Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  13–26 The ‘first Peter’ is Reynolds’s poem, the second Wordsworth’s, the third PBS’s. An ‘antitype’ fulfils the prophecy implicit in the original type.

  32 Predevote: Predestined.

  35 Cotter: One who occupies a farm cottage in return for work on the farm.

  36 polygamic Potter … [Shelley’s note]: In the second edition of Peter Bell, Wordsworth explained that in northern dialect a ‘potter’ was ‘a hawker of earthenware’. A ‘scholiast’ is an early commentator on a Classical text; ‘dodecagamic’ means ‘having married twelve times’ (as had Wordsworth’s Peter Bell); ‘megalophonous’ is ‘high-sounding’.

  [Peter Bell the Third]

  8  oiled his hair … [Shelley’s note]: Both whale oil and Russia oil (extracted from birch bark) were used to dress hair.

  15 the gravel: Stones in the urinary tract; painful urination generally.

  22 brimstone hue: Sulphureous yellow; as in The Witch of Atlas, l. 43.

  25 The other: i.e. ‘brimstone hue’ (l. 22).

  27 water gruel: A thin porridge of meal and water.

  32 lake of Windermere: Located to the south-east of ‘Grasmere vale’ (l. 60), where Wordsworth lived in the early nineteenth century and from which the Langdale Pikes, or Peaks, can be seen (l. 56).

  40 To curse one or the other of one’s parents is forbidden under pain of death in Leviticus 20:9.

  56–60 See note to l. 32.

  76 The Devil: PBS’s essay ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ (p. 630) makes an illuminating commentary on the character introduced here.

  82 Cp. Shakespeare, King Lear III.iv.134: ‘The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.’

  83–4 The Poet Laureate traditionally received a butt of ‘sack’ (white wine from Spain or the Canaries) as part of his stipend. The Laureate at that time, Robert Southey (1774–1843), PBS regarded as having abandoned the progressive politics of his youth for a reactionary conservatism, like his fellow ‘Lake Poet’ Wordsworth.

  86 Cp. 1 Thessalonians 5:2: ‘the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.’

  87 That is, with high boots and fashionable close-fitting trousers.

  92 slop-merchant from Wapping: A seller of cheap clothing in this poor district of east London populated by sailors and others engaged in shipping.

  94 perk: To act in a lively, jaunty manner; also assertively, impudently or with conceit.

  96 upper Benjamin: A short coat suitable for wear when driving a carriage.

  101 corse: Corpse.

  116 phiz: Face, from ‘phiznomy’ (physiognomy).

  120 Wordsworth attributes pride and joy to children in the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), l. 101, and in The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), l. 1810.

  128 Grosvenor square: Completed in 1737, this square was a fashionable address and the location of many grand residences.

  146 bowled … chaise: Driven in the Devil’s carriage.

  152–6 John Castles was a hired government informer and agent provocateur, a discredited witness for the prosecution in the trial (9–17 June 1817) of the leaders of the Spa Fields riots of 2 December 1816. George Canning (1770–1827), Tory politician and member of cabinet in the Earl of Liverpool’s administration, spirited contributor to the weekly Anti-Jacobin (1797–8), foreign secretary (1807–9), succeeded Castlereagh in that office (1822) and became prime minister briefly in 1827. William Cobbett (1763–1835), reformist editor of the weekly Political Register (1802–35); fearing prosecution, he fled to America in 1817, returning in October 1819. PBS admired the vigour and clarity of Cobbett’s writing, though regarded some of it as inflammatory and deplored Cobbett’s appeal to the people to exact retribution for the wrongs they had suffered. See l. 239. For Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, see headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’.

  154 caitiff: Base, wicked.

  155 cozening: Cheating, trickery.

  trepanning: Swindling.

  157 The three asterisks were substituted in the press-copy MS for ‘S—th—y’. The Laureate Southey (see note to ll. 83–4 above) had suffered a serious mental decline by the time the poem was published in 1840, so ll. 157–8 would have been considered unacceptably offensive had his name been retained.

  162 Chancery Court: The court that could be petitioned in cases of equity, presided over by the Lord Chancellor. See note to The Mask of Anarchy, l. 15.

