Selected Poems and Prose Read online

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  * * *

  SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE

  Edited by

  JACK DONOVAN and CIAN DUFFY

  Contents

  Introduction

  Note on the Texts

  SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE

  THE POEMS

  The Irishman’s Song

  Song (‘Fierce roars the midnight storm’)

  ‘How eloquent are eyes!’

  Fragment, or The Triumph of Conscience

  Song (‘Ah! faint are her limbs’)

  The Monarch’s funeral: An Anticipation

  A Winter’s Day

  To the Republicans of North America

  On Robert Emmet’s Tomb

  To Liberty

  Written on a Beautiful Day in Spring

  ‘Dark Spirit of the desart rude’

  The Retrospect: Cwm Elan 1812

  QUEEN MAB

  ‘Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed’

  ‘O! there are spirits of the air’

  A Summer-Evening Church-Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire

  Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante

  To Wordsworth

  Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte

  Mutability

  ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE

  Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England

  Hymn to Intellectual Beauty [Versions A and B]

  Mont Blanc [Versions A and B]

  Dedication before LAON AND CYTHNA

  To Constantia

  Ozymandias

  Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818

  JULIAN AND MADDALO

  Stanzas Written in Dejection— December 1818, near Naples

  The Two Spirits—An Allegory

  Sonnet (‘Lift not the painted veil’)

  PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

  THE CENCI

  THE MASK OF ANARCHY

  PETER BELL THE THIRD

  Ode to the West Wind

  To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]

  Love’s Philosophy

  Goodnight

  Time Long Past

  On a Dead Violet: To —–

  On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery

  To Night

  England in 1819

  Song: To the Men of England

  To —– (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’)

  The Sensitive-Plant

  An Exhortation

  Song of Apollo

  Song of Pan

  The Cloud

  ‘God save the Queen!’ [A New National Anthem]

  Translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII, lines 1–51

  Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa

  Ode to Liberty

  To a Sky-Lark

  Letter to Maria Gisborne

  To —– [the Lord Chancellor]

  THE WITCH OF ATLAS

  Sonnet: Political Greatness

  Sonnet (‘Ye hasten to the grave!’)

  The Fugitives

  Memory (‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’)

  Dirge for the Year

  EPIPSYCHIDION

  ADONAIS

  ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’

  Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon

  Epithalamium

  The Aziola

  HELLAS

  ‘The flower that smiles today’

  The Indian Girl’s Song

  ‘Rough wind that moanest loud’

  To the Moon

  Remembrance

  Lines to —– [Sonnet to Byron]

  To —– (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)

  To Jane. The Invitation

  To Jane—The Recollection

  ‘When the lamp is shattered’

  ‘One word is too often prophaned’

  The Magnetic lady to her patient

  With a Guitar. To Jane

  ‘Far, far away, O ye / Halcyons of Memory

  ‘Tell me star, whose wings of light’

  THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE

  To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)

  Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici

  THE PROSE

  From History of a Six Weeks’ Tour

  From Preface to LAON AND CYTHNA

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

  From On Christianity

  On Love

  On Life

  The Coliseum

  From On the Devil, and Devils

  From A Philosophical View of Reform

  A Defence of Poetry

  Appendix: The Contents of Shelley’s Volumes of Verse Published in His Lifetime

  Notes

  Chronology

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY:

  SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE

  The eldest child of a family of landed gentry in West Sussex, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792–1822) was heir to a considerable fortune and, from 1806, to a baronetcy. The major directions of his thought and writings were formed early. At Eton (1804–10), where he was teased and bullied by the other boys, he developed (encouraged by the enlightened physician Dr James Lind) an enthusiasm for contemporary science, began to read radical writers, published a short Gothic novel and, on leaving school, collaborated with his sister on his first volume of verse. Matriculating at University College, Oxford, in autumn 1810, he became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, with whom he wrote and distributed the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, leading to their joint expulsion from the university in March 1811. In August of that year Shelley eloped with the sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, precipitating a rupture of relations with his family. During a visit to Ireland in February–March 1812 he agitated for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union with England and distributed political pamphlets he had written for the purpose, an early instance of a life-long engagement with liberal politics. Shelley’s first major poem, the radical, anti-religious and visionary Queen Mab (1813), was printed and distributed privately. In July 1814 he left London to travel in France and Switzerland with his future wife Mary Godwin and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont.

  Following his grandfather’s death in 1815, Shelley inherited a substantial sum and was provided with a regular income, both of which he shared generously. The following summer he spent with Byron in Switzerland, beginning a complex and challenging friendship that lasted until Shelley’s death. Another lasting friendship, with the poet, essayist and editor Leigh Hunt, introduced him to a group of writers that included John Keats and William Hazlitt. After leaving England in March 1818, the Shelleys travelled widely in Italy before settling at Pisa. During these final years of his life he produced a series of masterpieces which include Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, The Triumph of Life and A Defence of Poetry. Shelley drowned off the north-west coast of Italy in July 1822.

