who
burn
In Hell , whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying, ‘Mercy on them, God!’
Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?”
……”
On The Legends: ~

"Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that
mourn." (Web: Illustration for The Rubayot of
Omar Khayyam)

“With regard to the present Translation, the
original Ruba` iya` t (as, missing an Arabic
Guttural, these Tetrastichs are more musically
called) are independent Stanzas, consisting
each of four lines of equal though varied
Prosody; sometimes all rhyming, but oftener
(as here imitated) the third line a blank.
Somewhat, as in the Greek Alcaic, where the
penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the
Wave that falls over in the last. As usual with
such kind of Oriental Verse, the Ruba` iya` t
follow one another according to Alphabetic
Rhyme- a strange succession of Grave and Gay.
Those here selected are strung into something
of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal
proportion of the “Drink and make-merry”
which (genuine or not) recurs over-frequently
in the Original. Either way, the Result is sad
enough: saddest perhaps when most

ostentatiously merry: more apt to move Sorrow
than Anger toward the old Tent-maker, who,
after vainly endeavoring to unshackle his Steps
from Destiny, and to catch some authentic
Glimpse of To-morrow, fell back upon To-day
(which has outlasted so many To-morrows!) as
the only ground he had got to stand upon,
however momentarily slipping from under his
feet.”
…………..

THE QUATRAINS OF THE ASTRONOMER-POET
OF PERSIA, OMAR KHAYYA`-M AND PERCY
BYSSHE SHELLEY, A PROPHET AND A
REFORMER.....

“I think the Vessel, that with fugitive
Articulation answer’d, once did live,
And merry-make; and the cold Lip I kiss’d
How many Kisses might it take- and give!”

Desmond King-Hele has thus summed up the
symbolism in Shelley’s poetry: “The main
symbols can quickly be summarized. Water
represents existence; streams or rivers are
paths for existence. Boats floating on streams,
or sometimes on the sea, are thus souls
journeying through life. The water is calm if
things are going smoothly, and rough if the
soul is vexed. Whirlpools signify perils…Caves
stands for minds which receive impressions
from the external world, either as shadows or,
if the caves has water in front, as in scientific
or artistic creation or in philosophic thought,
Veil usually refers to the veil between life and
death, between the impermanent and the ideal.
The statements above are dogmatic, but only
for the sake of brevity: different
interpretations sometimes apply; and often the
words are innocent of symbolic nuance. This is
to be expected, for Shelley is not producing a
neat set of artificial equations. He is merely

resorting to the same imagery, perhaps
unconsciously, perhaps half-consciously, when
faced with ideas and emotions which defy
direct expressions.”
Even in philosophical poem he pours out all
imagination and daring speculations. In
Prometheus Unbound, in Act IV where lone and
Panthea see bewildering forms in a forest,
Shelley describes it as having white face, white
feathers, a white body and white hair. Shelley’s
style abounds in personification and metaphor
and other of those natural figures which we all
use, as best we may, to describe vividly what
we see and feel, or to express what
passionately moves us. The metaphors he uses
for the Skylark, “Like an unbodied joy whose
race is just begun, combine both the abstract
and the concrete qualities, which is a
characteristics of Shelley’s manner. His act of
comparing flowers to stars sounds ethereal.

Though Keats is prominent for the use of
synaeasthetic imagery, Shelley has used it in
different combinations. In Triumph of Life, he
portrays sound as “A silver music on the mossy
lawn.”
“One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
“One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste-
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Stars for the Dawn of Nothing- Oh, make
haste!”
Shelley who apprehends the true and the
beautiful asks the moon whether its paleness is
due to its weariness of climbing the sky, or of
gazing on the earth, wandering alone among
the stars of a different nature and origin, or is
it because the moon is ever-changing like the
sorrowful looks that see inconstancy
everywhere. Perhaps the moon wanes and

waxes because she finds no objects worthy of
her constancy.
Godwin’s idea of man is perfectible; that is,
capable of moral improvement and the
developmentof his character is subject more to
nature’s environment than heredity. Godwin
didn’t believe in the existence of Government
and opposed the worship of wealth, religious
tyranny and diseased law, but he believed in
“free love” and advocated a universe where
men could live happily together and in peace.
Shelley too, influenced by his ideas, attacks
wars, tyranny, commerce, wealth and religion-
in short, all the existing vices of his present
world- and describes a Utopian future in Queen
Mab.
Shelley is much devoted to Godwin, Plato and
Rousseau for his thought and poetry. Godwin’s
book ‘Political Justice’ has profoundly

influenced Shelley’s iconoclastic rationalism
and his opinions on politics and morals.
Tinge of Godwinian theory is seen in
Prometheus Unbound too, where he celebrates
the perfectibility of human nature and foretells
a golden age which too is bound by guilt or
pain, “nor yet exempt from chance, and death
and mutability.”
“And this I know: whether the one True Light
Kindle to Love, or Wrath consume me quiet,
One glimpse of It within the Tavern caught
Better than in the Temple lost outright.”
The ideas he borrowed from Plato falls under
four groups: (i) General religious and
Philosophical Ideas- Shelley’s religious system
is more Greek and Platonic than Christian and
Biblical. Like Plato, Shelley believes in a
‘Supreme power’ and is conscious of the unity
of the world and of all life and the underlying

spirit which he celebrates in most of his poems,
especially in Adonais. “The one remains, the
many change and pass”. The struggle between
the powers of good and evil is the main theme
of The Revolt of Islam, a concept of Plato. (ii)
Cosmic Speculations: Plato’s teachings that the
entire universe is the self-evolution of an
absolute intelligence, is seen reflected in
Shelley’s Hymn to Apollo where he considers
the sun as the supreme source in the universe,
not of light and force only, but also of
intelligence. Even in Prometheus Unbound, he
personifies Moon and Earth (kha` k, zameen).
(iii) Social and Political Ideas: The concept of
dualism between Prometheus who stands for
the soul of man and Jupiter who represents the
baser side of man which we find in Prometheus
Unbound is based on Plato’s conception of a
constant duel in man’s nature between the
good and evil forces. (iv) Theory of Love:
Plato’s teachings on theory of love have two

aspects- his philosophy of beauty, and love, an
inspiration in human life. Shelley’s idea of
Intellectual Beauty’s departs; this world
becomes a ‘dim vast veil of tears vacant and
desolate’. On the other hand if human heart is
its temple then man would become ‘immortal
and potent’. Thus Platonism was a treasure-
house from which he borrowed valuable ideas.
“Oh, Thou, who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?”
Just as Shelley is devoted to Godwin for
political and moral ideas, so also he is devoted
to Plato for his Platonism of “one Spirit”, the
“supreme Power”. Just as Keats was a
Hellenist without knowing any Greek, so also
Shelley was a Platonist even before he had
read Plato. To Shelley, Plato was not only a

philosopher but a poet too. In his Defence of
Poetry, he says, “Plato was essentially a poet-
the truth and splendor of his imagery and the
melody of his language are the most intense
that is possible to conceive.”
Rousseau too has influenced Shelley much, for
Harold Bloom believes, “Without Rousseau,
Shelley would not have written the Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty and perhaps not Mont
Blanc either. Rousseau, more than even
Wordsworth, was the prophet of natural man,
and the celebrator of the state of nature.”
Shelley not only fights for the natural man and
against religion but against his desire in
Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s spirit and his
temperament made him more a disciple and
heir of Rousseau than of Godwin or
Wordsworth. Rousseau’s ideas are vividly seen
in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind and even in
his lyrical drama.

As Desmond King puts it “His skill in poetry
was a gradual growth”. Shelley’s first poem
Queen Mab (1812-13) has a considerable
biographical and psychological interest as the
starting point of his later development. It is a
strange poem, a confused yet eloquent record
of a confused state of feeling through which a
young poet who never quite understood either
himself or other men, was passing. This poem
is an exposition of Godwin’s doctrines and his
French atheistic and revolutionistic teachings
and in imitation of Robert Southey’s works.
This piece of work foreshadows the two great
themes of Shelley- belief in the existence of
Heaven and development of man towards
perfection. Thus, from the beginning we see
Shelley as a poet with the belief in the
existence of goodness, a Heaven, (Jeha` n va
ana` ser-i-oo) and the possibility that the
world can be transformed into the likeness of
Heaven.

“The Vine had struck a Fibre; which about
If clings my Being-let the Su`fi flout;
Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key,
That shall unlock the Door he howls without.”
J.C. Smith writing on Shelley, says: “No poet
suffered severer reprobation in his life and
none perhaps has evoked more ardent
sympathy and admiration in later years than
this strange offshoot from an otherwise
undistinguished aristocratic family.” In such a
poor state and circumstances, Shelley began
writing both verse and prose at a very early
stage. But of, his boyhood writings are of little
importance for they are more of imitation than
of originality.
“I tell Thee this- When, starting from the Goal,
Over the shoulders of the flaming Foal
Of Heav’n Parwi`n and Mushtara they flung,

In my predestined Plot of Dust and Soul.”
Queen Mab (1813) had foreshadowed faintly
the subject matter of his mature poetry, but it
has hardly any of its wonderful music. That
music is heard for the first time in the first of
his great works, Alastor (1815). Alastor is a
poem of an idealized version of Shelley himself.
It is about a tragic idealist who vainly pursues
the perfect beauty until his death which is
described at the conclusion of the poem in lines
of solemn beauty. The value of Alastor lies not
in its story but in its mood of ardent aspiration,
its magnificent descriptions of nature, and
noble music of its blank verse which owes much
to Wordsworth. This is the beginning of
Shelley’s apprenticeship to his art.
“Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst
make,
And with Eden devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man

Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give-and
take!”
Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
belong to the memorable period of Shelley’s
friendship with Byron in 1816, and express the
Shelley -idealism.
Next comes The Revolt of Islam (1818) a still
more ambitious, revolutionary, allegorical
poem modeled on Spenser’s work. This piece is
a combination of Shelley’s two invariable
motives-a passionate philanthropy and an
equally passionate eroticism. He feels the
liberation of mankind is to be achieved by
eloquent persuasion. It contains individual
passages of very great beauty with the use of
language in an entirely new and distinctive
manner. The chief and sole beauty of the poem
lies in the music of the blank verse and poetic
imagery, where his characteristic style appears
fully developed for the first time.

