Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Dating from the late seventeenth century, ‘God Save the King’ acquired something like its modern form in response to the Jacobite rising of 1745. Through the eighteenth century new stanzas were added in reference to royal events, and parodies of varying political colours were written, some sharply satirical. PBS’s version avoids specific satire in favour of a generalized hymn of praise to Liberty expressed in a religious idiom adopted from biblical tradition.

  3  murdered Queen: PBS introduces the figure of Liberty as murdered queen in An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte. See also ‘England in 1819’.

  36 The line alludes to the conferring of prophetic power in Isaiah 6:6–7: ‘Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand … And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.’

  40 The missing word, cancelled in the MS, is difficult to read: ‘triumphal’ and ‘trumpet’s’ have been suggested.

  Translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII, lines 1–51

  PBS drafted this translation from the Purgatorio, the second canticle of Dante’s Divina Commedia, in late spring or summer 1820 in a notebook which is now Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 6 (see BSM V). Lines 1–9 and 22–51 were first published in Thomas Medwin, The Angler in Wales (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), the complete text in Relics of Shelley, ed. Richard Garnett (London: Edward Moxon, 1862). PBS’s draft is incomplete and not always perfectly legible, so that the text offered below is necessarily conjectural in places. Some additional punctuation has been supplied.

  Dante imagines Purgatory as a steep mountain which sinners must ascend in the afterlife in order gradually to purge their sins; the present passage is set in the earthly paradise at its summit. The woman that the pilgrim Dante encounters will later be named ‘Matilda’; she, together with Beatrice, becomes his guide in the final six cantos of the Purgatorio. By mid 1820, PBS had come to hold Dante in the highest regard. The previous summer he had written that ‘Matilda Gathering Flowers’ was a representative specimen of ‘all the exquisite tenderness & sensibility & ideal beauty, in which Dante excelled all poets except Shakespeare’ (Letters II, p. 112). He felt both that no ‘adequate translation’ of the Divina Commedia existed (Medwin 1913, p. 244) and that Dante was ‘the most untranslatable of all poets’ (Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. E. J. Lovell, Jnr (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 160). In A Defence of Poetry, PBS defines the pivotal position he assigned to Dante in the development of European literature; while in The Triumph of Life he creates a Dantean visionary poem in the terza rima of the Divina Commedia – three-line stanzas rhyming aba bcb cdc, and so on – notoriously difficult to manage in English, which offers fewer possibilities for rhyme than Italian.

  2  woof: The greenery of the wood is, as it were, woven closely together like fabric.

  12 That sacred hill: The mountain of Purgatory.

  15 blithe quest: Cheerful singing; ‘quest’ is a term for the baying of hounds in a hunt.

  18 roundelay: A brief song with a ‘burthen’ (refrain).

  20 Chiassi: Modern Classe on the Adriatic coast south of Ravenna.

  21 Aeolus was the ancient god of the winds who released or restrained them. Sirocco is a hot wind from the south-east.

  34–5 Dante’s lines read, literally translated: ‘I stopped with my feet and with my eyes passed across the streamlet, to gaze.’

  42 besprent: Sprinkled, strewn.

  48–51 In Classical myth, Proserpine, while gathering flowers, was taken away by Pluto to the underworld to rule there with him; distraught, her mother Ceres wandered over the entire world searching for her.

  Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa

  Our text is based on PBS’s unfinished and untitled draft in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 9, pp. 346–8 (see BSM XIV). Probably composed in summer 1820, possibly before the Shelleys left Pisa for Livorno on 15 June. In 1824, where the lines were first published, MWS supplied the title and the date, 1821. There is little in the draft to suggest a specific location, although as Poems III, p. 421, observes, the windswept ‘Town’ described in ll. 10–12 would be apt for early nineteenth-century Pisa, where the population had been in decline for some time. The Ponte a Mare was the westernmost of the three bridges that then crossed the Arno at Pisa. The brief shift to the past tense in l. 14 would seem to be an inadvertence.