  163 manufacturing: Made up of industrial workers.

  163–5 set / Of thieves … Similar thieves: The unreformed Parliament, elected by a small minority to represent its interests.

  166 An Army: PBS and other liberals opposed the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime as a threat to freedom. See note to l. 173.

  public debt: See note to The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 176–83.

  173 Despotism: In four leading articles in The Examiner in April and May 1816, Leigh Hunt had warned of the dangers to civil authority of the increased presence of soldiers in London.

  174 German soldiers: Large numbers of German troops served abroad in the British army in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), but their presence on British soil was regarded by many with apprehension. King George III (reigned 1760–1820) was also Elector of Hanover.

  175 lotteries: From 1694 to 1826, lotteries were sponsored by the state as a means of raising revenue, but by the early nineteenth century were criticized as inefficient and subject to various sorts of fraud.

  176 suicide and Methodism: In An Attempt to Show the Folly and Danger of Methodism (1809), Leigh Hunt claimed that the extreme emotions encouraged by Methodism had resulted in a growth in the number of suicides.

  177 Taxes: Increases in commodity taxes (which fell most heavily on the poor), on items such as tea, coffee and tobacco, were voted by Parliament in June 1819.

  183 amant miserè … [Shelley’s note]: The Swedish naturalist Carl Linné (1707–78) had thus described the screeching and howling (amant miserè = ‘they love dolefully’) of the cat in the act of mating.

  186 Without which … [Shelley’s note]: The self-appointed Society for the Suppression of Vice, formed in 1802, campaigned against (among other things) prostitution, gambling and public drunkenness. ‘Women of the Town’ are prostitutes.

  187 hobnobbers: Drinking companions, familiar friends.

  190 stock jobbers: Members of the Stock Exchange who deal in stocks on their own account (OED); speculators.

  197 moiling: Drudging at menial or dirty tasks.

  202 levees: Receptions held by persons of eminence for men only.

  207 aldermanic: Dinners given by aldermen, municipal officials, were traditionally sumptuous.

  209 Cretan-tongued: St Paul (Titus 1:12) reports that ‘Cretians [sic] are always liars’.

  210 Alemannic: German.

  212 conversazioni: Small assemblies for cultivated discussion of the arts and sciences.

  213 Conventicles: Originally a meeting or place of meeting for illegal religious worship; more generally, a clandestine gathering.

  222–3 ‘God damns!’ … [Shelley’s note]: One of the central themes of the poem, that it is not God who damns men but men who damn themselves, is illustrated in the stanzas that follow. ‘Heaven’s Attorney General’ is the Devil: see the extract from ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ (p. 630).

  224 flams: Falsehoods.

  239 Cobbett’s snuff, revenge: See note to ll. 152–6 above.

  242 some few: PBS himself and other reform-minded individuals, such as Leigh Hunt, who strive for justice.

  273–332 The strengths and limitations attributed to Peter in this passage are those that PBS, together with Leigh Hunt and the liberal critic, journalist and essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830), considered characteristic of Wordsworth: great poetic power; an egotism, or intense sense of self, that coloured all he wrote, and a restricted capacity for dealing with physical pleasure and erotic experience.

  285 trim: Type.

  287 play: Gambling.


  320 Diogenes: Diogenes of Sinope (c.400–325 BC), Greek Cynic philosopher, taught that a radically simple life with the minimum of attachments was the condition of happiness.

  328–9 ‘A kissed mouth loses nothing but renews itself like the moon.’ PBS writes in a letter of 27 September 1819 that this maxim from Boccaccio’s Decameron (end of the seventh tale of the second day) might stand against ‘the common narrow-minded conception of love’ (Letters II, p. 122).

  341 toadlike: Alluding to Milton, Paradise Lost IV.799–809, in which Satan, ‘Squat like a toad’, tempts Eve.

  346 limes his lazy wing: Becomes ensnared by the sticky substance birdlime.

  348 wight: Individual.

  349 fixed aera: Appointed time.

  350 turtle: Turtle soup.