Prince Athanese is a fragment where the
eternal warfare of the idealist seems to have
been the theme and it pictures a philosophic
converse between a young disciple and a
‘’divine old man’’. With The Revolt of Islam
and this beautiful unfinished fragment of
Prince Athanese, Shelley’s apprenticeship may
be said to an end.
“Listen again, One evening at the Close
Of Ramaza`n, ere the better Moon arose,
In that old Potter’s Shop I stood alone
With the clay Population round in Rows.”
The first works of his maturity are the great
lyrics, Lines Written in Euganean Hills and
Julian and Maddalo, composed after his arrival
in Italy. In Julian and Maddalo, he celebrates
his friendship with Byron, a masterpiece of a
kind rarely achieved. It is a perfect example of
verse which is at once familiar and even

colloquial and yet highly poetical. What is
remarkable in this mastery is that Shelley
carries it over into his major achievement, the
great lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound.
Prometheus Unbound (1818-1819) is the most
ambitious and central attempt of the poet to
render his reading of life, the mystery of good
and evil and to give adequate embodiment to
his own ambition as poet and reformer: “I
have what a Scotch philosopher
characteristically terms, “a passion for
reforming the world.”
To Shelley, Prometheus is the embodiment of
the wisdom and heroism of humanity while
Jupiter of tyranny and superstition where he is
the representative of the whole machinery of
legalism and respectability which Shelley
considered to be the burden under which the
world was groaning. He portrays eternity
overpowering tyranny and tyranny is removed

by the spirit of love and beauty and thus a
regeneration of the world. But of, in the Fourth
Act, he portrays a magnificent lyrical vision of
a new heaven and a new earth, where time
itself has been replaced by Eternity and man
has become “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.”
“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshy`d gloried and drank
deep;
And Bahra`m, that great Hunter-the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.”
The central theme of Prometheus Unbound, is
again that of Godwinism- an enslaved world of
evils regenerated by their sudden overthrow.
But in, here, the abstractions of Godwinism are
not that of a political philosopher, but of

creator of mythology. Macaulay rightly
comments on this: “He turned atheism into a
mythology, rich with visions as glorious as the
gods that live in the marble of Phidias or the
virgin saints that smile on us from the canvas
of Murillo. The spirit of Beauty, the principle of
good, the principle of evil when he treated of
them, ceased to be abstractions. They took
shape and colour. They were no longer mere
words, but ‘intelligible forms’, ‘fair
humanities’, objects of love, of adoration, or of
fear.”
“I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Drop in its Lap from some once lovely Head.”
The Cenci (1819) is a work in a different
manner where Shelley shows his skill in
handling any subject and mastering an

uncongenial style. It is a tragedy of the Italian
life and displays his lack of knowledge of
human nature, for a play on such a theme is
seldom successful. Shelley’s treatment of the
tragic horror as tragic dignity with a restraint
and a delicacy, gives the play a unique place
among tragic dramas of modern times. “He
does not…reproduce with modifications the
style of Shakespeare, but does what
Shakespeare did… idealise without describing
the language of contemporary speech”, A.C.
Bradley.
“Ah, my Belove`d, fill the Cup that clears
TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears-
To-morrow? - Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thouand Years.”
His last achievement is The Triumph of life
(1821) which is a fragment as he died before
completing it. Here, he states his philosophy of

life that “Life is what triumphs over Nature,
triumphs over imagination. Life is death-in-
life, cold, common hell in which we wake to
weep.” It is in the form of Italian ‘terzarima’,
strongly influenced by Dante and Petrarch.
Some are of the opinion that had this work
been finished, it might have been one of the
greatest English poems.
“Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.”
Some may claim that Shelley’s poetry stands
less high in recent English estimation than it
did even before the war. But at, to Saintsbury,
he is nevertheless the quintessential poet and
to Herford as to A.C. Bradley and Gilbert
Murray, he is still both poet and prophet.
“And we, that now make in the Room

They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom,
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch-for
whom?”
To comment upon Shelley’s sarcasm, Peter Bell
The Third is an apt example. It is a satire on
Wordsworth, a “dull” poet and recalls the
earlier Wordsworth, a man of false ideals who
composed poems on ‘moor and glen and rocky
Lake/And on the heart of man’. Shelley
criticizes the reactionary politician who once
welcomed revolution and dull poet,
Wordsworth himself, who was very famous.
“Ay, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans
End.”

Though Shelley had not much natural aptitude
for satire, yet he was successful in his
attempts. In Mask of Anarchy (1819) and
Swellfoot (1820), he shows his skill in handling
the theme of politics also.
“Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
Have drunk their Cup a round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.”
The Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820) displays
his ability to write an easy, natural, yet
poetical conversation. The Witch of Atlas
(1820) composed in ottava rima like that of
Byron’s best poems, is a contrast to his other
works for it is a long poem of pure escape to
fancy weaving a myth of deliverance from
Shelley’s imagined troubles, personal and
human, where he gives his imagination free
play.

In The Sensitive Plant, he finds out a new
symbol for his own ‘love of love’. In Adonais
(1821), the great elegy on Keats, he
reincarnates the Greek pastoral lament and
reveals his faith in the spiritual reality.
“Ay, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans
End.”
Shelley’s famous and short poems The Ode to
the West Wind, The Cloud, The Skylark are
written in verse forms of his own innovation,
about the divinity of Nature and the Supreme
Power.
“Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after a To-morrow stare,
A Muezzi`n from the Tower of darkness cries

“Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor
There!”
The Letter to Maria Gisborne celebrates his
intellectual friendship without any imitation
and it is poetry of fun with human thought and
common sense.
“AWAKE! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to
Flight:
And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught
The Sulta` n’s Turret in a Noose of Light.”
Epipsychidion (1821) is a poem inspired by his
admiration for Emilia Viviani, an Italian girl
who was imprisoned in a convent at Pisa. It is
also an expression of that “high, sweet, mystic
doctrine of love” taught by Plato in the
Symposium and Dante in the Vita Nuova
though marred, as Swinburne has justly
pointed out, by ”such mere personal allusions

as can only perplex and irritate the patience
and intelligence of a loyal student.” It’s a
personal poem which demonstrates his
weaknesses and strong points more than any
other poem does.
Most of the critics are tempted to consider the
characters of Prometheus Unbound as
inhuman. They are inhuman, because they
represent mythical and elemental beings and
no men and women. Otherwise it can’t be
judged as a drama. Shelley wrote to Peacock:
“It is a drama, with character and mechanism
of a kind yet unattempted.” This poem is noted
for its vast orchestrated lyricism
representating a series of visions of an ideal

world. From this piece, it is understood, he has
risen to the highest line and it is seen that his
original ideas of a perfect world and of
regeneration are now deepened and
transformed by the study of Plato, of Spinoza,
and of Dante and the existing power is no
longer Reason but love.
“With me along some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of Slave and Sulta` n scarce is
known,
And pity Sulta` n Ma` hm` d on his Throne.”
Hellas (1821), the lyrical drama is described by
Shelley as a sort of imitation of the Personae of
Aeschylus. He wrote this to celebrate the
outbreak of the Greek war of Independence.
Though much slighter than Prometheus
Unbound, it is marked for Shelley’s most
beautiful and finished lyrical verse. The lyrical

movement of the “Chorus”, marks the highest
form of Shelley’s rhythmical invention.
“Then said another-“Surely not in vain
My Substance from the common Earth was
ta’en,
That He who subtly wrought me into Shape
Should stamp me back to common Earth
again.”
In 1821, a slight change came over the tone of
the shorter lyrics, but the achievements of 1821
were scarcely inferior to those of 1819.
“Look to the Rose that blows about us-“Lo,
Laughing’’, she says, “into the World I blow:
At once the silken Tassel of my Purse
Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw.”
In 1821, Peacock wrote The Four Ages of
Poetry, attacking the poetry of his own age
and to defend it. Shelley wrote his greatest

prose A Defence of Poetry which ranges far
beyond the scope of literature. It expresses a
profound philosophy of art, and is equally
valuable as a critical work of universal
application, and as a revelation of Shelley’s
own theory and practice of poetry. It reveals
the extraordinary power and beauty of the
language.
“Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after a TO-MORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
“Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor
There!”
Grierson did rightly say, “Classic and Romantic
are terms no attempts to define which will ever
seem entirely convincing to ourselves or
others.” So everyone tries to attributes one’s
own views to ‘Romanticism.’ For, to Hein and
Beers, Romanticism is synonymous with

Medievalism; to Elton it is “thought
confounding words”, to Victor Hugo
“Melancholy” is the distinguishing mark of
romantic art; to Abercrombie “Romanticism is
a withdrawal from outer experience to
concentrate upon inner experience”; to Pater it
is “an addition of strangeness to beauty”; to T.
S. Eliot Romantic signifies, “the individual”
and even “revolutionary”; to Herford “liberty
of imagination”. So in short, we can say
anything novel is romantic.
“For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day,
I watch’d the Potter thumping his wet Clay:
And with its all- obliterated Tongue
It murmur’d- “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”
In brief, we can say every bit of Shelley’s
poetry is romantic-in temper and style.
Whether they are short or long, whether they
are lyrical or odes, with Shelley’s element of

imagination they rise to an expectation which
is far beyond our reach. No wonder Shelley is
heralded as the best Romantic poet of his age.
“And lately, by the Tavern Doo agape,
Came stealing through the Dusk an Angel
Shape
Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and
He bid me taste of it; and ‘twas-the Grape!”
Shelley’s poetic style is also romantic. The
series of gorgeous similes in The Skylark show
the romantic exuberance of Shelley. He never
uses any ornamental word and every word fits
in its place and carries its own weight. They
express the diverse feelings of the poet with
the notes of music which appeal to every
human being’s ears.
“Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should
close!

The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who
knows!”
For Pater, classic signifies measure, purity and
temperance, whether romantic signifies an
addition of strangeness to beauty.
Abercrombie says Romanticism is an attitude
of mind-an element of art. Classicism is not an
element at all but a mode of combining
elements in a just proportion. For him there is
no antithesis between Romanticism and
Classicism. Classicism includes the romantic
element in its balance, for all good art is first
romantic, then becomes classical. Of all
Romantics, Shelley is the one who most
obviously possessed the quality of genius-
quickness, grasp of intellect, the capacity for
learning languages rapidly, ability to
assimilate and place scientific principles and

discoveries. Yet he is more criticized for his
‘falsity’ and ‘lack of grasp’.
“And we, that now make in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom,
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch-for
whom?”
Beauty, to Shelley, is an ideal in itself and a
microcosm of the beauty of Nature and he calls
it ‘Intellectual Beauty’. He celebrates Beauty as
a mysterious power. In the Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty, he says that when Intellectual Beauty
departs, this world becomes a “dim vast vale
of tears, vacant and desolate” and if human
heart is its temple, then man would become
immortal and omnipotent.
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse- and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”
Though Shelley was a man of hope and
expectations and spiritualistic about the future
of mankind, yet he represents himself in his
poems as a man of ill luck, subject to evil and
suffering. He expresses this in the poem, ‘Ode
to the West Wind’. He experienced these
sufferings because being a man of
imagination, he was easily disappointed by
any obstacle which stood in his way of a golden
age. Again he always imagined himself as the
target of critics and common people. So in
Adonais, he explains his state as “a phantom
among men, and a lonely man companionless.”
“Do you, within your little hour of Grace,
The waving Cypress in your Arms enlace,
Before the Mother back into her arms
Fold, and dissolve you in a last embrace.”

