Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  1016–20 The bought Briton … Victory: PBS imagines that the British navy will not intervene on behalf of the Greeks. Galignani’s Messenger for 18 August 1821 carried a report that five Turkish vessels off Lepanto were saved from the Greeks by British ships, while the issue for 13 September claimed that many of the sailors in the fleet sent by the Egyptian governor Mehmet Ali Paşa to Mahmud’s aid were Europeans.

  1030 the Evening-land: The west, where the sun sets; here, America.

  1038 Hesperus: Venus, as evening star.

  1049 Prankt: ‘Set, like a gem’ (OED); i.e. the ‘mountains and islands’ (l. 1048) are like jewels in the sea.

  1053 cope: Canopy.

  1060 See PBS’s Note 7.

  1061 The golden years: Or golden age, the peaceful and plenteous reign of Saturn, as described for example in Ovid, Metamorphoses I. Cp. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814) III.756–8: ‘I sang Saturnian rule / Returned, – a progeny of golden years / Permitted to descend, and bless mankind.’

  1063 weeds: Clothes.

  1068–70 The river Peneus (Pineios) flows into the Aegean Sea through the valley of Tempe in the northern Greek region of Thessaly; the river flows east, hence ‘Against the morning-star’ (i.e. the planet Venus), which rises in the east (see ll. 217, 231, 344, 1029, 1038). Tempe, renowned for its beauty, was a legendary haunt of the gods.

  1071 Cyclads: The Cyclades, a group of islands in the Aegean south-east of Athens.

  1072–3 Cp. Virgil, Eclogues IV.34–6: ‘a second Tiphys shall then arise, and a second Argo to carry chosen heroes; a second warfare, too, shall there be, and again shall a great Achilles be sent to Troy.’ Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica tells how Jason sailed to Colchis in quest of the Golden Fleece in a ship called Argo.

  1074–5 The mythical poet Orpheus tried and failed to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld and was subsequently torn to pieces by jealous Thracian women or, in another tradition, by intoxicated women followers of Dionysus.

  1076–7 In Homer, Odyssey IV and V, Ulysses is shipwrecked on the island home of the nymph Calypso, who falls in love with him and imprisons him for seven years before permitting him to continue his journey.

  1078 the tale of Troy: Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid recount incidents in the siege and destruction of Troy by Greek armies.

  1080–83 King Laius of Thebes, warned by an oracle that his son Oedipus would kill him, ordered the infant’s death. Spared by the servant who was to expose him to die, Oedipus, grown to manhood, unwittingly killed his father. The Sphinx, a monster who ravaged a district near Thebes, would pose a riddle to travellers, devouring those who gave a wrong answer. Oedipus solved the riddle, at which the Sphinx leapt to her death from a high rock; he became King of Thebes and (again unwittingly) married his father’s widow, and his mother, Iocasta.

  1090–91 See PBS’s Note 8.

  1091–3 more bright … unsubdued: Ollier omitted these two and a half lines from 1822, evidently to remove the reference to Christ (‘One who rose’).

  1094 The devotions in honour of the gods of reawakened peace and love will require neither blood sacrifice nor riches; ‘dowers’ = ‘furnishes’, ‘endows’.

  [SHELLEY’S] NOTES

  Note 1 [l. 60]

  The quenchless ashes of Milan

  p. 550 Sismondi’s Histoire des Républiques Italiennes: See note to The Cenci II.ii.49.

  Note 2 [l. 197]

  The Chorus

  p. 550 Gordian knot: An indecipherably complex problem only to be solved by radical action, after the intricate knot with which, according to legend, the chariot of King Gordias was tied in the temple of Zeus in the city of Gordium in Phrygia – and which had defeated all attempts to undo it. Alexander the Great is supposed to have cut the knot with his sword in 333 BC, thereby fulfilling the prophecy that whoever released it would rule Asia.

  Note 3 [l. 245]

  No hoary priests after that Patriarch

  Gregorios V, head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, was hanged, along with three archbishops, outside Istanbul’s Cathedral of St George, on Easter Sunday (22 April), 1821. Like most papers, Galignani’s Messenger for 5 May 1821 recorded that Gregorios had been forced before his execution to excommunicate, or pronounce an ‘anathema’ against, the Greek revolutionaries. Mount Athos, on the easternmost promontory of the Chalkidiki peninsula, in PBS’s day was the site of some twenty monasteries.