  352 East Indian Madeira: Madeira wine that had improved in cask on the voyage to and from India.

  373–97 PBS credits the guest who fascinates Peter with the exceptional mental and imaginative powers that he admired in S. T. Coleridge’s poetry and criticism, but also with the tendency to obscurity in Coleridge’s writings on philosophy and religion, which T. L. Peacock had burlesqued in the character of Moley Mystic in chapter 31 of the novel Melincourt (1817).

  374 petit soupers: Late-evening private suppers for invited guests.

  390–91 Alluding to John 3:8: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’

  407 heart of man: A Wordsworthian phrase, e.g. in the poem ‘Michael’ (1800), l. 33.

  425 quickset fence: A hedge, e.g. of hawthorn.

  428–32 The Wanderer, a leading character in Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), had previously been a pedlar. Books V–VIII of the poem are set in a churchyard where the character of the Pastor is one of the principal speakers. Most of Wordsworth’s ‘The Brothers’ (1800) is narrated by the local priest in a churchyard.

  447 pipkins: Small earthenware pots or pans.

  448–9 Wordsworth and Coleridge were paid 30 guineas for Lyrical Ballads (1798) by the Bristol bookseller Joseph Cottle.

  452 warning: Notice that he was leaving his position.

  458–9 ‘O, that … book’: Cp. Job 31:35: ‘Oh … that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book’ – the words of Job wishing his suffering to be accounted for.

  463 next new book: Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone had all attracted adverse criticism.

  468 seriatim: One after another.

  470–72 Betty Foy is the mother of the title-character, Johnny, in ‘The Idiot Boy’ in Lyrical Ballads (1798). She has no daughter. PBS himself had been censured for abandoning his first wife, Harriet, who drowned herself in London in 1816. Ullswater is a large lake in the north-eastern part of the Lake District. In the copy of the poem sent to London for publication in November 1819, a stanza is cancelled at this point:

  Another—‘Impious Libertine!

  That commits i——t with his sister

  In ruined Abbies—mighty fine

  To write odes on it!’—I opine

  Peter had never even kissed her.

  473–4 Shaving the head was jokingly said to relieve manic excitement and was a preliminary to blistering the scalp as a treatment for mental disorder. Dr Francis Willis (1718–1807) and his sons, John (1751–1835) and Robert Darling Willis (1760–1821), treated George III’s mental illness.

  478–9 Accusations of adultery and incest had been made against both PBS and Leigh Hunt in reviews of their poetry. See note to ll. 470–72.

  483 WE: Reviews in contemporary periodicals were written anonymously.

  500 Betty: PBS’s draft and fair-copy MS and 1840 all read ‘Emma’. PBS asked Charles Ollier to alter the name to ‘Betty’, if he published the poem, in order to avoid offence, as he apparently thought that Wordsworth had a sister Emma (Letters II, p. 196).

  514 sad stuff in prose: Wordsworth defended his verse from critical disapproval in the Preface and ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ of Poems (1815).

  518–19 The Devil sends to the annual book fair at Leipzig for the four volumes of F. G. Born’s translation into Latin (1796–8) of the works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

  524 psychologics: Science of the mind, psychology.

  525 furor verborum: Rage for words.

  532 Sir William Drummond (?1770–1828): The author of Academical Questions (1805), which is severely critical of Kant’s philosophy.

  534 ‘P. Verbovale Esquire’ … [Shelley’s note]: Verbovale, as the mock-learned Latin of PBS’s note indicates, approximates an early pen name adopted by Wordsworth, ‘Axiologus’ – a compound from the Greek, signifying ‘Worthword’ or ‘Wordworth’. The phrase ‘a pure anticipated cognition’ was used by Sir William Drummond (see previous note) to criticize the Kantian notion of a kind of knowledge arrived at by pure reason, as opposed to knowledge deriving from sense experience. The phrase became a joke in the Shelley circle: see, for example, Letters II, p. 438.

  536 Carlisle mail: The coach carrying mail from London to Carlisle and the surrounding region.

  538 ex luce praebens fumum: ‘From light producing smoke’, reversing the terms of Horace’s praise of Homer’s practice in Ars Poetica 143–4.

  541 subter humum: ‘Under ground’.

  549 hobby: Both a smallish horse or pony and an obsession.