Shelley not only believed in the eternity of love
and beauty but in the eternity of thought too.
The form that Shelley gave to his thought was
ideal and at times extremely visionary. Even
Brooke admits that he is a poet of certain
distinct human ideas and these ideas are not
many. That world, “though its substance is
grave and weighty, is often too idealised into a
world of woven dreams. Substances are
thinned out into a shadowy expression of them
or seem to disappear in a multitude of fancies
added to them.’’
“Ah, Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire.
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”
Like the other Romantic poets, Shelley too was
an ardent lover of Nature. Like Wordsworth,
Shelley conceives of Nature as one spirit, the

Supreme Power working through all things
“The one’s spirit’s plastic stress/Sweeps
through the dull dense world.” Again he
personifies each object of nature as an
individual life, a part of that Supreme Power,
Nature. He celebrates nature in most of his
poems as his main theme such as The Cloud. To
a Skylark, To the Moon, Ode to the West Wind,
A Dream of the Unknown.In his treatment of
nature, he describes the things in nature as
they are and never colours it. It is true, he gives
them human life through his personifications,
but he does it unintentionally for he felt they
are living beings capable of doing the work of
human beings. His mythopoeic power had
made him the best romanticist of his age. In
Ode to West Wind, he personifies Nature as the
Destroyer and the Preserver, and in The Cloud,
the cloud is a possessor of mighty powers. He
also believed in the healing aspect of Nature
and this is revealed in his Euganean Hills in

which he is healed and soothed by the natural
scene around him and also the imaginary
island. In The Recollection, we see the same
idea of healing power of Nature.
“Heav’n but the Vision of fulfill’d Desire,
And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.”
Shelley’s idealism falls under three
subheadings: Revolutionary Idealism- His
revolutionary idealism is mainly due to the
French Revolution. Through his Queen Mab,
The Revolt of Islam, and Prometheus Unbound
he inspired people to revolt against tyranny by
scoring at the tyranny of state, church and
society and hoping for a golden age which too
is not immune from pain or death. His political
idealism makes him a prophet. Religious
Idealism- Though Shelley was a rebel, he

wasn’t an atheist. He believed in the super
power of God, and he imagined God as
Supreme ‘Thought’ and infinite Love. His
Platonic conception of Love was the base of his
metaphysical idealism. He believed in the faith
of one mind, one power and one all-pervasive
spirit. Erotic Idealism- Just as he is a
revolutionist and a pantheist, so also he is a
theologist. He believed in the abstract quality
of love and beauty-love as infinite and beauty
as intellectual. He celebrates love as a creator
and preserver in his Symposium, and beauty as
Supreme Spirit with which man becomes
immortal in his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.

‘Facts’ said Shelley, ‘are not what we want to
know in poetry, in history, in the lives of
individual men, in satire of panegyric. They are
many diversions, the arbitrary points on which
we hang and to which we refer those delicate
and evanescent hues of mind, which language
delights and instructs us in precise proportion
as it expresses.’ Shelley calls poetry “the
expression of Imagination,” because in it
diverse things are brought together in harmony
instead of being separated through analysis. In
this he resembles Bacon and Locke, but differs
from them in his idea of imagination of man’s
highest faculty through which one realizes
noblest powers. Shelley made a bold
expedition into the unknown and he felt reason
should be related to the imagination. His
expedition was successful when he made the
people understand that the task of the
imagination is to create shapes by which
reality can be revealed to the world and this is

heralded as the best romantic note by his
successors.
“And much as Wine has play’d the Infidel,
And robb’d me of my Robe of Honour-well,
I often wonder what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the Goods they sell.”
Shelley is not only a successful Romanticist but
also an inspiring philosopher. He was enough
of a philosopher, not merely to enjoy ideals for
their own sake, but to make them a starting-
point for bold speculations in which he found
the thrill of a wild adventure. Whether he
derived his notions from Plato or from Godwin,
he was equally enthralled by them and much of
his inspiration came from them.
“Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should
close!

The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who
knows!”
Many critics who consider Shelley’s poetry as
wanting in substance refuse to take seriously
the philosophy it professes to preach, and do
not regard him as a philosophic poet at all. But
of, a systematic study of his poetry reveals the
fact that Shelley was a truly philosophic poet
and we cannot arrive at a proper appreciation
of his poetry if we dismiss his philosophy as
frivolous. Baker remarks: “Yet Shelley has not
been taken seriously as a philosophic poet, and
one often gathers from remarks of his critics,
whether inimical or worshipful, that his
philosophy does not matter. Yet it does matter
and vitality so because it is always either the
central matter of his poetry, or the frame of
reference in terms of which his poetry has been
written.”

“Indeed the Idols I have loved so long
Have done my Credit in Men’s Eye much wrong:
Have drown’d my Honour in a shallow Cup,
And sold my Reputation for a Song.”
Shelley had an inextinguishable faith in the
imperishable greatness of the human soul
which warms and colours almost every line he
wrote. In Adonais, he says that the spirit of
Adonais will return to the Eternal, from where
it came and is immortal but to Symonds,
Shelley was no materialist and didn’t believe in
the extinction of the spiritual element by
death. For he says, Shelley did not
acknowledge a formal and precise belief in the
immortality of the human soul: “We know
nothing; we have no evidence; we cannot
express our inmost thoughts; they are
incomprehensible even to ourselves.” Symonds
says that what Shelley believed was the
absolute and imperishable existence of the

universal as perceived by us in love, beauty
and delight. Though the destiny of the self be
unknown, these things exist permanently. The
“conclusion” of The Sensitive Plant expresses
the quintessence of his hope upon this most
baffling riddle: “For love, and beauty and
delight/ There is no death nor change; their
might/ Exceeds our organs, which endure/ No
light, being themselves obscure.”
“Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore-but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-
hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.”
Like Plato, Shelley believed that the world
possessed a soul. One mind, one power, one all-
pervasive and informing spirit- that is cardinal
principle of Shelley’s philosophy and faith. In

Adonais, he expresses his faith more
passionately.
That ev’n my buried Ashes such a Snare
Of Perfume shall fling up into the Air,
As not a True Believer passing by
But shall be overtaken unaware.”
Shelley’s idea of death is seen throughout his
works. In Stanzas Written in Dejection Near
Naples, Ode to Liberty and Alastor, he
expresses his wish to die. His Adonais can be
considered as a prophecy of his own death by
drowning.
“So while the Vessels one by one were
speaking,
One spied the little Crescent all were seeking:
And then they jogg’d each other, “Brother,
Brother!

Hark to the Porter’s Shoulder-knot a
creaking!”
He believed that love and beauty were not
concrete things but ideal and abstract. He was
in pursuit of love and beauty throughout his
life. And this became the sole aim of his life. He
describes the vain search of Beauty in Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty and meeting with that false
image of pure beauty which awakens sensual
love.
“Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the
Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
“Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.”
Like Plato, Shelley believed love leads to the
highest wisdom, the lover proceeds by grades
and stages until he achieves the supreme
vision. In Sensitive Plant, Shelley celebrates

Platonic love; and shows love is evident in all
parts of nature, and individualizes itself in the
individual flowers.
“None answer’d this; but after Silence spake
A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”
In Prometheus Unbound, the opposition of
Prometheus (Good) and Jupiter (Evil)
represents, “the fundamental antithesis of
good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and
hate.”
Said one-“Folks of a surly Tapster tell,
And daub his Visage with the Smoke of Hell;
They talk of some strict Testing of us-Pish!
He’s Good Fellow, and ‘twill all be well.”
Shelley’s philosophy mainly deals with the
problem of evil. To him this world is a

combination of both evil and good, and a
conflict exists between them. Shelley was
interested in finding out the causes of the evil
and wanted to eradicate them to bring in a
regenerated golden world. In Shelley’s view,
the forces of evil always have the upper hand
and hence he felt the good people suffered.
A.G. Strong says though Shelley had such a
view still he believed that evil, “if it is positive
and deep rooted, is also eradicable. It can be
made to disappear from life and given the
necessary condition of the changes, there need
be little transformation of the present order.”
Throughout his work, we see Shelley’s
portrayal of the conflict between Good and
Evil. In The Revolt of Islam, the fight between
the snake and eagle depicts the fight between
good and evil. Shelley speaks of the Eagle’s
victory as a temporary one.
“With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,

And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d-
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.” ‘’
The poet watches the pale moon in the murky
east and tries to account for its paleness. He
wonders if the moon is pale because it is tired
of climbing the heavens and of looking down
at the earth. The poet fancies that perhaps the
moon is pale because it feels lonely amidst
stars that have a different origin and widely
differ from her in nature. Lastly, the poet
imagines that the moon is pale because she
cannot find anybody worthy of her devotion
and love, just as a man’s eyes may be restless
because he cannot fins a beloved worthy of
constant love.
Shelley is not only a revolutionist but a
pantheist too. He believed in God, the Supreme
Power of the world but to him, Love and
Beauty are the two means to attain that

Supreme Power. Like Plato, he believed that
the universe possessed a soul, and that the soul
of man is pure in its nature, and though soiled
by earth is capable of its original perfection.
Among the Romantic poets, Shelley is marveled
for his inimitable abstract ideas, but he is less
of an artist. He was aiming not at the poetry of
art, but at the poetry of rapture. Keats advised
him to be “more of an artist” and to “load
every rift with ore”, but Shelley was aiming at
a different effect from that of Keats’s richly
decorated and highly finished poetry.
“Another said-“Why, ne’er a peevish Boy,
Would break the Bowel from which he drank in
Joy;
Shall He that made the Vessel in pure Love
And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy!” ‘’
Rabindranath Tagore’s comment on the genius
and philosophy of Shelley strikes at the

keynote of his philosophy of life: “In Shelley we
clearly see the growth of his religion through
periods of vagueness and doubt, struggle and
searching. But he did at length come to a
positive utterance of his faith though he died
young. Its final expression is in his ‘Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty’. By the title of the poem,
the poet evidently means a beauty that is not
merely a passive quality of particular things,
but a spirit that manifests itself through the
apparent antagonist of the unintellectual life.
Religion in Shelley grew with his life. It was not
given to him in fixed and ready-made
doctrines; he rebelled against them. He had the
creative mind which could only approach Truth
through its joy in creative effort.”
Shelley was essentially a poet of love. His
idealism was the Platonic conception of love-
the love of the soul. From the lowest order it
rises and reaches the supreme beauty which is

the highest form of love that leads to virtue,
wisdom, happiness, and is subject to its power
only. He speaks of love as: “The desire of the
moth for the star, / Of the night for the
morrow, / The devotion to something afar.”
“And, strange to tell, among the Earthen Lot
Some could articulate, while others not:
And suddenly one more impatient cried-
“Who is Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”
Shelley was as much a revolution as Byron.
From his boyhood days, he was a rebel and was
inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution.
He revolted against the authority at Eton
school and was expelled from Oxford. Later on
he revolted against the society itself regarding
his marriage difficulty. Thereafter, he became
a true revolutionist and thereby a reformer
through his poems. From Godwin he got the
twin ideas that social institutions and

conventions were the sources of tyranny and
corruption, and laws, customs and authority
are the hindrances to man’s liberty and
happiness. From Queen Mab onwards, his
poems were meant to express his concept of
the future- a future which is free from war,
tyranny and corruption. In Queen Mab, he
asserts the ideas of revolution and prophesies a
golden age in the end. In a note to Queen Mab,
he wrote “The state of Society in which we
exist is a mixture of feudal savageness and
imperfect civilization.” In The Revolt of Islam,
he has a vision of mankind which could be
liberated from the present tyranny and
corruption through the power of love, beauty
and thought. In Rosalind and Helen, Shelley
disagrees with a loveless marriage. It is in
Prometheus Unbound that his revolutionary
enthusiasm is best revealed. In this poem, he
shows how Mankind is saved from the cruel
hands of tyranny and corruption and attains