  Note 4 [l. 563]

  The freedman of a western poet chief

  Demetrios Zographos had been Byron’s servant in Greece and England 1809–1812: see Leslie Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 vols (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press/John Murray, 1973–82), IX, p. 23.

  Note 5 [l. 598]

  The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West

  PBS probably derived this story from a report in Galignani’s Messenger for 5 August 1821, which contains all the details given here.

  Note 6 [ll. 814–15]

  The sound as of the assault of an imperial city

  p. 551 1453: Both PBS’s draft and the fair copy give the date, incorrectly, as 1445.

  Note 7 [l. 1060]

  The Chorus

  p. 552 ‘magno nec proximus intervallo’: PBS is altering a phrase from Virgil, Aeneid V.320, ‘longo sed proximus intervallo’ (next but by a long way), which describes a runner who is in the second position in a race but far behind the leader. PBS’s formulation may be translated ‘next but not by a long way’. His meaning is not perfectly unambiguous but appears to be that the reader of the prophecy in the chorus will find it not so very different from the prophecies in Isaiah and Virgil which he goes on to quote from, and which had been interpreted in Christian tradition as foreshadowing the birth of Christ.

  ‘lion … lamb’: Misquoting Isaiah 11:6: ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’

  ‘omnis … tellus’: Quoting Virgil, Eclogues IV.39: ‘every land shall bear all fruits.’

  Note 8 [ll. 1090–91]

  Saturn and Love their long repose shall burst

  p. 552 the One … worship: Ollier omitted this clause from 1822.

  amerced: Forcibly deprived of.

  p. 553 The sublime … torture: Ollier omitted this sentence from 1822.

  ‘The flower that smiles today’

  PBS’s untitled fair copy in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. e. 7: see BSM XVI) supplies our copy-text. First published without date in 1824, where MWS gave it the title ‘Mutability’. Probably composed in October 1821, while PBS was working on Hellas, many of the drafts for which occupy the same notebook. The opening lines might have been suggested by letters containing dried flowers which PBS and T. J. Hogg exchanged in October (Letters II, p. 360 and note and p. 361). G. M. Matthews suggested that PBS had intended the lines as a dramatic lyric for Hellas, ‘to be sung by a favourite slave, who loves him, to the literally sleeping [Sultan] Mahmud before he awakens to find his imperial pleasures slipping from his grasp’ (‘Shelley’s Lyrics’, in D. W. Jefferson (ed.), The Morality of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 204). Whether or not this was PBS’s intention seems impossible to determine certainly, but the melancholy tone of the lyric is consistent with much of his writing in the winter–spring of 1821–2, such as in ‘When the lamp is shattered’.

  6–7 Recalling Juliet’s misgivings at the suddenness of her and Romeo’s love in Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II.i.161–2: ‘Too like the lightning which doth cease to be / Ere one can say it lightens.’

  13 Survive their joy: Persist, though without the gladness that once accompanied them.

  21 wake to weep: Cp. Caliban’s words in Shakespeare, The Tempest III.ii.143–6: ‘and then in dreaming / The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again.’

  The Indian Girl’s Song

  This lyric was first published after PBS’s death by Leigh Hunt in the seco
nd number of The Liberal (1823) under the title ‘Song written for an Indian Air’. MWS included it in 1824 as ‘Lines to an Indian Air’; in 1839 she grouped it with ‘Poems written in 1821’. It was probably composed late in that year (see BSM XII, pp. lii–liii, and BSM XVI, pp. l–liii). PBS’s drafts are in the Bodleian Library (BSM XVI and BSM XII). A fair copy in MWS’s hand (MYR (Shelley) V) is entitled ‘The Indian Serenade’, as is another autograph fair copy which was salvaged from the wreck of the Don Juan, the boat in which PBS had been sailing when he drowned (MYR (Shelley) VIII). Our text is from PBS’s fair copy now in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cologny-Genève, Switzerland (MYR (Shelley) VIII). According to Thomas Medwin, PBS wrote the lines, which are imagined as being sung by the Indian girl of the title, for Jane Williams to sing (Medwin 1913, pp. 317–18). See headnote to ‘To —–’ (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’).

