Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  In furnishing his poem with notes, PBS was following the example of such didactic works as Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden … With Philosophical Notes (1791), in which an imaginative survey in verse is supported with extensive references to botanical science and plant lore. The style mixes what PBS described as ‘blank heroic verse’ and ‘blank lyrical measure’: that is, unrhymed lines of ten syllables whose dominant pattern is an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, varied by shorter unrhymed lines of different lengths and stress patterns (Letters I, p. 352); he cites as precedents the flexible verse of the choruses of Greek tragedies, of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and of Robert Southey’s narrative poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). For the many additional influences Poems I and Complete Poetry II may be consulted.

  The 1813 edition of QM was a finely produced and relatively expensive volume which might, PBS claimed, be read by aristocratic youth (Letters I, p. 361). The appearance of cheaper pirated editions from 1821, of which PBS disapproved (Letters II, p. 298), attracted both fiercely vituperative attacks on him and prosecution for some of the poem’s publishers. But, having thus illegitimately been introduced to a broad readership, QM gained remarkable currency among Chartists, socialists, Marxists and freethinkers right through the nineteenth century.

  General introductions to QM may be found in Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), and in the works by Kenneth Neill Cameron, David Duff and Stuart Sperry listed under ‘Critical Sources’ in Further Reading (p. xxxix). PBS’s vegetarianism is considered in Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Bouthaina Shaaban, ‘Shelley and the Chartists’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 114–25, investigates PBS’s presence in the journals of that movement.

  Epigraph 1 Voltaire frequently ended his letters with this injunction, which may be translated ‘Crush the vile thing’, where ‘thing’ = ‘superstition and intolerance’.

  Epigraph 2 The opening lines (1–7) of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book IV: ‘I wander through a pathless region of poetry where no one has trod before me. I delight to approach virgin springs, to drink from them and to pluck unfamiliar flowers [PBS omits the phrase ‘seeking an illustrious crown for my head’] with which the Muses have never yet wreathed anyone’s brows. First, because I teach lofty matters, then because I go on to free the mind from the tight knots of superstition’ (editors’ translation).

  Epigraph 3 ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.’ This celebrated remark, attributed to the Greek mathematician, astronomer and physicist Archimedes (c.287–212 BC), had been adopted by radical writers as a slogan for the power of ideas to bring about change, and notably by Thomas Paine at the beginning of Rights of Man, Part II (1792).

  To Harriet *****

  The dedicatory poem is addressed to Harriet Westbrook, PBS’s wife since August 1811: ‘flowers’ (l. 11) and ‘Each flowret’ (l. 15) refer to the shorter poems in Esdaile which PBS at first planned to publish with QM. The Dedication before Laon and Cythna, addressed to MWS, offers an interesting comparison.

  11 wilding: Wild, uncultivated.

  15 flowret: i.e. floweret, a small flower.

  Queen Mab

  I.2 In Classical mythology, Death and Sleep were the children of Night. Line 1 revises the opening line of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801): ‘How beautiful is night!’

  I.27 Ianthe: PBS’s and Harriet’s first child, born 23 June 1813, was named Eliza Ianthe. The name derives from the Greek, ‘violet flower’. An ocean nymph in Greek mythology, Ianthe, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a beautiful girl of Crete loved by another girl, Iphis, who is transformed into a young man in order to marry her. Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry, p. 26, lists other possible sources.

  I.43 parasite: Any climbing plant could be designated as such.

  I.52 that strange lyre: An Aeolian or wind harp, conventional emblem of poetic inspiration. See Alastor, ll. 39–49.

  I.53 genii: Spirits or minor deities associated with natural phenomena. See Prometheus Unbound I.42.

  I.61 pennons: Wings.

  I.82–3 Purely translucent, the fairy chariot does not bend light by refraction.

  I.98 fair star: The planet Venus as the morning star.

  I.102 purpureal: ‘Purple’, and possibly (a secondary Latin sense) ‘bright’, ‘shining’.

  I.108 amaranth: A mythical flower that never fades.

  I.128 day-stars: Both the morning star and the sun are so called.

