Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  435 solid vapours hoar: Possibly glaciers, as Poems III suggests, or icebergs.

  447–8 The haven reflects Heaven as if it were a jewel engraved with an image of it.

  451 Hydaspes: The modern river Jhelum in north-eastern Pakistan, where Alexander the Great won an important victory before returning westward.

  453 quips and cranks: Antics and pranks; the phrase occurs in Milton, L’Allegro, l. 27, where it signifies witty remarks and verbal play.

  462 meteor flags: A recollection of Satan’s ensign which ‘Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind’ in Paradise Lost I.537.

  464 mere: Lake.

  465–72 The lines recall the building of Pandemonium by the devils in Paradise Lost I.710–30.

  466 exhalations: Mists.

  467 lambent: Softly and mildly glowing.

  469 cressets: Vessels containing fuel, such as oil, and mounted for illumination.

  serene: The clear sky.

  473 throne: The Witch’s throne is to be compared with Satan’s in Paradise Lost II.1 ff.

  482 crudded rack: A mass of high cloud appearing as if curdled.

  484 Arion: Herodotus, Histories I.23–4, recounts the legend of this supremely skilled musician who was travelling to Corinth in a ship when the crew attempted to rob and murder him. Having received their permission to play and sing one last time, Arion leapt into the sea, but one of the dolphins that had been charmed by his sweet music carried him safely to shore.

  488 fire-balls: ‘Certain large luminous meteors’ or ‘lightning in a globular form’ (OED 1a).

  498 Nilus: The Nile.

  500 Axumè: Or Aksum, a city in the mountains of northern Ethiopia, once an important trading hub.

  505 Moeris … Mareotid lakes: Lake Moeris lies some fifty miles south-west of Cairo, Lake Mareotis south and west of the city of Alexandria.

  511 the great Labyrinth: An elaborate funerary and commemorative temple near Lake Moeris described in Herodotus, Histories II.148, and in Diodorus Siculus, Library of History I.lxvi.3–6.

  512 pomp: Ceremonial display.

  Osirian: Osiris was one of the principal Egyptian deities, brother and husband of Isis; patrons of male and female fertility and parents of the child-god Horus, they were imagined as ruling the underworld together. In religious myth, Osiris had been killed and cut to pieces by his brother Set but revived by Isis. As a god of regeneration and rebirth, Osiris was the object of a widespread cult which practised orgiastic rituals – as Poems III points out, citing Herodotus, Histories II.42, 144, and Diodorus Siculus, Library of History I.xi.3, xxii.6.

  feast: Commemorative celebration of an event or personage of religious significance.

  513–16 Cp. ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’, ll. 13–16.

  519 fanes: Temples.

  552 weltering: Tossing, tumbling.

  577–84 Aurora, goddess of the dawn, counted the mortal Tithonus among her many lovers. She persuaded Jupiter to grant him immortality but neglected to ask also for perpetual youth; when Tithonus grew old and shrivelled, she shut him away. In some accounts he turns into a cicada. The myth of Adonis exists in various versions in which Proserpina detains the beautiful child or youth in Hades despite the pleas of Venus that he should be returned to her – until Jupiter decides that he should live part of the year with each of them. The Heliades were daughters of the Sun (Helios). The reference here (‘The Heliad’) appears to be to the Witch herself, who is also a daughter of the Sun (ll. 57–88). For further detail, see Poems III.

  587–8 Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon, fell in love with the beautiful shepherd Endymion, whom she visited nightly, he having been granted the gift of eternal sleep and eternal youth by Jupiter.

  589 sexless: Not restricted to a single sex, able to enjoy both sexes, as the next line makes clear. Hermaphroditus is described as ‘sexless’ in l. 329.

  594 panacea: A medicine that heals all illness.

  595 wave: The fluid medicine of the previous line.

  623 scribe: The word can designate a public official generally but here retains something of the sense attached to it in the New Testament – of a severe and hypocritical interpreter of the law, as in Matthew 23.

  626 The Rosetta Stone, with its texts of an official proclamation in three languages – hieroglyphics, demotic Egyptian and Greek – had been on display in the British Museum since 1802. For Shelley, Greek was the language par excellence of civilization and the arts, and ‘in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness excels every other language of the western world’ (Prose, p. 217).

