Hellas: A Lyrical Drama
Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon
Notes
The notes give the primary manuscript (MS) or printed authority for each poem, as well as its dates of composition and of first publication. The commentaries aim to identify literary, historical and personal allusions and to furnish such additional information (e.g. prosodic, scientific) as clarifies or enhances the understanding of a text or passage. References are provided to works of criticism offering comment and interpretation of particular importance. Textual variants of substance only are recorded.
Unless otherwise attributed, translations from modern foreign languages are the editors’. Translations from Greek and Roman authors are taken from the Loeb Classical Library editions unless otherwise indicated; the Bible is cited from the Authorized King James Version (1611); Shakespeare’s works from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
ABBREVIATIONS
Throughout, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley are abbreviated as PBS and MWS.
Shelley’s Verse and Prose
A. Volumes published in PBS’s lifetime (for a complete list with full bibliographical details, see Appendix)
1810 Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire (1810) [by PBS and his sister Elizabeth]
1810 (PFMN) Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810)
1813 Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: With Notes (1813)
1816 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816)
1817 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: With Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (1817) [by PBS and MWS]
1817 (L&C) Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser (1817) [withdrawn shortly after publication; see next entry]
1818 The Revolt of Islam; A Poem, in Twelve Cantos (1818) [an expurgated version of 1817 (L&C)]
1819 Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; With Other Poems (1819)
1820 Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems (1820)
1822 Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (1822)
B. Later editions
1824 Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. MWS (London: John and Henry Hunt, 1824)
1839 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. MWS, 4 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1839)
1840 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. MWS (London: Edward Moxon, 1840) [a one-volume revised version with additions of The Poetical Works (1839) published in late 1839]
1840 (ELTF) Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. MWS, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1840)
Chernaik Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland, Ohio, and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972)
Complete Poetry The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 3 vols to date (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000–2012): Volume One, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (2000); Volume Two, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (2004); Volume Three, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (2012)
Esdaile The Esdaile Notebook [a manuscript collection of PBS’s early poems]
Esdaile 1964 The Esdaile Notebook, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; London: Faber and Faber, 1964)
Forman 1876–7 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, 4 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1876–7)
Ingpen and Peck The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (London: Ernst Benn, 1926–30)
Locock The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. C. D. Locock, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1911)
Major Works Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Norton 2002 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002)
Notopoulos The Platonism of Shelley, ed. James A. Notopoulos (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1949)
OSA Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), corrected by G. M. Matthews, Oxford Standard Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970)
Poems The Poems of Shelley, 4 vols to date: Volume One: 1804–1817, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (London: Longman, 1989); Volume Two: 1817–1819, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (London: Pearson Education, 2000); Volume Three: 1819–1820, ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington (London: Pearson Education, 2011); Volume Four: 1820–1821, ed. Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 2013)
Prose Shelley’s Prose; Or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark, corrected edition (London: Fourth Estate, 1988)
Prose Works The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray, vol. 1 (1811–18) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) [1 vol. to date]
Rossetti 1870 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1870)
Shelley Papers The Shelley Papers: Original Poems and Papers by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Medwin (London: Whittaker, Treacher and Co., 1833)
Webb 1995 Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, ed. Timothy Webb (London: J. M. Dent, 1995)
Manuscript Facsimiles
BSM The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, general ed. Donald H. Reiman, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1986–2002)
Massey Posthumous Poems of Shelley: Mary Shelley’s Fair Copy Book, ed. Irving Massey (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1969)
MYR (Shelley) The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Shelley, general ed. Donald H. Reiman, 9 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1985–96)
Other Works Often Referenced
Bieri James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, 2 vols (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2004, 2005)
Clairmont Journal The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968)
Concordance F. S. Ellis, A Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1892)
Gisborne Journal Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951)