  I.134 Instinct with: Quickened by, energized by, as in I.271.

  I.188 immurement: Confinement, as if within walls. See II.61.

  I.200 disparted: Dispersed.

  I.242–3 See PBS’s Note [1].

  I.252–3 See PBS’s Note [2].

  I.259 Hesperus: The planet Venus as the evening star.

  II.21 fane: Temple.

  II.37 circumambient: Surrounding.

  II.51–4 The meaning of these lines turns on the sense of ‘for’ in l. 52. Locock, taking ‘for’ as ‘on account of’, understands that Ianthe does not refrain from tasting the ‘varied bliss’. Poems I takes ‘for’ as ‘despite’, so that Ianthe chooses not to enjoy the pleasures of the palace which are the reward of virtue and wisdom. Complete Poetry II, reading ‘for’ as ‘in order to obtain’, concludes that Ianthe refrains from raising virtuous scruples in order to enjoy the delights the palace affords.

  II.59 meed: Reward.

  II.98 intellectual eye: The mind’s eye.

  II.108 chain of nature: The totality of interconnected causes and effects operating in the universe.

  II.110 Palmyra: An important ancient trading city on the east–west caravan route through the Syrian desert which reached the height of its affluence and power in the third century AD – when, having engaged in conflict with Rome, it was conquered and destroyed by the emperor Aurelian (reigned AD 270–75). The extensive remains of Palmyra furnished matter for reflections on the transience of human prosperity and grandeur in Volney’s Les Ruines (1791), translated as Ruins of Empires (1795; see headnote to ‘To Liberty’), and Peacock’s Palmyra (1806).

  II.132 scite: Site, an unusual contemporary spelling.

  II.137–48 The building at Jerusalem (Salem) of a magnificent and lavishly appointed temple during King Solomon’s reign in the tenth century BC was accomplished by imposing heavy taxation on the king’s subjects and by large-scale forced labour. See 1 Kings 5–8 and 2 Chronicles 2–5.

  II.148 a dotard’s: Solomon’s.

  II.149–61 In order to enforce a similar judgement on the Israelites of the Old Testament in the pamphlet A Refutation of Deism (1814), PBS cites their savage treatment of the Midianites, in obedience to God’s command to Moses in Numbers 31:1–18 (Prose Works I, p. 102).

  II.153 Promiscuous: Indiscriminately.

  II.155 he: Moses.

  II.158–60 tales … credits: Which religion repeats to frighten its adherents into believing them.

  II.176 Where Socrates expired: i.e. Athens.

  a tyrant’s slave: Local rulers in Greece were subject to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

  II.179–81 The Rome that once produced courageous, wise and benevolent figures is now home to the Pope, leader of a fraudulent religion. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was a rational enquirer over a range of topics and a political orator. Antoninus may refer either to Antoninus Pius, emperor AD 138–61, admired for integrity and gentleness; or to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, emperor AD 161–80, Stoic philosopher and author of Meditations.

  II.182–210 As Poems I points out, some features of the ‘stately city’ (l. 187) appear to have been suggested by Tenochtitlán (built on the site of the present Mexico City), capital of the Aztec empire, which was described in D. F. S. Clavigero’s History of Mexico (tran
s. 1787). Robert Southey’s narrative poem Madoc (1805), which PBS had read, introduces the fictional city Aztlan as the capital of the Aztecs, citing authorities in footnotes.

  II.182 ten thousand: A rhetorical exaggeration.

  II.231 viewless: Invisible.

  III.17 imbecility: Weakness, feebleness.

  III.32 nickname: Here and in IV.212 (where it is a noun) the word signifies ‘(to conceal with) a deceptive verbal mask’.

  III.46 palled: Diminished, dulled.

  III.110 mechanic: Manual labourer.

  hind: Agricultural worker.

  III.111 stubborn glebe: Resistant soil – a phrase borrowed from Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), l. 26.

  III.124 genders: Engenders.

  III.157 impassive: Both the senses ‘invulnerable’ and ‘immovable’ are possible.