  JACK DONOVAN was formerly Reader in English at the University of York (UK), having previously taught at universities in the United States and France. He has written on French and English Sentimental and Romantic literature and is currently one of the editorial team preparing a complete annotated edition of Shelley’s poetry.

  CIAN DUFFY is Professor of English Literature at Lund University, Sweden. He has written on various aspects of British Romantic-period literature and is currently working on the relationship between romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries.

  Introduction

  I

  When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the north-west coast of Italy in July 18
22, just a month short of his thirtieth birthday, he left behind a quantity of poetry and prose as remarkable for substance and scope as for intellectual range and formal diversity. In a literary career of little more than a dozen years, Shelley produced some 450 finished poems and verse fragments. These extend across virtually the entire spectrum of genres and modes practised in the Romantic period: dream vision and epic-romance, tragic and comic verse drama, political ballad, satirical squib, popular song, funeral elegy, allegory, confessional autobiography, ode and hymn; occasional pieces on both private and public themes; sentimental, mythological and symbolic narratives; conversation poems, meditative and topical sonnets – as well as the exquisitely crafted brief lyrics for which he is mostly remembered. Shelley also made a number of verse translations – from Greek and Latin, Italian, Spanish and German, including a number of the Homeric Hymns and passages of Virgil, Dante, Calderón and Goethe. His work in prose includes two Gothic novels and several shorter fictional narratives; political pamphlets; metaphysical and psychological speculation; translations of Platonic dialogues; critical essays on subjects as varied as religious belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, the Devil and diabolism, and brief considerations of several others – as well as the classic of English literary theory, A Defence of Poetry.

  Shelley’s extraordinary output has come to be recognized as one of the major literary contributions to the English Romantic Movement, and his poetry in particular as boldly original, technically accomplished and critically challenging – altogether a brilliantly distinctive reinterpretation of the European poetic tradition. Such was not the case in Shelley’s lifetime, however, when a number of factors combined to deny him the audience that he persisted in seeking in the face of both widespread disregard and outright hostility. Both material and cultural factors account for the neglect of his writing by his contemporaries. Much of the verse and prose that now forms the basis of his reputation was not published until after his death. The Mask of Anarchy, for example, written in autumn 1819 as a response to the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ in Manchester, was withheld for fear of prosecution until 1832. Julian and Maddalo, The Witch of Atlas, Peter Bell the Third, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and A Defence of Poetry did not appear until Mary Shelley’s editions of her late husband’s work in 1824, 1839 and 1840. Other examples of posthumous publication, including most of Shelley’s lyric poetry, could be cited. The dozen volumes of his verse that did appear in his lifetime, almost all of them at his own expense (the usual practice at the time for an author untried in the marketplace), sold poorly, and that in an age when poetry could and did earn both critical esteem and commercial success for lesser talents than his – setting aside the remarkable status attained by major figures like Thomas Moore, Walter Scott and Lord Byron.1 The highly controversial subject matter of several of Shelley’s most ambitious works was another obstacle to recognition, established booksellers being averse to the financial and legal risk of publishing them. The firm that did bring out most of his published volumes, C. and J. Ollier, was a small, impecunious and inexperienced operation lacking the resources to promote a little-known author. Shelley came to regret his connection with the Olliers, whose dealings with him and his poetry were certainly less than assiduous and largely ineffective.2

  Partisan literary politics also played its part. Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) and Laon and Cythna (1817), revised and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818), made outright attacks on monarchy and institutional religion as principal sources of the injustice and oppression which had continued to blight the world since first kings and priests leagued together in mutual interest. Both poems also frankly denied the existence of God and (in the unrevised Laon and Cythna) celebrated the incestuous love of a brother and sister as liberation from arbitrary moral proscription. Polemical and openly belligerent, these substantial works attracted the animosity, and on occasion the malevolence, of the conservative press, instances of which are considered below. Shelley’s association with the liberal weekly The Examiner and its editor, the poet and man of letters Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), gave rise to further contention. Hunt had introduced Shelley in his newspaper as a rising talent, published some of his poems and defended his literary gifts and personal integrity. To some, Shelley was tarnished by association with what Blackwood’s Magazine lampooned as an impudent and subversive coterie gathered round Hunt, the ‘Cockney School’, which included John Keats and William Hazlitt.3 And, as if all this were not enough to nourish suspicion and provoke censure, a few notorious events in Shelley’s personal life served as a basis on which to construct a sensational history of impiety and moral depravity.