Shelley’s ideal world through love and
goodness in nature. Shelley’s idea of the
regeneration of mankind through suffering,
endurance of all pain, and hope is well
portrayed in this poem. His vision of the future
world is a world with the ideals of liberty,
equality and fraternity.
“Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash my Body whence the Life has died,
And in Winding sheet of Vine-leaf wrapt,
So bury me by some sweet Garden-side.”
Shelley as a prophet with penetrating vision of
reality is evident in his own sentence on Dante
in A Defence of Poetry.
“And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted-“Open then the Door!
You know how little while we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more.”

His very words are instinct with spirit, each is
as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable
thought and many yet be covered in the ashes
of their birth and pregnant with a lightning
which has as yet found no conductor.
Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the WHITE HAND OF MOSES on the
Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.”
As a true reformer, he tries to deliver himself,
as well as humanity from evil and darkness. He
preaches that the solution is the Universal
spirit of love. Love within sheds its rays and
illuminates the whole universe. He looked
forward to that world when the ‘plastic stress’
of this Power shall have mastered the last
resistance and have become all in all, and when
both Nature and mankind shall have been fully

redeemed. This is the most striking quality of
Shelley-to awaken public hope and to enlighten
and improve mankind.
Ir`am indeed is gone with all its Rose,
And Jamshy`ds Sev’n-fing’d Cup where no one
knows;
But still the Vine her ancient Ruby yields,
And still a Garden by the Water blows.”
Shelly’s devotion to liberty made him a violent
reformer. Seeking to overthrow our present
institutions and to hurry the millennium out of
its slow walk into a gallop, to renovate the
world, to bring about utopia-this was his
constant aim.
“And David’s Lips are lock’t; but in divine
High piping Pehlevi`, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!
Red Wine!” –the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That yellow Cheek of hers to incarnadine.”

Shelley is a poetical angel who saves us from
the cruel hands of dejection and suffering and
shows us the brighter way to success. For that,
he says, what is important is ‘hope’; we should
not lose our hope at any time, for destruction is
to regeneration, night is to day, unhappiness is
to happiness, slavery is to freedom, end is to
beginning as he points in Ode to West Wind. So
the golden age, in Shelley’s view, lies not in
past but in the future.
“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly-and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
He prophesies a world which is attainable. But
of, he reveals the truth that it is not easy to
attain such a virtuous world. Centuries will
pass before the goal is attained and it is
possible only through the efforts of wise

virtuous and heroic human beings. But of, in
his imagination, Shelley leaped over centuries.
He sings in the ‘Ode to the West Wind.’
Shelley was much influenced by Godwin’s
revolutionary theories. He was in rebellion
against the institution of marriage too, which
he proposed to substitute the doctrine of
elective affinity. A few years later, Shelley
showed his belief in the revolutionary theories
preached by Godwin by eloping with his
daughter, Mary. This proves that he is not only
a dreamer but a reformer too. He was a true
revolutionary, perpetually at war with the
present world, a martyr and exile, fighting and
crying defiance to the end.
“The Palace that to Heav’n his pillars threw,
And Kings the forehead on his threshold drew-
I saw the solitary Ringdove there,

And “Coo, coo, coo,” she cried; and “Coo, coo,
coo.”
Some critics are of the opinion that the world
cannot understand his ideas. Even if the world
fails to understand him, like a prophet, he will
lead them to his future world. For, Prometheus
Unbound, he dramatizes the defeat of evil by
the spirit of life. He is not shy to deal with such
an enormous subject and is ready with the
solution for the problems which it raises. The
answer is that evil is subdued by love. Shelley
suggests that this reappearance of evil is a
possibility in a remote future. To Shelley, the
prophecy is to begin and end, and the prophecy
is love. He prophesies: once human goodness is
aware of love and touched by it, marvelous
things may happen, which is the main theme
celebrated in his Prometheus Unbound.
Shelley is one of the subtlest and profoundest
thinkers among English poets, a prophet with a

penetrating vision of reality, whose words can
only be thoroughly understood after long and
careful study. They are well described by
Browning as, “a sublime fragmentary essay
towards a presentment of the correspondency
of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the
spiritual, and his poetry is largely the medium
of his prophetic message. He is not only a poet;
he is a prophet and a reformer.”
The idea of Love and Beauty in Shelley is
greatly influenced by Plato. Love to Shelley, as
to Plato is perfection of all that is good and
noble in life. In Episychidion, he says that love
is not bound to one object at a time and when
love fades away, we need not be faithful. He
adds that love conquers death and beauty, and
even goodness and truth originate in it. In fact,
Shelley was in love with love itself, “I love
Love, though he has wings/ And like light can
flee.”

Shelley never believed in life as it is lived; so he
made people realize and aspire for the absence
of the necessities. He hated and condemned the
tyranny of State, Religion and Society which
stand in the path of a heavenly blissful life.
The calamities, he refers to are not natural
calamities but man-made calamities;
aspiration of man for Power pollutes the whole
nation like a ‘devastating pestillence’. So
people suffer under such people’s tyranny. So
he longs for a golden age which is free from
such calamities yet immune to pain and death.
“Look to the Rose that blows about us-“Lo,
Laughing”, she says, “into the World I blow:
At once the silken Tassel of my Purse
Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw.”
It is the imagination which makes Shelley’s
poetry the best. His mind was abstract and
imaginative, that he sometimes wondered if he

were fitter for metaphysics or poetry. His
natural mode of thinking was too abstract to
isolate some element in Nature of man, and
then being a poet, to body it forth in imagery.
He gives life to every object in Nature through
his imagination in current words, in a new and
striking manner and forms new compounds,
always a fresh shoot in every living language.
Ordinary things are lifted to the higher plane
by his imagination. The Cloud is a wonderful
example of Shelley’s imagination. He imagines
the cloud as the fairy child that runs about
everywhere and laughs at all things. He speaks
of its immortality in : “I silently laugh at my
own cenotaph,/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.”
He imagines the wind in Ode to the West Wind
as the destroyer destroying useless and evil
creeds. Also, the wind blowing through the

forest and producing noise is a common thing,
but Shelley imagines the forest as a lyre on
which the West Wind plays different tunes.
“And those who husbanded the Golden Grain,
And those who flung it to the Winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn’d
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.”
Shelley fuses intellectual ideas with the images,
and the result is that the idea has a new
appeal. Shelley thought that the abstract ideas
which meant so much to him could be
presented only in symbols and images. In his
Preface, he says, “The imagery which I have
employed will be found in many instances to
have been drawn from the operations of
human mind, or from those external actions by
which they are expressed.”
“Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,

How Sulta`n after Sulta`n with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.”
George M. Ridenour observes: “Shelley’s
optimism is based on chances for extracting
benefit from an order of things not obviously
concerned with man. As he himself observes at
the beginning of his ‘proposals for an
Association of Philanthropists’, Man cannot
make occasions, but he may seize those that
offer.” This is classical, as Shelley knew. He
expanded a cynical epigram of the palatine
Anthology; “Under the heaving High Cope/
Fortune is God, all you endure and do/ Depends
on circumstances as much as you.” But of, it is
possible to reverse the emphasis and point out
that it depends on you as much as
circumstance and this is Shelley’s usual way.
He assumes that while man’s mind and what it
experiences concur only imperfectly, the extent
of disproportion can at least be reduced. Art,

science, and social organization can reshape
the experienced world nearer to the heart’s
desire but as we have noticed, Shelley’s
emphasis falls on what, for want of better
terms, we must call the spiritual or
psychological. He hopes it is possible to
exercise the mind in such a way that, without
deception the elements favourable to man may
be strengthened, the hostile reduced, and man
finds the good he seeks. The strategy is a
delicate one involving a complex interplay of
active and passive, inner and outer, mind and
experience, as in the intricate gearing of
Alastor, Intellectual Beauty or Mont Blanc. The
movement upward of the mind, often involves
an imaginative projection of what ought to be,
which is itself to some extent received –e.g., the
vision in Alastor. The passive aspect involves
an inner disposition that Shelley usually calls
love, roughly the affective correlative to the
more consciously shaping power. Together they

make up man’s capacity for integrated
experience, i.e., imagination. Shelley points out
that even limited success is evidence that the
non-human world is at least amenable to
human purposes and he hopes that it may
suggest an ultimate identity in Nature.
“The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes- or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Dessert’s dusty Face
Lightning a little Hour or two-is gone.”
R.H. Fogle says: “Shelley‘s imagery is symbolic
to an unusual degree.” Most of his characters
are symbolical. Alastor is psychological
allegory of the pursuit of the ideal, and is
concerned mainly with conflict of body and
spirit, dealing with the romantic conflict’s
inner aspect. He often uses eagle and serpent
as symbols of good and evil respectively. We
come across this eagle-serpent conflict in The