  11 champak: Or ‘champac’ or ‘champaka’: an evergreen of the magnolia family bearing fragrant yellow-orange-coloured blossoms.

  ‘Rough wind that moanest loud’

  Our text of these stanzas is based on MWS’s transcription in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. d. 7: see BSM II), the only recorded MS. MWS transcribed the stanzas – the second is incomplete – as separate poems, but close similarities of theme, metre and rhyme suggest that they may well be parts of the same draft (see BSM II). In the 1847 edition of PBS’s Works, MWS included the first stanza with ‘Poems written in 1822’. Both stanzas probably date from late winter 1821 or spring 1822. The first may have been inspired by the severe storms which struck Pisa in the last week of December 1821 (Letters II, pp. 370, 374), while the second seems to look back from spring on the previous winter. The sparse punctuation of MWS’s transcript has been modified and supplemented. Lines 1–8 were first published in 1824, as ‘A Dirge’, but omitted ‘by an unaccountable oversight’ from 1839 and 1840 (MWS Letters III, p. 17). Lines 9–15 were first published in Rossetti 1870.

  6  stain: The sense is unclear; Rosetti 1870 thought that MWS, in making her transcription, might have misread ‘strain’ as ‘stain’, but notes that ‘stain’ could refer ‘to the tints which come off on hands that touch soppy sprays of foliage’ (II, p. 577).

  7  main: Ocean.

  To the Moon

  MWS published these lines, providing them with the present title, in the ‘Fragments’ section of 1824. She had transcribed them from PBS’s notebook (Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 17, our copy-text; see BSM XII) containing a draft for his unfinished play Charles the First, for which, Nora Crook suggests in BSM XII, pp. xlviii–xlix, they may have been intended as a dramatic lyric. They were probably composed in January 1822 as PBS was working on the play, and not in 1820, the date assigned by MWS in 1839 and adopted by subsequent editors. After a space left on the MS page, a draft of two further lines follows:

  Thou chosen sister of the spirit

  That gazes on thee till in thee it pities.

  Remembrance

  Three autograph versions of this lyric are recorded: an untitled draft (probably composed in the latter half of 1821) in the Huntington Library (see MYR (Shelley) VII); a fair copy, also untitled, on the endpapers of a copy of Adonais, now in the Firestone Library, Princeton University (see MYR (Shelley) VIII); and another fair copy, entitled ‘Remembrance’, now in Eton College Library (see MYR (Shelley) VIII). There is also a transcript, entitled ‘Song’, in MWS’s hand, in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (see MYR (Shelley) V). These copies display a number of variants, of which the most important is signalled in the note to l. 20. Our text is based on the Eton fair copy, apparently PBS’s latest version, which he sent to Jane Williams (see headnote to ‘To —–’ (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’: in mid to late January 1822 with the following note inscribed at the end of the poem:

  if this melancholy old song suits any of your tunes or any that humour of the moment may dictate you are welcome to it.—Do not say it is mine to any one even if you think so;—indeed it is from the torn leaf of a book out of date. How are you to day? & how is Williams? Tell him that I dreamed of nothing but sailing & fishing up coral. Your ever affectionate PBS.— (See Letters II, pp. 386–7, for a transcription of this note)

  The ‘book out of date’ may refer to the copy of Adonais in which PBS inscribed the poem: see note to l. 20. In any case, the phrase suggests an interval of time between first composition and the copy sent to Jane Williams. ‘Remembrance’ shares the melancholy tone of much of the other poetry that PBS composed during the winter–spring of 1821–2, in particular ‘To —–’ (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’). First published in 1824 as ‘A Lament’, it is the first of two poems in the volume with that title.

  20 ‘Pansies let my flowers be’ is the reading of PBS’s draft, his fair copy in Adonais, MWS’s transcript and 1824. In a letter of 26 July 1822 to her friend the Irish painter Amelia Curran (1775–1847), shortly after PBS’s death, MWS wrote of her intention to wear a locket with an image of a pansy in memory of him: ‘In a little poem of his are these words—pansies let my flowers be pansies are hearts ease—and in another [‘An Ode, Written, October, 1819’, not included in this selection] he says that pansies mean memory’ (MWS Letters I, pp. 240–41). See Adonais, ll. 289–90. The pansy (or heartsease) was an emblem of remembrance.

  Lines to —– [Sonnet to Byron]

  Our text of this sonnet is taken from PBS’s autograph fair copy (now British Library MS Zweig 188: see MYR (Shelley) VIII), which is entitled simply ‘To —–’ and dated ‘Jan 22’. The poem was probably composed in January 1822, perhaps on the twenty-second of the month, which was Byron’s thirty-fourth birthday. MWS did not publish it in any of her editions. A variant, complete in fourteen lines, but deriving from an earlier draft as well as from inaccurate transcriptions by Thomas Medwin, was first published in Rossetti 1870, where it is given the title ‘Sonnet to Byron’, by which it has become known. Between the title and first line Rossetti prints an incomplete sentence from PBS’s draft – ‘I am afraid these verses will not please you but’ – and later editors have followed this practice. The sentence seems likely to be the beginning of an apologetic address to Byron; Medwin reported that Byron never saw the poem (Medwin 1913, p. 258).

  By January 1821, PBS had become acutely despondent about the failure of his poetry to win either critical acclaim or popular success. By contrast, Byron’s Don Juan III–V (1821) and his theological drama Cain (1821), which PBS had recently read, had reaffirmed his conviction that Byron was the pre-eminent writer of the age, worthy of comparison with the greatest English poets. PBS’s letters of late 1821 and early 1822 record his feelings on his own and Byron’s powers, fame and prospects. The unusual rhyme scheme (abababab cddcee) conforms to neither the Italian (abbaabba cdecde) nor the English (abab cdcd efef gg) model of the sonnet.

  7  worlds: Planets or other celestial bodies (OED).

  8  godhead: Divine nature, or the quality of divinity.

  9–12 PBS’s draft of these lines in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 17 (see BSM XII) reads:

  But such is my regard, that nor your power

  To soar, above the heights where others

  Nor fame, that shadow of the [unborn] hour

  Cast from the envious future on the time

  To —– (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)

  In January 1821, Thomas Medwin introduced PBS to his friends Jane and Edward Williams. Though married to another, Jane lived with Edward as his wife and had taken his name; the couple had just arrived in Pisa. PBS and Edward (‘one of the best fellows in the world’ (Letters II, p. 438)) remained close friends until their deaths on 8 July 1822, when their boat the Don Juan sank in the Gulf of Spezia, off the north-west coast of Italy. During the last six months of his life, PBS developed an intense attachment to Jane, whom he described in a letter of 12 January 1822 as ‘amiable and beautiful … a sort of spirit of embodied peace in our circle of tempests’ (Letters II, p.
376; see also pp. 342, 435). The nature of PBS’s involvement with Jane Williams has prompted much speculation (for an overview, see Bieri II, pp. 281–347), though few facts have been established with certainty. Between January and July 1822, PBS composed a number of poems either addressed to Jane or variously informed by his feelings for her, including ‘To Jane. The Invitation’, ‘To Jane—The Recollection’, ‘The Magnetic lady to her patient’, ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, ‘To Jane’ (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) and ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’. Although the present poem has often been titled ‘To Edward Williams’, PBS addresses both the Williamses as well as one of them, in particular, in l. 18. The stanza form, apparently of PBS’s own contriving, follows the rhyme scheme (abababcc) of the Italian ottava rima while varying the usual ten-syllable iambic line customary in English adaptations – such as his own The Witch of Atlas and Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24) – to six syllables in ll. 3 and 6 and eight in l. 7.

  No draft of the poem is known to survive. Our text is based on the fair copy, now in Edinburgh University Library (MS Dc.1.1004: see MYR (Shelley) VIII), which PBS sent to Edward Williams on 26 January 1822 with a note enjoining him to show it to no one but Jane and preferably not even to her. Williams’s journal entry for that date records that ‘S sent us some beautiful but too melancholy lines’ (Gisborne Journal, p. 127). The ‘serpent’ of the opening line is PBS himself, so nicknamed by Byron after the tempter Serpent of Genesis (Letters II, pp. 368–9). The melancholy tone of the poem can be accounted for not only by PBS’s conflicted feelings for Jane Williams, but also by his ill-health, faltering marriage and sense of failure as an author (Letters II, pp. 367–8).