  In March 1811 Shelley had been expelled from University College, Oxford, for diffusing, and then refusing to deny his joint authorship (with his fellow undergraduate Thomas Jefferson Hogg) of, the rationalist pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.4 For this, together with the two long poems mentioned above, he was in orthodox quarters caricatured as impious, not to say demonic. Additional opprobrium (as well as prurient interest) was attracted by the tangled involvements of his private life. In July 1814 he had eloped with the then Mary Godwin, abandoning Harriet, his wife of three years, and their two children – an act which acquired a tragic dimension when Harriet committed suicide in autumn 1816. Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, had accompanied her and Shelley to France and Switzerland in summer 1814 and lived with them for long periods thereafter. Claire (then pregnant by Byron) again made one of their party in summer 1816 in Switzerland, giving rise to rumours of a ‘league of incest’ involving herself, Mary, Byron and Shelley.5 From early 1817 the presence of Claire’s child Alba (later ‘Allegra’) in the Shelley household inspired further rumours of promiscuity. The imputations of sexual licence combined with his reputation for atheism to prepossess opinion against Shelley as both irreligious and dissolute, the latter condition seeming to follow as a matter of course from the former. As if in official validation of these charges, in March 1817 the Court of Chancery denied him custody of his two children by his first wife, in order, the court ruled, to prevent the principles that governed his behaviour being communicated to his offspring.

  And then many of Shelley’s major poems, among them several on which he himself set great store, are (in the words of his friend Edward Williams) ‘far above the level of common apprehension’.6 Ambitious in scope, sophisticated in their procedures, they ask for close and sustained attention from readers as well as an alert receptiveness to literary experiment. Shelley himself repeatedly acknowledged that such poetry could only ever be of limited appeal, qualifying the audience he addressed as ‘enlightened and refined’ (Laon and Cythna) or (in Greek) ‘the discerning’ (Epipsychidion) or consisting of no ‘more than 5 or 6 persons’ (Prometheus Unbound).7 The figures gathered by William St Clair confirm the truth of the publisher Charles Ollier’s remark in 1823, that ‘the sale, in every instance, of Mr Shelley’s works has been very confined’.8

  This set of circumstances prevented Shelley’s poetry from reaching any considerable number of readers in his lifetime. The one, modest, exception was the tragedy The Cenci (1819), 250 copies of which he had printed in Italy and sent to London, where a second edition was published in 1821, although this did not itself sell well. For a poet determined to write for his times, as Shelley was, this signal failure to find an audience was deeply dispiriting. His growing persuasion that Byron’s recent poetry, especially Don Juan (1819–24) and Cain (1821), had consolidated his status as the pre-eminent writer of the age added to the disappointment that appears over and again in Shelley’s letters during the last year or so of his life. ‘I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may: and there is no other with whom it is worth contending,’ he wrote to Mary in August 1821. And to his friend the novelist and poet Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) in January 1822: ‘I wish I had something better to do than furnish this jingling food for the hunger of oblivion, called verse.’9

  Such a signal absence of contemporary success might seem the i
nevitable consequence of Shelley’s nature as other-worldly dreamer, an idea of him which has proved remarkably persistent, and which appears to be borne out by some picturesque incidents in his early life. His first wife, Harriet, reported to a friend that she was ‘ready to die of laughter’ when, in Dublin, they threw Shelley’s political pamphlets out of the window, handed them to passers-by in the street, even ‘put one into a woman’s hood of a cloak’.10 The Romantic gestures celebrated in his two sonnets of August 1812, ‘On launching some bottles filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel’ and ‘To a balloon, laden with Knowledge’, seem to confirm the portrait of the young Shelley as high-minded but naïve, and feckless at delivering a message he considered of benefit to humanity.11 The truth is quite another matter. From the time of his earliest literary efforts, Shelley displays a practical awareness of the readers he means particularly to address among the various strands of the increasing and increasingly diverse reading public of the early nineteenth century.12 The second of his two Gothic romances, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian was, he wrote to the publisher in November 1810, ‘a thing which almost mechanically sells to circulating libraries, &c’.13 In March 1813 he advised a prospective publisher to have printed no more than 250 copies of the aggressively radical Queen Mab as a ‘small neat Quarto, on fine paper & so as to catch the aristocrats: They will not read it, but their sons & daughters may’.14 The self-deprecatory Advertisement to his volume Rosalind and Helen (1819) specifies the object of the title-poem, as no more than ‘interesting the affections and amusing the imagination’, thereby signalling the broad popular readership he means to address in this sentimental domestic tale.15 He evokes the ‘highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers’ in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820), having forewarned the publisher Charles Ollier that this ‘lyrical drama’ was unlikely to sell ‘beyond twenty copies’.16 The Cenci (1820), on the other hand, was ‘written for the multitude’, an audience of metropolitan theatre-goers for whom he had taken care to produce ‘the greatest degree of popular effect’ by presenting historical characters as naturally as possible and in unadorned language.17 Following the Peterloo Massacre he tried in spring 1820 to enlist Leigh Hunt’s help in publishing ‘a little volume of popular songs, wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers’, a project which never came to fruition, no doubt owing to Hunt’s prudence; while his long and incomplete prose essay A Philosophical View of Reform he conceived as a kind of textbook for ‘the philosophical [i.e. educated and thoughtful] reformers’, the appeal of which would be ‘from the passions to the reason of men’.18 Another sort of appeal (to those potential supporters acquainted with Greek history and culture) was made in autumn 1821 in favour of a current cause in urgent need of assistance, the incipient Greek revolution against Ottoman rule, which required the ‘immediate publication’ (Shelley wrote to Ollier) of his topical drama Hellas.19