Selected Poems and Prose
Page 82
In 1839 MWS recalls how PBS’s ‘Hymn’ ‘was conceived during his voyage round the lake [of Geneva] with Lord Byron’. PBS describes this excursion by boat (22–30 June 1816) in Letters I, pp. 480–88, and in 1817, pp. 107–39 (see the extract: p. 595). The Alpine scenes he then observed affected him intensely; he later recalled that the poem had been ‘composed under the influence of feelings which agitated me even to tears’ (Letters I, p. 517). The surviving draft (BSM XI), lacking stanza 4, was probably made during the tour of the lake or shortly afterwards and the poem finished by late August 1816.
The ‘Hymn’ of PBS’s title announces the religious character of a poem which incorporates a number of the traditional elements of prayer: praise offered to a mysterious Power, petition for its aid, confession of childhood errors, and renewal of a vow – in this case following upon a visionary crisis in youth. The poem borrows eclectically from religious and ethical traditions: biblical language is adopted equally with that of secular humanism, while the political implications of ll. 68–70 may have put contemporary readers in mind of the hymns sung during the public ceremonies of the French Revolution to such abstractions as Liberty and Reason. The development of the seven stanzas is underpinned by a discreet structure of argument. Visitations of the Spirit of Beauty, which the poet apprehends through the transient appearances of nature, together with the intense mental and emotive experiences that he recalls in stanzas 5 and 6, support a tentative affirmation: that an immanent force which cannot be known directly, but only through its intermittent interventions in the natural sphere, is the cause of all that the senses, the mind and the affections recognize as beautiful. This power is the Intellectual Beauty that is addressed throughout as if it were a deity, although no such claim is made explicitly. The phrase ‘Intellectual Beauty’ occurs in a number of authors that PBS had read, notably in chapter 3 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), where it signifies the mental excellence of a woman as opposed to her mere physical attractions; and in chapter 10 of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), where Mary Wollstonecraft herself is credited with possessing an intuitive perception of that Beauty which is proper to the things of the mind. But it should be stressed that PBS’s poem aims to redefine Intellectual Beauty in his own language and to his own purposes, the text elaborating with notable particularity the special cluster of meanings that he attaches to the idea. Good investigations of the sources and contexts of the term can be found in: N. Brown, KSR 2 (1987), pp. 91–104; Chernaik, pp. 32–40; Complete Poetry III, pp. 476–82; and Poems I, pp. 522–5.
1 awful: Inspiring awe.
6 glance: A sudden movement producing a flash or gleam.
13 doth: ‘Dost’ would be the correct form for an address to the ‘Spirit of BEAUTY’ in the second-person singular, as in ll. 14 and 16; but ‘doth’ is confirmed by both draft and first version.
16 state: Condition, lot.
17 vale of tears: The phrase derives from the Vulgate version of Psalm 84:5–6 (H. W. White and N. Rogers, KSMB 24, pp. 16–18) and traditionally signified the temporary afflictions of this world in contrast to the eternal bliss of heaven.
23 scope: Capacity.
27 name of God and ghosts, and Heaven: the Examiner version reads: ‘names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven’. The reading adopted here was entered by PBS on a clipping of the Examiner text of the poem (MYR (Shelley) V). The draft reads: ‘names of Ghosts & God & Heaven’ (BSM XI); Version B gives: ‘name of God & Ghosts & Heaven’. The removal of ‘God’ from the Examiner text may have been the result of Leigh Hunt’s anxieties; prosecution for blasphemous libel was a real danger in 1817 (see headnote to the extract from the Preface to Laon and Cythna).
34 still instrument: An Aeolian or wind harp, which gives out music as the wind blows upon it. Cp. Alastor, ll. 42–9 and note on l. 42.
36 Echoing John 1:14: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.’
37 Self-esteem: Here replaces Faith as the third of what were traditionally known as Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity (Love).
41 firm state: Unshakeable sway.
49–72 Cp. stanzas 3–5 of the Dedication before Laon and Cythna.
49 MWS confirms in a sketch of PBS’s early life that as a boy he sat up at night hoping to see ghosts. See BSM XXII, pp. 270–71, and cp. Alastor, ll. 23–9.
53–4 poisonous names … I was not heard: Both draft and Version B read: ‘false name … He heard me not’. PBS’s original ‘He’ probably intended God (cp. l. 27) and so was altered to avoid offence – as l. 27 seems to have been. But the context admits the possibility that it was the Devil’s aid which was being invoked to raise the spirits of the dead. This would be consistent with the occult experiments of the young PBS as described by his sister (T. J. Hogg in Life I, pp. 22–6). The precise reference of the revision ‘poisonous names’ is still less clear; it may include other demons, magicians, perhaps saints, and even the ‘God’ of l. 27. Cp. Queen Mab IV.112–13: ‘specious names, / Learnt in soft childhood’s unsuspecting hour’.
