Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  5  Silence and twilight: The personifications are repeated in Alastor, l. 455.

  9  own: Accept.

  13–14 The church of St Lawrence, Lechlade, has a central spire surrounded by four smaller pinnacles.

  pyramids of fire: The word ‘pyramid’ was thought to designate ‘flame-shaped’, its first syllable deriving from the Greek for ‘fire’.

  15 their: Refers to ‘Silence and twilight’ of l. 5.

  24 Its awful hush is felt inaudibly: Cp. Alastor, l. 30: ‘When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness’.

  25–30 PBS reworks the elements of this stanza in the fourth stanza of ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection—December 1818, near Naples’, an example, among many, of self-revision in his poetry.

  Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante

  The original of this translation is Dante’s well-known sonnet ‘Guido, i’vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io’; the Italian text can be found, with English version and commentary, in Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. K. Foster and P. Boyde, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), I, pp. 30–31, II, pp. 52–4. The text there given, the one accepted by modern scholarship, differs slightly from the one translated by Shelley: see note to l. 10. Guido Cavalcanti and Lapo (the usual spelling) Gianni De’ Ricevuti were friends of Dante and fellow authors who shared his ideas on a modern vernacular style in lyric poetry. In thirteenth-century Florence, it was customary for poets to comment on each other’s poems in verse; Guido Cavalcanti’s reply to this sonnet is given in Dante’s Lyric Poetry I, pp. 30–32, and PBS’s translation of it in Poems I, pp. 453–4, and Complete Poetry III, pp. 325, 942–6. Timothy Webb examines Shelley’s rendering of Dante’s sonnet ‘Guido, i’vorrei che’ in relation to the original in The Violet in the Crucible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 281. The date of the sonnet is uncertain, though PBS may have composed it, as Poems I suggests, in early September 1815 shortly after returning from an excursion up the Thames by boat in company with T. L. Peacock, Mary Godwin (as MWS then was) and Claire Clairmont’s brother Charles (see headnote to previous poem). Dante’s sonnet provided a set of themes that PBS would celebrate throughout his verse: the idealized journey by boat, the small community bound together by love and intellectual friendship, the high excitement of ‘passionate talk’ (l. 12) – and the intricate connections of all these to the practice of poetry. Our text is from 1816.

  8  strict: Close.

  10 Editors have wondered whether ‘my’ might not be a mistake or misprint because it was Bice (the familiar form of ‘Beatrice’) who was Dante’s love. ‘Vanna’ is familiar for ‘Giovanna’. The two named women in standard modern texts are Vanna and Lagia, the beloved of Guido and Lapo respectively.

  To Wordsworth

  Published in 1816, from which the text is taken; composed between September 1814 and October 1815, when the Alastor volume went to press. In addition to its engagement with Wordsworth’s poetry generally, as indicated below, the poem may be regarded as PBS’s reaction to Wordsworth’s The Excursion (August 1814), in which the older poet dramatizes his disappointment with the outcome of the French Revolution while endorsing the post-war political and religious status quo in Britain. MWS’s journal entry for 14 September 1814 records that ‘Shelley … brings home Wordsworth’s “Excursion”, of which we read a part, much disappointed. He is a slave’ (MWS Journal I, p. 25). PBS never met Wordsworth, though he had hoped to do so during a stay at Keswick between November 1811 and January 1812. This sonnet laments Wordsworth’s apostasy, ironically applying a theme that Wordsworth had made his own – ‘That things depart which never may return’ (l. 2) – to an examination of Wordsworth’s own departure from his earlier support for humanitarian and libertarian ideals. PBS’s critical apostrophe may be regarded as an ironic revision of Wordsworth’s evocation of Milton’s austere and high-minded example in the sonnet ‘London, 1802’ (1807), l. 9 of which – ‘Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart’ – is echoed in l. 7 here. PBS’s ambiguous response to Wordsworth (‘That such a man should be such a poet!’, Letters II, p. 26) would continue throughout his career, notably in ‘Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England’ and Peter Bell the Third. PBS varies the pattern of the Shakespearean sonnet by placing the traditional final couplet in ll. 9–10.

  1–4 Wordsworth’s most celebrated treatment of this theme occurs in the first stanza of his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807): ‘It is not now as it hath been of yore;— / Turn whereso’er I may, / By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’

  9–10 The lines adapt one of the cardinal sources of PBS’s conception of the philosopher-poet, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) II.1–14, in which the Roman poet imagines the pleasures of contemplating with a serene mind the blind struggles of ambition and greed. See editorial note to PBS’s Note [6] to Queen Mab V.58.

  11 honoured poverty: In a letter of 15 December 1811, PBS wrote enthusiastically from Keswick that ‘Wordsworth … yet retains the integrity of his independance [sic], but his poverty is such that he is frequently obliged to beg for a shirt to his back’ (Letters I, pp. 208–9).

  12 liberty: One of the sections in Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) is entitled ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’.

  Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte

  Published in 1816, which furnishes our text; date of composition uncertain but probably written in late 1815 as ll. 10–14 would be more appropriate to the harsh and restrictive post-Waterloo settlement imposed by the Allies on France than to the more generous terms of the Treaty of Paris of May 1814, which followed Napoleon’s first abdication the previous month. But Charles E. Robinson argues that an unnamed poem that PBS sent to Byron in June 1814 could be this one (KSJ 35 (1986), pp. 104–10). In a letter of late August 1815, PBS deplores ‘the enormities of their [i.e. the Allies’] troops’, adding: ‘In considering the political events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical’ (Letters I, p. 430) – a point of view consistent with the elevated and generalized idiom of this poem. Napoleon’s final defeat and exile to St Helena prompt PBS to recall the complex and ambivalent attitude towards the emperor which he shared with many radical and liberal contemporaries. He made numerous assessments of Napoleon in his poetry and prose: e.g. Letters I, pp. 345–6; ‘Ode to Liberty’ XII; ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’; The Triumph of Life, ll. 215–34; and A Philosophical View of Reform. See also Cian Duffy, ‘“The Child of a Fierce Hour”: Shelley and Napoleon Bonaparte’, SIR 43 (2004), pp. 399–416.

  2  unambitious slave: The ironic paradox taxes the former emperor with a lack of those truly noble aspirations which would have prevented his moral enslavement to the vices of monarchs through the ages – territorial greed and the exercise of arbitrary power.

  3  shouldst: Agrees with ‘thou’ rather than ‘slave’ (l. 2).

  12 owns: Recognizes.

  13–14 old Custom, legal Crime, / And bloody Faith: Referring to the provisions of the treaties restoring the Bourbon dynasty in France but with particular reference (‘bloody Faith’) to the Treaty of the Holy Alliance of September 1815 by which the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia claimed divine sanction for their authority and pledged to govern their nations according to the principles of Christian fraternity as set out in Holy Scripture. Liberals considered the Holy Alliance a cover of pious hypocrisy for the restoration of ‘legitimacy’, i.e. dynastic sovereignty, in Europe.

  Mutability

  These polished verses with their dramatic closing paradox appeared in 1816, from which the text is taken. They are likely to have been written sometime during the year preceding publication of the volume in February 1816. PBS was keenly interested in the nature and functioning of the mind, returning to the subject at intervals in succeeding years: see ‘On Love’ and ‘On Life’. The ‘psychology’ of stanzas 2 and 3 de
rives from the empiricists John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–76), in whose thought the mind is primarily a theatre for a succession of fleeting sense-impressions and the ideas arising from them – which leads Hume in particular to question traditional conceptions of a stable personal identity. See Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 13–43, 66–70. In a larger sense, PBS’s lyric takes up one of literature’s venerable themes, the unceasing change to which the world and human things are subject. Poems I cites Ovid, Metamorphoses XV.178–355 and Spenser’s ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (Faerie Queene VII.vii.13–56) as relevant precedents; Complete Poetry III refers to one of PBS’s favoured texts, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which imagines the universe as a perpetual flow of atomic particles. To these may be added The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812) in which PBS’s friend T. L. Peacock identifies the steady contemplation of universal mutability as promoting that ‘philosophical melancholy’ which is ‘the most copious source of virtue, of courage, and of genius’ (Peacock Works VI, p. 186). PBS returned often to the theme of ineluctable change – for example in ‘The flower that smiles today’, to which MWS gave the title ‘Mutability’ when she included it in 1824.

  14 still is free: Is always open.

  ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE

  Composed in autumn–winter 1815 (the Preface is dated 14 December) during PBS’s residence at Bishopsgate, near Windsor; published the following February in a volume entitled Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816), together with eleven shorter poems, six of which are included here: ‘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’ and ‘Mutability’. Our text is taken from 1816.

  PBS’s friend T. L. Peacock remembered suggesting the unusual title: ‘He was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted … The Greek word ’Αλάστωρ is an evil genius [i.e. malevolent spirit] … The poem treated the spirit of solitude as a spirit of evil. I mention the true meaning of the word, because many have supposed Alastor to be name of the hero of the poem’ (Peacock Works VIII, p. 100). The sense of ‘an avenging spirit’ also had some currency at the time (OED). In the poem, the ‘Spirit of Solitude’ designates not a supernatural being but rather a morbid state of mind in which sympathetic idealism collapses into solipsism. PBS evoked the mental impulses involved in a letter to T. J. Hogg shortly before he began to compose Alastor: ‘It excites my wonder to consider the perverted energies of the human mind … who is there that will not pursue phantoms, spend his choicest hours in hunting after dreams, and wake only to perceive his error and regret that death is so near?’ (Letters I, pp. 429–30). MWS’s ‘Note on Alastor’ in 1839 claims that it ‘contains an individual interest only’ (as against the broad political concerns of Queen Mab); and PBS introduced it to the Laureate Robert Southey as his ‘first serious attempt to interest the best feelings of the human heart’ (Letters I, p. 462). In 1839 MWS recalled that in spring 1815 PBS had been diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary consumption and identifies his apprehension of death, the sudden disappearance of his symptoms, and a chastened backward glance at his own early philosophic radicalism as conditions that shaped the major themes of Alastor.