Revolt of Islam and the symbol of veil too is
often repeated. Veil represents the veil of
Eternity in his former poetry, followed by the
veil of time in his later works. The symbol of
veil denotes the concealment of good. In The
Revolt of Islam, this symbol of veil is used to
conceal truth and beauty from man. Cythna
says: “For with strong speech I tore the veil
that hid/ Nature, and Truth, Liberty, and
Love.” In Epipsychidion, too, he uses the same
image: “I knew it was the vision veiled from
me/So many years-that it was Emily.” In
Prometheus Unbound, he uses the same image
as ‘a symbol of life’: “The painted veil, by
those who were, called life/Which mimicked, as
with colours idly spread,/All men believed or
hoped, is torn aside/The loathsome mask has
fallen.” Boat as the symbol of human soul and
stream as the symbol of unveil stream of
thought are also handled by Shelley in his
various poems. In Adonais, the boat is

described as human soul. Even in The Song of
India and The Revolt of Islam, the same image
is repeated. Moon symbol is also used as a
planet of magic calm and hope.
“Then said another- “Surely not in vain
My Substance from the common Earth was
ta’en,
That He who subtly wrought me into Shape
Should stamp me back to common Earth
again.” ‘’
Shelley’s language is pure and transparent and
free from archaism and Latinism. Far-stretched
images and contrived phrases and expressions
are not part of his style. Most of his thoughts
are coloured by imagination and are expressed
in figured speeches.
He is the master of using blank verse too. For
the blank verse of Alastor substituted the
Spensarian Stanza which Shelley masters at

once in his own more lyrical fashion. The music
of the verse and the poetic imagery are the
chief and whole interests of this poem: “the
visions of a dream/ Which hid in one deep gulf
the troubled stream/ of mind…” In Rosalind
and Helen, he blends self-pity, eroticism,
anticipation of death, the protest against
cruelties of society, all in the metre of Scott,
Coleridge and Byron’s tales. In Julian and
Maddalo, Byron’s influence on Shelley is
revealed. It shows how well Shelley could write,
as in translations. He curbed his genius and
wrote as one who can talk as well as think. The
first part of the poem where he describes the
day with Byron, is admirable in diction, and
management of the couplet with overflow and
varying pause. This poem is notable for its
conversational and descriptive manner.
“And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in-Yes-

Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be- Nothing-Thou shalt not be less.”
His skill in using undulating verse is well seen
in his Epipsychidion, in the description of the
ideal poetry and aspects of the Italian scenery
with which Shelley had become familiar- all
blended in the poet’s liquid and undulating
verse.
“For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and
go.”
In the love sons, the tone of a singer blends
with that of one who talks in gentle winning
accents: “One word is too often profaned/ For
me to profane it”
“Khayya`m, who stitched the tents of science,

Has fallen in grief’s furnace and been suddenly
burned;
The sheds of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his
life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for
nothing!”
Shelley, it may be said, loves to see Nature in
all its forms; but there is no doubt that the
doings of Nature are more important to him
than merely those forms.
“Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,-
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?”
This is the main reason for the defects and
weaknesses of his poems. His sentences often

trail and his meaning is not infrequently
obscure, but such faults can be forgiven in the
effect of the whole. Unlike Wordsworth and
Byron, he never writes versified prose. His
voice is always the singing voice, never that of
the talker or speaker. Hence, minute criticism,
as of faulty rhymes or as occasional vagueness
of meaning is of no avail when applied to the
poems of unique beauty, spiritual and formal
and of entire originality.
While Wordsworthian is fond of the static and
quiet aspects of Nature, Shelley is fascinated
by the dynamic. He himself has admitted: “I
take great delight in watching the changes of
the atmosphere.” this explains his great love
for the sky and the resultant composition of his
sky-lyrics- Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud,
and To A Skylark. The West Wind never rests
and it moves speedily and continuously to
perform its functions over land and sea and in

the sky. The Cloud and the Skylark show an
equally intense restlessness. Shelley is ever
conscious of the changes in Nature and her
periodic regeneration; these lines in Adonais
may be quoted as an illustration.
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”
The Masque of Anarchy is fraught with hard
thought, deep feeling and a sense of purpose.
Its street-ballad form and chipped un-
Shelleyan rhythm help in compressing and
condensing.
“For “IS” and “IS-NOT” though with Rule and
Line
And “UP-AND-DOWN” without, I could define,
I yet in all I only cared to know,

Was never deep in anything but-Wine.”
As Shelley’s poetic style has its merits, it also
has its own demerits. He was aiming not at the
poetry of art, but at the poetry of rapture, and
he achieves it as no other poet has ever done.
Macaulay too comments, “The words ‘bard’
and ‘inspiration’ which seem so cold and
infected when applied to other modern writers,
have a perfect propriety when applied to him.
He was not an author, but a bard. His poetry
seems not to have been art, but an
inspiration.”
Like other Romantic poets, Shelley is an ardent
lover and worshipper of Nature. Nature is to
Shelley, as it is to Wordsworth, a spiritual
reality. Shelley looks upon Nature, as a never-
ending source of solace and inspiration. Like
Wordsworth, he believes that there is in Nature
a capability for communicating with the mind
and emotions of man. Yet there is a

fundamental difference between these two
poets in their treatment of Nature.
Wordsworth endows Nature with a spirit,
Shelley goes much further to provide it with an
intellect. He also lends a dynamic quality to the
forces of Nature in a way that the other
Romantics have never been able to do. J. A.
Symonds remarks: “Shelley is one with the
romantic temper of his age in ascribing to
Nature a spiritual quality and significance and
in regarding man’s life as dynamic and
progressive. But he goes beyond romanticism
in his idea of a vigorous dynamic life of
Nature.” Shelley loves Nature and can extract
joy in its company and rid himself of his
sufferings and feelings of loneliness. His
admiration for Nature, thus finds expression in
his essay On Love: “There is eloquence in the
tongueless wind and a melody in the flowing
brooks and the rumbling of the reeds beside
them, which by their inconceivable relation to

something within the soul awakens the spirit to
a dance of breathless rapture and brings tears
of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the
enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of
one’s beloved singing to you alone.”
Shelley considers Nature to be a companion
endowed with a power of ridding human
beings of their pain and agonies. This view of
Nature has its origin in Shelley’s personal
experience. Whenever he is sad, he turns to
Nature and succeeds in drawing comfort from
it. During his days in Italy, the worst days in
his life, he keeps trying to find joy in the
beautiful Italian landscapes. In Lines Written
Among the Euganean Hills, Shelley displays a
mystic involvement with Nature. He finds in
Nature a never ending source of delightful
images. The sun is to him not just a nature
phenomenon, but something, “broad, red,
radiant, half-reclined on the level quivering

line of the waters crystalline.” The surrounding
scenic beauty of the Euganean Hills succeeds in
soothing his melancholy for the moment and
fills him with a radiant optimism heightened
by his musings on the so-called island of
Delight.
Images drawn from Nature are abundant in
Shelley’s poetry. His images often produce a
pictorial quality not to be derived even from
paintings. His portrait of the Cloud is more
vivid, more picturesque than the cloudscapes
painted by Constable or Turner. The image of
the sunrise in The Cloud is unequalled in its
splendor.
In To A Skylark, image after image has been
piled up in quick succession to give an idea of
the bird-a “Cloud of Fire”, an “unembodied
joy”, a “poet hidden in the light of thought”,
“a golden glow-worm”; a rose “embowered in
green leaves” and yet “scattering its scent.”

The changing aspects of the West Wind are
also illustrated through a series of images. In
Adonais, the imagery is particularly rich in the
Stanzas depicting the advent of spring.
Shelley has a natural talent for binding such
images at will. When Wordsworth comes
across an image, he takes care to ponder upon
it until the poetry flowing from it is exhausted;
he is miserly in his use of images because he
does not find many of them. Shelley, on the
other hand, is often seen to use one image for a
moment and then to throw it away for another;
unlike Wordsworth, he can afford to do so.
Shelley frequently goes outdoors to look for
symbols to give concrete shapes to his abstract
thoughts and emotions. Having a stronger
insight into Nature than other poets, he finds
in it an inexhaustible source of such symbols.
His poetry becomes more meaningful and more
vigorous whenever he finds in Nature a symbol

to suit his purpose. In his West Wind, Shelley
finds various symbolic meanings. To him the
wind is at once a destroyer and a preserver,
and hence a symbol of change. He uses the
wind as a symbol of his own personality-
“tameless, and swift, and proud.” Finally, the
wind is made the symbol of the forces that can
help bring about the golden millennium in
which the sufferings of mankind will be
replaced by pure happiness. Similarly, the
cloud which changes but never dies is regarded
by Shelley as a symbol of his belief in
immortality and his yearning for some kind of
supernal status, and the Skylark symbolizes his
hopefulness of the liberation of mankind
through the efforts of poet prophets. In
Adonais, “pansies’’ have been used to
symbolize the fate of Shelley’s poetry while
“violets’’ stand for his modesty and innocence.
The sky, stars, sun, moon, wind and the river
have frequently been used by Shelley as

symbols of eternity. In Adonais, we find such a
reference to the immortality of stars.
“How sweet is mortal Sovranty!”-think some:
Others- “How blest the Paradise to come!”
Ah, take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest;
Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!”
Edmund remarks: “No man ever taught the
triumph of the spiritual over the material more
eloquently than he.” S.A. Brooke points out
that Shelley’s poetry is an embodiment of
youth-like vigour and that middle-aged men
can regain their youth by going through it. Few
poets have done more than Shelley to shake
the foundations of injustice, superstition,
cruelty and tyranny. His greatest contribution
to mankind is, however, an unbound optimism-
an overwhelming hope for regeneration.
“And, strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot
Some could articulate, while others not:

And suddenly one more impatient cried-
“Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”
Another aspect of Shelley’s Nature poetry is his
tendency to make myths out of Nature. His
profound insight into Nature and his capacity
to feel it intensely account for his unique myth-
making power. In his poetry, he personifies the
forces of nature and gives to each one of them
an individuality, feelings and capacity to act.
In Adonais, for instance, morning, thunder,
ocean, winds, echo, spring and others are all
impersonated and made to participate in the
mourning for Keats. Clutton-Brock writes: “His
myths were not to him mere caprices of fancy.
They expressed by the only means which
human language provides for the expression
of such things, that sense, which he possessed,
of a more intense reality in nature than is felt
by other men. To most of us, the forces of
nature have but little reality….But for Shelley

these forces had as much reality as human
beings have for most of us…There is this
difference between Shelley and primitive myth
makers- that they seem to have thought of the
forces of nature as disguised beings more
powerful than themselves but still in all
essentials human, or else as manifestations of
the power of such beings. But to Shelley, the
West Wind was still a wind, and the Cloud a
Cloud, however intense a reality they might
have for him. In his poetry, they keep their own
character and do not take on human
attributes, though their own qualities may be
expressed in imagery taken from human
beings.”
“If I myself upon a looser Creed
Have loosely strung the Jewel of Good deed,
Let this one thing for my Atonement plead:
That One for Two I never did mistread.”