58 buds: Given as ‘birds’ in The Examiner. PBS corrected what was evidently a misprint on a clipping of the Examiner text (MYR (Shelley) V), so restoring the reading of both draft and first version.
84 fear: Wariness and self-suspicion, combined with the sense ‘revere, show reverence, especially towards God’ – as in ‘The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him’ (Psalm 147:11). PBS’s line reformulates as fundamental principles of a secular ethics two biblical injunctions: one frequent in the Old Testament, e.g. ‘Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments’ (Deuteronomy 13:4); the other in the New Testament, e.g. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ (Mark 12:31). The worship of Intellectual Beauty as conceived in the poem inspires instead the Shelleyan virtue of self-respect (cp. the ‘Self-esteem’ which stands in place of Faith in l. 37) as well as generalizing the love of one’s neighbour to include all of humanity.
Mont Blanc
Written between 22 July and 29 August 1816; published late the following year in 1817, which provides our Version A text. The Preface to 1817 introduces the poem as having been ‘composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang’. 1817 also contains a journal-letter recounting the excursion to Mont Blanc from 21 to 27 July during which the poem was conceived and probably drafted at least in part. This letter (see the extract from 1817 (pp. 595–601) and Letters I, pp. 495–502) and the parallel account in MWS Journal I, pp. 112–21, provide a revealing commentary on ‘Mont Blanc’. The Shelleys followed an established itinerary for tourists, and PBS’s poem refashions a language of response to much-described sights which had become current coin.
For the existence of two finished versions of the poem, reproduced here as ‘Version A’ and ‘Version B’, see the headnote to the previous poem, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Annotations are to the 1817 text, Version A.
In 1816 the valley of Chamonix presented an even more arresting spectacle than it does today. From the middle of the sixteenth century until 1820, its glaciers grew steadily – thereafter climatic changes slowly decreased their mass – so that the Shelleys saw them both rising higher and descending further towards the neighbouring forests and villages than at present, winding sinuously beneath the high peaks like rivers of ice. In some contemporary descriptions the valley appears as distinctly hostile and menacing, qualities which MWS turned to effect in Frankenstein (1818) by setting the first interview between Victor Frankenstein and the creature to which he has given life on the glacier known as the Mer de Glace.
In the poem PBS also evidently intended a specific riposte to the psalmodic enthusiasm of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1802). As against such ecstatic affirmations of immanent divinity as Coleridge’s, Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ maintains a tone of sceptical uncertainty; its rhetorical modes are interrogation, speculation, hypothesis. The observer-poet’s mixed horror and elation combine with the steady gaze of sceptical rationalism to prompt doubts as to the nature of knowledge itself. The result is a bleak and unsettling lyricism which yet carries a sense of exhilarated wonder.
Revealing commentary is provided in: Chernaik; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); William Keach, Shelley’s Style (New York and London: Methuen, 1984); Nigel Leask, ‘Mont Blanc’s Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science’, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor Shaffer (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1998); Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
Subtitle Chamouni: Both the draft title (BSM XI) and that of Version B indicate that PBS originally fixed the poem’s viewpoint at a specific location, where ‘he lingered on the Bridge of Arve’ (MWS’s ‘Note on the Poems of 1816’ in 1839), i.e. Pont Pélissier between the village of Servoz and the entrance to the valley of Chamonix proper. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595). As the poem proceeds, it develops its perspective to include sights that he observed both before and after this overwhelming initial impression.
1–11 The natural scene is taken as an emblem of the human mind, which perceives the physical universe as a vast stream of sensations while mingling with them thoughts from its own concealed source.
15 awful: Dreadful; inspiring mingled fear and awe.
16 Power: The might of the rushing torrent suggests the presence of a divinity (OED Power 5.II.7), whose nature is absolute force and strength, enthroned on the summit of Mont Blanc, and which the poet cannot perceive directly. The analogy with the God who speaks from within a cloud on Mount Sinai to Moses (Exodus 24:15–18) is developed with radical revisions throughout the poem.
27–9 When read along with the draft and with the longer version of these lines in Version B, ll. 27–31, the sense appears to be that in the momentary stillness of wind, river and trees a peculiar impression is created of the primeval and permanent nature of the scene.
27 unsculptured image: Shaped by natural forces rather than by a human sculptor. The lines recall the effect of an actual waterfall on the rock below it which PBS observed on the route to Chamonix. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595).
34–40 The dimensions and dramatic perspectives of the place overwhelm the mind, inducing an imaginative vision (‘phantasy’) of itself as the very ravine that it perceives. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595).
41–8 These difficult lines represent the mind’s efforts to make an adequate rational and imaginative grasp of the tremendous spectacle of the ravine, which continues to be addressed directly as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, as it has been since l. 12. In ll. 45–6, ‘shadows’ and ‘Ghosts’ are in apposition.
44 the witch Poesy: Dragons, demons and witches (like the Witch of the Alps in Byron’s Manfred (1817), II.ii) were among the fabulous beings long imagined as inhabiting these and other remote Alpine regions. A local legend accounted for the current condition of the once verdant valley of Chamonix as the result of a curse by a witch who, disguised as a poor old woman, had been refused bed and board by the inhabitants (F. Bidaut and J. Gendrault, La Mer de Glace et le Montenvers: une légende, une histoire, un site (Servoz: Edimontagne, 1997), pp. 11–12).
49 remoter: Imperceptible by the senses.
53 unfurled: Both the (opposing) senses ‘drawn aside’ and ‘spread out’ are possible.
59 viewless: Invisible.
63–6 Contemporary observers frequently noted that the glaciers of Chamonix resembled bodies of water agitated by the wind whose peaks and waves had suddenly been frozen. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595).
69 tracts: Traces, follows.
72 Earthquake-daemon: PBS imagines the work of gnome-like subterranean beings who cause earthquakes in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 58–65.
76–9 This passage has occasioned much commentary, the meaning of l. 79 being particularly contested. PBS’s draft and Version B (l. 89) read: ‘In such a faith with Nature reconciled.’ The alteration to ‘But for such faith’ (the phrase is heavily cancelled in the draft) in the 1817 text appears to carry the sense that the wild spectacle presented by Mont Blanc and its surroundings teaches two possible lessons: (1) doubt, adopted with appropriate dread and awe, regarding the doctrines of a divinely created and providentially directed nature; (2) religious conviction so calm and untroubled that it brings the believer as close as such faith can do to reconciliation with a natural order whose cause is evidently both remote from human concerns and inaccessible to thought – a reconciliation that might be complete were it not for such lingering faith.
81 codes: The word can denote both a system of secular law and a body of religious prescription.
84–95 The passage appears to be inspired by the opening lines of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things; I.1–20), which include the phrase daedala tellus (‘daedal earth’, l. 86) = ‘earth the intricate artificer’, though the sense here has usually been understood passively to mean ‘intricately fashioned earth’.
100 adverting: Observant, attentive.
105 distinct with: Adorned or decorated with.
120 And their place is not known: The exact phrase occurs in Nahum 3:17 apropos of the transience of earthly power, and closely resembles one in Psalm 103:15–16 (which served for morning prayer in the Anglican Psalter) on the brevity of human life.
120–23 Referring to the source of the river Arveiron, which flowed out of a cavern in a glacier – a favourite subject for contemporary prints. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595) for PBS’s visit to it.
123 one majestic River: The Rhône, which flows out of Lake Geneva (into which the Arve flows) to the Mediterranean.
Dedication
before LAON AND CYTHNA
PBS finished composing the twelve cantos of his epic-romance Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser by 23 September 1817 (see headnote to the extract from the Preface to Laon and Cythna). Between then and mid November he added the Preface as well as this lengthy Dedication to Mary (Wollstonecraft Shelley) – the complete name is cancelled in his fair-copy MS – whom he had married on 30 December of the previous year, two weeks after learning of the suicide of his first wife, Harriet. Laon and Cythna was on sale by early December; our text is from 1817 (L&C). In March 1817 the Court of Chancery had denied PBS the custody of his two children by Harriet. By late 1817 PBS and MWS had themselves had thr
ee children, of whom two were alive: William, born 24 January 1816, and Clara, born 2 September 1817. The Dedication incorporates two autobiographical strains, intellectual and affective, as well as announcing the formation of a literary alliance between PBS and MWS. In stanza 9 the genesis of Laon and Cythna is attributed to love and domestic fulfilment. Compare ‘To Harriet *****’, PBS’s dedication of Queen Mab to his then wife, Harriet Westbrook (here). Like the twelve cantos of Laon and Cythna, the Dedication is written in the stanza of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96), which comprise eight lines of ten syllables and a concluding line of twelve syllables, rhyming ababbcbcc.
Epigraph From George Chapman’s play The Conspiracy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608), by way of an extract in Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare (1808). Chapman’s lines evidently epitomized for PBS the ambition and daring necessary to undertake a poem with the high aims of Laon and Cythna, as well as recalling the poet he regarded as best qualified for the task, Byron, in whose company he had spent a good part of the preceding summer.
3 Knight of Faëry: ‘Elfin Knight’ (as Redcrosse Knight is styled in Spenser’s Faerie Queene) was one of Mary’s pet-names for PBS and one he used in 1817 as a nom de plume. ‘Faëry’ is fairyland.
4 dome: A stately home, mansion.
9 beloved name: MWS was the daughter of the liberal authors William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. See note to l. 38 below.
19–45 PBS’s unhappy experiences with both his schoolmasters and fellow schoolboys, especially at Eton (1804–10), contributed to the epiphany and self-dedication to oppose tyranny that are here imagined. Although the precise details cannot be verified, such an experience formed an important element in PBS’s conception of the course of his life. He recounts a comparable episode in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, stanzas 5 and 6, and attributes to the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo, ll. 380–82, a similar youthful decision to devote himself to ‘justice’ and ‘love’.