  13–16 See note to ll. 63–4 of ‘To Jane—The Recollection’ and cp. ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 76–9.

  15–16 Cp. Wordsworth, ‘Elegaic Stanzas’ (first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)), ll. 7–8: ‘thy Image still was there; / It trembled, but it never pass’d away.’

  17–18 PBS cancelled ‘Indies’ and left l. 17 unfinished, but the sense is clear: you could go to the ends of the earth and return to find the city reflected in the river as always.

  20 cinereous: Ashen, ash-coloured.

  Ode to Liberty

  PBS’s draft is in the Bodleian Library (BSM V), as is a partial Italian translation by him of stanzas 1–13 and 19 (BSM III). A transcript of ll. 1–21 by MWS of a now-lost intermediate fair copy also survives, in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (see MYR (Shelley) V). PBS sent a copy of the poem, which was probably composed between early May and 12 July 1820 (see Letters II, pp. 213–14), to T. L. Peacock in London on the latter date with instructions to publish it with Prometheus Unbound. It appeared as the final poem in 1820, which supplies our copy-text.

  ‘Ode to Liberty’ (the ‘Ode’) is a free imitation of the odes of the ancient Greek poet Pindar (c.522–c.443 BC) in honour of the victors in athletic contests. In this case, the victory celebrated – or anticipated – is that of liberty over political oppression. The primary occasion of the poem was the military uprising in Spain in early 1820, which prompted King Ferdinand VII to grant a return to the broad reforms provided for in the liberal constitution of 1812, and which PBS saw as part of the growing advance of liberty across mainland Europe. The ‘Ode’ surveys the history of liberty from its origins in Classical Greece until the early nineteenth century, finishing with a glance at some national struggles for freedom and independence in contemporary Europe. In this respect, then, it retraces in concentrated poetic form the political history that PBS had charted in A Philosophical View of Reform and also anticipates the progress of artistic creation that he imagines in A Defence of Poetry. As well as its debts to Classical sources, the ‘Ode’ had notable modern precedents in, for example, James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–6), Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1757), William Collins’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1746) and Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’ (1798).

  On publication, the ‘Ode’ was attacked by the conservative reviews for its explicitly anti-religious and anti-monarchical stance. Interesting commentary is given in Chernaik, pp. 97–108, and William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 151–8.

  Epigraph From Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), stanza 98, ll. 1–2. The stanza concludes Byron’s own review of the history of political liberty.

  1–2 PBS here compares Liberty to an electrical charge, which Spain now sends forth for a second time, the previous occasion having been the Spanish resistance to French occupation in 1807–8. Cp. PBS’s Preface to Prometheus Unbound: ‘The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored’ (here).

  6  plumes: Plumage, feathers. Images of the soul taking flight through poetry are common in Classical and Renaissance literature. In PBS’s translation of Plato’s Ion (1821) the souls of poets are ‘arrayed in the plumes of rapid imagination’ (Ingpen and Peck, VII, p. 238).

  8  a young eagle: Webb 1995 identifies an allusion to Pindar’s Nemean Odes III.80–82, in which the poet compares his art to an eagle swooping o
n its prey.

  11–15 The ‘whirlwind’ and the ‘voice out of the deep’ recall traditional figures for divine communication and inspiration: e.g. Job 38:1, Acts 9:4 and Revelation 1:10–12, 16:17. Cp. The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 1–3. The ship is a conventional figure for the poetic imagination, e.g. Dante, Purgatorio I.1–3.

  11 rapt it: Carried it away; enraptured the poet’s ‘soul’ (l. 5).

  16 The words of the ‘voice’ of l. 15 are ‘recorded’ from here until l. 270.

  18 daedal: Intricate, or cunningly made – after Daedalus, the master-craftsman (and father of Icarus) in Greek mythology. Cp. ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 86 and note to ll. 84–95).

  19 the world: i.e. the ‘universe’ (l. 21).

  23 thou: Liberty.