  627–32 The pantheon of ancient Egyptian animal deities included Apis, the divine bull kept at Memphis. Hawks were sacred to Horus and cats to the goddess Bast; ‘geese’ (probably appropriating the sense of goose as ‘a foolish person’, as Norton 2002 suggests) appears intended to ridicule the practice of animal worship.

  641–4 The Cyclopes served as blacksmiths in the underground forge of Vulcan, god of fire (Aeneid VIII.416–53), where they helped fashion weapons for gods and heroic warriors.

  645 Quoting Isaiah 2:4: ‘they shall beat their swords into plowshares … nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’

  647–8 Amasis was a tyrannical king against whom the people revolted in Memphis, capital of ancient Egypt.

  647 I wis: ‘Iwis’, i.e. certainly, truly. By the separation into ‘I wis’, the word came to mean ‘I know’.

  668 slights: i.e. ‘sleights’, cunning tricks, artifices, wiles.

  670 weird: Strange, mysterious, fantastic.

  671 garish: Extremely bright, glaring.

  Sonnet: Political Greatness

  First published in 1824. Our copy-text is PBS’s fair copy in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. c. 5: see BSM XXII). In 1839 MWS dates the poem to 1821, and it is probably the sonnet sent to Charles Ollier for publication in February 1821 (Letters II, pp. 262, 269). However, another fair copy in PBS’s hand (MYR (Shelley) V), entitled ‘To the Republic of Benevento’, suggests a likelier date of composition: late summer 1820, shortly after the declaration of independence from the Neapolitan monarchy by the small papal state of Benevento, near Naples. Michael Rossington, ‘Shelley’s Neapolitan-Tuscan Poetics: “Sonnet: Political Greatness” and the “Republic” of Benevento’, provides a searching consideration of the sonnet’s political contexts (The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 137–56).

  Title On the Bodleian fair copy PBS first wrote then cancelled ‘Sonnet to Naples’. In his draft he had experimented with the titles ‘The Republican’, ‘The True Republican’ and ‘Rex Sui’ (‘King of Himself’).

  1  Nor … nor: Neither … nor.

  6  glass: Mirror (as PBS had first written in his draft).

  7  fleet: Rush.

  9  numbers: Verse.

  10–14 The relation between civic and personal virtue asserted here is one of the central convictions of PBS’s political writing; see e.g. Prometheus Unbound I.492 and III.iv.196–7; ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 241–5; and The Triumph of Life, ll. 209–15.

  Sonnet (‘Ye hasten to the grave’)

  First published in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Pocket-Book (see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’) for 1823. Two versions of the poem in PBS’s hand are extant, a fair copy in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (see MYR (Shelley) V) and a neat press copy in the Morgan Library and Museum (see MYR (Shelley) VIII), which supplies our copy-text. MWS published the poem in 1824, and in 1839 grouped it with ‘Poems written in 1820’. The exact date of composition is uncertain, but the melancholy tone suggests that it might have formed part of the collection of PBS’s ‘saddest verses’ which he gathered together in November 1820 and hoped to publish with Julian and Maddalo (p. 163) (Letters II, p. 246). A bitterly ironic challenge to the traditional carpe diem theme and an anticipation in brief of The Triumph of Life (p. 570), the sonnet varies the rhyme scheme but
retains the final couplet characteristic of the English or Shakespearean form of the sonnet.

  1  grave: PBS first wrote and cancelled ‘dead’, then substituted ‘grave’, which he also cancelled; his final choice is not clear. The Harvard MS and MWS’s editions read ‘dead’.

  3  livery: Uniform, typically worn by a servant.

  6–7 Cp. The Triumph of Life, l. 398: ‘Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why’. Poems III cites John 8:14: ‘Jesus answered and said unto them, Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true: for I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go.’

  The Fugitives

  Written between late 1820 and early 1821 and published in 1824 with the present title; in 1839 the poem is grouped by MWS with those written in 1821. An untitled draft survives in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 8 (BSM VI). A fair copy in PBS’s hand, also untitled, on which our text is based, is in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia (MYR (Shelley) VIII). PBS’s draft continues for a further thirty-four lines beyond the end of the text given below; he did not transcribe these lines into the fair copy.