  552 White Obi: See notes to the Dedication above.

  555 Flibbertigibbet: The ‘foul fiend’ of King Lear III.iv.104.

  566 Deist: A subscriber to ‘natural’ religion who accepts on rational grounds the existence of a supreme being, creator of the universe, but rejects such supernatural elements as miracles, revelation and the divinity of Christ.

  574 Calvin and Dominic: Jean Calvin (1509–64), French theologian and religious reformer, and Dominic de Guzmán (c.1170–1221), founder of the Dominican Order, both notorious for zealous severity in suppressing heresy. See ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 25–6.

  583 Otter … [Shelley’s note]: Coleridge lived as a child in Devonshire near the river which he celebrates in the sonnet ‘To the River Otter’ (1796). The pompous phrase ‘Dynastophilic Pantisocratists’ mocks the support for hereditary European monarchies of Coleridge and Southey, who in their youth planned to establish in Pennsylvania a democratic agricultural community holding land in common ownership, a scheme known as Pantisocracy. The ‘new Atlantis’ refers to a utopian fiction by Francis Bacon published posthumously in 1627.

  584–8 In the death hues … [Shelley’s note]: PBS recalls ll. 556–71 of Wordsworth’s The Excursion on the beauty of some trout that have been caught and are lying dead. He opposes to it ll. 568–71 of Wordsworth’s ‘Hart-leap Well’ (1800).

  602 Sherry: The familiar name of the dramatist and Whig MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), who had been a friend and adviser to the Prince of Wales. When the latter became Prince Regent, he disappointed the expectations of Sheridan (and of liberals generally) and was accused of deserting his friend in his final years when ill and impoverished.

  603 The line is the reply of Peter’s soul.

  615 The line alludes chiefly to The Excursion V–VIII.

  616 George Colman the Younger (1762–1836) was a comic dramatist and wit noted for his affable disposition.

  617 male Molly: The word ‘Molly’ ranged in meaning from a lower-class girl or woman to a prostitute; a ‘male Molly’ would appear to mean an effeminate or homosexual man.

  618 staves: Stanzas.

  636–52 The ‘ode’ parodies the address to ‘Almighty God’ in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’ (1816), a hymn of gratitude for the victory at Waterloo. Lines 279–82 provoked widespread consternation: ‘But thy most dreaded instrument, / In working out a pure intent, / Is Man – arrayed for mutual sl
aughter,— / Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!’ Wordsworth altered the final couplet in subsequent editions of his poetry.

  644–5 Alluding to the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819, for which see the headnote to The Mask of Anarchy, as well as to recent demonstrations for reform in other manufacturing towns.

  650 Moloch: A deity of the Ammonites to whom children were sacrificed. See 2 Kings 23:10 and Leviticus 18:21.

  652 It was thou … [Shelley’s note]: See note to ll. 152–6 above.

  655 Lord McMurderchouse: ‘Chouse’ can mean both cheat (as here) and dupe.

  656 interest in both houses: Influence in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

  658 cure or sinecure: In 1813 Wordsworth had accepted the salaried post of Distributor of Stamps (in effect a collector of revenue) for Westmorland and part of Cumberland through the patronage of William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, whose political interests he served following the appointment.

  664 boroughs: Lord McMurderchouse controls several of these districts and so the member or members of Parliament that represent them.

  665 front: Forehead.

  671 Oliver: William Oliver was the pseudonym of a notorious government spy and agent provocateur. See An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte.

  679 pelf: Money and property.

  687 An additional stanza occurs at this point in PBS’s draft:

  So in the luxury & the pride

  Which Tyrants wring from the oppressed;

  Peter’s thought even now espied—

  A thought of pleasure & of pride

  Wherewith to ‘feather his own nest’.

  688 a house: Soon after his appointment as Distributor of Stamps (see note to l. 658 above), Wordsworth moved his family to a larger and more comfortable house, Rydal Mount, where he remained until his death in 1850.

  705 rehearsed: Recited aloud.

  711–12 In Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, chapter 10) the Struldbruggs, a race of beings that never die, increase in infirmities and follies as they age, becoming intolerable to others.