Shelley was a keen student of science during
his youth. This is why most of his descriptions
of Nature are based on the popular science of
his day. The Cloud is the most finished
illustration of Shelley’s knowledge of science.
The poem most seems to be written by a
meteorologist. “Sublime on the towers of my
skiey bowers, / Lightning my pilot sits-‘’ clearly
shows his knowledge of the relationship
between clouds and electricity. Another line: “I
change, but I cannot die…” is again based on a
significant scientific truth-the undying
circulation of the water particles which form
the clouds. The image in the poem ‘Sunbeams
with their convex gleams’ can also be cited to
show that Shelley knows all about the
atmospheric refraction of the sun’s rays.
Desmond King-Hele writes: “Writers who
figure in the history of science, like Bacon and
Goethe, are rare; but Shelley’s gift of
expressing in his verse a scientific outlook

which ‘permeates it through and through’ is
even rarer. It is difficult to define this special
scientific flavour. Probably its most important
component is a persistent analysis of Nature:
being eager to delve beneath the surface of
appearance, instead of seeing things whole
like Keats and Shakespeare, searching out the
casual chain between one facet of Nature and
another, and linking those facets imaginatively
or metaphorically to interpret the scene
describes. It is in his command of this last
technique that Shelley scores.”
“And look- a thousand Blossoms with the Day
Woke- and a thousand scatter’d into Clay:
And this first Summer Month that brings the
Rose
Shall take Jamshy`d and Kaikoba`d away.”
Most of Shelley’s poems are sad in tone and as
such he is regarded as “the singer of endless

sorrows.” But of, this is not true of all his
poems. Whenever he writes of the future of
mankind, he turns ecstatically optimistic.
“But come with old Khayya`m, and leave the
Lot
Of Kaikoba`d and Kaikhosru` forgot:
Let Rustum lay about him as he will,
Or Ha`tim Tai cry Supper-heed them not.”
In Ode to West Wind, the poet begins his
invocation in a buoyant mood. He looks upon
the Wind as the destroyer of the present order
and usherer of a new one. In the course of the
poem, he suddenly remembers his own plight:
“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” And the
tone turns pessimistic. But in, the subsequent
thought of the future at once turns his
melancholy into ecstatic rapture and he ends
the poem with one of the most optimistic and

memorable prophecies about the future of
mankind.
“But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me
The Quarrel of the Universe let be:
And, in some corner of the Hubub coucht,
Make Game of that which makes as much of
Thee.”
The ecstasy arises out of his ardent belief in the
imminent regeneration of mankind and the end
of all evils. He hopes that all forms of tyranny
and oppression will be replaced, in the
millennium to come, by all-round happiness.
“The mighty Mahm` d, the victorious Lord,
That all the misbelieving and black Horde
Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
Scatters and slays with his enchanted Sword.”
In Hellas, Shelley has a clear and sublime
vision of the future of mankind. His prophecy

of the gold millennium, envisagedin Ode to the
West Wind, finds a more elaborate and
rapturous expression in his poetic drama,
Hellas. In the poem, he imagines an age of
mental light with the law of love and beauty
for its guiding principle. The joyous rapture at
the end of the play is born of an intense feeling
of optimism.
Shelley’s attitude towards life is on the one
hand immensely pessimistic, and, on the other,
extremely optimistic. He is pessimistic about
the present and bears optimistic hopes for the
future. Contemplation of the corruption,
tyranny and social problems of the present fills
him with despondency. But at, he believes in
the imminent dawning of a new era- a golden
millennium-when all evils will disappear giving
place to a reign of love, beauty and happiness.
He is, by nature, a hypersensitive person-
reacting to all kinds of sentiments and passion

with an extreme intensity of feeling. He is a
man of many moods, and his poems,
depending on the moods, are either
expressions of ebullient ecstasy or revelations
of an extreme despair.
“With me along some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of Slave and Sulta`n scarce is
known,
And pity Sulta`n Ma`hmu`d on this Throne.”
Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples,
illustrates a mood of extreme despair on the
part of Shelley. The poem was composed at a
time when the poet had already faced a series
of personal misfortunes and was left extremely
lonely and sad. He had the feeling that he was
one “whom men love not”. The happy
surroundings of the Bay of Naples are
contrasted with his personal agonies making

them sharper and more poignant. It is,
therefore, natural that the poem becomes an
expression of an intense pessimism on the part
of the poet. A Lament (O World! O Life! O
Time!) is another poem depicting Shelley’s
characteristic mood of genuine despair. The
poet now finds joy in nothing. His twice-
repeated expression of hopelessness arising
from his contemplation of the prospect of joy
returning to him-“No more-O, never more”-
reveals a genuine and deep-felt mood of
dejection and despondency. The Indian
Serenade is one of Shelley’s most beautiful
lyrics written in the white heat of passion. The
tone underlying the poem is one of gloom and
intense pessimism. The sadness of the lovelorn
poet in this poem borders on morbidity.
The poet’s concept of love here arises from a
sense of frustration and his personal agonies.
He looks upon love not as a source of comfort,

but as a disease of the mind which slowly and
steadily leads the victim to his ruin. The lines
quoted from the poem remind us of a similar
expression of the poet’s sufferings in his
famous Ode to the West Wind: “Oh! Lift me as
a wave, a leaf, a cloud!/I fall upon the thorns
of life! I bleed!”
A Window Bird Sate Mourning is a short song
also characterized by an intense feeling of
pathos. The poet describes a widow bird in a
scene of wintry desolation where the wind is
frozen, the stream is freezing and there is no
leaf or flower in the forest and upon the
ground. There can be no doubt that the poem is
inspired by Shelley’s own feelings in the wintry
scene. The picture of the desolation is only a
concrete expression of the poet’s own
melancholy. The appeal of the poem lies in the
genuine emotion underlying it.
“The Grape that can with Logic absolute

The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:
The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice
Life’s leaden Metal into Gold transmute.”
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty also is an
expression of the poet’s melancholy. The poet
is depressed because this Intellectual Beauty
which gives joy to human hearts comes so
rarely. At the moment in which the poem is
written, the Spirit of Beauty is gone, leaving
the poet in a mood of absolute despair. The
world for him has now turned into a “dim vast
vale of tears, vacant and desolate.”
Despondency shines through the subsequent
questions he asks. Adonais originates from
Shelley’s intense feeling of sadness at the
premature death of a fellow poet, John Keats.
The sadness underlying the poem is greatly
enhanced by the blending of the occasion with
the poet’s own characteristic feeling of
loneliness. This accounts for the subjective,

pessimistic elements in the poem. His
description of himself:”He came the last,
neglected and apart; /A herd-abandoned deer,
struck by the hunter’s dart…” comes straight
from a wounded and agonized heart. He refers
to himself as “companionless” and gives an
extremely pathetic expression to his
helplessness and insufficiency by calling his
own spirit. Shelley’s pessimism reaches its peak
when in the last stanza of the Elegy, he
forecasts an early death for himself: “…my
spirit’s bark is driven/ Far from the shore, far
from the trembling throng/Whose sails were
never to the tempest given.”
Arnold finds Shelley’s poetry wanting in “truth
and seriousness.” While commenting upon the
visionary aspect of his poetry, Arnold remarks:
“It is his poetry, above everything else, which
for many people establishes that he is an
angel. But of his poetry I have not space now to

speak. But let no one suppose that a want of
humour and a self-delusion such as Shelley’s
have no effect upon a man’s poetry. The man
Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and
Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The
Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and
radiance, indeed, but availing nothing,
effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than
in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel,
beating in the void his luminous wings in
vain.”
We can trace both intense despair and bright
optimism in Shelley’s poetry. The growth of
these two opposing views can be traced as
more or less separate developments. The
optimism resulting from belief in the
impending regeneration of mankind develops
through Alastor, Prometheus Unbound and
Hellas. His mood of despair spreads through
his first individual lyric to his last poem. These

two opposing moods are, of course, seen
together in a few poems, particularly in Lines
Written Among the Euganean Hills. The poem
opens in a morbid contemplation of death, but
ends in the joyous dream of a land where music
and moonlight and feeling are one. He
recognizes misery and happiness as two
aspects of human life. The poem is basically a
sad poem, but an intense optimism, accepting
the presence of islands of Delight in the sea of
Misery, runs through the entire length of the
poem. On this aspect of the poem, Elton
comments: “The course of Shelley’s genius may
be regarded as an effort to attain this
coalescence, and to find a form that should
express at once all he dreamed of for humanity
and all, he knew about himself. Cut-off at
twenty-nine, he hardly achieved this, but a sort
of race between these competing impulses can
be traced in his poetic progress.”

It would be sheer injustice to pretend that
Shelley’s poetry, unsubstantial and vague as it
is, has taught us nothing. He has taught us the
lessons of love, forgiveness and patient
suffering through his poetry. In Prometheus
Unbound, he has taught the world: “To suffer
woes which Hope thinks infinite, /To forgive
wrongs darker than death or night, /To defy
Power, which seems omnipotent, /To love, and
bear.”
“How long, how long, in definite Pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute?
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
Than sadder after no new, or bitter, Fruit.”
Arnold’s criticism of Shelley has led to much
controversy. Many critics have taken an
unsympathetic attitude similar to Arnold’s
towards Shelley. They have all alike dismissed
Shelley’s poetry as unsubstantial, unreal and

visionary. Hazlitt remarks: “Bubbles were to
him the only realities, touch them and they
vanish,” and that “nobody was ever wiser or
better for reading Shelley.” According to Lamb,
Shelley’s poetry is “thin sown with profit or
delight.” ‘’Shelley’s creed,” says Leslie
Stephen, “means only a vague longing.” Arthur
Symons has criticized Shelley for “he teaches us
nothing and leads us nowhere but cries and
flies round us like a sea-bird.” Shelley is ‘’a
sentimentalist, pure and simple, incapable of
anything like inductive reasoning” is the
verdict of Kingsley, Prof Grierson has thus
abused him: “Shelley can neither comprehend
nor create.” T.S.Eliot too has dismissed
Shelley’s poetry as absurd and has called it “an
affair of adolescence.” The admirers of Shelley,
on the other hand, have been equally vehement
in their defence of his poetry. Olive Elton has
summarily dismissed Arnold’s criticism of
Shelley; he says: “Arnold is wrong about