  The poem’s debts to the Gothic tradition (the ‘mad weather’, l. 54; the ‘tyrant Father’, l. 53; the rescued bride) recall some of PBS’s earliest poetry, including ‘Song’ (‘Fierce roars the midnight storm’) and ‘Fragment, or The Triumph of Conscience’ in the present selection (pp. 5, 7). There are similarities to the narrative of escape in Epipsychidion, ll. 383 ff., which PBS drafted in the same notebook, as well as to poems by Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore, for which see Poems IV. Elements of ‘The Fugitives’ resonate with PBS and MWS’s elopement in July 1814 and may also have been prompted by the situation of Teresa (‘Emilia’) Viviani, for whom PBS had developed an erotic and sentimental attachment at the time the poem was composed (see headnote to Epipsychidion).

  18–19 It would be a brave pilot who would follow us in these conditions.

  18 I trow: I believe.

  27 beacon-cloud: Poems IV gives the sense as ‘signal-smoke’.

  28 In the gales of the storm the sound of the cannon cannot be heard.

  30 From the direction opposite the one from which the wind is blowing.

  36 boat-cloak: ‘A large cloak worn at sea’ (OED).

  47 portress: Gate-keeper; the feminine form preserves the rhyme. Cp. ‘the portress of hell gate’ in Milton, Paradise Lost II.746.

  54 To his: Compared to his.

  56–60 Recalling the old king’s cursing of his youngest child, Cordelia, in Shakespeare, King Lear I.i.108–19, and Count Cenci’s curse on his daughter Beatrice in The Cenci IV.i.114–36, 141–57.

  58 devotes: Gives over to; cp. the sense of ‘devote’ as ‘to invoke or pronounce a curse upon’ (OED 3).

  Memory (‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’)

  Our text of this lyric is based on PBS’s untitled draft in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian MS Shelley adds e. 8: see BSM VI), which probably dates from very late 1820 or very early 1821. Below the two stanzas given here is the opening line of what appears to be an abandoned third stanza: ‘As desire when hope is cold’. MWS transcribed the draft, supplying the title ‘Memory’, but published it as ‘To —–’ in 1824, where the order of the stanzas is reversed. Commentators have taken the latter title as an indication that the poem was addressed to Emilia Viviani (see note to l. 3 below and headnote to Epipsychidion: p. 808). There has been considerable debate on how to construct an accurate text from PBS’s draft, for which see BSM VI and Chernaik, pp. 281–4.

  3  thy thoughts: Perhaps the writings on love by Emilia Viviani (see headnote to Epipsychidion, below) are intended.

  Dirge for the Year

  Our text is based on PBS’s unfinished and untitled draft in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 9, pp. 176, 178–9, 201 (see BSM XIV), which he dated ‘Jan 1. 1821’. MWS supplied the title and completed the fourth stanza in 1824 (see note to l. 23), where the poem was first published. The attempt to position the harshness of winter within a cycle of seasonal regeneration recalls the final lines of ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’). Commentators have related this attempt both to PBS’s own unhappiness and ill-health during the winter of 1820–21 and to his aspirations for political change.

  1  hours: In Greek myth, the Hours (Horai) were three vegetation goddesses who ensured the growth of plants.

  7  corse: Corpse.

  14 tree-swung: Signifying both ‘suspended from a tree’ and ‘swung by the motion of the tree’.

  15 Cp. MWS’s journal entry for 31 December 1820: ‘it was a clear day with a bleak tramontano [wind]’ (MWS Journal I, p. 344).

  20 sexton: Employee of a parish church, responsible for bell-ringing, grave-digging and other tasks.

  23 In 1824, MWS completed this line and added another: ‘but, O, ye hours, / Follow with May’s fairest flowers.’

  EPIPSYCHIDION

  PBS sent Epipsychidion to his publisher, Charles Ollier, on 16 February 1821. It had probably been composed between that date and the beginning of the year, though drawing upon verse drafted some time earlier. PBS instructed Ollier to publish it anonymously and noted that ‘indeed, in a certain sense, it is a production of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisement [see below] is no fiction’ (Letters II, pp. 262–3). Our copy-text is the first edition of 1821, which Ollier published with the elaborate title that is given here.

