Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  VII.99 paeans: Hymns.

  VII.100 A murderer: Moses, who kills an Egyptian in Exodus 2:12 and in 32:26–8 directs the sons of Levi to slaughter in God’s name 3,000 idolatrous Israelites.

  VII.119 woman’s blood: Probably alluding to the slaughter of captive Midian women by the Israelites in Numbers 31:14–18.

  VII.135–6 See PBS’s Note [15].

  VII.149 reprobation: The condition of being condemned to, specifically predestined to, eternal damnation.

  VII.156 Alluding to Matthew 22:14: ‘For many are called, but few are chosen.’

  VII.170–72 Ahasuerus’ interpretation of Christ’s words in Matthew 10:34: ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword.’

  VII.192 ghastily: Adverbial form of ‘ghastly’.

  VII.195–9 Appropriating Satan’s defiant ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven’ and his determination ‘To wage by force or guile eternal war / Irreconcilable, to our grand foe’ (Paradise Lost I.263, 121–2).

  VII.208 So: ‘So did they’ or perhaps ‘Therefore’.

  VII.218 Recalling the prophetic vision in Revelation 14:18–19: ‘Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe. And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.’

  VII.219 the red cross: Symbol of militant Christianity.

  VII.221 exterminated faith: One of the Christian heresies eradicated by the bloody persecution of its adherents.

  VII.232–3 Those fanatics who slaughtered in God’s name believed they acted guiltlessly.

  VII.241–53 The freedom that has begun to emerge following the progress of reason has mitigated the worst impulses of the zealous, frustrating divine malevolence.

  VII.259–60 The fallen angels are described as ‘forest oaks’ scathed by ‘heaven’s fire’ in Paradise Lost I.612–15.

  VIII.3–5 Kronos the Titan, associated with Chronos (‘Time’), devoured his children as soon as they were born, it having been foretold that one of them would dethrone him. Kronos’ sister and wife, Rhea, tricked him by wrapping a stone in infant’s clothes and giving it to him to swallow instead of her newborn son Zeus, whom she concealed. Once grown, Zeus made Kronos vomit up the children he had eaten; together they and Zeus defeated him and ruled in his stead.

  VIII.17–30 See note to VI.41.

  VIII.37 Glow mantling: Suffused with the ‘glow of health’.

  VIII.86 basilisk: Alluding to the prophecy of an age of peace in Isaiah 11:8: ‘And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.’ The ‘cockatrice’, another name for the basilisk, was a legendary reptile (supposedly hatched by a serpent from a cock’s egg, i.e. a hen’s egg without a yolk) whose poisonous look and breath were deadly.

  VIII.108 consentaneous: Mutual, concurring.

  VIII.115 mantles: Spreads foaming over the surface.

  VIII.120–21 There will be no more winter.

  VIII.124–8 Recalling Isaiah 11:6–7: ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them … and the lion shall eat straw like the ox’ – examples of PBS’s contention in Note [17] that abstaining from flesh in favour of a vegetable diet would result in moral improvement.

  VIII.129–30 nightshade’s … Poisons no more: The beautiful plant with poisonous berries ceases to be toxic. Cp. Prometheus Unbound III.iv.78–85.

  VIII.132 mantles: Foams.

  VIII.183–6 Referring to the British military campaigns of 1798–1807 against the French in Egypt, regarded as the birthplace of the fraudulent monopoly of power by a league of priests and kings.

  VIII.194 the train-bearer of slaves: The menial servant of tyrants, who are themselves the true slaves. See III.32, IV.246, IX.94.

  VIII.203–7 Him, still … eternity: A slightly altered version of these difficult lines in 1813 serves as the key to PBS’s Note [16]:

  Him, (still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing,

  Which, from the exhaustless lore of human weal

  Dawns on the virtuous mind,) the thoughts that rise

  In time-destroying infiniteness, gift

  With self-enshrined eternity, &c.