  28 their violated nurse: The earth.

  41 The sister-pest: Institutional religion; ‘pest’ = ‘plague’, ‘pestilence’.

  42 pinions: Wings.

  43 Anarchs: Tyrants who promote misrule; cp. ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’, l. 152 (p. 157), and The Triumph of Life, l. 237.

  45 astonished: Stunned, bewildered.

  46 nodding: The sense is elusive: perhaps the image is of promontories covered with trees ‘nodding’ in the wind.

  47 dividuous: The sense is not immediately clear. OED defines the word as ‘divisible, characterized by division’; so PBS may have intended ‘(a large number of) individual waves’. Webb 1995 suggests ‘which break up’.

  48–9 Perhaps referring to arguments made by, for example, the German classicist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), on the climate and landscape of Greece and the flourishing of Classical Greek culture.

  51 unapprehensive: Deficient in understanding.

  53 savage: Uncultivated.

  58 Parian stone: Fine white marble from the island of Paros, prized by ancient Greek sculptors.

  73 mock: Imitate.

  74 that hill: The Acropolis, the citadel on a rocky plateau dominating Athens which included the Parthenon and other magnificent temples built in the fifth century BC.

  75 PBS identifies Athens as both the historical birthplace of liberty and an emblem of what mankind might achieve in the future.

  76–9 Cp. ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’, ll. 13–16.

  92 Like a wolf-cub … [Shelley’s note]: A Maenad, in Greek myth, was a frenzied female follower of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy (cp. l. 171). Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, one of the daughters of Cadmus; in Euripides’ play The Bacchae, the Maenads were Semele’s sisters, the other daughters of Cadmus (hence ‘Cadmaean’). PBS here blends the figures of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, supposed to have been suckled by a she-wolf, with the report of a Maenad suckling a wolf-cub in The Bacchae. On Maenads, see also Prometheus Unbound II.iii.7–10, IV.473–5.

  93 thy dearest: Athens.

  94 Elysian: From Elysium, the paradise of Greek and Roman myth.

  95 terrible: Awe-inspiring.

  98 Marcus Furius Camillus (c.446–365 BC) was a Roman statesman and military commander, sometimes known as the second founder of Rome after he returned from exile to defend the city from a besieging army of Gauls in 386 BC; PBS described Camillus as ‘that most perfect & virtuous of men’ (Letters II, p. 86). Marcus Atilius Regulus (consul 267 and 256 BC) led the Roman invasion of Africa during the First Punic War and was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians. Tradition had it that, sent to Rome to sue for peace, he instead advised the Romans to continue fighting, and then honourably returned to Carthage knowing he would be executed.

  99 thy robe … whiteness: The Vestal Virgins, priestesses of the cult of Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth, were charged with keeping alight a perpetual flame which guaranteed the safety of Rome.

  100–105 PBS associates the Capitoline Hill in Rome with the founding of the Republic, and the Palatine Hill (l. 103) with the Empire.

  104 Ionian: Here probably signifying the Greek, and specifically Athenian, attachment to political liberty celebrated in stanzas V and VI.

  106 Traditionally wild and rugged, Hyrcania was a region south of the Caspian (Hyrcanian) Sea, in modern-day Iran and Turkmenistan.

  111 Naiad: In Greek myth, Naiads were female spirits associated with particular rivers, lakes, or fountains.

  115 Scald … Druid: Skalds were the court poets of Scandinavia and Iceland during the Viking era; Druids were priests in Celtic Britain, Ireland and France.

  116 shattered: Some editors have emended to ‘scattered’, but ‘shattered’ could also mean ‘dispersed’ (OED).

  119 The Galilean serpent: Christianity (as opposed to Jesus, whose teachings, PBS believed, had been perverted by the institutional Church).

  123 Alfred’s olive-cinctured brow: Alfred the Great (848–99), King of Wessex, repelled a Danish invasion and introduced legal and political reforms. In ancient Greece, an olive wreath was awarded to the victor in the Olympic Games and is a traditional symbol of peace (‘cinctured’ = ‘encircled’).