Letters The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964)
Life The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Humbert Wolfe, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1933) [contains Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s Life of Shelley (1858); Thomas Love Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley (1858–62); and Edward John Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858)]
Medwin 1913 Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913) [a revised version of a work originally published in 2 vols, 1847]
MWS Journal The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
MWS Letters The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–88)
OED The Oxford English Dictionary
Peacock Works The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1924–34; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1967)
SC Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fisher, 10 vols to date (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961–2002)
Journals
ELH English Literary History
KSJ Keats-Shelley Journal
KSMB Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin
KSR Keats-Shelley Review [continuing
KSMB from 1986]
MLR Modern Language Review
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
RES Review of English Studies
SiR Studies in Romanticism
THE POEMS
The Irishman’s Song
Text from 1810, where it is dated October 1809. PBS’s first poetic engagement with Irish politics, ‘The Irishman’s Song’ was written before his initial visit to Ireland in 1812; it should be compared with other fruits of that expedition: the poems ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’ and ‘The Tombs’ (1812), as well as the pamphlets An Address to the Irish People (1812) and Proposals for an Association of … Philanthropists (1812). The overtly revolutionist sentiments of the ‘Song’ anticipate a comparable strain in PBS’s later poetry on Ireland, a militant stance in marked contrast to the gradualist tenor of the Address and Proposals. The poem’s ancestry reaches back to the plangent laments for departed Gaelic heroes in the poems that the Scot James Macpherson (1736–96) attributed to the ancient bard Ossian, of which the best known was the epic Fingal (1762). More recent verse on Celtic themes also left its mark on PBS’s ‘Song’, in particular Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) from which 1810 borrows its epigraph: ‘Call it not vain: – they do not err, / Who say, that when the Poet dies, / Mute Nature mourns her worshipper’ (V.i.1–3). Scott goes on to imagine that, rather than Nature, it is those valiant and gentle souls whose memory has been given the second life of poetry who mourn the passing of the bard who bestowed it on them. The theme of forgotten heroism recovered in verse is shared by many of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808), from which PBS also drew inspiration, and where dormant Irish culture is celebrated and its harp called to reawaken. Both Scott and Moore assert an intimate link between the well-being of a people and the vigour of its poetry. The degree to which PBS adopts the idiom of national song from these two current contemporary best-sellers can be appreciated by comparing his final stanza with: ‘Forget not our wounded companions, who stood / In the day of distress by our side; / While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood, / They stirr’d not, but conquer’d and died’ (‘War Song’, ll. 17–20, in Irish Melodies); and with ‘The phantom Knight, his glory fled, / Mourns o’er the field he heap’d with dead; / Mounts the wild blast that sweeps amain, / And shrieks along the battle-plain’ (Lay of the Last Minstrel V.ii.13–16).
12 Sloghan: From the Gaelic sluagh-ghairm = battle-cry (literally ‘host-shout’). In The Lay of the Last Minstrel the word is spelled ‘slogan’ and defined as ‘the war-cry, or gathering word, of a Border clan’ (I.vii).
15–16 The ‘heroes’ of l. 13 are either lying in the throes of death or their ghosts are already riding on the passing wind. Poems I emends 1810’s ‘Or’ to ‘As’.
Song (‘Fierce roars the midnight storm’)
Text from 1810, where it is dated December 1809. The clear verbal and metrical debt to the ‘wild and sad’ air sung by the squire Fitz-Eustace in Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808), III.x–xi, is noted by Poems I. PBS refashions his literary model, a complaint against a deceiving lover who abandons his true maiden, by transferring the guilt to Laura (a name established in lyric tradition as that of the beloved celebrated by the Italian humanist Petrarch (1304–74) in many of the poems of his Canzoniere) and having the song sung by her faithful and despairing lover.
‘How eloquent are eyes!’
Text from Esdaile, where it is dated 1810. PBS spent much of the period 16 April to 5 May of that year in the company (chaperoned) of his fifteen-year-old cousin, Harriet Grove – an intense romantic attachment had developed between them – both at his home in Sussex and at her brother’s house in London; the poem no doubt derives from these ‘impassioned’ days. Harriet’s Diary for 1809 and 1810 (including entries for this period) is transcribed in SC II. Her relationship with PBS is recounted in detail in Desmond Hawkins, Shelley’s First Love (London: Kyle Cathie, 1992). PBS follows established conventions of love poetry in deploying musical (ll. 6–7) and vernal (ll. 23–4) analogies while perhaps also alluding to actual conditions: Harriet Grove and the Shelley family shared a music teacher; PBS heard her play at a musical evening on 1 May; and the poem seems to want the completion of a musical setting. Physical love is de-emphasized throughout: in stanza 3 the lovers do not wish to prolong the moment of desire; instead they imagine it completing its course in the eternal spring of Heaven.
2 rapt: Enraptured.
5–8 More even than impassioned music, eyes summon rapture.
19–20 The sense seems to be: ‘We burn for the eternity of “Heaven’s unfading spring” (l. 23) when our love will be fulfilled.’