  III.182 Lowered: Scowled, frowned.

  IV.10 depend: Hang down.

  IV.14 idly: Motionless.

  IV.24 vesper: Hesperus, the evening star.

  IV.33–70 This scene of war has been taken as evoking the siege and occupation of Moscow by the French in August 1812, the setting fire to the city by the Russians and the debacle of the French retreat. But, as Complete Poetry II points out, although some details are consistent with those events, others are not – so that the passage is better understood as a general condemnation of the horrors of war bearing some analogy to recent events.

  IV.66 outsallying: A ‘sally’ is ‘a sudden rush (out) from a besieged place upon the enemy’ (OED).

  IV.82–3 PBS’s prophecy combines two references common in contemporary radical writers: to John the Baptist’s accusation of the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matthew 3:7–10: ‘O generation of vipers … the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire’; and to the upas tree, supposed to poison the atmosphere and lay waste the country round it, according to legend. The latter is developed further in IV.262–5, V.44–52, VI.207–8.

  IV.86 the serpent’s famine: ‘The Upas-tree’s hunger for its victims’ (Poems I).

  IV.98 Partial in: Inclined/biased towards.

  IV.102 But: Only, merely.

  IV.122 tenement: Abode (in a human body).

  IV.127–38 The newborn soul’s oppression by customary power parallels the lot of the child factory-worker sequestered from fresh air and daylight.

  IV.178–9 See PBS’s Note [3].

  IV.212 nick-name: See note to III.32.

  IV.240 thy master: Jesus.

  IV.255 nerveless: Listless, lacking vigour.

  IV.262–5 See note to IV.82–3.

  V.1–2 See PBS’s Note [4].

  V.4–6 See PBS’s Note [5].

  V.13 lawn: Glade, open space among trees.

  V.34 impassive by: Not responsive to.

  V.44 See note to IV.82–3.

  V.58 See PBS’s Note [6].

  V.64–8 Referring principally, though not exclusively, to the production of sugar on West Indian estates worked by African slaves and the military conflicts between European powers in the region. See PBS’s Note [17].

  V.72 slaves: Exploited factory labourers are primarily intended, as ll. 76–7 indicate.

  V.80 wealth of nations: Recalling the title of Adam Smith’s landmark work of political economy An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the classic analysis of the working of free and open markets and the role of capital in promoting them; but PBS’s specific target here is the withering effect of commercial greed.

  V.93–4 See PBS’s Note [7].

  V.98–101 See note to VII.33–6 and PBS’s Note [15].

  V.112–13 See PBS’s Note [8].

  V.116 famished offsprings scream: Complete Poetry II makes a good case for retaining the 1813 reading ‘offsprings’, ‘scream’ then being a verb and ‘offsprings’ an acceptable early nineteenth-century plural.

  V.135 plastic: Capable of being moulded.

  V.137–46 The lines recall a well-known passage in Gray’s ‘Elegy’, ll. 45–76.

  V.140 vulgar: Pertaining to ordinary or common people.

  Cato: The Roman soldier, statesman and author Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 BC), proverbially stern, upright and public-spirited, remained active into old age.

  V.147–66 PBS’s elementary statement of the doctrine of Perfectibility is chiefly indebted to Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), where it is formulated as ‘the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement’ – without ever attaining perfection (1798 edn), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 144–5.

  V.166 mean lust: Petty cravings.

  V.177 light of heaven: Poems I detects an allusion to an increased window tax reintroduced in 1797 to defray the cost of the war against France.

  V.189–96 See PBS’s Note [9].

  V.194–5 pestilence … sensualism: Venereal disease.

  V.196 hydra-headed: In Greek myth, the Lernaean Hydra was a monstrous serpent with many heads and poisonous breath and blood.

  V.223–7 The virtuous man’s actions for the general good require no other reward or recognition than those provided by his own feelings.

  VI.4 periods: The rhetorical passages into which Mab’s lessons are divided.

  VI.36–8 PBS again deploys the legend of the scorpion’s suicide when surrounded by fire in IX.43–5 and in The Cenci II.ii.70–71.