  The poem is addressed to Teresa (whom the Shelleys called ‘Emilia’) Viviani, to whom they were introduced in late November 1820 while she was confined in the convent of St Anna at Pisa, awaiting her marriage (Teresa was the daughter of the Governor of Pisa, and such a prenuptial arrangement was not altogether uncommon in Italy at the time for women of her social standing). The title is a compound from the Greek, apparently PBS’s coinage, which combines three elements: epi (on, upon, above, concerning), psyche (soul) and a diminutive suffix. Deliberately enigmatic, it has been variously interpreted as meaning, for example, ‘On the Subject of the Soul’ (Norton 2002) and ‘A little soul song’ (Webb 1995). See l. 455 and Poems IV, pp. 125–6. The dozen occurrences of the word ‘soul’ in the poem repay close attention. In a letter to John Gisborne of 18 June 1822 – in which PBS generally distances himself from the poem – he describes it as ‘an idealized history of my life and feelings’ (Letters II, p. 434). In this respect, the important visionary encounter of ll. 72–266 might be compared with similar episodes in Alastor as well as to Rousseau’s encounter with the ‘shape all light’ in The Triumph of Life, ll. 352 ff. Despite its sentimental character (see, for example, note to ll. 267–383), however, Epipsychidion is also very much in the urbane, self-conscious and highly stylized tradition of writing about idealized love as transformative which was practised by Dante , to whose writings about his love for Beatrice in his Vita Nuova (1295) and Convivio (1304–7) PBS signals his debts in the ‘Advertisement’. Cp. also Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), from which Epipsychidion makes a number of structural and conceptual borrowings.

  PBS seems quite quickly to have distanced himself from the poem and asked Ollier to withdraw it from circulation except for that ‘class of readers’ (as he puts it in the ‘Advertisement’) who were able to appreciate its subtleties. PBS took this decision partly because, as he wrote to John Gisborne on 22 October 1821, the uninitiated were ‘inclined to approximate me to the circle of a servant girl & her sweetheart’, but presumably also because of the distress it must have caused to MWS (Letters II, p. 363). She for her part made no comment on Epipsychidion in any of her editions, dismissing PBS’s involvement with Viviani, in a letter to Maria Gisborne of 7 March 1822, as ‘Italian Platonics’ (MWS Letters I, p. 223).

  Epigraph ‘The loving soul soars out of creation, and creates for itself in the infinite a world all its own, very different from this dark and fearful abyss’, from Teresa Viviani’
s essay Il Vero Amore, which she allowed PBS to read.

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  p. 474 the Sporades: Islands in the Aegean Sea.

  the Vita Nuova of Dante: A sequence of sonnets (c.1292) with interlinked prose commentary, in which Dante explores his love for Beatrice. PBS read it to MWS on 31 January 1821.

  gran … intendimento: PBS adapts Dante, Vita Nuova XXV: ‘great embarrassment would come to one who, having written things in the dress of an image or rhetorical colouring, and then, having been asked, would not be able to strip his words of such dress in order to give them their true meaning’ (trans. Mark Musa, Dante’s Vita Nuova (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)).

  The stanza on the opposite page: PBS refers to the nine lines of verse following the Advertisement, the conclusion of the first canzone of Dante’s Il Convivio (The Banquet; 1304–7), a work inspired by Plato’s Symposium, on the subject of love. PBS translated the canzone, the first line of which, given here in Italian, has been rendered ‘Ye who by intellection the third heaven move’ (see Poems IV, p. 110). The injunction ‘tell them that they are dull’ is not in the original. Cp. ll. 116–19.

  p. 475 own (l. 9 of ‘The stanza’): Acknowledge.

  Epipsychidion

  1–2 Although the ‘orphan one’ has been understood as the spirit of either PBS himself or MWS, PBS’s Italian version of these lines includes the phrase ‘Il nome e la forma mia’ (my name and form), suggesting that it is his own ‘spirit’. See Poems IV, pp. 187–8.

  4  votive: Offered as a sign of devotion.

  21 Seraph: In the Christian tradition, a species of angel, associated with love.

  44 unvalued: Extremely valuable, i.e. priceless.

  45 Cp. Song of Solomon 8:1: ‘O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.’