Fragment, or The Triumph of Conscience
Probably composed in summer 1810; published as the final poem in 1810, from which the title is taken. A slightly different and untitled version, the text given here, appears in chapter 1 of PBS’s Gothic romance St. Irvyne (1811), which he published anonymously while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. It is possible that PBS originally intended the ‘Fragment’ for the place it occupies in St. Irvyne, following the example of some Gothic novelists of the period, especially Anne Radcliffe (1764–1823), who embedded songs and poems at dramatically appropriate moments in their narratives. Certainly he provides a conventionally sublime setting for it: an evening among high Alpine peaks clad with dark pine forests where the noble Wolfstein, whose past includes an unspecified ‘dreadful’ event, has wandered to soothe the agitation of mind caused by his having joined a troop of bandits who are about to commit a savage robbery: ‘At last he sank on a mossy bank, and, guided by the impulse of the moment, inscribed on a tablet the following lines; for the inaccuracy of which, the perturbation of him who wrote them, may account … Overcome by the wild retrospection of ideal [i.e. imaginary] horror, which these swiftly-written lines excited in his soul, Wolfstein tore the paper, on which he had written them, to pieces, and scattered them about him’ (Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002), pp. 165–6). By the early nineteenth century the fragment had acquired currency as a poetic form and could be presented (as it is here) as the product of an exceptionally heightened state of mind. Coleridge referred to ‘Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream’ (written sometime between 1797 and 1800; published 1816) as both a ‘fragment’ and a ‘psychological curiosity’, while the final quarter of Byron’s The Giaour (1813) is delivered by the despairing title-character in incomplete and disconnected recollections.
15 upholding: Raising up.
16 Victoria: The pedigree of the name in Gothic fiction is given in Kim Ian Michasiw’s edition of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (Oxford: OUP World’s Classics, 1997), p. 269. It is also the female form of ‘Victor’, the nom de plume adopted by PBS as joint author of 1810, as well as the name later to be given by MWS to the creator of the monster in Frankenstein (1818).
17 1810 reads: ‘Her right hand a blood reeking dagger was bearing’.
Song (‘Ah! faint are her limbs’)
Written late summer/early autumn 1810, published in chapter 9 of PBS’s Gothic romance St. Irvyne, which supplies our text. The orphaned Eloise de St. Irvyne has resisted the sinister but fascinating Nempere’s attempts to seduce her (he will later succeed); playing her harp, she sings ‘Ah! faint are her limbs’ to him, explaining afterwards that ‘’tis a melancholy song; my poor brother wrote it, I remember, about ten days before he died. ’Tis a gloomy tale concerning him; he ill deserved the fate he met. Some future time I will tell it you; but now, ’tis very late.—Good-night’ (Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, ed. Behrendt (see headnote to previous poem), p. 232). The stanza and rhyme scheme are those of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Helvellyn’ (1805), which features a corpse exposed to the elements.
5 whortle: A low shrub bearing the bilberry.
6 myrtle: The common myrtle, traditionally sacred to Venus, is an evergreen shrub.
7 kirtle: A gown, skirt, or outer p
etticoat (OED).
The Monarch’s funeral: An Anticipation
Dated 1810 in Esdaile, which provides our text, and probably composed in November or December of that year; published in Esdaile 1964. Lines 21–32, alluding to the Irish patriot Robert Emmet, might have been added following PBS’s visit to Dublin (12 February–4 April 1812), as Complete Poetry II suggests. The poem was evidently prompted by the coincidence of two events: a recurrence of the illness and mental derangement from which George III had suffered intermittently since 1787 and the death of his daughter, the Princess Amelia, on 2 November. The king having been diagnosed as mentally incapable, a Regency Bill was introduced in Parliament on 20 December and passed on 5 February 1811, effectively ending George III’s reign, although he survived until January 1820. As the title makes clear, the poem looks forward to the king’s death and burial in Westminster Abbey (the ‘Gothic … cathedral’ of stanza 3). PBS’s prose pamphlet An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte similarly combines regret for a royal death and indignation at the injustices of the current social and political system.
21–32 Erin’s ‘uncoffined slain’ is Robert Emmet, already the subject of ‘lays’ like Robert Southey’s ‘Written Immediately after Reading the Speech of Robert Emmet’ (1803) and Thomas Moore’s ‘Oh! breathe not his name’ (1807), as well as PBS’s own ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’. Unclaimed after his execution by the British in September 1803, Emmet’s body was buried in the paupers’ graveyard in Dublin, whence it was later removed to an unknown location.
33 Yet: Poems I reads the word as ‘Yes’, which is possible.
34 lay: An alternative for ‘lie’, found in contemporary poets as a rhyme word.
Selected Poems and Prose Page 76