  VI.41 The idea that the revolution of the seven planets in their orbits round the earth created harmonious music, emblem of cosmic concord, was a commonplace dating from antiquity. See VIII.17–30.

  VI.45–6 See PBS’s Note [10].

  VI.54–238 In 1839 MWS omitted the remainder of this canto and all of Canto VII.

  VI.72–102 A slightly modified version of these lines appeared as an independent poem in 1816 under the title ‘Superstition’.

  VI.74–9 That the uninformed and extravagant infant mind of humanity first attributed divinity to the great forms of nature, was a hypothesis maintained by contemporary critics of orthodox theology such as Holbach.

  VI.111 Ironically recalling the words of Sin in Paradise Lost II.787–9: ‘I fled, and cried out Death; / Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed / From all her caves, and back resounded Death.’

  VI.132 horrent: Shuddering with horror.

  VI.154 sublunary: Beneath the moon, and so (according to traditional astronomy) subject to change and decay, unlike the immutable planets and stars.

  VI.167 uprooted ocean-fords: ‘Ford’ can designate a shallow tract of the ocean (OED n. 2a); Complete Poetry II suggests that the phrase designates a waterspout, i.e. a gyrating column of mist, water and spray created by the action of a whirlwind on the sea (OED n. 3).

  VI.171–3 See PBS’s Note [11].

  VI.188 virtue: Strength, power.

  VI.198 See PBS’s Note [12].

  VI.207 poison-tree: See note to IV.82–3.

  VI.220–38 The sense appears to be: ‘When inevitable change has destroyed the temples of sanguinary religion, a temple to the Spirit of Nature/Necessity (ll. 197–8) will subsist unalterably.’ This ‘fane’ is simply the sensitive extension of the world (l. 231), an elusive phrase that may mean either the world as perceived by the senses or – more likely – the world of sentient beings.

  VII.13 An ironic rejoinder to Psalm 14:1: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ See PBS’s Note [13].

  VII.15–26 The passage affirms the view that the infinity of interlinked causes evident in nature denies the hypothesis that there is a first cause, God, which created the world.

  VII.23 exterminable: The reasoning of the passage seems to demand a meaning opposite to the usual sense of the word, ‘that may be exterminated’. OED remarks: ‘used by Shelley for “illimitable”’.

  VII.30 PBS’s principal source for these names appears to have been Volney’s Ruins, which identifies
Seeva (Shiva), representing destruction (but also generation), as one of the trinity of Hindu gods together with Vishnu and Brahma. ‘Buddh’ is Buddha and ‘Foh’ the Chinese form of ‘Buddha’. Jehovah or Yahweh is the Hebrew god of the Old Testament, sometimes addressed or referred to as ‘Lord’ (Hebrew ‘Adonai’).

  VII.33–6 Recalling the Hindu procession of Juggernaut, from Jagannath, a title of the god Vishnu; an image of the god was pulled along on a huge wagon attended by Brahmins (members of the priestly cast) under the wheels of which devotees were said to throw themselves. See V.98–101.

  VII.43 iron age: PBS adapts the ancient commonplace (as in Ovid, Metamorphoses I) of accounting for the imperfection of the world by imagining that it has declined from a golden through a silver and then a bronze age to the present age of iron.

  VII.49–59 The knowledge that Ianthe has so far acquired has been called up from a complete and accurate record of time indistinctly present in all minds and which needs only to be awakened to be recognized as true.

  VII.53 Tablets: Here the word signifies a notebook (as Poems I points out) – in which the lessons the pupil Ianthe has learned are permanently inscribed.

  VII.65 purblind: Myopic; figuratively ‘dull’ or ‘stupid’.

  VII.67 Ahasuerus: See PBS’s Note [14]. One of the names by which the Wandering Jew of legend was known. In the Preface to PBS’s early poem The Wandering Jew (1810) the subject is described as ‘an imaginary personage, noted for the various and contradictory traditions which have prevailed concerning him’ (Poems I, p. 41). He appears again in Hellas, ll. 738 ff.