  124–35 PBS compares the rise of the Italian city states in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which maintained liberty in opposition to religious-political tyranny and created conditions which allowed the arts to flourish, to the rise of volcanic islands from the sea.

  136 huntress … Moon: In Greek myth, Artemis was goddess of the hunt and of the moon.

  141 In PBS’s view, Martin Luther (1483–1546) inspired a religious awakening but did not go far enough in challenging ecclesiastical authority. See A Defence of Poetry: ‘Dante was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation’ (here).

  145 England’s prophets: The writers and thinkers of the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Cp. ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 31–2, and A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘Shakespeare and Lord Bacon and the great writers of the age of Elizabeth and James the 1st were at once the effects of the new spirit in men’s minds and the causes of its more complete development’ (Prose, p. 231).

  147–50 The restoration of the Stuart monarchy, a political calamity for the republican Milton, was a sombre circumstance beyond which his vision allowed him to see.

  148–9 Contrasting Milton’s prophetic powers with his physical blindness.

  151–65 The stanza is a symbolic celebration of the progress of enlightened thought in Europe from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, the period that included the American Revolution.

  158 the destroyer: Death.

  166–73 Centuries of oppression issued in the bloodshed that marred the French Revolution, the supporters of monarchy and the Church behaving like drunken revellers. For ‘Bacchanals’, see note to ‘To —–’ (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’), l. 19.

  174 one: Napoleon Bonaparte; for PBS’s attitude to Napoleon, cp. ‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’, ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’ and The Triumph of Life, ll. 215–31.

  181–7 As Geoffrey Matthews was the first to point out (‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, ELH 24 (1957), pp. 191–228), PBS deploys contemporary scientific investigations into the subterranean connections between volcanoes to symbolize the inevitable spread of revolution across Europe.

  185–6 The Aeolian (or Lipari) Islands are a volcanic archipelago located off the north coast of Sicily. Pithecusa (Ischia) is south-west of Naples and Pelorus (Punta del Faro) lies at the north-eastern tip of Sicily.

  188 The brilliant light diffused by the volcanic eruptions of Liberty obscures the heavenly bodies.

  189–90 The interests of the wealthy, which England could easily shake off if it wished, contrast with the long traditions of absolutism in Spain which require a resolute struggle.

  194 West: Referring to democratic developments in America, probably both North and South.

  196 Arminius (c.18 BC–AD 21): A Germani
c tribal chieftain who inflicted a defeat on the Romans in AD 9, effectively halting further Roman expansion into Germania.

  201 While he was composing ‘Ode to Liberty’ PBS felt that a revolution in Germany was imminent. Cp. A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘everything … wears in Germany the aspect of rapidly maturing revolution’ (Prose, p. 237).

  204 lost Paradise: In Julian and Maddalo, l. 57, Italy is described as ‘Paradise of exiles’.

  212 KING: Replaced by four asterisks in 1820; PBS authorized the substitution when he sent the poem to London in July 1820 (Letters II, pp. 213–14), because ‘imagining or compassing the king’s death’ constituted high treason.

  216 Ye: ‘the free’ (l. 211).

  217–18 According to legend, Gordius, King of Phrygia, bound his chariot in a temple with a highly complicated knot; an oracle foretold that whoever untied the knot would become king of all Asia. Alexander the Great, having failed to undo it, simply sliced through it with his sword. Hence, ‘gordian’ = ‘intricate’, ‘hard to solve’.

  220 irrefragably: Obstinately, intractably.

  221 The axes and the rods: The fasces, an axe tied in a bundle of rods, which was a symbol of public authority in ancient Rome, and became so again in fascist Italy.

  224 thou: Liberty.

  225 reluctant: ‘Struggling, writhing’ (OED).

  231–3 Cp. PBS’s characterization of those open to imaginative power in A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘they are … compelled to serve, that which is seated on the throne of their own soul. And whatever systems