Shelley, wrong beyond recovery, and without
qualification.” Quiller- Couch asserts,
“Ineffectual is the falsest word that has been
applied to Shelley.” Sir Walter Raleigh, George
Ridenour, Carlos Baker and A. C. Bradley have
found ample meaning and substance in
Shelley’s poetry. S.A.Brooke condemns Arnold
for his criticism and points out that Arnold has
proved to be a critic with wrong judgement by
predicting that Shelley’s prose will outlive his
poetry. Clutton-Brock is of the opinion that
Shelley had an intense faith “in mankind and
the future of the universe; but it remained
always abstract, and he hated all facts that
seemed to him to contradict it.”
Arnold’s charge against Shelley seems to be a
mixture of truth and illogicality. There is no
doubt that Shelley’s poetry, to a great extent,
suffers from a lack of concreteness and a want
of substance. His friend, Hogg, once remarked

that Shelley’s feet were seldom planted on
earth and that he “flew aloft to heaven with
singing robes around him, or the mantle of the
prophet on his shoulders.” Shelley had been
haunted by visions since his boyhood. In his
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Shelley himself
describes his boyhood when he looked for
ghosts through “many a listening chamber,
cage, and ruin,” and “musing deeply on the lot
of life” would see ethereal visions. Referring to
this characteristic of Shelley’s personality,
Symons observes: “At no period of his life was
he wholly free from visions which had the
reality of facts. Sometimes they occurred in
sleep and were prolonged with painful
vividness into his waking moments. Sometimes
they seemed to grow out of his intense
meditation, or to present themselves before his
eyes as the projection of a powerful inner
expression. All his sensations were abnormally
acute, and his ever active imagination

confused the borderlands of the actual and the
visionary.” His visions fill him with aspirations
that cannot be defined; they are like: “The
desire of the moth for the star, / Of the night
for the morrow, / The devotion to something
afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.” It is
obvious that such abstract aspirations cannot
be fulfilled in this matter-of-fact world
inhabited by human beings. So Shelley is often
found soaring like his skylark far into the
ethereal world out of the reach of human
beings. The poetry composed in that ethereal
sphere must inevitably be somewhat vague
and lacking in human touch. His sky-lyrics-Ode
to West Wind, The Cloud, To A Skylark-are
beautiful poems, but they all deal with their
subjects as far away from ordinary human
experience.
When we discuss the charge of
“unsubstantiality’’ against Shelley, we must

recall to our mind a few facts about the art of
poetic communication. The relationship
between a poet and his poetry differs from that
between a mechanic and his machine. A
mechanic can run his machine only if he knows
the technique of doing so. But of, mere poetic
technique cannot produce poetry; poetic
inspiration must accompany technique for
doing so. The inspiration in Shelley’s case has
ever been so intense and all-pervading that it
has often swept him off the ground and taken
him into an ethereal world to find images and
objects for its expression. The inspiration of the
poet, by its intensity and great range, becomes
vague and incomprehensible to ordinary men,
and this vagueness passes on to everything it
touches. Clouds, Skylarks, the moon, the stars
are all familiar to us; they become vague only
when Shelley’s superhuman genius touches
them. Shelley belongs to the rare category of
the men of vision who have that magnificience

of perspective, that depth of experience, that
poignant touch of the soul that escape one who
lives on the surface. Shelley’s experience is,
therefore, larger and deeper than ours and his
heart more capable of responding to the
remotest murmurs of things. Poets like Shelley
can find far-off truths, often called poetic
truths, not easily visible to the ordinary eyes. If
we want to enjoy Shelley’s poetry, we must not
look for information in it; we must try to
insinuate ourselves into his moods, feel with
his heart and judge with his mind to get to the
poetic truths that he has expressed in his
poetry. If we look through the whirling
obscurity of thought and fancy in his poetry we
can find this remaining constant and steady
throughout. It is the truth propounded by Plato
twenty five centuries earlier, one that states
that man is essentially good.

The Cloud is a wonderful illustration of
Shelley’s myth-making power. In this poem,
Shelley personifies the Cloud which is a
familiar sight to all of us and then goes on to
give a new significance to all its changes. The
autobiographical and scientific presentation of
the myth has lent it immense credibility and
has created a new romance of the sky.
Shelley shows no sense of history and cannot
put forth the cause and remedies of the evils he
finds in human society. He has an intense belief
the regeneration of mankind is imminent but
cannot tell us why and how it is coming. His
West Wind is a symbol of the forces that will
bring about this regeneration: it is nothing
more. He has never told us what these forces
symbolized by the wind are in Written Among
the Euganean Hills, is merely a product of an
unfounded optimism and has no logical
bearing. Shelley’s faith is no doubt genuine

and intense, but it comes from his abstract
visions, not from sound logical reasoning.
Similar artistry can be traced in To A Skylark
which is not simply a poem but the bird’s song
itself translated into Stanzas. The Stanza used
in the poem indeed corresponds, in its first four
lines, to the crescendo of the bird’s song, and,
in the prolonged last line, to the ‘rain of
melody’ which is its climax. The rhythm of the
poem, The Cloud, beautifully suggests the
hurrying movement of the Clouds before a
tempestuous wind. Such blending of sense and
versification is wonderful and unique, and it is
this quality in particular which has made
Shelley’s lyrics so musical. On his lyrical poetry
Charles Morgan remarks: “His instrument was
unique. There is no poet, not even Shakespeare
in his lyrics, who has Shelley’s effect of bird-
song pouring and pouring out. His lyrics are
not written; they burst from the hedgerow, the

sunshine, the air; they give to the hearer the
life of the heart, the sense of penetrating
rapture which is given by Nature and by love.”
Melancholy is found to be the dominant note in
most of Shelley’s lyrics. He becomes sad and
often despondent whenever he thinks of the
evils of the present, or of personal sufferings.
Some of his lyrics are entirely pessimistic in
tone. His Stanzas Written in Dejection near
Naples, reflects a mood of utter despondency.
He feels that he is one “whom men love not”
and then proceeds to narrate a profound sense
of helplessness. The Indian Serenade is another
of his lyrics written in a similar mood. Here he
gives expression to his sufferings and
frustration with genuine passion: “O lift me
from the grass! / I die! I faint! I fail! This note
of melancholy that pervades his poetry has
added to the lyrical quality of his poems.
Looking at them we cannot but agree with the

famous poetic truth: “Our sweetest songs are
those that tell of saddest thought.” But of,
Shelley’s melancholy is never depressing.
Shelley never allows morbidity to overcome the
enjoyment in his lyrics. Self-pity is no doubt his
favourite theme. But at in his lyrics, he
presents this self-pity, not as something to be
feared, but as an essential part of life.
Shelley’s readers are never depressed because
they are constantly reminded that sufferings
lie only in the present and that in future all
sufferings will be replaced by pure happiness.
In Ode to the West Wind, the poet shows a
mood of despondency. His despondency is soon
replaced by an ecstatic rapture of joy when he
comes to think of the future happiness of
mankind, of the millennium to come. This co-
existence of pessimism and optimism- the swift
replacement of one by the other-is a major
attractive feature of Shelley’s lyric poetry.

Spontaneity is the most striking quality of
Shelley’s lyrics. His lyrics move so flowingly
because they come straight from his heart. His
lyrics as, Stopford Brooke remarks “have the
rush and impetuosity of south.” According to
Compton Rickett, “Shelley exhaled verse as a
flower exhaled fragrance. The essential point is
that there was no effort or laborious artistry
about it any time.” Shelley is swept forward by
a rush of poetic energy and goes on producing
image after image, all inspired by the original
thought. The imagery in these lyrics, therefore,
gives the impression of being the product of no
laborious thought but of a spontaneous growth
of poetic impulse. The imagery in the West
Wind, for example, gives an instant impression
of a spontaneous flow of thought. We pass in
turn over earth, sky, and sea, the music
growing fuller and more majestic as the poet
moves on.

Eagle-serpent battles are quite frequent in
literature. Shelley may have come across such
battles in Iliad, Aeneid, Metamorphoses, or
Faerie Queene. Of the use of this symbol of an
eagle-snake encounter in The Revolt of Islam,
Desmond King-Hele writes: “The life-long fight
of Laon and Cythna against tyranny
corresponds to the day-long aerial battle
between eagle and serpent. The theme of
romantic love comes in when the serpent,
defeated, falls into the sea: for in myth,
serpents and water often have sexual
implications. And the name ‘Cythna’ with its
hissing sound and its hint of a swan, serpent-
necked, afloat on a still lake, again links
serpents and water. Byron called Shelley ‘the
snake’ because the way he walked, but the
nickname really went deeper, for Shelley was
always fascinated by snakes, perhaps because
as a child he had heard the legends of dragons
and serpents terrorizing the vastness of St.

Leonards’s Forest, near Horsham. He was
equally fascinated by eagles, but since it was
his habit to stress their nobility and to use
them to personify young nations throwing off
the yoke of tyranny, it is odd that he should
here choose the eagle to symbolize evil.
Presumably he wished on this occasion to
emphasize its cruelty, strength and apparent
arrogance, which contrast with the serpent’s
unassuming air.
‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces play:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and
slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.”
Adonais illustrates Shelley’s capacity to feel
Nature and its doings. The poem is full of
myths, that is, personifications of Nature.
Nature, according to Shelley, is linked with

mankind in an inseparable bond of love and
sympathy. Thunder, ocean, winds, echo, spring
and other natural phenomena have all been
personified and made to participate in the
mourning for Adonais. The myth of Morning,
lamenting the death of Adonais, is but one
example of such powerful, credible, and
typically Shelleyan myths.
“Ah, Moon of my Delight, who know’st no
wane,
The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me- in vain!”
S.A. Brooke regards this poem as the most
astonishing example of Shelley’s myth-making
power. Of this poem he says: “It is not only a
myth of the Cloud; the Cloud is accompanied by
a host of other impersonafications of nature-
the sanguine sunrise with his meteor eyes, the

orbed maiden of the moon, the imprisoned
giant of the thunder, the lightning which runs
through the sky to find his love, - all are
touched into life, and yet there is not one
phrase, not one adjective which is
contradictory of, or which does not illuminate,
natural fact.”
Shelley has been universally accepted as one of
the supreme lyrical geniuses in English poetry.
He, according to Swinburne, “stands alone
among singers, and he is the perfect singing
god.” According to Cazamian, “Shelley’s
lyricism is incomparable. In no other poet do,
we find the perfect sureness, the triumphant
rapidity of his upward flight, the soaring
height, the super-terrestrial quality as well as
the poignant intensity of the sounds which fall
from these aerial regions.” Ernest Rys in his
Lyric Poetry has paid a similar tribute to
Shelley’s lyrical genius: “Among the lyric poets,

Shelley, who was a lyric poet before
everything, needs no longer to have his claim
reaffirmed. We judge him by the verdict of
those English poets who, coming after him,
have famously sustained his ideals.” Even the
narrative poems of Shelley are stamped by his
lyricism. Shelley combines his passion and
simplicity with other remarkable qualities,
namely, the quality of music and the art of
combining the outward rhythm of the verse
with an inner rhythm of thought and imagery.
No other English poet has so well succeeded in
blending music with thought, in harmonizing
rhythm with emotion.”
“And when Thyself with shinning Foot shall
pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on the Grass,
And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one-turn down an empty Glass!”

