Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  woman taken in adultery: In John 8:3–11, Jesus forgives an adulterous woman, confounding the scribes and Pharisees who wish to stone her, saying: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’

  spoken daggers, but used none: ‘I will speak daggers to her, but use none’ – Hamlet’s words as he prepares to confront his mother Gertrude (Hamlet III.ii.385).

  circumstances … Keats’s life: PBS learned on 16 June that Keats felt he had been ‘infamously treated’ by some towards whom he had behaved generously, that his temper had become ‘outrageously violent’ towards the end of his life and that he had been selflessly attended by his friend the painter Joseph Severn (1793–1879) (Letters II, pp. 299–300).

  p. 493 ‘such stuff … made of’: Quoting Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.i.156–8: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’

  Adonais

  1–2 A traditional opening and refrain of the Classical elegy, as in Moschus’ ‘Lament for Adonis’: ‘I weep for Adonis, cry, “Fair Adonis is dead.”’

  4–9 The hour of Adonais’ death is urged to impart its grief to all past and future hours, which had not been specially chosen to mourn him.

  5  compeers: Companions, equals.

  10–12 mighty Mother … Urania: This complex figure, who functions as principal mourner of Adonais (as does the goddess Venus for Adonis), has multiple associations. Urania is the name of the Muse of Astronomy, as well as of the ‘heavenly Muse’ invoked by Milton in Paradise Lost VII.1–39, and by Dante in Purgatorio XXIX.40–42 – hence she is ‘Most musical’ (ll. 28, 37). In Platonic tradition, Aphrodite Urania is the patroness of that love that rises above the merely physical to seek objects that are apprehended by the intellect, ultimately the good and the beautiful.

  11–12 the shaft which flies / In darkness: The anonymous review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review. Cp. Psalm 91:5–6: ‘Thou shalt not be afraid … for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.’

  14 Paradise: A park or garden; here a celestial retreat is probably intended.

  15–18 The echo (‘one’) revives the poems of Adonais/Keats (‘He’).

  17 corse: Corpse.

  18 bulk: ‘A body of great proportions’ (OED).

  29–36 He … sons of light: The post-Restoration political climate was dangerous for the republican John Milton (1608–74), who laments that he had then ‘fallen on evil days’ (Paradise Lost VII.25). PBS considered Milton ‘the third Epic Poet’, the voice of his age to succeeding ages, as Homer and Dante were of theirs (see A Defence of Poetry). ‘Hyperion’, Keats’s fragment of an epic poem in blank verse (see headnote), is decidedly Miltonic in subject and style.

  38–43 Contrasting lesser poets who lived long enough to achieve a modest reputation with those of greater talent who were cut off at the height of their powers.

  48 pale flower … sad maiden: Alluding to Keats’s poem Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil (1818), in which a young woman buries the head of her murdered lover in a pot of basil and waters it with her tears.

  51 extreme: Latest.

  52 blew: Flowered.

  55 that high Capital: Rome, the ‘Eternal City’.

  60 charnel: A mortuary chapel in which bones of the dead were piled.

  63 liquid: Clear, bright, pure.

  72 The reading in 1839, no doubt originating with PBS. In 1821 the line read: ‘Of mortal change, shall fill the grave which is her maw.’

  73 quick Dreams: The living poems of Adonais/Keats.

  94 anadem: A band for tying up the hair, a wreath or garland for the head.

  99 barbed fire: The dream is likened to Cupid, whose arrows excite love.

  100 Another Splendour: Another Dream; in Dante’s Paradiso ‘splendori’ are radiant spirits.

  107 clips: Embraces.

  121 hair unbound: Loosened hair was a traditional sign of mourning.

  123 aerial eyes that kindle day: The fading light of stars awakens daylight.

  127 Lost Echo: The nymph Echo, disdained by Narcissus, pined away until only a sound remained of her.

  140 Phoebus … Hyacinth: Apollo accidentally killed the beautiful youth Hyacinth, whom he loved.

  141 Narcissus: For rejecting the love of the nymph Echo (see note to l. 127) Narcissus incurred divine vengeance, which caused him to fall in love with his own reflection.

  142 they: The flowers into which both Hyacinth and Narcissus were metamorphosed.

  sere: Withered.

  144 ruth: Pity.

  145 Thy spirit’s sister: See penultimate paragraph of headnote.

  147 the eagle: According to legend, every ten years the eagle soared into the region of the sun, then plunged into the sea, from which it emerged with its youth renewed.

  151 Albion: England.

  Cain: For slaying his brother Abel, Cain was cursed by God to become a wanderer over the earth bearing a mark upon him lest he be killed (Genesis 4:8–15).

  159 brake: Thicket.

  160 brere: Briar.

  179 sightless: Invisible.

  191 childless Mother: Urania.

  198 ambrosial: ‘Belonging to heaven or paradise’ (OED 1b). Urania (‘Splendour’ – see note to l. 100) begins her journey from her ‘secret Paradise’.

  204 rapt: Carried away.

  212 Palms: Soles.

  217–21 Urania’s vitality causes Death to blush in shame and thereby momentarily restore signs of life to the pale corpse of Adonais.

  222 Alluding to Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ll. 311–15: ‘How changed thou art! How pallid, chill, and drear! / Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, / Those looks immortal, those complainings dear! / Oh, leave me not in this eternal woe, / For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.’

  234 As an inspiring Muse, Urania is implicated in the mortal world; as an immortal goddess, she cannot die.

  236–8 Urania asks why Adonais/Keats abandoned the safety of the beaten track and courageously wrote the original poetry that stirred the wrath of conservative criticism.

  238 unpastured: Unfed (and so hungry).

  240 mirrored shield: Perseus slew the Medusa with the help of a polished shield which enabled him to avoid looking directly at her deadly image. See headnote to ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery’ and A Defence of Poetry.

  scorn the spear: The implication is that Keats was too good-natured to retaliate upon his critic.

  242 crescent: Growing (like the moon).

  245 obscene: Apparently combining the sense ‘foul, loathsome’ with the obsolete meaning ‘ill-omened, inauspicious’ (OED).

  248 wings rain contagion: The raven was traditionally fabled to spread contagion from its wings.

  250 The Pythian of the age: Byron responded to the adverse notice of his collection Hours of Idleness (1807) in the Edinburgh Review with his satirical English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1808). He is here compared to Apollo, who slew with bow and arrows an enormous Python – hence his title of ‘the Pythian’ – then established athletic games in its honour.

  261 kindred lamps: The stars, to which the sun, itself a star, is ‘kindred’.

  264 Pilgrim of Eternity: Byron, who in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816), stanza 70, contrasts those who strive in the world with ‘wanderers o’er Eternity / Whose bark drives on and on, and anchored n’er shall be’.

  266 The first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) were phenomenally successful.

  268–70 The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852), in effect the national poet of Ireland (‘Ierne’), author of the very popular Irish Melodies (1808), many of which were set to music.

  271 one frail Form: PBS himself.

  276 Actaeon-like: In Greek myth, Actaeon the huntsman happened upon the virgin goddess Artemis as she was bathing; his punishment was to be turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own houn
ds.

  280 pardlike: Leopard-like; the god Bacchus was represented in a chariot drawn by leopards, as in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ll. 312–13: ‘Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy’.

  283 superincumbent: Overhanging or lying upon; here used figuratively: ‘weighty, oppressive’ (OED).

  289–95 The ‘frail Form’ (l. 271) and ‘pardlike Spirit’ (l. 280), a version of PBS himself, here appears as a follower of the god Bacchus carrying a spear, known as a thyrsus, wreathed with ivy and tipped with a ‘cypress cone’, associated respectively with poetry and mourning. Traditionally, poets were thought to create while in a frenzy of inspiration, like those who were possessed by Bacchus.

  297 herd-abandoned deer: The poet William Cowper (1731–1800) described himself in well-known lines as ‘a stricken deer that left the herd / Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt’ (The Task (1785), III.108–9).

  298 aloof: Apart.

  partial moan: Lament expressing sympathetic attachment.

  300 Who: PBS himself; see headnote.

  301 unknown land: The phrase may indicate both that PBS is writing in English of a death in Italy and that the language and ideas of the poem are alien to most people.

  305 ensanguined: Marked with blood.

  306 Cain’s or Christ’s: The ‘mark of Cain’ (see note to l. 151 above) was traditionally thought to be on his forehead. Christ’s brow was wounded by the crown of thorns (Matthew 27:29) placed upon it.

  307 softer voice: That of Leigh Hunt, who had encouraged Keats’s poetic ambitions and supported him in his illness. See headnote.

  319 nameless: Reviews in the Quarterly and in other contemporary periodicals were anonymous.

  325 thou: See Preface, ‘One of their associates’ and note.

  332 upon thy secret brow: In private.

  337 Echoing Satan’s riposte to the guardian angels who surprise him as he tries to insinuate vain thoughts into Eve’s ear in Paradise Lost IV.828–9: ‘Ye knew me once no mate / For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar!’

  338–40 Dust to the dust … Eternal: Adapting words from the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life’. The idea of an unquenchable spirit returning to the pure realm of its origin where it will exist permanently is found in Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy.

  352–60 This stanza alludes to and echoes the third stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, especially ll. 24–6: ‘Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; / Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’.

  375–9 PBS employs the non-theistic and rationalist term ‘Power’ to designate the force that animates nature and ensures its continuance, and with which Adonais has been reunited. See ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ll. 1 and 78, and ‘Mont Blanc’, ll. 16, 96, 127–8.

  381–3 Variants on the idea of a creative ‘Spirit’ that moulds the undifferentiated mass of material nature into its various forms (‘plastic’ = ‘shaping’) are widely diffused, e.g. in the first chapter of Genesis. PBS will have encountered it (and the word ‘plastic’) in Coleridge, e.g. in ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1817 version), ll. 44–8, and Religious Musings (1796), which addresses spirits ‘of plastic power, that interfused / Roll through the grosser and material mass / In organizing surge’ (ll. 405–7).

  384–5 The ‘Greek philosophers … [supposed] that God, in making the world … moulded the reluctant and stubborn materials ready to his hand into the nearest arrangement possible to the perfect archetype existing in his contemplation.’ See the extract from ‘On the Devil, and Devils’.

  388 splendours: Those great creators, now among ‘the dead’ (l. 395), who will permanently continue to inspire the living.

  399 the Unapparent: PBS seems to have coined this noun from an adjective in order to designate a region of the heavens that cannot be seen from earth but from which the ‘splendours’ of l. 388 exercise their influence.

  399–404 The three named poets died before fully realizing their early promise. Keats dedicated Endymion to Thomas Chatterton (1752–70). Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) was a distant ancestor of PBS himself. The Roman poet Lucan, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (AD 3–65), was the author of the epic poem Pharsalia on the civil war between Pompey and Caesar; it was a favourite of the young Shelley for its republican sympathies (Letters I, p. 432). Lucan’s role in a plot to remove the emperor Nero having been discovered, he was forced to commit judicial suicide, which he carried out with courage and equanimity – hence he was ‘approved’ (justified, sanctioned) by his death.

  414 Vesper: Hesperus, the evening star.

  416 Fond: Foolish.

  417 pendulous: Suspended, floating (in space).

  439–41 a slope … spread: Describing the spot in the cemetery for non-Catholics where Shelley’s son William was buried. See Preface, ‘cemetery of the protestants’ and note.

  444 one keen pyramid: The pyramid that marks the tomb of the Roman official Caius Cestius, constructed at the end of the first century BC.

  447 flame: The word ‘pyramid’ was formerly thought to derive from the Greek word for fire, pur. PBS describes a pyramid as ‘sculptured flame’ in Laon and Cythna (1817), l. 614.

  454 mourning mind: PBS’s own.

  460–64 Cp. Dante, Paradiso XXIX.142–5: ‘Look then how lofty and how huge in breadth / The’ eternal might, which, broken and dispers’d / Over such countless mirrors, yet remains / Whole in itself and one as at the first’ (trans. Henry Cary (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1814)). The idea of an enduring unity underlying the multiplicity of nature has been variously expressed in philosophy and notably by two philosophers that Shelley admired, Plato and Spinoza.

  461 Earth’s shadows fly: Cp. the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live … he fleeth as it were a shadow.’

  466–8 The eternal splendour of ‘The One’ (l. 460) is inadequately expressed even by the full brilliance and variety of Roman culture.

  477 Adapting the ‘Form of Solemnization of Matrimony’ in the Book of Common Prayer, from Matthew 19:6: ‘Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.’

  478 Adapting the opening lines of Dante’s Paradiso: ‘His glory, by whose might all things are mov’d, / Pierces the universe, and in one part / Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less’ (trans. Henry Cary).

  ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’

  PBS drafted this melancholy lyric, with its unusual stanza of eight-syllable lines rhyming aabbb, in a notebook, now Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12 (see BSM XVIII), probably in late spring–summer 1821. MWS published it in 1824 with the title ‘To —–’, the third of five poems so titled in that volume. Our text is edited from adds. e. 12. Like several other of PBS’s lyrics – such as ‘Time Long Past’, ‘On a Dead Violet: To —–’ and ‘The flower that smiles today’ – ‘When passion’s trance’ laments what it affirms to be true on an analogy with other natural things, that love itself is subject to decay and death.

  8  dream the rest: Echoing the words of Eloisa to her former lover Abelard, who has been castrated, in Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717), l. 124: ‘Give all thou canst – and let me dream the rest.’

  Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon

  A portion of PBS’s draft survives in the Bodleian Library (see BSM XII). Our text is based on the press copy transcription by MWS which PBS sent to his publisher, Charles Ollier, on 11 November 1821, asking him to publish it ‘at the end’ of the volume containing Hellas (Letters II, p. 365). This transcription is now in the Huntington Library (HM 330: see MYR (Shelley) VIII); we have also consulted the first printing in 1822. Napoleon Bonaparte died on 5 May 1821 on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where he had been held prisoner following his d
efeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. PBS probably heard the news of Napoleon’s death in July 1821 and composed the poem some time between then and 11 November. The title suggests an immediate response to the news which, Leigh Hunt wrote in The Examiner for 8 July 1821, ‘fell upon the town, as if it had been a change in the natural world. And no wonder: for his life had been identified with a series of events so great and all-stirring, that they seemed to be connected with the very beating of his heart’ (p. 417). In response to the prodigious nature of the subject, PBS constructed a technical tour de force, using three rhymes only, which deploys key words in a series of artful repetitions that subtly vary their sense and impact. PBS also considers Napoleon’s career in ‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’, ‘To the Emperors of Russia and Austria’ (not included in this selection), ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 174–80, and The Triumph of Life, ll. 215–34. For further discussion, see Cian Duffy, ‘“The Child of a Fierce Hour”: Shelley and Napoleon Bonaparte’, SiR 43 (2004), pp. 399–416.

  5  starry fold: Echoing Milton, Paradise Lost V.708–10, on Lucifer and the fallen angels: ‘His countenance, as the morning star that guides / The starry flock, allured them, and with lies / Drew after him the third part of heaven’s host.’ In a letter to Leigh Hunt of 6 October 1821, PBS compares himself to ‘Lucifer who has seduced the third part of the starry flock’ (Letters II, p. 356).

  24 the quick: The living, as in the Creed of St Athanasius in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘He ascended into heaven, he sitteth at the right hand of the Father, God Almighty: from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.’

  34–40 Cp. Leigh Hunt on Napoleon’s career in The Examiner’s obituary:

  The torrent of wild enthusiasm and resentful passion,—which had rolled out from France, like a burning lava, and overwhelmed the despots who had tried to crush it in its earliest formation,—had long before [Waterloo] spent itself, and had produced by its recoil disappointment … [Napoleon’s] master-passion was a restless ambition, the impetuous tide of which bore him onward to his ends through many signal acts of injustice and violence. (here)