  The convoluted syntax in each version obscures both the order of subject, predicate, object – ‘thoughts’, ‘gift’, ‘Him’ – and the sense: ‘Hope prompts him to seek the happiness that leads the virtuous mind to educate itself in the knowledge of human well-being; and the unbounded thoughts that arise from this pursuit endow him with an autonomous immortality.’

  VIII.211–12 See PBS’s Note [17].

  VIII.222 prune: Preen.

  VIII.226–7 prerogative … equals: Man ceases to kill animals, regarding them as his fellow-creatures.

  IX.29–30 A theme amply developed in ‘Ozymandias’.

  IX.48 MWS omitted this line from 1839 and did not restore it, as she did other censored passages, in 1840.

  IX.76 sweet bondage: Sexual love.

  IX.86 senselessness: Absence of sensual feeling.

  IX.130 wreck: The remains of something ruined.

  IX.149–63 PBS here conceives of human destiny in its broadest terms by combining the idea of perfectibility with that of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls through successive material existences.

  IX.154 Bicker: Flash, gleam.

  IX.175 gulph-dream: A dream of falling into a gulf.

  [SHELLEY’S] NOTES

  Editorial summaries of excised passages of significance are given in italics within square brackets.

  [1] The astronomical information is taken from the source that PBS credits in Note [2], William Nicholson’s The British Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1809).

  [2] p. 83 awful: Awe-inspiring.

  p. 84 necessity … itself: See VI.197 ff. and Note [12].

  The works of his fingers: Ironically alluding to the praise of God in Psalm 8:3–9: ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers … how excellent is thy name in all the earth!’

  [3] The first three paragraphs are taken with minor variations from William Godwin’s The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797). The verse dialogue, one of the titles that PBS collected in Esdaile but did not publish, appears to have been composed before he began to work on QM. Commentators have found models for the poem in the exchange between the witches in Macbeth I.iii.1–35 and in Coleridge’s castigation of the war policy of William Pitt in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (1798).

  p. 84 trepanned: Inveigled, tricked.

  [4] Quoted with minor inaccuracies from Ecclesiastes 1:4–7.

  [5] The Greek quotation from Homer’s Iliad is translated by Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 200, as follows: ‘Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. / Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, / now the living timber bursts with the new buds / and spring comes round again. And so with men: / as one generation comes to life, another dies away.’

  [6] The Latin quotation from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II.1–14, is translated by R. E. Latham in On the Nature of the Universe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 60, as follows:

  What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the shore at the heavy stress some other man is enduring! Not that anyone’s afflictions are in themselves a source of delight; but to realize from what troubles you yourself are free is joy indeed. What joy, again, to watch opposing hosts marshalled on the field of battle when you have yourself no part in their peril! But this is the greatest joy of all: to stand aloof in a quiet citadel, stoutly fortified by the teaching of the wise, and to gaze down from that elevation on others wandering aimlessly in a vain search for the way of life, pitting their wits one against another, disputing for preceden
ce, struggling night and day with unstinted effort to scale the pinnacles of wealth and power. O joyless hearts of men! O minds without vision!

  [8] The two Latin verses are from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III.85–6: ‘Many a time before now men have betrayed their country and their beloved parents in an effort to escape the halls of Hell’ (trans. Latham, On the Nature of the Universe, p. 98).

  [9] p. 92 one tenth of the population of London: An extreme, perhaps exaggerated, estimate of the number of prostitutes in the metropolis.