To Night is another fine example of Shelley’s
ability to create new myths. He does not pursue
Greek legend in this poem, but himself creates
“forms more real than living men, Nurslings of
immortality.” While admiring the mythical
element in this poem, Fowler has observed:
“Personifications of Day, Night, Sleep and
Death are common enough in the English poets
in imitation of Classical poetry, but they are
apt to be frigid. The remarkable thing about
Shelley’s personifications is that they are more
real to him than their ancient counterparts
were to the great majority of the classical poets
themselves. Perhaps the best help to the
appreciation of the most delicate hues would
be the study of some of the allegorical
paintings of Burne Jones.” In the poem, Shelley
has strengthened his myths by lending life and
feeling to some abstractions and by
distributing relationships among them.

By ‘myth’ we usually mean a purely fictitious
narrative involving supernatural persons etc.
and embodying popular ideas on natural
phenomena or such other things. The origin of
myths lies in the ancient days when people,
unable to form abstract conceptions, described
the phenomena of nature in terms applicable
to their personal actions. The introduction of
myths in poetry is, of course, a much later
development. Mr. Henri Frankfort and Mrs.
H.A. Frankfort, in their book Myth and Reality,
have referred to the functions of myths in
poetry: “Myth is a form of poetry which
transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth; a
form of reasoning which transcends reasoning
in that it wants to bring about the truth it
proclaims, a form of action, of ritual behavior,
which does not find its fulfillment in the act but
must proclaim and elaborate a poetic form of
myth. Like Blake, Shelley is essentially
mythopoetic. Of all the Romantic poets, he is

the greatest myth-maker. No other poet has
used the ancient myths to such advantage as
he has done in nature and philosophical poems.
He was alone the perfect singing God; his
thoughts, words and deeds all sang together.
Arnold, one of the worst critics of Shelley,
admired his music and remarked: “The right
sphere of Shelley’s genius was the sphere of
music.” Shelley’s careful handling of diction
fitting into the sense of his lines enhances the
musical quality keeping with the swift, of his
lyrics. The rhythm of Ode to the West Wind is
thus exactly in gusty march of the wind itself:
“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s
being.”
“While the Rose blows along the River Brink,
With old Khayya` m the Ruby Vintage drink:
And when the Angel with his darker Draught

Draws up to Thee-take that, and do not
shrink.”
Shelley’s is unparallel in the sphere of making
myths out of Nature mainly because he has a
greater imaginative insight into Nature than
any other poet. The natural phenomena
occurring through a great volume of space
have always attracted him. The moon, in
particular, has always been an object of
interest to Shelley. He has referred to the moon
as a living and feeling object in many of his
poems. In Prometheus Unbound, the moon has
been given a human shape. It is presented
there as the lover of Earth, indulging in an
erotic myth. The moon is imagined as a young
maiden in another poem, The Cloud.
A symbol in a broad sense denotes an image
used to signify an idea. Shelley, endowed with
tremendous imagination and a deep insight
into natural objects, finds symbols to express

his ideas almost at will. That is why his poetry
abounds in symbols and requires from the
readers quite an amount of insight to be able
to appreciate it. R.H. Fogle observes: “Shelley’s
poetic world is not a literal transcription of his
perceptions of the natural world but a
conscious arrangement and compositions of
these perceptions. Shelley is also abstract in his
consistent use of symbolism.” This abstract
nature of his symbolism has added to the
difficulty in understanding his poems. Yet it
has to be admitted that despite their
vagueness, most of his symbols have a charm
of their own are generally accepted as evidence
of Shelley’s great imaginative genius.
In the ancient myths the actions of nature are
impersonated described as doings of men or
animals. The dawn is, in such myths, regarded
as a being flying before the rising sun. summer
and winter are presented as powerful beings

conquering each other by turn with a
regularity. Such impersonations of the forces of
nature still exist, but they no longer live in
faith of reason. Shelley’s greatness as a myth-
maker lies in his ability to keep himself
detached from the older implications of the
myths and make new myths out of such forces
of Nature. His myths are refreshing because
they come in a spontaneous, natural way, and
not out of a conscious and laborious effort on
the part of the poet. Clutton-Brock has paid a
glowing tribute to Shelley’s myth-making
faculty: “To most of us, the forces of nature
have but little reality….But for Shelley these
forces had as much reality as human beings
have for most of us, and he found the same
kind of intense significance in their
manifestations of beauty that we find in the
beauty of human beings or of great works of
art…There is this difference between Shelley
and the primitive myth-makers-that they seem

to have thought of the forces of nature as
disguised beings more powerful than
themselves but still in all essentials human, or
else as manifestations of the power of such
beings. But to Shelley the west wind was still a
wind, and the Cloud a Cloud, however intense a
reality they might have for him. In his poetry
they keep their own character and do not take
on human attributes, though their own
qualities may be expressed in imagery taken
from human beings. When he addresses the
West Wind…we are not wrought upon to feel
anything human in the wind’s power; but, if we
are susceptible to Shelley’s magic, we are filled
with a new sense of the life and significance
and reality of nature.”
The personification of the moon becomes more
credible and more realistic in the lyric To The
Moon. In the poem, the moon looks more
human and commonplace. The Moon looks

pale because, the poet explains, she is weary of
“climbing heaven and gazing on the earth.”
The “gazing on the earth” also implies a
relationship of love between them. She is sad,
like any human being, when she is lonely. She
keeps changing her form because she is
restless, like human beings, at finding none
worthy of her unchanging love. Shelley’s myth
of the moon may not agree with modern
scientific explanations of the satellites, but it is
at once unique and appealing.
The theme of the frail boat adrift on stormy
seas or streams appears again and again in
Shelley’s poems. Boating appears as Shelley’s
favourite pastime. He seems to relish the
alternate senses of danger and domination as
the boat survives the pull of the waves which
seem to overwhelm it. In the boat, he finds his
own personality summed up while he proceeds
along the stream of his life challenging bravely

the hurdles it sets up for him. That is why he
goes on to use a boat’s progress, across the
ocean or down a river, as a symbol for a soul’s
journey through life. Rough waters for him
signify emotional crises faced by the souls.
Shelley makes good use of this boat symbol in
Alastor where the Poet is seen setting sail in a
shallop that survives a furious storm and a
hazardous journey along an underground
stream into the bowels of the earth via an
enormous whirlpool. It is also used in
Prometheus Unbound, where Asia sings.
Shelley’s lyrics are surpassingly musical and
sweet. Swinburne was ecstatic in his tribute to
this aspect of Shelley’s lyricism. Shelley out-
sang all poets on record, but some two or three
throughout all time; his depths and heights of
inner and outer music are as diverse as
nature’s and not sooner exhaustible.

Shelley uses the symbol with even greater
significance in Adonais where, ensconced in his
soul-boat, he zooms out of sight on his way to
join Adonais. With such symbols Shelley
obviously follows in the track of Coleridge who
liked to represent the soul’s progress through
life by a voyage in a boat, a device used on the
grand scale in The Ancient Mariner.
“And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River’s Lip on which we lean-
Ah, lean upon it lightly! For who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!”
“The lyric proper” says Stopford Brooke, “is
the product of a swift, momentary and
passionate impulse coming from without for
the most part, suddenly awaking the poet into
a vivid life, seizing upon him and setting him
on fire. The duration of this fire is short in all
poets, but it burns with different intensity in

different poets.” In Shelley, it burns slowly for
a time, then flares to heaven in a rush of
flame, then sinks and dies as swiftly as it
flamed. It is as momentary as a meteor in him,
and its substance is vapourised by its own
heat. A pure lyric arising out of such
circumstances has to be simple both in theme
and form. Because the lyric fire is short-lived,
the lyric gives forth only one emotion or one
thought. In the creation of such a lyric there is
no time for ornamentation. Shelley is the
master of this swift, fiery and simple form of
lyric. The Flight of Love can be quoted to
illustrate this form.
“Perplext no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow’s tangle to the winds resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.

The poetic drama, Prometheus Unbound,
abounds in symbolism. The person in the play
is not real; they only represent some ideas.
Prometheus stands for something which
Shelley himself describes in the preface as “the
type of the highest perfection of moral and
intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and
truest motives to the best and noblest ends.”
His companions- Panthea, Ione, and Asia-are
in effect Faith, Hope, and Love. Pitted against
them is Jupiter, who represents the brutal
forces in human nature. Jupiter’s ultimate
defeat symbolizes the defeat of evil by the
spirit of life. The union of Prometheus and
Asia similarly signifies the union of human
mind with the spirit of love that pervades the
universe, and marks the beginning of the much
awaited reign of love. Thus in the play Shelley
has symbolically represented a whole Greek
legend to express his favourite idea of the
imminent regeneration of mankind.

The word ‘poison’ often recurs in Shelley’s
poetry to signify evil and corruption. In Lines
Written Among the Euganean Hills, the
‘poison’ symbol has been used to imply evil
and exploitation. The symbol is used in The
Revolt of Islam where the poet says that in the
good time to come. The frequency with which
the symbol of poison has been employed in
Shelley’s poetry is a glaring evidence of the
poet’s deep concern about the evils in this
world.
“You know, my Friends, how long since in my
House
For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.”
Shelley’s sky-lyrics-Ode to the West Wind, The
Cloud and To A Skylark- have all been
interpreted as having symbolic significance.

The West Wind drives away the old, pale,
hectic-red leaves and scatters fresh seeds over
the ground. Shelley thus looks upon the Wind
as a destroyer of the old order and the usherer
of a new one i.e., as a symbol of the forces that
will end all evil and bring about the golden
millennium in which there will be nothing but
peace and happiness for mankind. In the poem,
The Cloud, the brief line of a Cloud has been
interpreted by many critics as Shelley’s
intended symbol of man’s brief span of life.
The Cloud’s rebirth after death has also been
construed by such critics as a symbol of the
immortality of the soul. However, there is no
doubt that his concept of the Skylark is entirely
symbolic. To Shelley, the bird stands for the
perfection that ever remains unattainable and
unknown to man. So he tells the bird, “What
thou art we know not” and then asks, “What is
most like thee?” The bird is: “Like a poet
hidden/ In the light hymns unbidden, /Till the

word is wrought/ To sympathy with hopes and
fears it heeded not”… and in this sense, it
performs functions that the poet himself
wishes to do. The skylark, by its very nature,
also symbolizes Shelley’s own poetic spirit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri.
~
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
[Except Setting, Ideas, Changing anew words
or alike, words are taken from Critical
Thoughts on Shelley of Dr. Sen and quatrains
of Omar Khayya`-m...]
~Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri.

"The Astronomer-Poet of Persia and Percy Bysshe Shelley"~ Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri.

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to "The Astronomer-Poet of Persia and Percy Bysshe Shelley"~ Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri. (20)

More from Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

"The Astronomer-Poet of Persia and Percy Bysshe Shelley"~ Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri.