Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  387 thought-executing ministers: The phrase has been understood as meaning ‘those who carry out Jove’s thought’ and/or ‘those who destroy thought’.

  398–9 the Sicilian’s … o’er his crown: Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, compelled the courtier Damocles to dine under a sword suspended by a single horse-hair so that he might appreciate the insecurity of rule.

  409 lowers: i.e. ‘lours’, ‘threatens’, presumably by darkening.

  450 Notopoulos, p. 227, suggests that this idea, which features in various forms in PBS’s writings, derives from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791): ‘It is the faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object’ (ed. Eric Foner and Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 109). See III.iii.49–53 and A Defence of Poetry.

  479 lidless: Always open; unsleeping.

  492–4 Cp. ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’, ll. 10–14.

  506–9 Cp. ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ll. 63–70.

  530 Kingly conclaves: No doubt to be understood as referring in particular to the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which was convened to decide the partition and governance of post-Napoleonic Europe, and which PBS and many of his contemporaries regarded as having legitimized reactionary royal authority.

  546 One came forth: i.e. Jesus Christ.

  563 pillow of thorns: Recalling the crown of thorns placed on Christ’s head in e.g. Matthew 27:29.

  567 a disenchanted nation: Coleridge, ‘France: An Ode’ (1798), l. 28, describes France, in the early phase of the Revolution, as a ‘disenchanted nation’, i.e. freed from the spell of tyranny.

  573–7 The lines suggest parallels with recent historical events, such as the Reign of Terror (1793–4), the wars of revolutionary and imperial France (1792–1815), and the restoration of the European monarchies post-Waterloo (1815).

  609 ounces: Leopards.

  619 ravin: Prey.

  622 fanes: Temples.

  625–8 Cp. The Triumph of Life, ll. 228–31.

  631 they know not what they do: Echoing the words of Jesus on the cross (e.g. Luke 23:34).

  651 ‘Truth, liberty, and love!’: Cp. the French revolutionary slogan: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; see also John 8:32: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’

  658 subtle and fair spirits: The first four of these immaterial (‘subtle’) beings represent qualities inherent in general and individual human thought which offer hope for the future of humanity as an antidote to the Furies’ counsels of despair. The fifth and sixth spirits exemplify the intimate relation of hope and despair in even the enlightened mind.

  765 That planet-crested Shape: Love, associated with the planet Venus.

  769 unupbraiding: Without rebuking or criticizing; one of a number of unusual negative constructions in PU; see Webb, ‘The Unascended Heaven’, in Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued, pp. 37–62.

  772–9 PBS is adapting the imagery of Plato, Symposium 195.

  782 Cp. Revelation 6:8: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.’

  825 the Eastern star: The planet Venus, as the morning star.

  830–31 And haunted … waters: Adapting Shakespeare, The Tempest III.ii.138–40: ‘The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give Delight and hurt not.’

  ACT II

  Scene i

  1–9 Poems II cites this passage, as well as ll. 27, 35–8, 92 and 107–8 of this scene, as evidence that the action of the poem is to be considered sequential rather than simultaneous.

  3  horny: An unusual usage: ‘semi-opaque like horn’ (OED); hence (perhaps) ‘dull’, ‘cloudy’.

  26–7 The beating of Panthea’s wings through the morning air makes music: see ll. 50–52. Aeolus was the mythical keeper of the winds.

  43 erewhile: i.e. ‘Before the sacred Titan’s fall’ (l. 40).

  44 glaucous: ‘Of dull or pale green colour passing into greyish blue’ (OED).

  62–7 Recalling the Gospel episode, e.g. Matthew 17:1–6, in which Christ is transfigured.

  133–41 This complex sequence involves several elements: the almond-tree, which flowers early, heralds the spring. Its blossoms are killed by an icy wind from the north (for the ancient Greeks, Scythia indicated lands to the north of the Black Sea; this is the region in which the action of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is set). Each fallen almond leaf bears the message ‘O, follow, follow!’, just as the hyacinth’s petals were imagined as bearing the sorrowful cry ‘ai’ in memory of Apollo’s love for Hyacinth, who had been transformed into the flower after his early death. Apollo was the Greek god of the sun, and patron of poetry, prophecy and medicine. The priestesses of some ancient oracles traditionally wrote their prophecies on leaves.

  Scene ii

  Stage direction As Geoffrey Matthews notes, in ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, the scenery of PU II.ii, through which Asia and Panthea journey on their way to the cave of Demogorgon, is based upon the lush volcanic landscapes of Lake Agnano and the Astroni crater near Naples, which PBS visited in the spring of 1819 (see Letters II, p. 77). The scene (like much of PU II) is also indebted to both ancient and contemporary speculation about volcanic activity, e.g. the account of ‘the breathing earth’ (ll. 50–56), which combines early nineteenth-century natural philosophy with Classical notions of the inspirational or intoxicating properties of volcanic gases. See also II.iii.1–10.

  Fauns: A faun was a rural semi-divinity, half man and half goat.

  10 Cp. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream II.i.14–15: ‘I must go seek some dewdrops here, / And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.’

  70–82 These lines derive from the debate among some contemporary natural philosophers on the question whether flammable hydrogen gas, released from water plants by the sunlight, might be the cause of various luminous atmospheric phenomena (‘meteors’).

  90 Silenus is a satyr (part man, part goat), repository of ancient myth and wisdom and tutor to Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. Here he would be ‘thwart’ (cross, testy) to find his herd of goats ‘undrawn’ (unmilked).

  Scene iii

  Stage direction Asia and Panthea have reached the summit of a volcano, from which gas is being expelled (ll. 3–4); the cave of Demogorgon is located in the depths of the crater beneath them. Many of the details recall PBS’s account of his ascent of Vesuvius on 16 December 1818 (Letters II, p. 62–3).

  4  the oracular vapour: The priestess who delivered the responses of the Oracle at Delphi was reputed to draw her inspiration from vapours rising from a chasm.

  9–10 In Greek myth, Maenads were the frenzied female followers of Dionysus; their ritual cry was ‘Evoe!’. Equivocal figures, they express both transformative energies and the dangers of intoxication, hence the ambivalence of ‘The voice’ in l. 10, where ‘contagion’ can be construed in either a positive or a negative sense. Cp. I.178.

  28–42 PBS’s draft of these lines indicates that he intended them as a response to an attack, in the Quarterly Review for May 1818, on his atheism and on the absence of pious awe before mountain landscapes in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) and ‘Mont Blanc’. See Timothy Webb, ‘“The Avalanche of Ages”: Shelley’s Defence of Atheism and Prometheus Unbound’, KSMB 35 (1984), pp. 1–39.

  70 stone: Lodestone; magnetic iron oxide.

  79 one: Demogorgon is intended, here and in l. 95 (‘the Eternal, the Immortal’).

  97 snake-like Doom: Fate, or destiny; ‘snake-like’ suggests an association with eternity (sometimes represented as a serpent devouring its own tail).

  Scene iv

  Stage direction Asia and Panthea have reached the cave of Demogorgon, at the bottom of the volcanic crater. As Geoffrey Matthews observes, in ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, one current theory held that volcanic eruptions were triggered by the interaction of sea water and molten magma in subterranean caverns. Hence, the entry of the Oceani
des to Demogorgon’s cave appropriately precipitates a symbolic eruption, and the various accounts of Jupiter’s fall in ll. 129, 150 ff. and III.i–ii draw upon that scientific dimension.

  1–7 Commentators have found sources for PBS’s conception of Demogorgon in T. L. Peacock’s Rhododaphne (1818), where Demogorgon is named as the supreme earthly power; in Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (1472), which was Peacock’s source; and in a range of Classical texts, including Lucan’s Pharsalia. PBS’s description of Demogorgon in these lines recalls Milton’s portrait of Death in Paradise Lost II.666–70. Carl Grabo suggests that the ‘rays of gloom’ (l. 3) emitted by Demogorgon might allude to infra-red radiation, which the astronomer William Herschel had discovered in 1800; see also IV.225–30 (A Newton Among Poets, p. 47). Paul Foot finds in the name ‘Demogorgon’ the etymological sense ‘people-monster’, thereby suggesting that the character is linked in PBS’s mind with the (revolutionary) political energies of the crowd (Red Shelley (London: Bookmarks, 1984), pp. 193–201 (p. 194)).

  32–4 There was … shadow: Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth) were the parents of the Titans, including Saturn (Greek ‘Kronos’, associated with Chronos (Time)).

  52 unseasonable seasons: Both Classical and Christian traditions regarded the seasons as the consequence of a fall from an original Golden or Edenic age of perpetual spring.

  61 In Classical mythology, nepenthe was a drug which caused forgetfulness of sorrow. According to Homer, Odyssey X.302–6, moly was the flower which Hermes gave to Odysseus to protect him from the enchanted potion of Circe. Amaranth here is a mythical, unfading flower growing only in Paradise.

  77–9 Recalling Christ’s walking on the water, e.g. Matthew 14:25–6.

  80–84 A difficult passage, of uncertain meaning. The general sense appears to be: ‘Sculptors first copied the human body and then created idealized versions of it, inspiring love in the mothers who beheld such idealized forms and hoped that their own children would share such perfection.’ Some commentators find a reference to the idea that a child in the womb is influenced by an intense impression on its mother during pregnancy. As Poems II, p. 562, observes, ‘the subject of behold, and perish is presumably the men of line 83, but the grammar is dislocated and the sense unclear’.

  91 interlunar: The period between the old and the new moon. Cp. ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, l. 24.

  94 Celt: Used loosely to indicate a northern European.

  101 immedicable: Not capable of being healed.

  102–3 Man … glorious: The prerogative of divinity, as in Genesis 1:31, ‘And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good’, and Satan’s address to the Sun in Paradise Lost IV.32–4: ‘O thou that with surpassing glory crowned, / Look’st from thy sole dominion like the God / Of this new world.’

  107 adamantine: Unbreakable.

  156–9 See … tracery: The chariot that attends Asia recalls Aphrodite, the goddess of love, one of whose emblems is the seashell. Cp. II.v.20–25, where Asia’s emergence from the ocean on a seashell recalls the myth of the birth of Aphrodite.

  171 Atlas: Traditionally the highest point on earth, Mount Atlas was thought in ancient times to stand in the far west of the known world; it was associated with the Titan Atlas, brother to Prometheus, who was condemned by Zeus to support the heavens on his shoulders for having joined the war against the Olympian gods.

  Scene v

  2  respire: Catch their breath.

  7  it could not: The cosmic cataclysm that has begun must take its course, keeping even the sun from rising until noon (l. 10).

  20 Nereids: Sea deities, daughters of Nereus, the sea god.

  21 the clear hyaline: The glassy sea, as in l. 24.

  98–110 Asia’s lyric traces, according to a broadly Platonic scheme, a journey from age back to birth and through that portal to the eternal realm peopled by spirits – from which the soul enters the world. Commentators have suggested that PBS may be reversing the account of the soul’s progress from eternity to manhood in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), ll. 58–84. See III. iii.113–14 and note.

  ACT III

  Scene i

  11 the pendulous air: Cp. Shakespeare, King Lear III.iv.64–5: ‘Now, all the plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters!’

  18–19 Even now … fatal child: Jupiter’s child by Thetis who, he assumes, will secure his reign, but whom Prometheus knows will be his undoing. See also note to ll. 33–9 below. Jupiter’s words echo Paradise Lost V.603–4: ‘This day I have begot whom I declare / My only Son.’

  25 Idaean Ganymede: Ganymede was a young Trojan prince who was abducted by Jupiter from Mount Ida (in what is now north-west Turkey) and became the cup-bearer of the gods.

  26 daedal: Intricately crafted; from Daedalus, the Greek master craftsman and father of Icarus. Cp. ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 86.

  33–9 And thou … presence: In Classical myth, Zeus/Jupiter ensures that Thetis, a sea goddess, is married to a mortal after Prometheus reveals that her son will become greater than his father; Thetis marries Peleus, and gives birth to Achilles. Thetis’ account of her rape draws on the story of Semele – a mortal woman raped by Jupiter and destroyed by the intensity of his presence. See Ovid, Metamorphoses III.259 ff., XI.229–65.

  40–41 Like him … poison: Lucan, Pharsalia IX.762–88, recounts how Sabellus was ‘dissolved’ after being bitten by a seps (a highly poisonous, mythical snake) in the Numidian desert.

  48 Griding: Cutting or scraping with a grating sound.

  51 Stage direction The Car of the HOUR: The chariot driven by the ‘spirit with a dreadful countenance’ from II.iv.142–4.

  62 Titanian: The Titans were imprisoned underground in Tartarus, below Hades, after their defeat by Zeus and his divine allies.

  72–3 a vulture and a snake … fight: PBS introduces similar images of archetypal combat in Laon and Cythna (1817), I.vi–xiv, and Alastor, ll. 227–32.

  Scene ii

  Stage direction Atlantis: A legendary island in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias; sometimes associated in PBS’s work with America.

  19 unstained with blood: Because naval warfare, piracy and the slave trade will all have ceased to be.

  24 Blue Proteus: A shape-shifting god of the sea. Cp. III.iii.65.

  26–8 P. H. Butter(ed.), Shelley: Alastor and Other Poems, Prometheus Unbound with Other Poems, Adonais (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1970), suggests that the complex image likens the moon with a star at its tip to a boat (‘bark’) guided by an invisible (‘sightless’) pilot with a star as his crest.

  49 unpastured: Unfed (with the ‘calm’ it hungers for).

  Scene iii

  10 a Cave: It is not clear whether this cave is the same as the ‘Cavern’ which Earth describes and allots to Prometheus in ll. 124–47, although here Prometheus does not mention any adjacent ‘temple’ (l. 127). Both locations revise Plato’s image of the cave as a theatre of deceptive illusion in Republic 514–19: instead these caves are privileged places from which Prometheus and Asia will observe the operations of a regenerated, post-revolutionary consciousness.

  15 the mountain’s frozen tears: Stalactites.

  22–9 The passage borrows from King Lear V.iii.8–19.

  42–3 Proserpina/Persephone was snatched away by Pluto/Hades as she gathered flowers in a mountain meadow near Enna in central Sicily (see Ovid, Metamorphoses V.385–96). Himera was a Greek town on the north coast of Sicily.

  49–56 Adapting the Platonic notion that the intimate experience of beauty transforms the mind, finally rendering it capable of immortal creations. See note to I.450.

  64–8 The association of Asia with a curved shell given by Proteus (see note to III.ii.24) links her with the mythical Aphrodite, born on a seashell.

  96–9 to me … brimming stream: Echoing the Song of Solomon 4:5: ‘Thy two breasts are like
two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.’

  113–14 Death … lifted: Cp. III.iv.190–92, ‘Sonnet’ (‘Lift not the painted veil’) and ‘Mont Blanc’, ll. 53–4.

  124 Cavern: See note to II.iii.4 and to the stage direction for II.iv.

  136 ivy: Sacred to Dionysus.

  154–5 Bacchic Nysa … Indus: Dionysus/Bacchus was born in the semi-legendary mountains of Nysa, which some Classical authors locate in India; hence ‘beyond’ Indus, a river which flows through Tibet, India and Pakistan.

  165 Praxiteles (fourth century BC) was one of the foremost sculptors of ancient Athens.

  168–70 there the … emblem: At the Athenian festival of Lampadephoria, young men competed in races while carrying torches in honour of Prometheus’ gift of fire to humanity.

  168 emulous: Both ‘competing’ and ‘desiring to imitate’.

  Scene iv

  Stage direction In this scene, PBS associates the Spirit of the Earth with electricity and electrical phenomena: many contemporary scientists believed that electricity was the fundamental force animating the physical universe. The Spirit has also been likened to the god Eros, Aphrodite’s son.

  2–4 on its … hair: Carl Grabo relates this image to the Leyden jar, an early form of electrical battery, which emits a green light when charged (A Newton Among Poets, p. 126).

  8  populous: ‘Numerous’, or perhaps ‘full of life’, i.e. ‘populated’.

  19 dipsas: A mythical snake, whose bite was supposed to induce severe thirst.

  54 a sound: No doubt a blast from the ‘curved shell’ given by Prometheus to the Spirit of the Hour in III.iii.64–8.

  65–7 Those ugly human shapes … the air: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) IV.30–37, describes the simulacra or filmy images which leave the surface of all material objects and float in the air.