  [13] This note reproduces, with some additions and modifications, The Necessity of Atheism (NofA), the pamphlet jointly authored by PBS and his friend and fellow-undergraduate Thomas Jefferson Hogg, which led to their expulsion from Oxford in March 1811. The most significant additions to the text of the pamphlet are: the first paragraph; ‘of the relation … bear to each’ (third paragraph); ‘(A graduated scale … attached to them)’; ‘But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility’ (‘1st … the senses’); ‘We must prove design before we can infer a designer’ and ‘beyond its limits’ (‘2d. Reason’); ‘or involuntarily active’ (‘3d. Testimony’); ‘creative’ (final paragraph). Important excisions from and alterations to NofA are given in the notes below.

  p. 95 least incomprehensible: ‘less incomprehensible’ (NofA).

  there must have been a cause: After this phrase, NofA reads: ‘But what does this prove?’

  omnipotent being: ‘Almighty Being’ (NofA).

  p. 96 either of: ‘any of’ (NofA).

  neglect to remove: ‘willingly neglect to remove’ (NofA).

  views any subject of discussion: ‘views the subject’ (NofA). At this point and before the final sentence NofA reads: ‘It is almost unnecessary to observe, that the general knowledge of the deficiency of such proof, cannot be prejudicial to society: Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.—’

  no proof of the existence of a Deity: As a concluding flourish NofA adds ‘Q.E.D.’ (abbreviating the Latin formula Quod erat demonstrandum, ‘Which was to be demonstrated’; i.e. ‘What was to be proved has been proven’).

  [16] See note to VIII.203–7. The verse ‘Dark flood of time … unredeemed’ quotes lines 58–69 of PBS’s unpublished poem ‘To Harriet’ (‘It is not blasphemy to hope’), written in 1812 and included in Esdaile. The citations at the end of the note identify PBS’s principal sources, Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) and Nicolas de Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique (1795).

  [17] This note is substantially identical to PBS’s pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), which appears to have been printed shortly before the notes to QM, as Complete Poetry II argues. PBS adopted a vegetarian diet at the beginning of 1812 and largely kept to it for the rest of his life. His principal sources for pamphlet and note were John Frank Newton’s The Return to Nature; or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (1811), Joseph Ritson’s An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (1802) and Dr William Lambe’s Reports on the Effects of a Peculiar Regimen on Scirrhous Tumours and Cancerous Ulcers (1809). Timothy Morton’s Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) considers PBS’s vegetarianism in the context of contemporary debates on animal rights, diet and health.

  The verse is from Paradise Lost XI.477–88, the words of the Archangel Michael (and not Raphael) to Adam prophesying the effects on humans of ‘intemperance … / In meats and drinks’.

  The Latin verse is from Horace, Odes I.iii.25–33: ‘The human species, audacious enough to endure anything, plunges into forbidden sacrilege. The audacious son [Prometheus] of Iapetus by an act of criminal deception brought fire to the nations. After the theft of fire from its heavenly home, a wasting disease and an unprecedented troop of fevers fell upon the earth, and the doom of a distant death, which up to then was slow in coming, quickened its step.’

  p. 99 the shambles: The slaughterhouse.

  mouflon: Wild sheep.

  p. 100 It is true … mass of human evil: This paragraph does not appear in A Vindication.

  p. 102 Muley Ismael: Sultan of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, notorious for cruelty.

  ‘Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed’

  MWS printed this enigmatic lyric without date and with the title ‘To—–’ in 1824 and placed it among the poems of 1821 in 1839; earlier, in transcribing it from PBS’s draft, she had entitled it ‘To MWG’ (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) and dated it June 1814 before cancelling the initials. Some commentators and editors have considered the earlier year as the more likely, MWS as indeed the addressee, and composition to have taken place between the mutual declaration of love that PBS and the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin (MWS) made on 26 June and their elopement on 28 July. Many details of the poem are susceptible of being understood in that context. See Poems I, pp. 442–3. But evidence that the poem is more likely to have been composed in 1820–21 and addressed to Claire Clairmont has been adduced by Nora Crook in ‘Mary Shelley’s Concealing “To—–”: (Re)addressing Poems’, Wordsworth Circle 43:1 (Winter 2012), pp. 12–20: see note to ll. 13–14. The present text, which differs in some respects from that in MWS’s editions of PBS’s poems and later ones, has been edited from Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12, pp. 8–11, a rough draft, unfinished in places and not always confidently legible. Some punctuation has been supplied and some readings are conjectural.