  Alastor is PBS’s first sustained examination of what would become a central topic of his work: the scope, responsibility and potential dysfunction of the poetic imagination. These have an obvious autobiographical dimension, but his claim in the Preface that ‘The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men’ has prompted attempts to discover in the Poet-protagonist features belonging to Wordsworth and Coleridge, who also receive particular assessments in the Alastor volume: see ‘To Wordsworth’ and ‘O! there are spirits of the air’. In reading Alastor the different estimates of the Poet’s destiny in the first and second paragraphs of the Preface should be noted; one should also bear in mind the differences between the narrative that is sketched in the Preface and the one that unfolds in the poem, as well as the different roles assigned to the narrator of the poem and its principal character – neither of whom is simply to be identified with PBS himself or any other.

  The volume received only a few, largely hostile and uncomprehending, reviews when it appeared, but has since come to be regarded as one of the landmark collections of the second generation of British Romantic poets. The title-poem has attracted important critical commentary; a representative sample would include: G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988); Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 219–33; Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 47–53; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 73–83; Donald Maddox, ‘Shelley’s Alastor and the Legacy of Rousseau’, SiR 9 (1970), pp. 82–98; Paul Mueschke and Earl Griggs, ‘Wordsworth as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, PMLA 49 (1934), pp. 229–45; Joseph Raben, ‘Coleridge as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, RES 17 (1966), pp. 278–92; and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 15–46.

  Preface Compare this early development with the ‘education peculiarly fitted for a poet’, an idealized account of PBS’s own poetic vocation, in the Preface to Laon and Cythna, written about a year later in autumn 1817.

  p. 112 requisitions: Claims.

  Blasted: Blighted.

  Power: The idea of a ‘Power’ inherent in nature figures in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, l. 1, and ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 16.

  p. 113 doubtful: Apparently combining the obsolete sense ‘to be dreaded’ with the more usual ‘uncertain’.

  All else: Completely different.

  ‘The good … socket’: A slight misquotation of Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814) I.500–502. The lines describe the poor cottager Margaret; although she is kindly, loving and industrious, the harsh material conditions of her existence, the loss of her soldier husband in war and the death of her child have destroyed her will to live.

  socket: The hollow part of a candlestick that holds the candle.

  Epigraph ‘I was not yet in love, and I was in love with love, I sought what I might love, loving to love.’ The Latin quotation is composed from a longer passage in St Augustine’s Confessions III.i, in which the saint declares that his impulse to love was unconscious longing for God. The sense that PBS attaches to words is set out in the Preface. In Esdaile (SC IV, p. 1005) he applied the quotation to his younger self, and later inscribed it in a notebook in 1814 (Clairmont Journal, p. 61).

  2  our great Mother: The forces of nature personified as maternal. See note to ll. 18–19.

  3  natural piety: Reverence for nature; echoing Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up’ (1807), ll. 7–9: ‘The Child is Father of the man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety’, lines which were set as an epigraph to ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ in Wordsworth’s Poems (1815).

  8  sere: Dried, withered.

  14 consciously: Intentionally; PBS became a vegetarian in 1812, defending the ‘vegetable regimen’ himself in his Note [17] to Queen Mab VIII.211–12.

  18–19 Mother … song: The appeal to nature for inspiration replaces the similar appeal to the Muse in ancient Greek and Roman poetry.

  21 Thy shadow: The operations of nature cannot be perceived directly, but only through its manifestations in the material world. Cp. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ll. 1–2.

  23–9 I have made … what we are: PBS’s friend Hogg records (Life I, pp. 36–7) PBS’s youthful watching for ghosts, and in a letter to him of January 1811 the nineteen-year-old PBS claims to ‘have been most of the night pacing a church yar
d’ (Letters I, p. 39). Cp. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ll. 49–54, which describe a similar quest for ‘high talk with the departed dead’.

  26 obstinate questionings: Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 142–3: ‘those obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things’. In Wordsworth’s poem, adults retain vestiges of the lively sense of their own divine origins they experienced in childhood.

  29–37 In lone … thy charge: Just such a session is recorded by PBS in MWS Journal (7 October 1814): ‘soon after’ the ‘witching time of night’ he asked ‘whether it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears’. He and Claire Clairmont then ‘continued to sit by the fire at intervals engaging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries’.

  42 lyre: The instrument here functions like the Aeolian harp (from Aeolus or Eolus, the god of the wind), a hollow box stringed across its opening which produced sounds when exposed to wind or breeze, and the subject of Coleridge’s ‘Effusion XXXV’ (1796; later retitled ‘The Eolian Harp’).

  44 fane: Temple.

  49 deep heart of man: A Wordsworthian phrase; relevant passages would include: ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 190–206; ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798), ll. 94–112; ‘Michael’ (1800), ll. 29–33.

  56 votive cypress wreath: In ancient Rome, boughs of cypress, sacred to Pluto, were carried at funerals as an offering to the gods.

  67–8 Wordsworth’s account of the Wanderer’s development in The Excursion I.301–2 – ‘In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought, / Thus was he reared’ – is one among many parallels between his early life and that of the Poet in Alastor.

  67 silver: As well as evoking glowing colour, the word suggests the sense ‘gently melodious’.