  6  into: ‘upon’ is an uncancelled alternative in the MS.

  13–14 These lines are very difficult to decipher in the MS. The present text adopts the reading offered by Nora Crook after a detailed study of the MS (‘Mary Shelley’s Concealing “To —–”’, pp. 14–16), which gives the sense: ‘Only you saw the paleness in my face that otherwise went unseen, it having been intended for you alone.’ Other readings have been proposed, for example in Poems I: ‘Whilst you alone then not regarded / The tie which you alone should be’; i.e. ‘You alone, in loving me, disregarded the fact that I was married – you only, by virtue of our love, deserving to be my wife.’ 1824 reads: ‘Whilst thou alone, then not regarded, / The [  ] thou alone should be’.

  15–18 Mary declared her love for PBS before he confessed his for her (Letters I, p. 403).

  24 ‘Turning to bliss its wayward pain’ is an uncancelled alternative in the MS.

  ‘O! there are spirits of the air’

  Published in 1816, from which the present text is taken; probably composed in 1815. MWS noted in 1839 that the poem ‘was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom [PBS] never knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through his writings, and accounts he heard of him from some who knew him well. He regarded his change of opinions as rather an act of will than conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth’ (III, pp. 15–16). These remarks have influenced understanding of ‘O! there are spirits’ as addressed to a well-known writer who had adopted conservative views while remaining inwardly attached to his earlier progressive ones; as such it may be set against the more directly political confrontation of ‘To Wordsworth’, also published in 1816. PBS was well acquainted with Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’ (1798), which combines an account of the author’s solitary wanderings in nature with a statement of his altered political sympathies towards revolutionary France. But rather than treating politics explicitly, the moral portrait and condensed narrative of ‘O! there are spirits’ have largely to do with the complex, and hazardous, character of imaginative inspiration – its relation to nature, to love and to the self. Stanzas 3–6 might allude to the effects of the married Coleridge’s infatuation for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, which is implicit in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802).

  Title There is no title in 1816, the text being preceded solely by the epigraph; in 1839 MWS adopted ‘To * * * *’ as the title.

  Epigraph ‘I shall endure in tears an unhappy lot’ – from Euripides, Hipp
olytus 1142–4. In 1816 the Greek is incorrectly printed; the text here is that edited by W. S. Barrett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Preceded by the phrase ‘for your misfortune’, the words are spoken by the Chorus to Hippolytus, who has been banished by his father Theseus following a false accusation of rape by his stepmother Phaedra, who has hanged herself in despair at her love for her stepson.

  1–6 Poems I notes a number of echoes of Coleridge’s poems in these lines.

  9  inexplicable things: The ‘lovely ministers’ of the preceding stanza. Cp. Alastor, l. 6.

  15–16 tame sacrifice / To a fond faith: The sense is obscure – perhaps either: (1) ‘You naïvely thought you could elicit a response to your love from one who was meant for another’; or (2) ‘Your orthodox religious convictions prevented you from finding outside marriage the love you might have enjoyed.’

  25–6 The lines would be appropriate to the disappointments in love that PBS recounts as his own in ‘The Retrospect: Cwm Elan 1812’, ll. 65–70, and in the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, stanza 6.

  A Summer-Evening Church-Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire

  Text from 1816, where the poem was first published. PBS, Mary Godwin (as MWS then was), T. L. Peacock and Claire Clairmont’s brother Charles visited Lechlade in the first week of September 1815, during a boating expedition on the Thames. They had originally intended to visit the river’s source, but shallow water prevented their going further than Lechlade, where they stayed for two nights before turning back. Years later, Peacock remembered that ‘A Summer-Evening Church-Yard’ was written during this stay. As well as the setting, the poem adopts the pensive and melancholy idiom of eighteenth-century ‘graveyard poetry’ – in comparing the onset of death to the fall of evening, for example – though such consolation as it offers involves no reference to religion, a conspicuous absence in view of the central position given to the church and surrounding graves.